Skateboard Prodigy the Wheel Deal

Ryan Sheckler is one of the most talked about athletes on the Southern California skateboard scene. Besides sponsorship deals with sunglass, clothing, helmet and skateboard companies, he boasts four shelves of trophies in his San Clemente home.

When he’s not at tournaments in Florida or New York, neighborhood kids descend on his yard to do tricks on his massive U-shaped ramp. Some children look up to him, but most are at eye level or a few inches above it. That’s because Ryan is 10.

Last spring he skipped school to tour the East Coast, where he signed autographs for scores of fans--”mostly little kids,” said Ryan, who is 4 feet, 6 inches tall. On the California amateur circuit, he regularly defeats skaters nearly twice his age.

A generation ago, Ryan’s parents might have steered their 67-pound prodigy toward a sport that offers college scholarships and a shot at a professional career. But that was before investments from cable television and such blue-chip sponsors as General Motors and AT&T; transformed an adolescent pastime into a $900-million-a-year industry.

The sport’s most famous athlete, 32-year-old Tony Hawk, was nearly broke eight years ago, but now is a millionaire with his own skate company and strong-selling video games. His bone-bruising stunts, seen by millions on cable sports shows, have made him a bigger hero to young males than Shaquille O’Neal, professional basketball’s most valuable player, according to one survey. A committed family man, the personable Hawk reassures parents about a sport long synonymous with youthful rebellion.

“Hawk made it acceptable,” said Melissa Murphy, a marketing manager for Vans Inc., the athletic shoe and skate-park company. “You can be a hero and make a lot of money, too.”

Feeding the drive of Ryan and other promising skaters is a regular shower of free equipment and expense-paid trips from companies combing Southern California’s playgrounds for talent. Marketers scout tournaments and review sponsor-me videotapes that amateurs send in by the dozens. The companies are searching for an athlete acceptable to hard-core skaters as well as soccer moms whose lavish spending on their kids accounts for much of the industry’s growth. As shoe marketer Sasha Steinhorst put it: “We’re looking for the next Michael Jordan of our sport.”

The Shecklers have turned over their entire yard to Ryan’s career, which figures to go professional before the boy finishes high school.

A series of metal grind rails, wooden ramps and platforms built by Ryan’s engineer father forms a course along the back and side of the house to the street. A red safety cone alerts motorists to Ryan’s landing zone. He puts in 12 to 14 hours of practice each week on the course, which is so hazardous that his friends cannot use it unless the Shecklers have a signed legal release from their parents.

In the only free spot, Ryan’s parents have wedged a trampoline. That, too, is for Ryan. The boy bounces on the canvas, his calf muscles tightened in small knots as he manipulates a skate deck with his feet. He is perfecting his 360 flip, a trick so difficult most kids don’t attempt it.

The California-born sport dominates the Sheckler household as well as the yard. The family of five plans vacations around Ryan’s travel schedule, which has included trips to Philadelphia and Tampa, Fla. His mother, Gretchen, quit work as a dental office manager three years ago because she could no longer balance work, family and skating. Ryan’s 1-year-old brother, Kane, is named after one of his favorite skaters, Caine Gayle.

Ryan, a fifth-grader at a local Christian school, must finish his homework before he practices, but beyond that Gretchen seldom limits his workouts. She stepped in three years ago when Ryan struggled to learn the kick-flip, a trick that separates skate kids from wannabes, whom Ryan and his friends call poseurs. Gretchen restricted him to 100 attempts a day.

“I sat in the garage with my cup of coffee, counted and said, ‘That’s enough.’ Otherwise, he wouldn’t have stopped,” she said. “I think when he got it, we all felt like we accomplished something.”

The payoff is a collection of 52 trophies and sponsorship deals that would make Ryan the envy of most professional athletes. Few sports use children to advertise products as openly as skateboarding, which treats prodigies the way NASCAR treats vehicles. With his Pro-tec helmet, Oakley sunglasses, Volcom clothes and Etnies shoes, sponsors have Ryan covered head-to-toe.

Every part of his board has a sponsor: the plywood deck (World Industries), the wheels (Dark Star), the wheel bearings (Shorty’s) and the metal trucks that attach the wheels to the deck (Grind King).

His hillside home is a regular stop for UPS trucks delivering free stuff from sponsors, adding to his status among friends getting by on weekly allowances. A plastic storage chest in Ryan’s bedroom closet is stuffed with freebies: wheels, hardware, stickers. Ryan digs into a drawer and grabs a Shorty’s wallet, which he tosses to a grateful friend, Matt DiPaola, who stopped by to skate. DiPaola, 13, plans to add it to a collection that includes two of Ryan’s autographs.

“He’s famous,” he said. “I figure someday they’ll be worth something.”

From birth, Ryan has been a mix of intensity and perfectionism. As a preschooler, Ryan figured out how to climb onto a low roof of his family’s home. When Ryan started school, he kept his shirttails tucked in with a belt so tight it “practically cut off his circulation,” Gretchen said.

Gretchen is thankful that the physically demanding sport helps Ryan relax. “It wears him out,” she said. “If he didn’t skate, he’d be dead.”

Skateboarding entered his life at age 4 when his grandmother gave him a board as a Christmas present. Older boys in the neighborhood showed him how to use it. By 7, he was California champion of the mini division.

Trophies in his room are sorted neatly with separate shelves for first-, second- and third-place awards. Ryan knows the number of each. Plaques recognizing lower-level finishes occupy a fourth shelf.

“I don’t like those,” he said in a voice so low that he was asked to repeat the inaudible words. Ryan touches shelf No. 4. “I don’t like those.”

Ryan carries with him the memory of what he calls his “worst day” in skating in 1998 when he finished seventh out of 45--too low for even a plaque. As a reigning champion of a younger age group, losing was foreign to him. The boy was so discouraged that Gretchen consulted a therapist friend, who advised her not to worry about him. But Gretchen resolved to remove Ryan from elite competition if his self-esteem suffered.

Ryan rebounded, emerging as 1998 state champion in his division.

In skateboarding, learning to handle the pressure of competition can be as hard as mastering a kick-flip front-side grab over a flight of stairs. There are no teammates, coaches or trainers to blame when things go wrong. Add to that the demands of sponsors who expect their athletes to perform. “There is no free ride,” said Steinhorst, whose Etnies shoe label spent $7,000 on Ryan in 1999. “I expect these kids to work.”

Usually Ryan’s efforts end well. In January, he placed fifth of 250 competitors at the prestigious Tampa Am. He took second in street skating in the Etnies U.S. Open of Skateboarding, a July pro-am competition in Huntington Beach, with a breathtaking drop into a 31-foot-high ramp. A gutsy improvisation helped him win the Climax Manufacturing Invitational in Oceanside in August. To break a three-way tie for first, the 10-year-old climbed on top of a delivery truck outside the fenced-off arena, leaped over the barbed wire barrier and landed squarely on a wooden ramp.

Within the industry Ryan is likened to Hawk, a former prodigy who turned pro at 14. So energetic as a child that he got kicked out of preschool, Hawk has won 71 of 105 professional competitions with body-rattling feats few attempt. He practiced a trick called the 900--2 1/2 midair rotations from a 12-foot ramp--for 13 years before landing it in the 1999 ESPN X Games.

In mastering the trick, he fought bouts of despair familiar to elite athletes. “I could have eaten a bucket of Prozac . . . and still have been depressed,” he said in his autobiography about a particularly bad day. “It was the worst feeling I’d had in years.”

Ryan and Hawk go way back. The superstar attended Ryan’s sixth birthday party at an Encinitas skate park, where they met during practice sessions. When Ryan turned 10, Hawk e-mailed greetings from Australia, where the pro was on tour. The towering ramp in Ryan’s yard is a gift from Hawk, who used the so-called half-pipe for years before giving it to the boy.

“He has the consistency, confidence and motivation to be as good as he wants,” said Hawk, who is more popular than Shaq and skateboarding itself, according to a March survey by Long Island, N.Y.-based Marketing Evaluations. “He will try some of the hardest stuff, without fear of failure or consequence.”

To be sure, professional skaters form an exclusive club. Of the more than 200 active professionals sanctioned by World Cup Skateboarding, only a handful are rich. And in a sport played on concrete, the road to stardom is paved with possible career-ending injuries, though it claims a lower injury rate than football and ice hockey.

Ryan missed two weeks of skating last month recovering from a concussion that put him in the hospital overnight. At an exhibition at the San Diego Convention Center on Sept. 10, he crashed head-first on a cement floor after a 10-foot leap from a ramp. Though he had been wearing a helmet, Ryan was so dazed he did not know left from right.

“He had the most frightened look,” said Gretchen, who sees Ryan’s first serious accident as a long-delayed rite of passage. “This is not a sport without injury. . . . We all know skaters who have been knocked out.”

Many in the industry are betting that Ryan, one of 500 amateurs on the California circuit, will stay healthy. He has already been recognized by skate fans while walking the aisles of a supermarket with his mother and 8-year-old brother, Shane, who also skates. Before being sidelined by injury, Ryan ranked first among amateurs in Southern California. The skater in second place was 26 years old.

“It’s frustrating sometimes,” said Falco Baltys, then ranked No. 2. “When the crowd sees a little kid, they really get into it. It’s a little unfair.” But he adds: “Ryan’s a really good skater.”

Outside the skate arena, older amateurs are no match for Ryan, whom marketers view as an ideal spokes-kid. Grind King, Etnies and Volcom have used Ryan in skate magazine ads aimed at young skaters. World Industries uses him as a model in its current catalog.

Though Ryan wears a uniform to school, his sponsors want the budding superstar to wear their logo-covered clothing everywhere else: shopping malls, playgrounds, tournaments. In an interview for this story, Ryan wore a yellow World Industries T-shirt; baggy, blue Volcom shorts; and black suede Etnies shoes.

“I hate to say [he’s] a little billboard,” Steinhorst said. “We are a marketing-driven industry.”

Although sponsors don’t pay him to skate, many of them pay him up to $2,000 whenever their logos are visible in photos of Ryan that appear in print or on television. Last year, his mother said, he received between $10,000 and $12,000, mostly in travel stipends and incentive payments from sponsors. The total includes $2,000 that World Industries put into an individual retirement account for him.

Gretchen accompanies Ryan to all his skate events, with sponsors helping to pay her way as well. The private school she chose for him is outside the skateboard culture.

As she was being interviewed at the family home, he spontaneously hugged and kissed her, cut and served her a piece of pumpkin bread on a paper napkin and changed his baby brother’s diaper. He keeps a Bible on his desk at home.

But being a future skateboard superstar means often playing in an adult’s world. His first magazine cover came in January 1999, at age 9, when he was featured in Big Brother. The publication, owned by Hustler magazine publisher Larry P. Flynt, is often loaded with obscenities, references to sex and bathroom humor. The current issue has an eight-page feature on Ryan.

Though Gretchen doesn’t allow Ryan to read the publication, a reflection of the sport’s bad-boy streak, she knows her son’s sponsors benefit from the publicity. And without sponsors, Ryan could not compete in the elite amateur class reserved for sponsored skaters.

After changing his brother’s diaper, Ryan again hops on his skateboard, where he’s been nearly all afternoon since arriving home from a half-day at school. This time he has 20-pound Kane in his arms. Holding his brother close to his chest, Ryan begins rhythmically sliding up and down the 6-foot-tall sides of the wooden half-pipe. Skaters call the moves fakies. For Ryan, they are effortless.

Gretchen first saw the baby-holding routine on a videotape her husband, Randy, a successful technology entrepreneur, shot when she wasn’t there to object. Her first inclination was to scold Ryan and her husband for endangering the baby. Randy protested: When has Ryan ever fallen doing a fakie?

“He’s right,” she said. “Ryan doesn’t fall.”