For skaters that grew up in the suburbs, there’s something special about skating in a driveway.

We put together a list of some of our favorite amateur clips captured in driveways to keep you inspired.

SKATE DADS AND DAUGHTERS

Back in my day, it wasn’t so easy to record your every development, so I’m a little envious of the folks who get to capture that first magical moment where you’re suddenly standing on grip again after a flip trick and share it with the world. After I landed my first kickflip I showed my dad who gave a gruff, “nice one, kiddo,” before going inside for another beer. But my old man wasn’t a skate legend.

Here we’ve got two instances of notable skate fathers showing off their daughter’s first kickflips in non-descript parking lots. First, the Pulaski pro Darren Harper shows his daughter the foot stance which she replicates with pop and precision. And second, we have a clip shared by Tony Hawk, father to generations of skaters, of a Ukrainian girl with dreadlocks bursting with glee after getting 4-down.

THE QUARANTINE KOOK

Sales of skateboards have shockingly risen over the past couple of months, even as everyone is asked to stay at home. I guess now is as good a time as any to finally learn the fine art of wood pushing. That’s what it looks like this guy is doing: just finishing up one of his first seshes putzing around the driveway of his parents’ house. Mom just called him in for dinner, his favorite, frank and beans! So he tries to pop the board up into his hand like he saw in that Jonah Hill movie, but things go terribly wrong. It’s hard to tell if he’s laughing or crying when he finally makes it inside, but I know for sure that I am laughing.

THE JAMIE FOY RAMP SLAM

Even a SOTY has to start somewhere, and Big Boy Foy, as you might imagine by looking at him or listening to him talk, got his start by slamming his face across some sunny cement driveway in Florida. Taking a tow in from his homies tricked out motorbike, young Jamie, in a sideways plaid cap no less, flies towards a tiny kicker and gets absolutely bodied by some bad weight displacement. You know it’s going to be bad when, just before it all goes awry, the filmer utters, “Oh shit.”

THIS DAMN ASS ROCK

An absolute classic of the genre, these kids deserve some kind of award for best representing America’s driveway scene in the early ’00s. It’s got it all: jeans with shredded hems, blue Phantom trucks, a man versus nature storyline and strange scatological revenge schemes–Spike fucking Jonez couldn’t direct a better clip. You gotta wonder whatever happened to Austin though, did he ever get to pee on that rock? I’ve got the feeling he’s out there somewhere, searching out stop-rocks to urinate on in driveways all across the world. In the skaters’ war against the stop-rocks, he’s our meanest general. We salute you, soldier.

JAWS’ JURY RIGGING

There’s got to be a lot of leaky ceilings in whatever sunbaked town it is that Aaron ‘Jaws’ Homoki lives in because that guy is always running up on someone’s roof and jumping around and shit. Here he test’s his own crib’s structural integrity, riding off his roof onto his Camry, lipsliding a flatbar from the roof to driveway, and, ultimately, landing this corkscrew roll-on grind right into his garage door. Hopefully, Birdhouse and Bayer are paying him well enough to get an inspector over there sometime soon, things don’t seem quite to code if you know what I mean.

YOUNG THUNG IN THE PINK 12s

Confidence is everything in skateboarding, and Young Thug ain’t lacking in any of that. The iconoclastic rapper, drenched in his Hermes belt and pink Jordan 12s with the laces undone, takes a flying leap to land bolts and rides the thing down the driveway, over the asphalt lip that has taken out so many of our “let me try that” friends, and down the hill straight to the bank, laughing all the way. While Thugger may not seem to have as many tricks as Lil’ Wayne, he’s nothing if not surprising, and I wouldn’t be too taken aback to find out he’s actually got a mean shuvit body varial.

TODD FALCON’S ENTIRE EXISTENCE

You thought we’d get through this whole list and not mention the legend, Mr. Todd Falcon, himself? Naw, buddy! We’ve got nothing but admiration for The Falcon. Like generations of Falcons before him, Todd was born in that driveway and will die there too, but not before he unlocks for you every damn level of skateboarding the game has to offer. No single individual has done more to show off the incredible potential of a simple driveway. He literally invented over 10,000 tricks there–some while holding chainsaws and machetes. In these uncertain times, one thing is certain, Todd Falcon is the world’s greatest driveway skateboarder. Respect!

Words: CK
Illustration: Michael Giurato
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