Rodney Mullen Is Skateboarding’s Spiritual Core
His role in Tony Hawk’s Documentary, “Until the Wheels Fall Off,” Proves It
Rodney Mullen is skateboarding’s spiritual core. Not like a mega-church pastor who drives a G Wagon and tells you Jesus will return your tithes tenfold. More like a Buddhist monk, quietly giving lectures that by their sheer profundity compel listeners to endorse the tenets therein. He has the radiant calmness of someone who’s died a thousand deaths. It’s rumored that he makes his skateboards from the wood of poplar trees that he’s planted himself after eating the seeds and mining them from his own feces, Kopi Luwak-style. He fertilizes these trees with the compost from his composting toilet, thus creating a closed loop system, an unbroken ring of vitality, or what the Chinese call Qi (“chee”). He only eats one meal a day, either fish soup or fermented veggies over rice, and he only drinks rainwater, as it falls to earth. When he’s skating, seagulls are known to congregate and drop off gifts — small fish, and french fries they’ve gotten from tourists. Complaints from skatepark maintenance teams about the rotting fish and seagull poop reached Mullen who now pays the parks’ additional cleaning fees, and sometimes joins in the cleanup efforts himself. He once did a five-second nose grind that made a screeching sound onlookers swear sounded like the violins from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Another time he started a session on a board with a completely blank deck, pure beige poplar, and by the end of the session the skid marks on the board’s underside created a millimeter-perfect portrait of Ghandi. He sold this board at auction to raise money for homeless youth. During his daily skate sessions, which start at six am, he’ll ride for 20-minute stretches with his eyes closed, skating based on subtle vibrations felt in his wheels and echolocation from seagull squawks bouncing off the coping. The debate over these stories is ongoing, but what’s undeniable is that Mullen is the spiritual fulcrum around which skateboarding sways. His role in Tony Hawk’s documentary, Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off, is proof positive of this.
Mullen’s posture is straight, sturdy. He leans in when conveying something particularly poignant, searching optimistically in your eyes for a hint of shared understanding. He speaks in a syncopated, sing-songy cadence akin to spoken word. Every sentence or two he’ll take a word and stretch it out, belaboring it in breathy exasperation, not so you know it’s an important point, but because it is, at its core, such an important point that to say it any other way would be sacrilege.
Mullen talks about skateboarding like a religious practice, a gateway for commingling with the divine. In this heightened state he doesn’t speak in tongues, but in kick flips¹. He might speak in tongues while doing kick flips, too, maybe that’s what attracts the seagulls. Who knows.
People talk about skiing, surfing, climbing, and other action-adventure sports in the same way Mullen talks about skating. Steven Kotler or any of the capital-F Flow experts whose work has rippled through the zeitgeist over the past few decades would probably label Mullen as some version of a flow junkie. But a lot (all?) of the top skateboarders in the world would fit that description. In contrast, Mullen’s brand of flow is more akin to a painter’s or writer’s. The kind of flow the painter Phillip Guston described:
“When you start working, everybody is in your studio…the past, your friends, enemies…and above all, your own ideas all are there. But as you continue…they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you’re lucky, even you leave.”
Mullen looks like a painter, too, at least when he appears in Hawk’s documentary — wide-eyed and wiry, wearing a simple red and white striped tee shirt. He’ll occasionally move a few wandering strands of jaw-length hair from in front of his eyes, the childishly optimistic glint in which is amplified by the skin around them, loosened by the sun, and squinting, and gravity. He appears both seasoned and brand new, like he’s seen otherworldly vistas, perhaps even stepped across dimensional divides, yet he has the enthusiasm of a kid who’s just discovered where in the freezer mom hides the popsicles.
There are Mullen-like characters across sports and entertainment — people who aren’t the face of their team, but who provide its spiritual scaffolding. Draymond Green on the Warriors, or Marcus Smart on the Celtics play this role. Marshawn Lynch during his run with the Seahawks was undeniably the driving spiritual force for the team. You get the sense that Marshawn would have been playing padless tackle football in the park for free if the Seahawks weren’t paying him to do it in pads on Sundays. Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers is another example — not the front man, but the backbone. What Lauryn Hill was to the Fugees, what RZA is to the Wu-Tang Clan, Rodney Mullen was to the Bones Brigade, and is to skateboarding as a whole.
In Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off, we’re introduced to Rodney Mullen early on. He’s one of the key subjects whose interviews are spliced throughout the film. At first his “enlightened” tone casts him as a sort of self-serious cook, especially against the content of the early part of the documentary which focuses on competitive skate contests and the emergence of the skateboarding industry in the mid-late eighties. The sponsors, tours, and oversized-checks of it all were very splashy, anathema to Mullen’s monk-like demeanor². As the documentary progresses, however, Mullen’s sagacity blooms.
About halfway through the film, Tony Hawk, having reached the pinnacle of the skateboarding world at just eighteen years old, was burning out. He was winning almost every event with impressive yet formulaic runs. City after city after city. Bus rides. Flights. No true peers in sight. Hawk was overcome by the sameness of it all, struggling to find fulfillment. Mullen had, it turns out, gone through something similar about a year earlier. He’d even quit skating competitively before eventually rediscovering his spark. So Mike McGill, the ring leader of Hawk’s and Mullen’s skate crew at the time, set up a phone call between the two.
On the call, Mullen told Hawk how he’d undergone a paradigm shift. Instead of focusing purely on winning — micromanaging the scoreboard, perfecting repetitive runs — he’d begun taking more chances, competing against possibility itself. He was using skating to explore the limits of his creativity. In this way the sport opened up. It became less about winning the next competition and instead about progressing the sport as a whole. With this mindset, competitions regained a lightness of spirit, and, perhaps more importantly, sessions outside of competition became a laboratory³ in which new frontiers could be unlocked. Hawk was inspired by this approach and credits it for reigniting his passion for the sport.
Mullen’s coronation as skateboarding’s spiritual fulcrum comes at the end of the documentary, when he gives an all-time monologue and frankly, the coup de grâce for the movie that you’d expect to come from Hawk. This monologue even included the films titular phrase, until the wheels fall off. The film is exploring what drives people like Hawk (and Mullen) to continue skating so hard into their old age, despite the health risks of broken bones and concussions. That’s when Mullen leans in and speaks, over uplifting piano keys, in his breathy profoundness:
“This is the luxury of having spent my life doing what I love. The cost of that? It sucks. I’m not blind. I’m not numb to the pain. I would argue I’m more conscious of it than anybody else. But I’m also more conscious of what that gives me. And when I’m done with this, that will be what it is, and I’ll find a way. But there’s something inside of me, propelling, that I’m not going to give up until the wheels fall off. That’s what I’m made of. And I wish — I see all the arguments against it — but I wish I could relate the intangibles to you. My guess, is that we’re all built the same. None of us are completely stupid. A little deranged, I think there’s a strong argument there. I do. But ultimately, we also know what we have. And to go and lay down in that sense of it, that’s like, embracing what we’ve done with our lives. You know?”
Consider the intangibles related, Rodney. As much as they can be, anyway, through words alone.
[1] Mullen invented the kick flip, and the ollie, and hundreds of other tricks
[2] This monk-like demeanor is apparent most clearly in late-stage Mullen. He always had a sacramental dedication to skateboarding but was a lover of competition and an absolute killer during his peak pro touring days
[3] As of this writing (May, 2022), Tony Hawk has invented over 100 skateboarding tricks
