Who is Rodney Mullen?

“The Godfather of Street Skateboarding.” If you don’t know Rodney Mullen, you probably don’t know skateboarding.

Rodney Mullen is arguably the architect of modern day street skating. Credited for inventing tricks such as the flatground ollie, the kickflip, heelflip, treflip, and many others, Rodney Mullen essentially created skateboarding as we know it today. Without him, who knows where skateboarding would be now.

Rodney was always my favorite skater growing up because of how unique his approach to skateboarding was. Creativity was always his thing coming from a freestyle background. If you watch clips of Rodney Mullen skating, many of the tricks you see him doing are essentially freestyle tricks which he has brought into a street skating context. That is by far what made him stand out and is the same thing that makes skaters such as Jonny Giger and Andy Anderson so unique. It is that creativity and that freestyle approach to street skating that really distinguished Rodney Mullen from other skaters. In the modern day, there are now a good amount of skaters out there that skate like Rodney, bringing primo or casper slides to street obstacles as opposed more traditional freestyle skating you would see skaters like Mike Osterman doing. In his time he really was the first of his kind as a freestyle skater to start bringing his tricks to street as freestyle skateboarding became less and less popular. Rodney really did not have a choice but to adjust and become one of the best street skateboarders of all time.

But it is not just his unique style and approach to skateboarding that made Rodney Mullen the legend he is today. Before really distinguishing himself as a street skater, Rodney invented an insane amount of tricks in his freestyle days. In the 1980’s he invented the flip tricks I mentioned earlier, as well as many others including the gazelle flip, impossible, and half cab kickflip. It wasn’t until the 1990’s that he really began street skating and from there the tricks he invented went beyond the everyday tricks you see today. This was the time where he truly distinguished himself both as a street skater and inventor. This was when he invented and perfected tricks such as the kickflip underflip, the casper slide, as well as the half flip to darkslide. Skateboarding was really picking up at the time and Rodney was showing that he was still far before his time.

Nowadays, Rodney Mullen goes down as a skateboarding legend. At the age of 55, he still skates to this day and there seems to be nothing holding him back. There was even a point in his career where he had a hip injury whereas he had to relearn skating entirely in the opposite stance, becoming equally as skilled switch. There really is no talent in skateboarding quite like Rodney Mullen and it is thanks to him that skateboarding has come as far as it is today.