Cover article: Mike O’Meally photo
Today, I think everyone woke up with this bad news about Marc Johnson.
Sometimes skateboarding is so strange. People that you only watch on TV for so many years become part of your life, and you don’t understand why.
I never met Marc in person. Sometimes I think I was lucky to keep him far from me. You know, it’s so easy to idolize people for a trick or for a pair of pants that you like when you are a kid and living everything so far from reality.
I dunno the reality about MJ, everyone will have their own, but for what he gave to skateboarding, I think he was a great soul, with troubles (who hasn’t?) and infinite style on this piece of wood that we love.
I have a lot of memories about MJ, one for almost every year of my life.
Starting from the Maple video, passing by Uno from TWS, Modus Operandi… all these songs, all these tricks, all the time I spent trying to be someone living on the other side of the world, just because he was so graceful in my favorite passion.
We are not looking in history books or TV shows for people to admire. We were, and still are, living in these videotapes that isolate us from the rest of the actual world, the one we don’t wanna live, fight, or believe in.
We live in this spot in the middle of nowhere, the one that my friends ask about every time I do a trip, convinced that I was in that part of the world for tourism.
And I came all this way just to see the MJ spot or a fucking ledge that I saw in those videotapes.
Thank you, MJ, for letting this old kid keep smiling hearing songs like “Goodbye Horses” or “Love Will Tear Us Apart”… everything is in one of your video parts.
RIP MJ
– S
