Pierre Andre

I'm continuing on with my 25th anniversary look back at my 1990 self-produced bike video, The Ultimate Weekend.  Go to 13:30 in the video for today's clip.

After the wall ride session with Keith Treanor and Randy Lawrence (and Alan Valek spectating), I continue on my ride to the Huntington Beach Pier.  At the time of this video, I lived on Sims Street, off of Warner, in the apartmentland near Huntington Harbor on the far north end of Huntington Beach.  I made the 3 to 4 mile ride to the pier every weekend that there wasn't a competition somewhere.  The main bike locals at the pier in 1990 were Mike Sarrail (inventor of no-handed and barspinning Miami Hop Hops), myself, and Randy Lawrence.  Many others came by now and then.  For the freestyle skaters, the main locals were Pierre Andre' from France, and Don Brown from England, as well as amateur freestyle skate Jeremy Ramey, an HB local.  We took turns sessioning and gathering crowds all day long every Saturday and Sunday on the empty patch of pavement just south of the pier.  That's where the outdoor seating for the lower level restaurant is now.

Unlike today's riders and skaters, we rarely had video cameras with us.  Actually, that really bums me out now, because I don't have any footage of our weekly sessions at the pier.  It just seemed too average then, so I didn't bother even shooting it.  Big mistake.  Anyhow, Don Brown was out of town on that particular weekend, to I asked Pierre if I could shoot a little footage of him for the video.  We went to the bike path loop just north of the pier and shot this footage in a few minutes.

Now, to put this in the context of the time, none of us had much money.  Pierre was the top freestyle skater form France, and was living off a small income from Vision, who owned Sims, his board sponsor.  One day, Pierre walked up to me and said, "I got a shoe manufacturer in France talked into making skate shoes."  "Cool," I replied, not thinking much of it.  That skate shoe company was named Etnies.  At the time of this video, Etnies was a tiny start-up company.  A lot of people thought it was Natas Kaupas' company, because he was the best known guy wearing the shoes then.  But Etnies was Pierre's baby, and he bought out the French company two or three years after this video was shot.  That shoe company grew into Sole Technology, which produces Etnies and E's shoes (and formerly Emerica shoes), 32 snowboard boots, Altamont clothes, and has a huge facility in Lake Forest, CA, where they built the city's skatepark, one of the best in Southern California.

Long before that, though, Pierre was a skater and friend I hung out with every weekend.  He gave me one of his old boards at one point, and I learned a bit of freestyle skating.  I remember one particular day, early evening, when I was sitting near the pier, with my back to the warm gray wall as dusk approached.  Pierre was skating in front of me.  I suddenly wondered where all of us bikers and skaters would be in 20 or 30 years.  We were just dirtbag kids to most people then, spending all our time on kid's toys like skateboards and freestyle bikes.  I had this sense then that some of us dirtbags would actually do some pretty cool things in the future.  But I had no idea what.  I just sat there content after a day of sessioning, watching Pierre perfect his skating.

These days, Pierre Andre' Senizergues is known as the founder/CEO/president of Sole Technology, and last I heard their annual sales were somewhere around $200 million a year.  That makes the company about four times the size of Vision Skateboards, which Pierre and Don skated for, and I worked for in the late 1980's.  Although he doesn't spend much time in the spotlight like other former bike/skate people such as Spike Jonze or Tony Hawk, Pierre is one of the most successful skaters in the action sports world.  The big lesson here is that when a kid commits thousands of hours to learning some activity, especially a highly creative activity like skateboarding, you never know what that kid may be capable of later on.

Pierre is not just highly successful and innovative, he's also just an all-around good guy.  The last time I ran into him was when I was driving a taxi, several years ago.  I saw him talking to some Japanese guys at the Huntington Beach Hilton.  I yelled out a "HI."  He left the Japanese guys, who happened to be his major distributors there, and walked over to talk to me for a couple of minutes.  Don Brown is now vice president of marketing at Sole Tech, and also helped me tremendously when I wound up homeless in SoCal.  You never know where your bike or skate friends will end up in the future.