Cole Nowicki interview

28 / 10 / 2023 / Interview

Cole Nowicki’s right, down + circle is a timely study of the pop cul­ture phe­nomen­on that is the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater fran­chise, present­ing what now feels like a miss­ing piece of the puzzle in the his­tory of skate­board­ing. With wit, insight and some won­der­ful trivia – see Bruce Willis’s rela­tion to the first game, the Aus­sie trib­ute band who only play cov­ers from the soundtrack, the mys­tery of Private Car­rera or the com­pet­it­or Skate­BIRD – Cole engages with the games’ suc­cess, and their com­plex rela­tion to fame, money, myth­mak­ing and rep­res­ent­a­tion. This is also undoubtedly a skateboarder’s book, one that knows that the most power­ful con­sequence of the game might be the most straight­for­ward: to make its play­er pick up a real board and find their own ware­houses, hangars and secret videotapes. 

Inter­view by: Sam Buchan-Watts 

Can you sum­mar­ise the pas­sage between play­ing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater as a kid and read­ing your book on Fort Forno at Vladi­mir in 2023?

One of the cru­cial bridges is the game. It’s not tech­nic­ally what got me into skat­ing – my older broth­er was – but THPS helped me stay in skate­board­ing and devel­op a love for its cul­ture and the stil­ted way that the game presen­ted it. You become enmeshed in the cul­ture. And now I’m here. 

‘Stil­ted’ is an inter­est­ing word for it.

There are those cul­tur­al touch points through­out that early series. Burn­side is one of the first levels in the first game, and there are the secret tapes that you col­lect and watch, but you kind of have to piece it togeth­er your­self as a kid if you have no con­text, which puts you on that hunt.

How did video games change the media land­scape of skateboarding?

It helped skate­board­ing reach a broad­er audi­ence, bey­ond 720 or even Street Skater before it. And video games were just easi­er for non-skate­boarders to access. Maybe you think real life skate­board­ing is some­thing you actu­ally want to try after­wards. Maybe skate­board­ing looks cool in the video game and you real­ize that, hey, I can just roll down my drive­way on one of these things.

Skate­board­ing media already con­di­tions the way that skaters move and look at each oth­er, the huge pop­ular­ity of THPS must have influ­enced this too.

There’s no hard evid­ence to back this up, but even Tony him­self spoke of how skate­board­ing was advan­cing quite quickly in the late nineties and early two-thou­sands (in rela­tion to the game). He cred­its being able to do a 360 flip crooked grind flip out in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, some­thing like that, and then try­ing to piece those togeth­er in real life. Get your neck on.
And hav­ing broad access to the video game means that a lot more people have this base level under­stand­ing of what skate­board­ing is, which I think is also inter­est­ing: wheth­er that inspires them to skate or just yell tricks at you, which The Ber­rics has based an entire media series after. Part of the main thes­is of the book is that the game helped skate­board­ing break through the pop cul­tur­al bubble and just stay where it is to this day.

To what extent is this book a study of an indi­vidu­al, Tony Hawk?

The book is a study of him as a per­son, and also not just what makes him mar­ket­able, but what makes a per­son mar­ket­able in gen­er­al. What I find fas­cin­at­ing is how mar­ket­ing in this way really does cre­ate cul­ture. I believe that THPS helped skate­board­ing grow to an expo­nen­tial level, and that’s because Tony Hawk was a pol­ished enough per­sona. And right­fully so, but he was mar­ket­able enough to make that hap­pen. If it was Chad Muska’s Pro Skater would it have been as big as it is? I don’t know. 

You touch on the fact that he’s a kind of fath­er fig­ure to an industry approach­ing middle age. What would skate­board­ing look like without THPS? 

It would prob­ably still be chug­gin’ along. Maybe not with all the big cor­por­ate spon­sors that it has now. But it’s hard to say because he really helped stew­ard skate­board­ing to a place that was more accept­able. The X‑Games were around, so it’s not like skate­board­ing was in the wil­der­ness, but he – and the video game itself – helped pull it from its death-and-rebirth cycle every sev­en to ten years, and helped it stay afloat. There prob­ably wouldn’t be a Janoski shoe: that’s my hot take.

What can writ­ing and lit­er­at­ure tell us about skate­board­ing and THPS that oth­er medi­ums – like film­mak­ing and pho­to­graphy – can’t?

I don’t have a very ser­i­ous edu­ca­tion­al back­ground; writ­ing has always just been free flow­ing thoughts that I push togeth­er and see what hap­pens. It’s all feel­ings based, so when I write about THPS, I try to tap into what it made me feel like when I was a kid play­ing it and chase those feel­ings through the years. And what it means to me now that I have become a skate­boarder through the game and everything that skate­board­ing has brought me since.
Writ­ing and skate­board­ing have par­al­lels where I’m just work­ing off the feel­ings, essen­tially. It’s like I approach an obstacle with whatever lim­ited tools I have, I try to do some­thing that feels good even if aes­thet­ic­ally it’s not the greatest. It’s like I’m doing back 50:50 and push it into suski and then shuv-it out: it’s not a cool-look­ing trick, but man it feels good. And with writ­ing too: I find a sub­ject that I think I can make some­thing with, (imit­ates bro voice) “and then I try to shuv out of it, man”.

You’re going to be a guest in one of the Writ­ing Towards Well-Being work­shops at Vladi­mir this year, which con­sider the ways that writ­ing, skat­ing and men­tal health aware­ness inter­act. You com­pare both play­ing video­games and skat­ing with find­ing a refuge, what did you mean by that?

I think for me and a lot of skate­boarders the abil­ity to just go out­side, throw your board on the ground and push away from home is a big tool for find­ing relief and some space from what your both­ers are, wheth­er it’s school or fam­ily strife. After the passing of my step­fath­er and I got the news, all I needed to do in that moment was go skate. It was Feb­ru­ary, I was liv­ing in the interi­or of Brit­ish Columbia, there was snow but thank­fully someone had shov­elled the skate­park. I just skated in this essen­tially frozen skate­park for hours, had a great time, I’d nev­er felt as focussed on my board as I had then. Just hav­ing those moments where I could be sep­ar­ate from grief – or what I didn’t yet know to be grief – and to centre myself. When I was done skat­ing and I was sweat­ing in zero degrees I was like, yeah, I know why I was skat­ing so hard. I think skate­board­ing is import­ant in that way: def­in­itely not a cure-all, but helpful.