Christopher Hiett Interview

Were you a sponsored skater before you came out here?
Yes, I was actually, I was on Killer Skate Park and shop which is in Evansville Indiana. It’s like our local skate shop as well as the only skate park in the area. That was awesome and I’m still on them to this day. And I was also on shop flow for Powell Peralta.

Where did you end up when you came to California?
When I came out here, I came out and I was like, “all right, I’m gonna give it a test run. Hang out for a week.” And I got the skate with Deville and the Powell Peralta crew on a Wednesday and on Saturday that week. I was leaving on Sunday. It was super, super fun. I got to get the trick that actually ended up becoming my first ad in Thrasher with Deville on that Saturday and I was like, “all right, that’s it. I did it!”…But I don’t have any way to come out here. I don’t have money. But it was a great experience. I tried my hardest. I really wanted to do this and I got to see how it really was to be out here skating with all these incredible people.

And then Deville came to me that night and said, “Hey, would you want to come and live with me for a while at my house and see how that goes and stuff? You can get on your feet out here…” and I was, honestly, I was very shocked. And a little scared. I was still living with my mother at the time and just like I was like I have to take this opportunity so I ended up living with Deville. At first, I was in his computer room, And then, when Nigel Alexander came to live with us, I moved into the closet for a lot of months.

Did you get a job to help support this? You weren’t getting paid from Powell or anything yet, right?
I had money saved up for my first job, back in Indiana. I was working at Tilly’s in the mall. So I had money saved up. And then, while I was living with Deville. He was teaching me a lot of things. We redid his backyard. We’d dig it out every Tuesday and Thursday. We would have to water it, wait about an hour for the mud to dry until it was kind of a softer dirt and then we’d fill up three trash cans.

And then we just kept repeating and repeating that for probably like five months we did that. We redid his one of his lower apartments, he owns. We painted all the walls, re-did all the doors and the handles got a new oven & new stove. And then I painted and scraped his chipped up porch and his back stairs at an apartment complex that he owned as well. So, I learned so much from that and that really helped me a lot. But yeah, I have had money saved up just for that reason, but Deville took pretty good care of us because we would skate so much together.

I didn’t know Deville was such a landlord, that’s pretty awesome.
Yeah, he’s great, he’s fantastic. I love everything he did and still does for me. I could not have been out here without him. There’s no way.

Are you still living with them or in one of his apartments or anything? How’s that going?
At the moment. I live in Huntington Beach. I really love it there.

This first ad you did with Powell how was that?
I have always ridden the shaped skateboards. And it really stems from the fact that where I grew up in Indiana, a lot of people ride shape boards. Because it’s such a small town, a small community that it’s not as weird. You don’t go to a skate park and you’re riding a shape and everyone’s like that’s so weird. What are you doing? You know how it is. It was pretty normal for everyone to have a shape board setup. The owner of the skate shop has always skated shaped skateboards. And most skate shops have like maybe three or four shaped boards on the walls in a lot of big city areas, I’d say in Evansville at Killer, the majority of the walls are shaped boards.

Was he pushing them harder on people or they just naturally do it?
Not necessarily pushing them, just he rode them. We had the pros that would come the most, like three times when I was still living there. Back to back summers was Street Plant skateboards. 1031 would always come to Killer for demos and then Mike Vallely had come to Killer for a demo and then they started Steet Plant. So they were just like “we have to go and Killer!”. So they went there a lot and Street Plant was a big thing back there.

So yeah its pretty normal to be riding a shaped board.

And then when Deville found out that I like to skate them he was like, “why don’t you embrace what you enjoy doing rather than trying to make it as like fitting in with the other people!”, because I was nervous. I was scared of being out here (In CA). I didn’t know how people would feel about the real me yet. I didn’t have any friends really and this was like I don’t know if they will be turned off if I’m riding the shaped boards because that’s what I like to ride anyway. So it just somehow kind of worked out. of like I had the encouragement from my peers to just kind of be myself out here. And that’s kind of how it all came about.

What if you had Chris Hiett Pro model. What shape would you go for?
So, I actually have been working with Andy and Justin in the Skate One Corp office. They are who work on the concaves and the shapes and all this stuff. For over a year now, it’s constantly changing each deck that they send me. We work together and we come up with ideas of what might work better and what might help this trick and that trick and slowly we’ve have created a shape that is in tune with the tricks that I like to do and I think helps them more. It also still has what I think is cool and so it’s officially definitely finished. Whether it becomes a team board or if I’m lucky enough to have my own pro model in the future, I just stoked for people to skate this board. I think it feels incredible. It has a lot. Like every part of the board calls back to an older board. So each little piece of it is actually kind of like a Frankenstein together of other boards out there. A lot of Powell 80’s shapes as well, are all kind of combined in this board and each one has a different story to it.

What’s the width you like to ride?
So the, the width that I was riding mostly was the 10 inch Steve Siaz board.

Wow, 10 inch. Do you find it easier to kick flip them wider or harder?
I don’t find it to feel any different. I think that anybody can get used to anything as long you look down and see something that you’re stoked on. It doesn’t really matter what tricks you do. If you want to do kick flips or if you want to do bonelesses as long as what you’re looking at down under your feet, makes you feel happy then I think you can do whatever you really want to so it doesn’t affect any of my flip tricks or anything like that whatsoever. The new board that we have put together is a 9.6 at its widest, and that’s the final width. It tapers down. It started off as the Steve Siaz shape so it has the fish inward, and then it comes to the nose and the nose is based off of the Tony Hawk Medallion but it’s cut down a little bit and goes to a point reminiscent of the Skull Skates Coffin shape. Then the tail goes down in the same length of the Steve Siaz squareness, but on the two edges, they are cut corners in order to help with tre-flips and impossibles because it eliminates that little point at the end of the fish tail and really helps that scoop for those specific tricks. I learned that one from the countless talks I’ve had with Andy Anderson. I was going I talked to Andy all the time. I mean, Andy is one of my one of my greatest friends. He’s just fantastic and we can talk and skate and come up with things for hours, never ending.

Well. How often do you ride a vert ramp? I’ve only seen you do it once. I don’t see you doing it often… but do you ever?
Yeah. Um lately. We’ve been riding it every Sunday at Vans (skatepark in Huntington Beach) and it’s been fun. It’s something I never got to skate growing up ever. We didn’t have one, the closest vert ramp to us was the one in Louisville Kentucky. At the time it hadn’t been redone and so it was like one of the sketchiest vert ramps to skate. The wood was all destroyed and the top deck had holes in it that fell down all the way like the 13 feet. It was a very tall vert ramp and you just fell straight through from on the top deck and it was super old. So I never ever got to skate any vert ramps at all. I’ve been trying to get more into it. It’s very fun but it’s also very different because you know, learning proper ways of knee sliding and I’m learning from great teachers there.

As we skate, people kind of help each other out and they help me out. Yodabomb helps me with like “you have to NOT try to force anything you kind of have to go with the ramp”. It’s not like any other ramp. And then we have Ryan Endo. He helps me a lot and it’s become, really, really fun trying to learn the different feeling and the different way of skating a vert ramp cuz I never had the opportunity.

Have you done much traveling with the Powell team? Have you done any international stops or anything?
Yeah. So with Powell Peralta we’ve gone to New York and that was a really good time. But with my other sponsor Fallen Footwear we’ve been to Costa Rica, Argentina, Germany that has been really, really fun as well.

Are you a vegetarian or anything?
No, I’m not a vegetarian. I have no problem with vegetarians, though. I have a lot of friends who are. I like to eat a lot of protein bars. Well I don’t know if that’s like super good for you or not, but that’s what I really enjoy eating and I think that’s my thing that I eat the most. That is kind of become a problem, because I eat them so much all day long, Another is pistachios. I really love Pistachios a lot. Yeah, I love pistachios man. Those are the best thing.

Do you have a job to pay the rent or how do you work that out?
I am very very lucky and thankful that my sponsors pay me enough, money to where I can I can live here in California and pursue my dream of skateboarding every day.

Awesome. So then you are pro now if they’re paying you!
Yes. But no, I don’t have my own board. Yeah, so I’m very, I’m very lucky.

Is there anybody that you would like to say thanks to?

Oh yeah. Definitely. Thanks to Deville. Thank you to Willow and Kevin from Fallen Footwear and Daxter and Chad. Thanks to my mom, my girlfriend Julia, who’s incredible! Thanks to my roommate, Lando. Thank you to all of 224 media. Thank you to everyone at Powell, George, Stacy, Andy Anderson. Andy at Powell, Justin. Just all those people up there and Micaiah.

Everyone that I get to see, everyone who supports me at all because I don’t consider them fans. I don’t like that word very much. I like the word just friends. Whether we’ve met each other yet or not? And also thank you to you.

Thank you and all the best. I hope to see your board on the wall in my shop sometime soon.
All right.