Just over 2 weeks ago Scott Fierbach from Coastal Riders called me up to tell me a dilemma – The Girl and Chocolate Team wanted to do a Demo at Chuck Bailey on August 30th… At first I said no, not because I didn’t want them there but because we already had another event Top Grom set up for that day, and also to do a proper demo in Surrey you need to get approved by the city and obtain insurance and a permit; 2 weeks is really tight for that to happen. Scott spoke to Top Grom and worked it out that we could run the demo in the afternoon prior to their event. So the paperwork was filled out and I started working on my end to help get it approved asap. With Kevin McCoubrey at Supra Distribution getting started on the insurance portion right away, and the 3 of us working hard together, all of a sudden it looked like this was actually going to happen. So here we were now planning for a Girl Demo, little did I know at this time that I was going to end up being the MC.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of Girl Skateboards so all the main guys were definitely coming – Rick Howard, Mike Carroll, Rick McCrank, Sean Malto, Raven Tershy, Cory Kennedy, Elijah Berle, and Mike Mo Capaldi. They showed up in pure skater style, over an hour late to a packed park full of skaters that all wanted to see these guys shred. Everybody sat down and chilled as soon as they arrived, everyone except Brad Muscat. But after busting a couple big bangers and getting props from the crowd, he too stopped skating and sat back for the show. It was a solid performance from all, Cory Kennedy utilized the entire park and put his feet on everything he tried, Malto showed off some tech tricks that probably no one else had done before on the flat ledges and skated solid the entire time, Elijah aired the volcano a couple times and shredded the bowl with Raven, and McCrank took over as he destroyed the whole place, street and tranny. This went on for over an hour and the whole crowd was super respectful by not skating and by cheering hard whenever something awesome went down. The riders stayed pumped and kept on landing stuff so the demo continued until finally everyone was tired enough to stop and do a little mingling with their fans. So Scotty lit up the Barbeque and fired off a couple hundred free hot dogs for the crowd.
It was a super awesome day and the weather was perfect. The skating was solid, the crowd was awesome, the demo team was cool. It’s funny when I think about it, when I was a young teenager and Rick Howard and Mike Carroll were 2 of my favourite skateboarders when they rode for Plan B and were just about to start Girl, I never thought for a minute that 20 years later I would be a guy that lived in British Columbia that everyone referred to as Hippie Mike announcing a demo for them. You never know what life’s gonna bring you and when…
