Many years ago, I met John when he was just sixteen or seventeen years old, having recently moved from Sacramento to St. Petersburg, Florida. I was the team manager for The Finest Skate Shop, and it didn’t take long to realize that John was always down to skate. When he got his first camera, a VX1000, we teamed up—I shot photos while he became the filmer for the shop, and we spent years on missions all over the Tampa area.
That chapter of our adventures realistically culminated after a wild ride to Miami. Between having to manage transportation logistics for the crew and experiencing some unexpected car trouble, we even received a warning from a skater named Tyler before finding ourselves stranded after a car accident. We eventually hitched a ride back to the mainland with a plumber named Kevin, after smoking a blunt with him, and had to call someone’s parents for a ride home.
Beyond the sessions, one of my favorite memories of John is from the early days when we played basketball on a hoop lowered to about five feet. He drove to the basket and threw down a dunk on that tiny hoop, and it was so comical that everyone started calling him Shaq, after Shaquille O’Neal. We also bonded over Bay Area hip-hop and spent countless hours working on sessions alongside skaters like T.J. Sparks and Nate Humphrey from Westside Skate Shop. John was wise beyond his years when it came to skateboarding history and had brilliant insights into filming, famously shooting the video “Burg Life” with a scratched fisheye lens, a derail that I thought was super sick. We eventually went our separate ways as life took us to different cities, but I’m incredibly proud to see him as an accomplished photographer, and I’m very happy to welcome him to the Chainsaw team.
Chainsaw Magazine 