Article USA Today
Nyjah Huston is, it would appear, the best skateboarder alive right now.
Huston just completed a never-before-seen undefeated regular season on the 2014 Street League Skateboarding Nike SB World Tour. Street League is the brainchild of Rob Dyrdek, who became one of the country’s most famous skateboarders thanks to his multiple shows on MTV. The league brings together some of the best skaters alive to compete in a street competition at arenas around the country. Unlike traditional skateboard contests, the pacing of Street League is frenetic, with scores on tricks showing up on the jumbotron almost immediately after they are performed.
The Street League Super Crown World Championship, the final event of the 2014 season, was held late on August 24 at the Prudential Center in Newark, televised on Fox Sports and attended by thousands of skateboard fans. Huston was undefeated entering the championship, but any of the eight skateboarders had a fair shot to win the trophy. Prior rankings meant nothing going into the final. Just like the organizers of Street League designed it, the whole season came down to just one night.
The walk to the Prudential Center from the PATH train was littered by young men in their late teens and early 20s, all on skateboards. They rode noisily and aggressively through the people walking, decked in ratty t-shirts and ripped shorts. Skate fashion hasn’t changed all that much in the last decade.
One skater, who appeared to be in his mid-20s, exited the PATH train holding a bag of Doritos, and then, as he was exiting, threw the empty bag of Doritos on the ground demonstratively before riding away, a rebellious gesture so tiny it was almost adorable.
The energy was palpable, and everyone was there to see if one young man could complete the first ever undefeated Street League season. They were there to see Nyjah.
Nyjah Huston is just 19 years old but has already been a professional skater for nearly a decade. He first made his mark when he became the youngest competitor in X-Games history at age 11, a spindly kid with long dreads and a bright smile. He was already known around the competitive circuit for tearing apart courses better than kids twice his age. His father was always there with him at these competitions, pushing him on from the sidelines.
“My dad was really controlling and he did want me to skate every single day,” Huston said in a video produced by ESPN. “I would say he did it in a little bit of a strict way, which probably wasn’t necessary because bottom line I loved skateboarding and that’s all I wanted to do anyway.”
Huston’s backstory reads like fiction: His father, Adeyemi Huston, was a devout Rastafarian who pushed his son to greatness at a young age, before moving his entire family to a 26-acre farm in Puerto Rico in 2006. He purchased the property with his son’s winnings, according to ESPN. From there, Adeyemi could pick what contests his son could enter, autograph sessions he would attend, when and for what he could leave their home.
“I think [my dad] wanted to keep me and my brothers as far as possible away from having friends and being a normal kid,” Huston said.
Eventually Huston’s mother, Kelle Huston, who is now his manager, packed up Huston’s brothers and sisters and fled when Adeyemi and Huston were on a skateboarding trip. Two years later, his mother filed for divorce, and it took a judge’s order in May 2010 for Huston Sr. to eventually relinquish control of his son.
It’s a horrifying story, and one Huston has only recently been willing to discuss. But he got through it, and Huston rejoined the skateboarding world, eager to get back on the competitive circuit. He hasn’t lost much since. This has made many people happy, but none more so than his sponsors.
Skateboarding may be a niche sport, but it is a big business, and Huston is a big part of the business.
He has one signature shoe already with DC Shoes, The Nyjah S, and a second shoe just coming out, The Nyjah Vulc, that is marketed for casual wear. The S and the Vulc are both relatively traditional shoes, suede uppers, solid colors. The shoes are Huston’s way of paying homage to the tradition of skateboarding, but DC says he’s willing to push the style of the sport going forward.
“It’s great working with a guy like Nyjah, who’s not one of the older guys,” said Kevin Becker, who designed the Nyjah Vulc for DC. “He’s willing to try stuff. We have a great opportunity to push product. Not just push it in the performance direction, but have more aspiration in the aesthetic of the product as well.” Translation: Huston is OK if the shoes look a little crazy.
Huston is also sponsored by Element Skateboards and has been since before he hit puberty. He’s the darling of the sport, the next young star who has a chance to become the next Rob Dyrdek or, some people even dare to say, the next Tony Hawk.
Huston is a marketer’s dream: young and handsome, careful with his words, eager to succeed. He’s not as charismatic or as funny as Dyrdek, but he is more driven, more competitive, more put together. While many of the other Street League competitors acted a lot like you’d imagine teenage skateboarders to act, Huston is polished.
“I think he’s come so long in just a few years in terms of handling the media, handling the pressure,” said Brian Atlas, president and co-founder of Street League. “I mean, he won two ESPY awards, his competition dominance…it’s quite miraculous to see him rise through and evolve into a young, but obviously elite, competent pro.”
Huston also wins, a lot, all the time. Unlike some other skaters, Huston doesn’t have a problem with winning.
“There’s definitely a lot of people out there in the industry who feel that skateboarding shouldn’t be a competitive sport,” said Huston on a phone call. “Or be a sport in general at all. Those are the people who want to keep skateboarding at the core side of things. But me personally, I love seeing the sport of skateboarding grow in general. It’s just going to naturally happen. There are so many skateboarders in the world and they want to see skateboarding on TV.”
That last sentence seems to be what Street League is trying to accomplish — to make skateboarding into something that can be brought into TVs around the country. Atlas said the goal of the league was not only to “create an infrastructure for the competition side of the sport,” but also to “create a great televised product.” Street League is bringing skateboarding to television, and Nyjah is its biggest star.
He’s such a star, that before the finals, many of the fans inside the Prudential Center thought the competition was over before it began.
“Nyjah’s gonna win,” slurred a guy in the crowd who declined to give his name but said he’d been drinking since 10 a.m. “It’s rigged, probably. He always wins these things. They want him to win.”
It was hard for anyone to disprove the young man’s theory because no one in the crowd really had any idea how the judges were scoring each trick. By keeping the pace of the events so fast for television, the judges and announcers had no time to explain what move was just executed, how difficult it was, or how a score was arrived at. A guy did a trick, and seconds later he got a score.
“It’s fast because we score every trick as it happens, unlike in snowboarding or something where you’re judging like an entire 40-second halfpipe run,” said head judge Scott Pfaff, who is Dyrdek’s cousin. “With us, with all these scores coming in, it has to be quick, because of TV time.”
Pfaff leads a team of five judges, all former skaters or industry guys, who use an instant-scoring technology called ISX. Dyrdek is a spokesman for the company.
Pfaff admits that scores come in fast and can be difficult for a casual fan to understand completely, but he laughs off any idea that the events are rigged for Huston.
“People try to say, fans try to say, ‘oh you guys favor Nyjah,’” said Pfaff. “To me, thinking it’s rigged for Nyjah, it doesn’t make any sense. If anything, the contest is sponsored by Nike. [Huston is not sponsored by Nike.] What benefit is there to rig it for Nyjah and have it be, ‘Oh, it’s the same dude again.’“
Even to a total layperson, it’s clear how much more athletically gifted Huston is than the other competitors. Other competitors are more stylish in their execution, but it’s clear the rules of gravity apply to them. They pop up, and then they come down. Huston seems beyond gravity — when he takes off, it feels like he’s just going to sail away.
“Nyjah wins fair and square,” said Matt Berger, a Street League rookie who Nyjah called one of his best friends on the tour. “The caliber of tricks I see him do to win, the strategy involved where he’s done specific tricks to build up on and then go to newer tricks, I mean it’s all a strategic process. He has the game figured out, and he has the consistency he needs to win. I don’t question the judging on it.”
Fans are right to be curious, though. Street League is a business, and for its business to succeed, it needs to have stars. Huston has been dominant throughout the year, but it was also clear in the promotion of the event and during the event itself the skateboarders were divided into Nyjah and Everyone Else. Huston, by all accounts, is beating these other skaters fair and square…but Street League is just fine that that’s the case.
Inside the Prudential Center, things were heating up before the big event. The crowd was amped, to use a word I kept hearing. There were the 12-year-old skater kids with their disheveled looking fathers (on one trip to the bathroom a middle-aged man was leaning against a sink, broken, staring into the middle distance as two young boys screamed at him to hurry up already), but there were also a huge amount of 20-somethings, skater kids who grew up and never gave up their decks.
The event had a 9 p.m. start time for West Coast television purposes, and it appeared that many in the crowd had been drinking for much of the day. Backstage, which was accessible by skaters, media, sponsors, and friends (each group oh whom had its own specially colored wristband), was just as insane as the crowd. The Prudential Center staff struggled to identify which of the six or so different colored wristbands meant what, so people were running around all over the place.
In all the backstage rooms there was no water. Just Monster Energy Drink and beer. The line for the beer was long, the line for the Monster not so long, and all this led up to a very aggressive vibe in the arena before the event even began.
And then the lights went out, and the music kicked up, and everyone howled.
The Super Crown World Championship, and all of the events in the tour, are broken down into three sections. The first is called the Flow section, where each competitor is given one minute to express himself on the course in whatever way he sees fit. Next is the Impact section, where everyone gets a few chances to do one trick upon which he is judged. The last section is the Control section, which seemed to be the exact same thing as the Impact section, just with more tricks that were added up.
No one in the crowd was adequately able to explain the difference between the Impact and the Control section. Not that anyone cared. They were there to see skateboarders, and the celebrities in the crowd.
Did I mention the celebrities? Chum Lee, he of the TV show Pawn Stars, was there, wearing a flat brim hat and a comically large gold watch. Every time he walked by, dozens of fans in the crowd would scream “Chum Lee!” and he’d point at them dramatically.
Members of Floyd Mayweather’s The Money Team were there, but not Mayweather himself. All Money Team members wore t-shirts emblazoned with “TMT” on the front. They also had with them a very young boy with long hair who rode a skateboard around the edges of the competitive area for the entire evening. The boy, who couldn’t have been older than 10, was unsupervised for much of the event, and it wasn’t clear just how he was involved with TMT, Mayweather, etc. A request to interview him was denied by an older TMT member.
Lil Wayne was also there! The rapper did a brief interview with the sideline reporter at the event (yes, there was a sideline reporter) and the crowd tried its best to understand what he was saying. It wasn’t clear if it was Wayne’s garbled Louisiana twang or poor acoustics from the arena speakers, but the entire interview was more or less unintelligible.
During all this madness, Huston was off to a solid start. After an early fall, he recovered well and had the lead with a Flow score of 8.2. (The score is an average of the five judges, thus the decimal places.) The crowd wasn’t really behind him, though, as most people there were pulling for hometown kid Ishod Wair or Berger.
Berger is different than the other skaters in how he got to this event. The native of Canada got into Street League by winning the Street League Pro Open, a competition that invited a host of skateboarders to earn a spot in the 2014 tour.
“For me, it’s like, I’m OK not winning because I shouldn’t even be here, you know?” he said on a phone call.
His rookie status endears him to the crowd, as well as his appearance — Berger is a lot taller than any of the other skaters, and wears a black button down shirt buttoned all the way up when he skates. He smiled often during the competition, seemingly stunned by the raucous applause from the crowd.
As the competition progressed, and the scores flashed along the screen, Huston kept nabbing high scores, and the crowd kept reacting coldly. There were cheers, but not nearly as loud as those for the other competitors.
“Someone was telling me that it was very similar to Tony Hawk back in the day,” said Pfaff. “When he just won every vert contest that happened, and it got to the point that people would root against him.”
Each skater had his own distinct style. Wair and Huston were high flyers, Luan Oliveira and Paul Rodriguez more technical and stylish. Torey Pudwill, another fan favorite, had a fun manic energy to his tricks — he flailed his arms a bit during grinds, giving the impression that every trick was being done just at the edge of control. When he landed a trick, the crowd roared.
After runs, all of the skateboarders usually congratulated each other. Some were obviously closer to each other than others — for Huston, he usually was cordial with the other skaters, but saved his biggest celebrations for Berger.
“I think Berger skated absolutely amazing tonight,” said Huston after the event. “I’m so hyped he was out there killing it. He’s one of my good friends and we skate together all the time back home.”
In the end, it all came down to three skaters: Huston, Wair and Pudwill. The crowd, by then even drunker and cranky with exhaustion, made it clear who they wanted to win: anyone but Nyjah.
The tricks kept coming, and the announcers kept calling out things, and it was all on the verge of being lost until there was a brief break in the action and it became clear: Pudwill was in first place, but Huston had one chance to beat him. He needed a 5.3 on the final trick to win. It all came down to this, the perfect end that was just what Street League wanted.
“The vision for Street League in terms of the instant scoring and what we’re trying to create with the experience, it’s all about that buzzer beater final trick moment,” said Atlas. “Where even if you don’t understand what’s happening with the tricks, you understand the stakes at hand. And that Nyjah had to literally land his last trick to become the champion.”
With a smattering of boos echoing through the arena, Huston went up and nailed his final trick. He received a 7.8 and finished the first undefeated season in Street League history. When he landed the trick, the crowd cheered. Then, a few seconds later, the boos came.
The boos continued, mostly concentrated in one small section, while Huston stepped up on the podium and received his trophy.
Ever a gentleman, he acknowledged “the haters” and gave them a big thumbs up as he took his award. Afterward, he admitted he was surprised by it.
“The crowd was good, aside from the left section at the end there,” said Huston after the event. “You know what? Haters come along. Personally, I don’t understand it too much. I mean, skaters, we’re all out there trying to win. I don’t know if people expect me to mess up on purpose or something? I don’t know.”
After a brief interview in the press room, Huston was whisked off by a Street League representative. An extra event out on the course was going on, and fans stuck around to see the competitors and other skaters who happened to be in the crowd skate the course. Huston had to make an appearance.
Well after midnight, it was time to head home. There was a shuttle from the arena to a bar in Manhattan where an after party was being held.
A parade of exhausted skateboarders and media members shuffled through the guts of the Prudential Center, then streamed out to find two shuttle buses waiting. Most went to the back bus, but a few of us made our way to the bus up front.
“You can’t go in that one,” said a young man walking with Oliveira. “That’s Nyjah’s bus.”
We changed course, and all packed into the second bus until it was over capacity. I was sitting next to Berger, who sat shirtless, still sweating from the competition, staring out the window.
As Huston got to ride a private bus with friends, rookies like Berger were crammed back there with the media folks and PR reps. But without competitors like Berger, no matter how good Huston is, the league can’t grow into the massive skateboarding league and televised event it hopes to become.
As we pulled out of the parking lot, Berger asked the guys sitting behind him what the deal with the after party was.
“Don’t worry,” one of them said. “You’re a competitor. You’re in at the party.”
“I don’t need a wristband?” Berger asked. They told him no.
Berger thought about this for a second. “But how will anyone know who I am?”
Innovate & Skate 