Skater of the Year: Danny Way

Thrasher Magazine, May, 2005 by Michael Burnett

I DON'T THINK DANNY IS CRAZY. Ever since he was a little boy, he has been involved with dangerous activities like jumping motorcycles high...where you have to make the landing clean or you will receive trauma.

He is completely calculated. He knows what he needs to do to make it, and he's aware of the fact that he's eventually going to get injured. He's prepared for that and the next rehabilitation. That's courage! D Way does the math. Crazy is when you don't count the cost."

--Daniel Harold Sturt 2.22.2005

Did you grow up out in Rainbow?

No, When I was really little we lived on the coast. Then my parents split up and my mom moved us to Vista and that's when I made friends with Hensley, Ortega, Mario and Brennan. I made friends with those guys before just from going to school but then there was this skate scene in Vista. I look at those years in Vista as ones I value the most as far as becoming a skateboarder.

You guys didn't grow up rich, right?

No, We didn't grow up with anything actually. My brother and I had a pretty rough childhood and our mom struggled as a single parent. Our dad died when I was about eight months old and basically my mom bad to work a couple of jobs to take care of us. For the most part my brother and I had to work for everything we had. By the time I was 14-years-old I was helping to take care of my mom so she didn't have to work and even to this day, we're going to the house that my brother bought my mom for Christmas.

That's like the American dream--buying your mom a house.

Yeah. It's been great that we have the means to take care of our mom who had to struggle to take care of us. We grew up living in the barrio. Steve Ortega had the same type of upbringing--living where we did in the barrio. My brother and I had to put up with a lot of shit being blonde-haired and blue-eyed white kids living in a part of town that was mostly Mexican. It was a rough childhood. I put up with a lot of shit when I was a kid and there's a lot of bad stuff that happened that I don't want to get into.

Did you skate or surf first?

Both, simultaneously. My mom remarried when I was two and my step-dad became a very important person in my life. He's the reason why I skateboard today, because he took me to the skateboard park in Del Mar. He started taking us after we saw it off the side of the freeway and he'd take us surfing all the time too. He passed away two years ago from the beach, coming in surfing. The doctors told him he had bad acid reflux and didn't realize he had something wrong with a heart valve. He was young and in great shape and it's pretty tragic that it happened. But it happened on the beach, after surfing so that kind of tells you the influences I had as a young kid. It was not the typical influences--especially in that era. Surfing and skateboarding were still pretty underground activities. They were still pretty much outcast sports in those days. Luckily I had parents who were pretty open-minded. They didn't really put any boundaries on us. We played football and baseball. My brother and I played seven or eight years each of football. My brother even played in high school. We all played football and skated at the same time. I used to come to practice all beat up and my coach would know it was from skating and put me on the bench. He knew I wasn't committed to football. After that I decided to quit and concentrate on skating. But yeah, I didn't have a real traditional upbringing, but I think I got some of my motivation from some of the bad things that happened. There were some bad times that made me want to work even harder to make my dreams reality. I would look around me and think, "I'm not going to be like this when I get older."

Have you always been so motivated?

Yeah. Starting with the first drop-in at the Del Mar keyhole. I've just always had this fire burning inside of me ever since I was a little kid. My brother was pretty hard on me as a kid and skateboarding was my vent. I'd just take all my aggression out in skateboarding. If I slammed on something I'd get up and be just that much more angry to make it. It's a vicious cycle but as a kid I learned that this mind set actually works. I learned from a young age that you can take all this negative and turn it into something positive. I found an outlet for it, thank God, otherwise I could have ended up in some bad situations that I can't get out of. If it wasn't for skateboarding, who knows? It was a definite vent for me. From the first time I started dropping in at Del Mar, the next week I was rolling in and taking slams--hard ones, dude. The guys who used to run the pro shop, they would just antagonize me. They used to make those Otis Spunkmeyer cookies when they first came out. What kid doesn't like cookies? They used to make those at Del Mar and they'd make some fresh ones and they'd say, "Hey, we'll give you a couple cookies. Let's see you do something crazy."

You were like eight or nine, right?

Yeah. I used to roll in backside into the keyhole. I didn't know how to grind in so I'd just acid drop in and miss three fourths of the transition and make it. I took heavy slams in the process and got up, and I think I earned their respect. I think the mentality started at that age that if you slam, get up and try it again. I don't like to slam. It hurts and it pisses me off, but it motivates me at the same time. I don't know if it all makes sense but it's something that's helped me my whole life--take the negative energy and turn it into something positive.