Waiting for Lightning Page #4

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came down

on his tailbone very hard,

and yet he has managed

to pull himself together

and get a nice routine

going here. Oh, very nice!

He does

a 360 transitioning

from the big ramp

to the small ramp.

Very nicely done.

That'll be it

for Danny Way.

Pulling him

out of school,

it was the hardest thing

for me to do.

So, I had to take

a leap of faith.

I believed

in my son enough

to believe that his dream

would come true.

- First place, $2,500...

- Congratulations, Danny.

...goes to the youngest pro

on the circuit, Danny Way!

Danny, first of all, that was

an outstanding performance.

What do you think

did it for you today?

You had a lot

of competition.

Um...

basically, um...

Uhhhh...

Let's do it again,

take two.

Well, after a hard-fought

contest, this is our winner.

This is Danny Way, the

youngest pro on the tour.

Do you feel like you were hampered

by your injury at all today,

or did you skate

through the pain?

It was kind of hard in

practice, but in contest

I didn't think about

anything but staying on,

you know,

busting out.

Well, that was one heck

of a comeback.

Again, he hit

the floor.

I saw him a little earlier,

and he hit it hard.

He wasn't feeling

too good,

but he came back

and won the contest.

Once again, Danny Way

is our champion,

and that'll do it now

from Lansing, Michigan.

Quiksilver had

bought DC Shoes,

so we go for a meeting

with Bob McKnight,

the chairman

of Quiksilver.

And Bob writes a check

for the money we needed.

That was one

of those moments where

it finally strikes you

and was like, wait a second.

This really is going

to happen now.

This is a team effort,

so we brought

JT and Brian in

because they are

the experts in big structures.

With Danny, you're

dealing with history.

The stuff he does is always

so new and so creative,

like, there is

no norm to go from.

There is no fulcrum point

to start from.

It's like, okay, let's try it

with this and see what happens.

I have a lot to do

with these guys' careers,

making and breaking them.

I want to see Danny succeed,

that's what I'm there for.

I don't want to see

anybody get hurt.

The challenges

of building a structure

that has not

been built before was huge,

never mind

in a different country.

Probably get it

here somewhere.

Twenty-one meters.

Twenty-one meters converts

into 68 feet, 10 inches.

- What is it?

- Sixty-eight feet, 10 inches.

- Hello?

- Danny, JT.

JT,

how you doing, man?

- Good, how you doing?

- Good.

Hey, I got

a quick question for you.

I'm sitting here with Brian,

and the scaffolding's going up.

Everything's going good, but we're

actually pulling measurements

off of, like, distances

and stuff.

It looks like

right now, um,

the distance is

between 65 and 70-foot gap.

Is that

too gnarly or...?

- No.

- Okay.

Nothing's too gnarly.

It's no more

than 70.

Well, 70, that's getting up

there, I mean, yeah.

It changes the game

a little bit, which is good.

- I can do that.

- Okay.

I'm not worried

about it. Um...

Okay, I was worried about,

like we discussed earlier,

there was a good 55-foot gap

now that got changed.

I want you

to come out here

and know what you're

getting yourself into

so you're mentally

prepared for it.

No, I'm cool with it.

I'm cool.

- All right, Danny.

- All right, man.

Take care. Talk to you

in a couple of hours.

- Sounds good, JT.

- Okay, bye.

That same thing

that makes Danny tick

is what makes me tick.

I was just like,

"Yeah, but I've never

done this before".

We all set goals.

It's what makes

you go forward.

Goals can be dangerous.

I'd be coming home

from work

and he had

the little ninja motorcycles,

and I'd see "whooomp!"

right past me, and I'd go,

"God darn it,

there goes Danny!"

And I turn my car around,

try and chase him down

because he'd

already had it out

with the police

in Fallbrook several times.

One of my prominent memories

of Danny's early success

was when he started getting

a little bit of money.

He could start affording

his fantasies and things.

Quality American machine.

All of a sudden he started

buying all this stuff,

and he had, like,

motorcycles.

He'd ride them all over town,

no license, nothing.

It was just, like,

wild child.

- Going M.T?

- Yeah.

I'm gonna seriously pack

off the side, watch.

No, just go

straight up and down.

Oh, sh*t!

The house out in rainbow

that they lived in,

this was out in the middle

of nowhere up on a hill.

Most of the time we had

the house to ourselves.

Thought you were gonna

land on your back.

I remember pulling up

and bullet holes in the cars

and had the ramp there

and everything

and just skate house.

It was lawless.

Absolute lawlessness.

Danny didn't grow up the same

way a lot of other people did.

He dropped out of school

in ninth grade

and then he went into

this skateboard touring mode.

There he is!

And he started hanging out

with older kids right away,

so he really jumped

that period that's formative

in all of our lives

of going through high school

and finding out who we are

and developing ourselves.

He was just chasing

his passion at that point,

which anybody else

would do.

In the mid-'80s, there,

a lot of parks were going out.

I just remember seeing

Del Mar in chunks.

It was pretty devastating

on a lot of people.

People were

taking to the streets

because they had nowhere else to

go, and if you wanted to skate,

you just figured out how to use

the urban landscape,

learn how to use rails and

ledges and benches and stairs.

The city was

the skate park.

That didn't hurt

that bad.

We were

skating everything.

Calvary chapel was the hub.

Like, everybody went there.

Everybody would

meet there,

and then we'd all go

wherever we would go.

Danny grew up

skating Del Mar,

riding transitions...

Naturally talented

little kid.

Then this whole evolution

of skateboarding

in the late '80s

into '90s of street skating,

he adapted to that.

He could do anything

he wanted,

whether it be

in street or vert, anything.

And it looked right.

It looked good.

Danny

was doing some

of the heaviest street

skating at the time.

Make it, D. Yeah!

He was taking

those skills to the ramp

and opening a whole

new doorway to tricks.

Because he had

that background

of being able to ride

everything else.

It kind of led him

down a different path.

Yeah, Danny,

that was it!

We'd hear, like,

rumblings of, like,

"Oh, there's gonna be

this new super company

"and it's gonna

be called Plan B,

"and there's gonna be

all these crazy people

that are gonna skate

for it".

Danny Way,

Matt Hensley, Mike Carroll,

Sean Sheffey,

and Rick Howard. That's it.

- Cut and dry?

- Cut and dry, that's it.

It felt the same way

to me that I'm sure it felt

to the general public

when the USA finally decided

to put together

a dream team for basketball.

It floored everyone.

Plan B set the bar so high

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