Omar Hassan Week Day 3: Snapshots From A Life Well Lived

Hello and welcome back to the third day of Omar Hassan's Rider Week. The first day we had some Blasts From The Past with a half dozen classic Omar interviews from the past 20+ years, yesterday we did a meaty exclusive interview. The third day is usually wide open for whatever the skater wants to do. For JLay we reviewed some Toy Machine Ads, for Dan Lu it was looking at his cellphone photos, Gilbert put together an amazing video with his buddies and so on and so forth. For Omar he decided to pull out a few of his old photo albums he recently unearthed and show us some of his favorite snapshots from a life well lived on a skateboard. Enjoy.


That's Sam Cunningham and I in Spain getting loose. I was probably 16 but you can drink when you're 16 there so i was probably cutting loose a little bit. These were some of the first drinking trips for me.



That's the first pro contest I ever entered, the Del Mar NSA pro in 1989. I think I did alright, I qualified but I don't remember what place I got. The funny thing about this was Mark Waters announced on the microphone that the night before I got devirginized and kind of embarrassed me at that event.



This was a demo we did in France on this seven country Tracker tour through Europe. It was Lester Kasai, Adrian Damain and this kid Matt Goldsby. We showed up at this street spot and that's where they wanted us to do the demo on that ledge right there. That was it. That was the spot. "Here's what you're skating." Kids were stoked. That whole trip was really rad because I got out of school for a month to go to Europe. We just got Eurorail passes and we just went to all these different spots.




This is the local ramp I grew up skating in Laguna Hills. I was probably 12 right there. PVC days and way before Skatelite, it was masonite with screws, maybe not even screws, nails. It was 9-feet high, 16-feet wide; that was an average vert ramp then, 10-feet at the highest back then.



That was one of the first ramps I ever skated when I was 11. That was in the same area in Laguna Hills. Back then that was a vert ramp; maybe 16-feet wide and 9-feet high and didn't even have coping or decks, you just pumped your way up. There were no safety precautions like in this day and age. You either go off the hill or stay on the ramp.



That's in Denmark but I wanted to put it in here because that's when I had hair. My Ace Ventura 'do when I was 15. Now the only hair I got is pubic hair.



This was on the way to that seven country Europe tour. Chris Carter and Steve Claar were on that trip. Chris Carter worked for Tracker and did the majority of the team stuff at the time. They were all joking because I was sitting next to that girl on the plane; I got the lucky seat. They were laughing because I was always on the prowl. She was stoked. We had good conversations but there was no hand job or nothing though. No mile high club.



That's when we were in Marseilles in 1999. We both got beat up at a nightclub by the bouncers. That's Duncan's blood and he was saying, "You got to get this photo because I might die," because he was spitting up so much blood. That was supposedly the last photo of his life but he made it through. But he was serious, he thought he was going to die, spitting blood in the bag. What happened was Duncan had this great idea to stick his hand behind the bar and steal a bottle of Jack Daniels. Then he's at the bar giving people shots and someone found out what he was doing and bum rushed us. They beat the shit of him, me, Bryce Kanights and a couple other dudes. He got pretty beat down; I felt bad for him.





That was one of the first ramps we had in Laguna Hills. It went down this drive way into a quarterpipe. I was probably 10-years-old. Those Vans are pretty awesome. They were the original Vans shoes they made that weren't Old Skools. And look at me in the full ear helmet. Those were the days.



That was a street plant at my elementary school. They made me do a street plant demo for my class. I was probably 11 at Newport Heights Elementary. They sat all the kids in a circle and I sat there and did street plants for my school. It was pretty weird. It was like a breakdance circle but on my skateboard. That's when street plants were big. I easily spent five years, every day, upside down as a kid. I think it helped me do inverts on tranny because I learned to stall them on the ground first and then take them to the tranny. That's a sad plant. I rarely do that one. I got to bring that one back. But that proves that I do them. Or I've done them, I should say.



That's the backyard of The Turf in Wisconsin. That was their street course back then. That was street skating. I guarantee you Al Partanen and Sam Hitz boardslid that thing a million times back then. That's when it began to be like, "Hey, the kids aren't paying to skate the park so much so we need a little street area." Street was just starting to take over.





This is the clover at The Turf. There wen't a lot of parks then, just a few and The Turf was one of the parks that you were stoked to go to because it was out in Wisconsin but this is when the parks started to die a little bit. Look at me, hairless armpits, pre-Tae Bo days, skin and bones. That was some 80s shit right there; if you didn't have leather gloves on you weren't doing it.



That's the big bowl in the back of The Turf. That thing was gnarly. It was pretty challenging. No flat bottom, super tight and big and scary. Jeff Grosso had a really cool part in one of the Santa Cruz videos and he skated it really well.



That's the original Combi. That's where I really learned to skate vert stuff. That bowl was really gnarly and everyone knows that ever skated there: coping stuck out a lot, there was a lot of vert. If you could skate that thing you could skate anything because it was really big and gnarly. I started skating it when I was 9 and in this photo I'm about 12. Back then guys like Tony Hawk, Gator, Chris Miller, Salba or Malba would show up and you'd just sit down and soak it all in and learn. It was cool watching those guys skate. I just got on Blockhead at this point. I'm riding a Jim Gray board, who ripped that place too.





That was when I was really into smoking weed and thought maybe I could grow some dreads but never did. All I could find was hash in Europe because they don't have weed.



More of that Euro trip.



That was a local curb by my house in Costa Mesa that I used to skate all the time. Back then when you found a good double sided curb you'd sit there all day and skate it. That's when I had the vato look going with the buttoned down shirt. When is that look going to make a comeback? It needs to come back. A few people in Santa Cruz still run that program.



Just some memorabilia I saved. I think it's the ticket they gave you when you went and skated.



I think this is my first Blockhead ad. I think Jeremy Klein shot that photo. Not the Jeremy Klein from Birdhouse. This guy used to shoot for Poweredge. I don't know what ever happened to that guy. [Poweredge magazine photographer Christian Kline is now a yoga instructor in Laguna Beach, California. -ed.]



That was a photo that I had in Poweredge. We used to skate the Hellbow Ramp a lot and that was on the extension on the Hellbow ramp. The Hellbow Ramp was one of the first ramps that had a single coping spine. It was in Westminster. It was Jimmy Arrighi who did RVCA and is doing Eswic now, it was at his house. Everyone skated that ramp, Jinx, Ed Templeton, Justin Regan, everyone from Orange County skated that ramp.



That's Munster in Germany when I was 13. That was the first time I was ever sent out of the country to see a pro contest. It was rad. Lance Mountain won the street contest, if that tells you anything. That's how rad skateboarding was back then. It was the first time I ever saw all the dudes, all the pros, I was kinda blown away. Mark Gonzales was supposed to go with me on that trip and he couldn't find his passport so I had to go without him.



That's in Spain on that Tracker tour again. That's an old original skatepark in Spain and that was just one of the little bowls that they had. This might be the same spot that was just in Thrasher recently that they dug up and it had this snakerun. That snakerun was gnarly and hard to skate.



That's Mark and Ron Emery, the guitar player of T.S.O.L. I was driving home and they were at this bus stop just randomly, they weren't even together, they just happened to be at the same bus stop. Mark had a Polaroid camera and they were both taking the bus together and he asked me to take a photo. I took an extra one for myself to keep. It was pretty cool because it was such a random situation.



That's in Mexico in 1995. That's Peter Hewitt in the background, really young. That was when he rode for Vans and we both went on a Vans trip to Mexico City. This is right in the beginning of when Peter was like, "I don't ever want to enter contests and I'm going to do my own thing." He's always been one of the best skateboarders and traveling around with him back then was real cool. I kind of miss that he's not on Vans anymore.



That was the Junk Ramp. It was right around the corner from Vision and Schmitt Stix. Jinx is in the background there with his little beret. All those guys are locals that I grew up skating with and they probably all have Vision and Schmitt boards. That was a ramp that was pretty renowned in Costa Mesa because it was right around the corner from Vision so whoever was in town would usually stop by there. Vision had thing thing going back then that if you broke your board they would give you a new board so me and Skip Pronier and other guys would have this racket going where we'd buy Vision boards and skate them and when they were old we'd take it to these fence bars and break it and keep getting new boards until the guy caught onto us. But we did it for a solid year.