Editor’s Note: The following story contains expletives.
He was a skater boy.
Joey Derby, acting junior, aspires to be a skater god.
Derby said he recently bought his first pair of wheels.
“At the end of February, I got my longboard,” Derby said. “I’ve snowboarded for a while, and I really like the feeling of carving out S’s in the snow, and so I figured I should transfer it to the pavement.”
On March 1, Derby decided he wanted to start a skate crew.
“I didn’t want to do it alone. I felt like we would have strength in numbers, and that we could have a presence on campus of like, ‘oh shit, here comes the skating crew. Watch out,” he said. “We would have OCU clout that way.”
Derby posted on the “OCU Buy Sell Trade” Facebook group at 12:46 p.m. that day.
The post read:
“Requesting all OCU peeps that have a longboard or something
of the like to help me create a crew.
*must be willing to shred or die
*must know all of the words to Smells Like Teen Spirit
*must be cool and have cool hair”
Five hours later, however, disaster struck. Derby posted again in “OCU Buy Sell Trade” at 5:57 p.m.
The post read:
“Update on the skate crew:
I ate absolute shit going off a staircase so I will now never board again”
Derby said recalling the incident was painful. He said he was by the soccer field when inspiration struck.
“There was a little, four-step staircase right in front of the soccer field, and I was cruising around on my longboard, and I was itching for some danger because I had gotten my cruising down,” he said. “I could carve. I could do all that, but now I wanted to do a stunt. I was like, ‘I’m going to roll off this staircase.’ You can’t exactly jump off on a longboard, but I figured you can ride down it.”
Derby said he attempted to complete his sweet trick.
“I gave it two attempts. I bailed both times halfway down the staircase. I was like, ‘I just need a little more speed, and I need to really commit to it this time,’ and I did exactly that, but my board actually got stuck between the steps, and it launched me off, and I crashed on the left side of my body.”
Derby said the fall hurt his physical well-being as well as his spiritual well-being.
“It took a chunk out of my knee. I was bleeding pretty heavily. I had a pretty bad scrape on my hip, and my back hurt a lot. Like a lot,” he said. “I just remember writhing in pain for about five minutes, and meanwhile the soccer girls practicing in front of me hear me on the ground, writhing and screaming, and I heard some of them laugh.”
Derby said he got back up and skated back home. He then considered a decision that could have changed the course of American history.
“I decided that after this defeat, maybe a skate crew wasn’t the move. I heavily contemplated abandoning my board for good,” he said. “It was a pretty low moment for me. There was a lot of self-doubt, but I made a vow a long time ago that I would shred, or I would die, and I’m holding on to that vow until I die.”
An anonymous source said they saw Derby skating shortly before the incident, and also saw him skating days later.
“As I was walking into Alvin’s, I saw him before, practicing by going down all of the stairs. I asked him, ‘didn’t you post about wanting to start a skate crew?’ and he said, ‘yeah bro, we’re going to start a skate crew.’ And then I left,” they said. “I heard later that he ate shit.”
Derby said since his defeat, he has actually gotten better at skating downstairs.
“My goal is to be able to ride down from the University Center, down those stairs, and then immediately go down the large staircase that leads right into Alvin’s. One day I’ll do it.”
Derby received an offer to join a different skate crew. Nicholas Quinnie, bass performance junior, is the founder of a small Facebook group dedicated to OCU skaters.
“I started it sometime last semester. I was going to go through the school to make a club, but it was too much work,” Quinnie said.
Quinnie said the Facebook group has about 17 people in it currently, and that Derby should avoid stairs at all costs.
“Wheels. That’s all it takes to be a skate god,” he said.
Derby said he will be starting at the bottom of the skate crew.
“It’s not my crew, so I’m going to be on the low end of things,” he said. “I’m going to be a grunt compared to them, but I’ll work my way up.”
Derby said the group is planning to cruise around Lake Hefner once mid-terms are over.
Derby said he has advice for his haters.
“If I’m flying down the quad, and you’ve ever hated on me, or you’ve ever looked at me longboarding and said, ‘that guy sucks,’ well, just get out of the way, because I’ve got some carving to do,” he said. “I’ve got some cruising to do, I’ve got hills to bomb, and more importantly, I’ve got places to be. If you ain’t gonna shred with me, you’re dead to me.”
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