The Very First Ollie

I was 40 when I went to live in Groningen with Karin. We had been friends for many years, but around millenium it slowly grew to be more.

One day Karin’s son Hobbe asked us to come down to the pavement. He was fifteen at the time, had taken up skateboarding and wanted to show us a trick.

So he stepped on his skateboard, got up to speed and suddenly the board was up in the air a little with him standing on it. He landed safely and rolled back to us.

It didn’t look that spectacular and at first we weren’t sure if there was something more to come, but then Hobbe enthousiastically explained that the trick is called »Ollie« and that he’s been practicing it for quite a while.

Later I learned that for many skateboarders an Ollie is the first trick to master as it’s the foundation for many others. I’m not a skateboarder. I cannot even stand on that thing without holding on to something. So I don’t really care much about Ollies, Nollies and all the other tricks with funny names.

But I do care about Hobbe, and that Ollie was at the very beginning of me learning to be a father to a teenage boy. A few years later he introduced me at the local skate park by saying »And that’s my father«. I was the proudest monkey. And I still am.

Today Hobbe turns 40.

Congratulations 🤗

The featured image above does not show the very first Ollie described in this post. It was shot a few years later in San Francisco.