MIKE RANQUET | POWDER & RAILS | VICE | PT 1/4

[THEME MUSIC PLAYING]
MIKE RANQUET: So, yeah, I'm in Chicago.
Came here to see the nice doctors at Northwestern
University.
And I didn't know it when I got here--
I thought I had a really bad sciatic nerve, and I
had that for years.
And a couple x-rays of my hip showed that I had, like, such
severe arthritis in my left hip that they told me my hip
could have fallen out of socket if I rolled
over in my bed wrong.
Like, it was messed up.
They were surprised I could walk in the door.
I got a full hip replacement, metal on metal, so I have this
bionic hip now.
And yeah, it's the first time I've walked without a limp in
four years, I think.
I just masked the pain well.
Like, I did little things, and kind of bullshitted myself,
told friends, "Oh, it's not that bad." But
it was really bad.
Now that it's gone, and I can walk without a limp and
without pain for the first four years--
yeah, so I feel like I'm just a lot happier in general.
I hit a tree, like, seven years ago at Mount Baker.
And it was a pretty bad accident.
It was, like, I dropped in the chute, and it was sunbaked
where I landed, so it was just ice, and I just went up from
my heel edge and went down probably 300 feet
and just hit a tree.
Like, I wrapped around it.
Like, I thought I was going to die.
And ended up breaking two bones my foot, and I think I
really damaged my hip on that, because my left leg took the
brunt of it.
When they told me, the doctors at Northwestern, like, "You
need a hip replacement," it literally made me, like, "Oh
god." It just seemed so bizarre.
And then I'm used to breaking it-- if I break my hand, I go
get a cast, take the cast off, and move it around, and I can
do handplants again, eight, six months later.
And the doctor said last week, I could do anything.
I need to rebuild muscles in my leg,
because they atrophied.
Once my muscles are back--
I can already feel--
I feel like skating for the first time in years, like,
just doing frontside grind.
The thing before is, I couldn't run out of anything.
I could, like, roll around on a skateboard, but if I hit a
rock or if I did a lean to tail, and wanted to throw my
board away, I couldn't run out.
So I just kind of didn't skate for a long time.
CIRCE WALLACE: We've been friends since my teens, his
teens, and he was always just kind of like the
leader of the pack.
He was always the one instigating the most trouble.
He's really kind of an adventurer, and he was always
listening to the cool new music, and he was
just a total shit.
Like I remember, he would come to Eugene, Oregon, and skate
the vert ramp when I was 13.
And he was the young kid then, amongst the kind of more
sophisticated, older vert skaters.
But he kept hocking loogies and catching them in his
mouth, and he would always just laugh at his own jokes,
and he was just like the gnarliest punk ever.
And everyone totally loved him or hated him.
He would constantly just get punched in the face or be
drunk in the gutter.
JAMIE LYNN: And then when he had the nature ramp--
that's where I met Mike.
First time I found a vert ramp, skating throughout
through Auburn, through neighborhoods, trying to look
in backyards to find this ramp that I
suspected being down there.
Being groms from Auburn, we'd drive up to his ramp and go
and cut the chain, and skate it when he was gone and shit,
before I even met him.
But it was one of the one and only vert ramps in the
Northwest that was around when kind of vert skaring died, and
that ramp was influential with continuing to give us a venue
and a place to skate when things had kind of shrunk down
to small wheels and big pants and street skating.
MIKE RANQUET: My mom and dad had five acres of land that
they bought like in the '70s for $20 or something, and in
the mid-80s, about the time I was really getting into
snowboarding, all the vert ramps in Seattle were dead.
They were done.
And so it was kind of like, me and my friends had nowhere to
go, so my mom offered up the land--
16 when I built it, and it was 12 feet tall.
Two feet of vert, 10 foot trannies--
so I just thought, "If I'm going to build a ramp, I don't
want to outgrow it."
And it was built in the middle of the land, so you couldn't
even see it from the street.
It was like a hippie camp.
You know what I mean?
Like, I remember going--
I'd pull in there at 3:00 in the afternoon, and there'd be
30 cars, 20 heads on the deck.
You know what I mean?
Because it was impossible to shut down.
Like, if I tried to chain it, it'd just get broken.
And was finally like my mom trusted these other friends of
mine, so it wasn't even worth trying to close.
You'd have to sit there all day on guard.
For a couple years, my mom was like, "Quit skating at 6:00."
That's right when the sun went down.
Everybody would get pissed, and I'd be like, "Hey, get the
fuck out of here."
At 17, had to tell, like, 21-year-old mohawk, leather
jacket skateboarders, "Get the fuck out of here, or I'll get
my paint gun." it was the best thing ever.
I had a vert ramp for nine years.
Just having the freedom to skate-- which just made my
snowboarding that much better.
And the opposite, too.
I remember one summer, I came back, and my average air used
to be say, two to four feet, and all of a sudden, I could
go four to six, just like from snowboarding.
I just got used to being in the air a lot, snowboarding,
and then it just transferred.
They complemented each other well.
But on the other hand, I'd never liked snowboard
half-pipe riding, because I felt so
confined by the bindings.
In skating, you can move your feet around a little bit, and
you snap your tail.
I just didn't like floating off a lip.
It seemed like a match made in heaven, but it contradicted
itself, for me anyway.
PAT BRIDGES: I would call Ranquet the first skate snob
in snowboarding.
He was the guy who preached where it had to be like this,
it had to be boned, you had to grab between the bindings.
He'd just be in your face, like, "That's gay.
That's stupid.
That doesn't look right," or whatever.
"That's not cool.
This is how it would be done if you're on a skateboard."
And when you saw him, he practiced what he preached.
I mean, you never saw something that wasn't
technically right along with the ethos that he was trying
to portray.
TERJE HAAKONSEN: You can do a big Taipan right in front of
his face, but he would think that would be really gay, if
you didn't do a proper skate move or something.
MIKE RANQUET: Skaters' minds are never-- they never rest on
what they just did.
They want to do it--
in snowboarding at that time, get another 180 in, or land
that backwards, or--
we just looked at skateboarding at the time, and
hey, let's ride switch.
I mean, that's when switch skating came in.
It was, like, late '80s, early '90s, and that year, we filmed
some video called "20 Tricks." It wasn't the TransWorld one.
There was one that was out before that, that this guy
Bruce Benedict shot.
And I remember at the time, watching the footage he had
already of--

I won't say who, but just doing big 360s
with the arms out.

Tim Windel was doing the Dew plant, just going up and
drinking a Mountain Dew.
I remember looking at it, just going, "Come on." And then we
ended filming "20 Tricks," and I was doing, I think, fakie to
fakie 360s, and I just called it what it was because
everyone else was like, "My trick's called the mashed
potato." I was just like, "Come on."
PAT BRIDGES: If you look at all the tricks in "20 Tricks,"
which is the how-to video that came out in 1990.
You look at them all back then, and you look at what are
still tricks in, like, the lexicon of
snowboarding today--
a fakie to fakie 360, cab three, cab five--
those tricks are part of the path, the arc of tricks today,
whereas Lean Dracula or Guano Alley-Oop, stuff like that's
not, and that just tells you that his
style is more timeless.
MIKE RANQUET: To do a whole run backwards back then--
people were kind of like, "Why would you do
that?" Like, literally.
And then a couple years later, someone like Peter Line comes
along, and you couldn't even tell which way he was riding.
You know what I mean?
So to me, it was like, OK, there's the fruit, finally--
like a super guy.