Stevie Williams

1979—

Skateboarder, business owner

Professional skateboarder Stevie Williams is a celebrity among skateboarding enthusiasts and one of a relatively small number of African-American daredevils to achieve fame in the sport. When he first began skateboarding during the early 1990s in his Philadelphia neighborhood, he was often the target of derision among his peers and faced disparaging comments from white teens when he moved beyond his immediate surroundings. He was undeterred, however. "Skating's big enough for people to be into whatever they're into," he told Charlotte Philby in the Independent. "There's something for each kid to relate to."

Williams was born on December 17, 1979, in Philadelphia, and grew up in a house on North 41st Street. He received his first skateboard at age eleven, and practiced his first ramp moves off the table in his living room when his mother was out of the house. Basketball was the dominant sport in his North Philadelphia neighborhood, and others ridiculed him for his interest in skateboarding. "People would say then that skateboarding was corny, why you acting like a white boy, stuff like that," he recalled in an interview with Jarrett Carter on BlackSportsNetwork.com. "I didn't let it affect me; it was just something I loved to do."

Williams began heading to downtown Philadelphia's Love Park, which is less a park than a sweeping concrete vista in Center City more formally known as JFK Plaza; it takes its name from an iconic Robert Indiana sculpture of the word "love" situated on the site. Love Park was a favorite haunt for Philly skateboarders because of its wide-open spaces, railings, and precipitous staircases, and had already gained some international repute among the skater community. Videographers regularly showed up to film the gravity-defying tricks of skaters who competed with one another for camera time. Once Williams and his friends began to show up at Love Park, other skaters "would tell the camera crews that we were dirty ghetto kids and that we didn't have any talent," Williams explained to Carter. "We were doing our thing, but people looked down on us because of what neighborhood we were from or because our gear wasn't the freshest."

Williams soon appropriated the term "Dirty Ghetto Kids" for his own use, later abbreviating it to DGK. It traveled with him when he left home at age fourteen, hitchhiking to San Francisco and living in such dire poverty for a few years that he was essentially a homeless teen at times. His break came in 1999, when he won a spot on the first Chocolate Skateboards tour, a recently launched company that featured several up-and-coming new skaters. The tour was a success and is considered a pivotal moment in skateboarding when the "street" style began to gain a wider audience. Until then, the sport had been dominated by "vert" skaters, whose moves relied on steep vertical ramps and had originated in the mid-1970s in California, when a statewide draught left many in-ground swimming pools empty. As Ben Detrick explained in the New York Times in 2007, "over the last two decades, the sport shifted away from ramp-based vert skating to street skating, a variation that made use of urban structures like stairways, curbs and railings. As the importance of access to ramps dwindled, skateboarding's fan base grew increasingly diverse."

Williams's teen years in California remained difficult ones, despite the fame he gained on the Chocolate tour and a sponsorship deal with DC Shoes. After moving south to Los Angeles, he told a writer on Vice.com, "I didn't really leave the house for a month cause I was just intimidated by the whole place." A friend from the Chocolate tour, Keenan Milton, showed up one day and urged him to come with him to a party in Malibu. Williams acquiesced, but left Milton there and felt uneasy on the way home, he told Vice.com. He learned the next morning that Milton had drowned in the pool after being struck in the head by another guest who had jumped from a balcony into the pool. "That was a dark time right there and it was on the 4th of July," Williams said. "Every year I get the same dark chill on Independence Day. After that I was back in the house for like two months."

In 2002 Williams launched his own company, called DGK, and two years later became the first skateboarder ever to sign a sponsorship contract with athletic-gear maker Reebok. In 2006 he opened the L&K Limited skate shop in Oceanside, California, with fellow-skater Nick Lockman. He has also appeared as himself in the top-selling line of video games from skateboarding professional Tony Hawk, including American Wasteland and Project 8. In 2008 Williams's DGK brand partnered with Reebok for a new line of Williams designed shoes and apparel under the name "DGK RBK." Reebok is also the sponsor of the DGK professional team in which Williams competes alongside teammates Darren Harper, Evan Hernandez, Marcus McBride, and Lenny Rivas.

Williams and his father, Steve Lassiter, cofounded the Educate to Skate Foundation in 2004, which runs after school skateboarding programs for at-risk youth in Philadelphia. "Dropping out of school, running away from home, some of those decisions I made when I was 14 I look back on and wonder how I got to where I am now," he told Carter on BlackSportsNetwork.com. "If I can bring some different elements to the hood, then I can help build the block and uplift the community."

At a Glance …

Born on December 17, 1979, in Philadelphia, PA; son of Steve Lassiter (a teacher and social worker); two children.

Career: Professional skateboarder with the Chocolate Skateboards Tour after 1999; signed sponsorship deal with DC Shoes, 2001; founded DGK, 2002; signed a sponsorship deal with Reebok, 2004; cofounder of L&K Limited skate shop, Oceanside, CA, 2006; launched DGK Skateboards, 2006, and a line of shoes and apparel sold under the name DGK RBK, 2008; appears in several video games under the Tony Hawk brand, including American Wasteland, Project 8, and Proving Ground.

Addresses: Office—c/o Reebok International Ltd., 1895 J.W. Foster Blvd., Canton, MA 02021; Educate to Skate Foundation, PO Box 6601, Philadelphia, PA 19149.

Sources

Periodicals

Independent (London, England), October 6, 2007, p. 11.

New York Times, November 11, 2007.

Periodicals

Carter, Jarrett, "Stevie Williams: Everlasting Grind," BlackSportsNetwork.com, http://www.blacksportsnetwork.com/articles/features/skate_122206.asp (accessed August 13, 2008).

"Stevie Williams Knows Fear," Vice.com, February 10, 2007, http://vice.typepad.com/vice_magazine/2007/10/stevie-williams.html#more (accessed October 23, 2008).

—Carol Brennan