My own King of the Road

Thrasher Magazine, Dec, 2004 by Michael Sieben

I DIDN'T GO on the real King of the Road for a number of reasons. Full-time job. Mediocre skateboarding abilities. Not being invited. That kind of shit. So I decided that I was going to have my own King of the Road. Oh man, I had big plans for it. I was going to invite a bunch of local dudes to participate, and we would take a mini road trip from Austin to San Antonio. Yeah man, it was going to be awesome.

But then I never got off my ass to plan any of it and before I knew it my deadline for this issue was only one day away. So I abandoned my original idea for the event and planned an even smaller, even easier King of the Road.

My team consisted of me and my neighbor Adam Young. Our mission was to get from my house to a couple of ditches in town. Along the way I wrote down what we did, and then made a list of challenges based on shit that had already happened. It was so easy. Oh, we didn't invite anybody else to participate in our King of the Road, so no matter what we were going to win. Here's the breakdown:

MISC CHALLENGES

HARD (10 points):

--Draw a phallic banana on your new deck before going skating

--Find a convenience store that sells beer on the way to the ditches

HARDER (20 points):

--"SALMAN'S LIFE:" I had to wear my new wrist guard the whole time I skated since I recently fractured a bone in my wrist

--Make and session a Philly Bar leaning against a makeshift wallride in a ditch (OK to use somebody not on the team to hold the bar in place)

HARDEST (50 points):

--Get Tim Kerr to go on the mission

--Find a fence at one of the ditches with "BEER!" spray-painted on it

HIGHEST, LONGEST, MOST

(Uh ... since nobody else was competing we just gave ourselves 50 points for every trick we landed):

--Frontside noseblunt on the curb

--Backside disaster revert on the curb

--Frontside disaster backside revert on the curb

--Ollie to frontside pivot on the curb and then ollie to fakie out

--Frontside blunt on the curb

--Backside blunt

--Blunt to fakie on the curb

--Floating kickflip to fakie

--Frontside rock and roll on the makeshift wallride thing

--Switch pole jam (come in forwards)

--Ollie the pyramid thing

IN-THE-CAR CHALLENGES

HARD (10 points):

--Play a CD we both could agree on

--Drink a tall boy of PBR

HARDER (20 points):

--I had to find a koozie in the backseat

--Get a person in another car to not notice us

HARDEST (50 points):

--Decide whether to use only the air conditioner or go with windows down

--Adam had to play a CD by a band I'd never heard of

--These two lines are here only so the columns look all even and stuff

So we ended up with a grand total of 870 points. Not too shabby, We would have earned 920 points, but Tim Kerr was too busy to go skate with us. We'll probably go skate with him later this week though, so don't feel too bad for us. Actually, don't feel bad for us at all. We're the fucking Kings of the Road for Christ's sake. Jeez.