KENNY HUGHES

INTERVIEW BY STEVE OLSON

Kenny is one smooth style criminal and That shit is highly illegal, but it ain't against the law, yet.

Is Kenny Hughes there?
What's up, Steve?

What are you doing right now?
I'm playing 'NBA Live 2003.'

Who are you?
I'm the '76ers. I would've been the Lakers but my roommate got them.

I'd much rather be the '76ers. Where do you come from?
I'm from Wilmington, North Carolina.

Is that considered the South?
I think so. Yeah, people from New York definitely consider it the South.

Right. So what's your full name?
Kenneth Eugene Hughes.

How long have you been skateboarding?
14 years.

How did you hook up and get into skateboarding?
I was coming home from school one day and I saw this kid riding a skateboard. I just started talking to him and then we started hanging out and I started skating with him.

Why would you just stop and talk to some kid on a skateboard?
I don't know. He could ollie really high and I guess that caught my eye. It was just something completely new to me. I started kicking it with him and that was that. I've been skating ever since.

And that's it. That's the story. All right, thank you, Mr. Hughes.
(laughs) No problem.

When was that?
It was probably around the mid-summer of '87.

Obviously, the ollie caught your eye, so was that the first basic trick that you learned?
Basically, the ollie was one of the first things. That's the trick that the majority of tricks came from.

Then you rode vert?
Once I had honed my skills a little bit.

How long did it take you to hone your skills?
I don't really know. I've been skateboarding for 14 years and I'm not even positive now if I've completely honed my skills.

What I mean is, it takes some people five years to roll, compared to a guy who's obsessed and is a fast learner.
A couple of my friends that I started off skating with were like, 'Yeah, dude, you're learning pretty quickly.' I guess, I learned fairly quickly, but I'm not too sure.

What did you guys skate in Wilmington?
We built crazy quarter-pipes and little banks. We used to skate down the road for a mile to this place called 'Hills'. It was a super market and they had these transition banks in the back of it with parking blocks on the top. It was cool to skate that. We'd always get kicked out of there, but we'd always keep going back. We were just little kids, learning how to skate in the middle of the street.

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