![]() ![]() Hanging inside the wheel well of his truck, he pulled and pulled and pulled. One night, in 2010, Mullen targeted his fusing hip. He started to notice that, after the big breakthroughs, he would enjoy a breadth of movement he didn’t have before the lockdown, one that allowed him to skate as though he was almost innately goofy-footed. ![]() To gauge his progress, Mullen would skate a couple of hours each night, exploring his restored range of motion. “You have to be so desperate where you actually don’t care what happens to you at some point.” Mullen was twice approached by police who, hearing his screams, thought he might be getting mugged. “Shopping cart racks: Those are really useful.” When scar tissue breaks free, it feels like dried gum snapping in half, or uncooked spaghetti cracking apart. “So you pull, you pull, you pull, and right when you think you can’t take it anymore, that’s when you give it all you have.” Late at night, Mullen would look for things against which he could hoist, heave, and winch himself, tearing the tissue into submission. “You know it’s a little rope in there that’s binding you,” he explains. In time he graduated to pulling the tissue apart, using large objects as leverage. With wrenches, knife handles, and other instruments, he began to jam open the scar tissue that was locking him down. One doctor in particular, says Mullen, “said with his eyes what he wouldn’t say with his mouth: There’s no way out for you with this.” And if you can’t fall, you can’t skate.” Doctors were wary of breaking up the fusion. “I could feel how fast it was cinching me down. “Like anything that grinds, the body will fuse it, will calcify it,” explains Mullen. Decades of skating had yielded decades of scar tissue his right femur had started to grind against his right hip. What makes a soul regular, and what makes a soul goofy? To understand why this question began to grip Mullen, you have to go back to 2003. Mullen has set out to reverse his native stance-to feel as adept at skating with his right foot forward as he is with his left. He has not been aiming simply to ride switch, as many other riders do and have done, however. Now 49, Mullen has in recent years been equally absorbed in a new endeavor: conditioning his body to perform the tricks he came up with more than three decades ago, as well as new ones, with his opposite foot forward. This makes some sense, because back in the late ’70s and early ’80s, when Mullen was pioneering many of the tricks on which modern street skating is based-the flat-ground ollie, the kick-flip, the 360-flip, the heel-flip-he did so alone, with a storied monastic dedication, in his family’s barn in Gainesville, Florida. Rodney Mullen skates only by himself, and only at night.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |