The Best American Sports Writing 2011 (40 page)

As Danny awaited the judges' score at the bottom of the ramp, an ESPN reporter asked if he'd be able to take his next few runs, given the fall.

"I'm taking every run," Danny said. His voice was slurred and his eyes were glazed and he couldn't really stand up straight because inside his shoe his foot was swelling to the size of a football.

Then he said: "It's about how much abuse the body can take and come back from."

He thought he was talking about skateboarding.

Although I'd been hiding the fact that I still skated, I'd long entertained delusions of skating the Mega. But once I was there, I saw the sheer absurdity of my thinking. It wasn't the scale of the ramp that intimidated me. It was Danny. Failing to land even the most basic aerial would've been an insult, like he'd offered me a gift and I chucked it into the trash, bow and all, right in front of him. I was afraid to let him down.

And yet he's a man who strives to put you at ease. In his car he asks if you're getting enough air, if you like the radio station. In restaurants he asks about your food allergies—he has many—and then suggests dishes. He gives extremely thorough driving directions, spells out the street names, and then repeats the spellings, and you get the sense that he'd take your getting lost personally. Which is how I felt on the Mega—afraid not of embarrassing myself so much, but of embarrassing Danny.

All of which got me thinking about fear, so after his next attempt—where he barely made the full flip and kind of landed on his spine and all of the cameramen nervously looked to each other—I asked if the Mega in any way scared him.

"I was more scared talking to those students this morning," he said.

He did look uncomfortable giving his speech, like an awkward groomsman making a toast.

"It's weird," he said. "Onstage I can't get hurt, but here, where I could get maimed or killed, I feel totally relaxed. I have a lot of things in my memory that I can dig into and unlock to propel my motivation. Skateboarding is my tool for processing emotion and energy. I try to use it that way. It's easier said than done."

Then he dropped in again, slammed again, and just lay at the bottom of the ramp for a long, long time.

In 1989, when he was on the verge of being expelled from 10th grade for truancy and his home life was increasingly unstable, Way quit school altogether to skate full-time. Powell Peralta, however, wasn't ready to offer him a professional contract, so when he was approached about riding for H-Street, a new and edgy skater-owned company, Danny accepted. The move would prove significant and prescient. Soon, the few titanic companies that had long monopolized the industry would fall to smaller, grittier upstarts that appealed to skaters' insubordinate sensibilities. The break with Powell epitomizes what would become the defining traits of Danny's personal and professional experience, a pathological need for upheaval and an occasionally sadistic aversion to moderation. He feels most safe, most at home, when he's risking everything.

No one recognized how predisposed toward self-destruction Danny was better than Mike Ternasky, H-Street's cofounder. Ternasky was only 22, but he'd also grown up largely fatherless and saw that Danny's recklessness and the way he punished himself daily wasn't unrelated to the tumult at home. He knew taming Danny wasn't an option, but he also knew that the wildness, coupled with Danny's talent and obsessive nature, could be more than a liability. Ternasky earned Danny's trust not by asking him to share his feelings, but by pushing him to float higher airs and land more technical lip tricks, to channel his anger and confusion into his skating. Again, think Tyson. With Ternasky's guidance, Danny won his first pro contest, beating veterans and newcomers alike, and he began collecting monthly royalty checks in the neighborhood of $20K. He was 15.

And then, when everything seemed golden, Danny quit H-Street. He thought the team was getting too big and losing its edge. He couldn't abide such softness, even though he himself was making $80,000 a year before he could legally drive. For a short period, he skated on the Blind Skateboards team (with eventual
My Name Is Earl
star Jason Lee), but he never found the footing or inspiration he'd had with Ternasky. He placed poorly in contests and his board sales faltered. Any savings he had from the H-Street gravy train were gone. Once, while filming a skate video for his wheel sponsor, he was so broke he jumped off a 150-foot cliff into a lake for $200. And, like his brother, he started gravitating toward a more dangerous crowd, skaters who would fight the security guards who tried to run them off and then reconvene at the Way compound to drink and shoot guns. "Have you seen
Mad Max Beyond Thunder-dome?
That was Danny's house when he was 16," says Colin McKay, one of Danny's closest friends, his business partner, and a pro skater himself.

"I look back on that time," Way says now, "and I think, How stupid were we?"

Which was maybe what Ternasky was thinking when he called Danny in 1991 and asked him to skate for a new company he was launching called Plan B. Danny, 17 at the time, signed on immediately, and Ternasky assembled the most advanced and influential team in skateboarding around his star athlete. Ternasky intended to build a skater-centered company that he could eventually bequeath to the elder skaters, ensuring that the nonconformist spirit of the enterprise would endure. Plan B became the shadow version of Powell Peralta, an unvarnished and unrivaled group of skaters that seemed both dangerous and soulful, and nowhere was that paradox more present than in Danny. Reconnecting with Ternasky ushered Danny into one of the most productive and creative periods of his career—even today, there are only a handful of pros who can land the tricks he invented in the early '90s, and no one skater can do all of them.

Then the bottom fell out from under Danny again. In 1994, on his way to the Plan B offices, Ternasky was T-boned at an intersection and died of head trauma. He was 27, and with the exception of Ternasky's wife, Danny was the last person to see him alive. The loss gutted him (the initials MT are tattooed under Danny's left arm, a tribute to his mentor). Even skateboarding, the only shelter he'd known since his stepfather introduced him to the sport, could do little to fill the hollowness he felt. The sport was itself dying, as it had a decade before, the result of increased overhead for skate parks and dwindling sales throughout the industry—board shops closed, ramps were torn down, countless pros sulked into more reliable careers or did humiliating demonstrations at amusement parks to pay the bills. Plan B closed its doors in 1995.

Then, while surfing near San Diego, Danny dove into a shallow break and snapped his neck.

After he broke his neck—which he describes as "my face pretty much hitting me in my stomach"—Danny was partially paralyzed for more than a year. He went in and out of the hospital, bouncing from one doctor to another, and made no progress. He was afraid to lift a carton of milk, convinced that even minimal exertion would cause more damage. He suffered severe depression and spent most days lying on his floor to ease the pain. He was an invalid at 20. Imagine going from jumping off huge cliffs to being scared of something in your fridge. "It's like being in jail," he says. "You lose all your freedom."

Doctors said he'd never skate again. Danny refused to listen. He read everything he could about spinal injuries and experimented with different treatments. Each failure fueled his obsession. Finally he flew to Hawaii and lived with a spiritual healer who guided him out of his "superdepressed" state not with pharmaceuticals, but with meditation and a holistic focus on mind-body synergy. He made slow progress over the course of a few months, exacting the same determination on his recovery that he long had on his skating. When Danny returned to California, he endured months of brutal physical and psychological therapy. Nearly every day, he thought about giving up, but what kept him going was a vision of a ramp so unprecedented, massive, and jaw-droppingly gnarly that it would forever change the face of skateboarding.

As Danny returned to skating—he won a major contest in 1996, shocking the industry that had written him off as a lost soldier—he began experimenting with the size and design of ramps, testing both the physical limitations and the possibilities he'd dreamed up during his long recuperation. "There were no engineers or mathematicians involved," he says. "It was all human trial and error." Which means that until he hit upon a design that worked, he'd try out the biggest ramp in history, destroy himself, then build a bigger one. Between 1999 and 2002, he underwent seven major surgeries. Then, in 2002, the prototype of what's now called the MegaRamp was erected in the desert. Before the weather eroded it, Danny invited other pros to ride the ramp, but only a select few had the requisite skills—and balls.

Danny's high-profile stunts eventually gave him enough cachet and cash to resurrect Plan B Skateboards in 2005. He called back most of the original team members and scooped up prodigies like Paul "P-Rod" Rodriguez and Ryan Sheckler. This March, Plan B partnered with Billabong to increase its market value and visibility. "The partnership will allow Plan B to go bigger and stay true to its core," Danny says. "We aren't going to make girls' clothing. We're going to make the best boards and wheels. We're going to be the modern-day Powell without selling ourselves short." In other words, he's doing exactly what Mike Ternasky had hoped he would. And it was probably because Ternasky would have wanted him to that Danny went to China and built a MegaRamp beside the Great Wall. For Danny, though, it was the means, not the end. He wants to make sure he's given the sport everything he can, everything it will need to flourish in his wake. His concern isn't his legacy, but the future of skateboarding.

As Danny was showing me clips of the new Plan B skate video on his iPhone, he said, "With the window of time left in my career, I'm not interested in proving I'm better than somebody else. I want to push skateboarding into another paradigm."

The new video is called
Superfuture.

Some of the rumors hewed pretty close to the truth. Way did go to Germany—not to have surgery, but rather an experimental treatment where doctors inject bone marrow into the joints to rejuvenate them; it worked. And he had been considering a stunt that involved skating down the Luxor in Vegas, and he had been doing a lot of street skating, but he put everything on the back burner to train for X Games 16, which could be the defining moment in his career. He wants to build an ecologically sound skate facility in Hawaii, but that's a ways off. Right now he's concentrating on erecting a MegaRamp with a foam pit at the Woodward West Skate Camp in California. The foam pit will help him practice his top-secret new trick, but more important, the Mega at Woodward West will make Big Air skating available to anyone who goes to the camp. It will democratize the genre of skating that has, in Way's opinion, been too exclusive. He wants kids who spend afternoons at small municipal skate parks to envision themselves on the Mega, and he wants to hit upon a Mega design that skate parks around the country will adopt.

Since his marriage ended in 2009, he and his ex-wife have been negotiating how to raise their three kids in two different houses. There were rough patches, but they're in the past. Way says, "Everything is chill. No one's right and no one's wrong. We're great friends on different paths, except with the kids. We're walking with them, together."

As for the rumors about him being strung out and jet-setting with Tommy Lee, Way laughs. "I am friends with Tommy, and I've been in his plane, but he's sober and laid-back. Partying wouldn't complement my life right now. What we usually talk about is our kids and our new band. He's a really wise, spiritual dude."

"He's got some stubborn bull in him," Lee says. "We keep each other going in the right direction. I'm on the Danny Way program and he's on the Tommy Lee one. It's all positive. We should brand it, call it 'Lee-Way.'"

Way tells me that the documentary is back on track, slated to hit theaters in early 2011, and he says he thinks he can take X Games gold in both Big Air and Rail Jam this year, if he can avoid injury. Just as the conversation seems to be wrapping up, he says, "If I tell you the trick I'm working on for X, do you have to print it? Can I just tell you for your own information?"

He sounds keyed up and nervous, like a kid with a secret. Then I realize it: he's not just worried that I'll spill the secret to the world; he's worried that I won't be impressed, worried that what he's trying to do won't be enough.

"We can go off the record," I say.

"Cool," he says.

Then he tells me. I ask him to repeat himself because I'm sure I've misheard him. I haven't. And he's right; everything he's done before seems like a warm-up, a throat-clearing.

"Is that really possible?" I ask.

"I'm optimistic," he says.

And then our connection drops. The line goes dead. When I call back, I'm dumped to his voice mail. His outgoing message is addressed to his sons: "Ryden and Tavin, leave a message and Daddy will call you back. Okay, I love you guys. Later."

I've left a lot out of this article. I haven't mentioned how Danny has twice jumped from a hovering helicopter into a halfpipe, or how one of those times, the first time, he did it with a dislocated shoulder. I've not mentioned his four ACL reconstructions, two of which were done while he was awake. Not the fact that he holds the land speed record on a skateboard. I left all of this, and tons more, out because finally it's irrelevant, which is the definitive difference between Danny Way and, well, you. And me. And most everyone else on the planet. When you add up all of Danny's accomplishments and trespasses, his loves and losses and the times when he's been lost, there's still something missing. And what's missing—it's not fear, but maybe fearfulness—is what the rest of us have an awful lot of. We cling to our fearfulness as tightly as we do our triumphs and traumas; we envision these things as the perimeters of our identities, the irrefutable evidence of our capabilities, and Danny simply, emphatically, doesn't.