Tom penny is basically a mythical
character in skateboarding. There's so
many urban legends and stories about the
crazy things that he's done. A lot of
them actually being true, which we'll
talk about. But Tom had one of the best
skateboarding styles of all time, of
anyone who put wheels to pavement. And a
lot of people actually consider him the
best skateboarder, in general, of all time.
So let's take a look at the career of
Tom penny. Welcome back to Rad Rat Video,
the channel you can learn something new
about skateboarding three times a week.
Every Monday Wednesday and Friday, we
take a look at something in the
skateboarding world, from tricks to
culture to your favorite skaters like
Tom penny. And Tom penny is a religious
or cult figure in skateboarding. You hear
about the cult of Tom penny, you hear
about his legends, you hear stories about
how he showed up at a park, did
something incredible and unheard of, and
then just faded away into the ether,
never to be seen again. All kinds of
really crazy things about Tom. From
his style to his demeanor, the way he
held himself on a skateboard,
he is absolutely a legendary
skateboarder and that we should take a
look at his history and where it came
from.
Tom is from England, and he started his
career with the radlands contest over
there. Although he mostly grew up skating
alone, or with a small group of friends, his
first few appearances were pretty
heavily influenced by what was going on
in skateboarding at the time, like the
tech stuff, the multiple flips, and that
kind of thing, but you can see a glimmer
of what he would become. There's some
style under there, and there's some
switch and some nollie stuff, which was
still pretty new in 1994. Tom got 6th
place, but the following year in 1995 he
actually got 1st place, with a single run.
There were all sorts of stories even
from that, where he showed up, did his one
run and left halfway through the comp.
When he won, they had to call him to get
his mum to bring him back to find out
he'd won. Soon after that win, Tom moved
to the US. His original UK sponsor death
box, they had transformed into flip, and
they had moved headquarters over the US,
and Tom went to join them over there and
he also got on Etnies, where he got his
first full length, legit, video part
in High 5. Let's take a look at that.
There's a few standout tricks in here,
like that switch frontside flip over the
rail. Doing tricks over handrails was
still new, and switch frontside flips
were pretty new. This trick alone
would have been an ender. Also, his switch
flip was perfect. Not a lot of people
could do them just as well as their
regular ones, but Tom could. Or how about
this? The
flip back tail stall was sick enough, but
how about this ultra casual frontside
flip over the vert hip? A few years after
that, when I was first starting skating, I
saw that video part and I was not very
impressed because it looked so easy.
I couldn't even comprehend how hard that
stuff was supposed to be because of the
way that he does it so casually. But
think about who has the best frontside
flips you can think of. Did you think of
Andrew Reynolds? Because he went and he
tried that same frontside flip on the
hip, and this is what he said. I went to
chickens pool this one time to skate, and
just thought like, I want to try and
frontside flip where he got that little
hip, you know. He did the kickflip back
tail and then he just went down and did
that kickflip, stuck to the wall over the
hip. I figured I could frontside flip in
a quarter pipe, so I should be able to
frontside flip this little hip, right? I
tried it, and seriously, every time the
thing would just shoot me out to the
flat bottom. Like, completely out of
control. There was just no way I could do
it. After that, I was just like, "I don't
get it." He was just as delicate little
thing, just stuck to that wall. Flat
ground and vert are like the same thing
to that dude." Look, we're 20 seconds into
his video part and it's already
legendary, but his actual ender is a
switch frontside flip down this double
set, which is pretty crazy, because he did
a regular frontside flip, and that was
good enough to make it in Transworld.
He also switch frontside flipped
Carlsbad. Twice. The first time, he went
there alone, and the second time he
actually had to bring a filmer to
actually record it. He didn't even think
of it at the time, which you'll find
happened a lot over his career. Around
that time, there is also an industry
section in 411 issue 11. Tom only
has a few tricks, but just watch this
line. Every trick is perfect or better.
His tricks that are a tiny bit sketchy
are actually better looking than his
perfect ones. Everything is super clean.
And just watch how he ends it. A lot of
people probably could have done this
line, but just look at the way he does it,
the way that he just goes with the flow
of the spot. He doesn't push, he doesn't
do speed checks to try to get ready when
it's time to hit that rail, he just kind
of does it. He just goes with the flow. It
looks like he just made up that line on
the spot, and given the other things that
I've read about him, it's possible that
he did. But even if that one was planned,
there are a lot of stories about him
doing crazy stuff. There's this one from
Transworld in 2007. There's no
actual footage from this event, though.
"Outside of his ridiculous footage during
his early days in the States, one example
of the types of urban myths penny spawned
was one that I happened to experience
firsthand. In early 96, West LA's hot rod
skate shop had rented a warehouse
downtown, built a pretty decent mini ramp,
and threw a party to inaugurate/
celebrate the whole thing. With
jam-packed platforms and anywhere from
two to four skaters dropping in at the
same time, the session was extremely
heated. With his trademark beanie pulled
well below eye level, Penny embarked on
his run-of-the-mill tranny destruction
run, miraculously dodging the likes of
Mike Carroll, SAD and others. As he
casually cruised the ramp until he was
alone, pretty much at that very moment,
every light in the warehouse blew a fuse
and the entire party was left in pitch
black. However, through the darkness the
discernible noise of Tom's trucks
hitting the coping did not stop for
nearly a full minute, until someone found
the fuse box with the help of a lighter and
some luck.
Penny kept skating, either unaware or
simply unaffected by the lack of vision
on the ramp. Precisely as a lights came
back up, a stunned crowd watched in
disbelief as Tom's frozen, mid frontside
flip, floating over the ramp, completely
undaunted by either light or dark. Sixth
sense indeed." Also in 1996, Tom appeared
in Transworld UNO video. He only has a
few tricks at this bank spot, but even
that is a crazy story.
So if you want to see the whole video
watch Transworld Anthology. There is some
music in the beginning, so I can't play
it for you for copyright strike reasons,
but I'll try to summarize it. So the team,
being rob dyrdek and some other skaters,
took him to this spot and it's a really
crazy spot. It's really steep, it's just
the right length that it can shoot you
right onto your face if you mess up, and
they figured they'd get some basics out
of him: his switch flip, his frontside
flip and stuff like that. But what
actually happened was pretty ridiculous.
So he did that basic stuff they were
expecting, but he just didn't stop. He did
a nollie backside flip, going in blind
and fakie, and after that nobody else was
skating because they were just watching
this guy do whatever he wanted. Within a
couple of tries, he does a bunch of stuff,
and then he sealed the deal with a
switch backside flip. "Don't come back
here, the bank is definitely closed."
"That was the final time I feel like
anything was ever done there. I don't, I
can't even imagine, like, especially in
Southern California, like, when one
individual just shuts a spot down, like... I
don't think... nobody goes there. Not even
to this day, like, you can't go there
because you know, like, no matter... it
doesn't matter what you do, like, it just
will never compare to the one man
destruction session that he just put
down, and like, blessed skateboarding with."
Absolutely crazy, but also in 1996, Tom
got his first Transworld cover doing
this front blunt is completely
unbelievable... because he didn't actually
land it. Kind of weird. These days, you
would never consider publishing a trick
that wasn't landed, but apparently that's
what happened. But tom was always super
casual. If he was trying the trick and
just didn't feel it, then he would have
walked away and not even bothered with
it. I found a ton of stories about just
how ridiculously casual he was, like this
one from Chad Muska.
"That was pretty much the craziest part
of it all. It was almost like he didn't
know he was doing anything special. None
of it was conscious. Nothing he's done
has been conscious. It's just all natural.
His whole life is like that. Anywhere you
went, he would just bust something. No
cameras, nothing. None of it was ever
planned in any way. It was never like, "I'm
gonna do this, and I'll get this cover and
be a superstar." It was just, "Oh, there's an
obstacle in front of me, and I want to do
this down it." Boom. "I'm just doing it." Tom
was one of the biggest skaters in the
world in 1996, and then he suddenly just
disappeared, and even his disappearance
was casual. I remember even when I first
started skating a few years later, I
started 2001, there were always these
stories about Tom sightings. People
would see him somewhere, "he showed up at
my skate park, he did a giant nollie flip,
and then he's gone." There would be ads
published of him where he would be doing
a trick, and it would just say 'somewhere
in Europe.' You wouldn't know where, and
you wouldn't know when it was shot or
anything like that.
He was completely gone from the public
eye, and even his sponsors had a hard
time tracking him down, like Sole Tech.
They wanted to give him a pro shoe, and
they kept asking what he wanted his pro
model to look like and he just never got
back to him. Apparently, he had been
skating around Europe in Timbaland
boots for a year, the same
boots, and so they kept asking him 'what
do you want you shoe to be like?' Over and
over, and he eventually just sent them the
boot so that they could do some sketches
based on it, and they got it. And it
wasn't actually a Timbaland boot,
that's kind of the urban legend version
of the story. It was actually a Colombia
hiking boot, but still. Either way, this
dude had a shoe sponsor, he had enough
money to buy skate shoes, and yet he was
just skating around in hiking boots, you
know. It just didn't matter to him.
Something else that didn't matter to him:
I found this story where he lived in
Europe and he -- in France I believe -- and he
was right next to a filmer, and they
lived right next to each other, and they
also lived by this park. Well there was a
bunch of cool stuff to skate. Sometimes
he would call up the filmer and they
would go do stuff, sometimes he wouldn't
even bother. So one day, he went there, he
found the biggest gap that was in the
whole park, and he kicked flipped it, and
he didn't bother to call the guy. It just
didn't matter to him. But why did Tom
actually leave? There was always a lot of
talk about how he wasn't happy with the
skateboarding industry or how things
were going in the US and stuff like that.
But here's a quote from Tom himself: "I
never really made any decision to leave
the states or the spotlight. Right before
I left, I was living with Shawn Sheffy for
a couple of weeks, and he was like, 'you're
not coming back.' I was like, 'yeah I am.
I'll be back in two weeks. I'm just going
to the contest and then I'm coming back.'
He was like, 'no you're not coming back.' I
went to all the Euro contests and just
ended up in London I saw all my old
friends again and ended up staying there
for a while. It just happened." Of course
he just kind of wandered over there and
it just kind of happened. Completely
ridiculous. Well there's a ton of really
crazy things that happened while he was
over there in Europe. For example, he shot
this ad in 1998,
although the ad ran in 2000. He's doing
an Indy 540 on vert. Tom had skated pools,
a lot of transition and stuff like that,
but he was never known as a vert skater.
And yet, here he is doing a legitimate
Indy 540, with a legitimate amount of
vert skater level air. Completely crazy.
And even more crazy is the fact that he
had never tried a 540 before. He just
kind of got the idea and did it. And he
never bothered to call up a filmer, even
though he was filming for menikmati at
the time, and he actually made it pretty
tough on himself. He said, "I would drink a
beer between every try. I think I drank
something like 18 elephant tall boy
Carlsberg beers before
I finally landed it. I manual rolled the
flat bottom and manual rolled up the
other side. It was pretty crazy." Yeah,
there was a lot of drug and alcohol use
around this time too, but he says he
cleaned his life up around 2003. But
here's another crazy story from the time
in France. This is that same park I was
talking about earlier. He does a 5-0 shove
it out. It's basically like a one set,
like a stair height. I could probably do
that trick at that spot. Just picture how
that would look if you or I did that.
Okay, but now this is Tom doing it.
Transworld wrote a whole article about
the invisible shove it. It kind of looks
like he does a 5-0 and he's gonna go
to tail side, then he just doesn't. His
feet never look like they leave the
board, but somehow it ends up rolling
away backwards. It's completely crazy.
That was just his style though, it was
just so fluid and natural. You could
barely even see when things happened.
Here's another crazy one: this is a 360
flip to fakie that he did in Copenhagen.
Here's the story: "there were not many tries,
it's only a few as I remember it. The guy
is such a natural, it's insane. That roll
in he's skating is no joke.
It's a gnarly place to do those tricks,
and the way he did them, it was hard to
comprehend. I'm not sure he even noticed
Jesper shooting. Jesper got two great
photos: the 360 flip for the es ad, and a
frontside flip that I don't remember if
it showed up somewhere. As far as I
remember he made a couple of them (the
360 flips), maybe two or three." There's
actually a rumor that he was really
upset when he saw that ad because he was
there shooting the frontside flip for
TSA ,and that 360 flip was just poached,
like he wasn't planning on using it for
anything. But that's completely
ridiculous,
like he was just doing those anyway. He
didn't care if it was documented, and
someone just happened to take a picture
and shoot an iconic ad that's completely
amazing.
But his skating, it really makes me think
of how I skated back in the day, you
know, I was the complete opposite. I was
always trying to film for video parts. I
wasn't on any kind of Pro videos, I was
just shooting for YouTube, but every time
I went out, I would always push myself a
lot further than what I could do and
I just get more and more angry, just
trying to force this trick that I just
couldn't do. I would finally land it
really really sketchy and that would be
good enough, and I would just go home
angry. But that's not what Tom was like,
you know.
He would just do it. He was skating at
video part quality all the time.
Completely crazy. So after all that time
in Europe he came back and he shot for
Menikmati, which is one of my favorite videos ever
made. He was also in Sorry, Really Sorry and
Extremely Sorry. He moved back to the US
with a permanent residence visa in 2006,
and the parts that he put together
during this time were amazing, as were
his board sales. This Cheech and Chong
graphic sold like crazy, and flip ended
up having to pay Cheech royalties when he
found out about it.
Geoff Rowley said it was one of their
best selling boards for 13 years
as of 2009, but it's actually been
re-released more since then. After a few
years in the US, it seems like he ended
up back in Europe. You start to see his
footage and pictures coming from over
there.
In 2015 Lucien Clark mentioned in an
interview that Penny isn't allowed in
the US anymore. I don't know the story
there. Maybe his visa got revoked or
something. I'm not really too sure, but in
2014 he was in a UK video called Albion.
It was shot on a VX but it's actually
pretty new. He's 37 here and it looks a
lot like his signature style is kind of
faded away over time. Although, because of
his cult-like status, you'll see people
arguing in the comments that this is the
best skateboarding has ever looked in
all history. I'll let you decide for yourself.
Last year, he filmed some stuff in Chile.
You never really know where he's gonna
turn up. It looks like he's still rocking
boot style skate shoes. His Supra model
which is called the Bandit, looks like
this. He also had a small section in the
Supra video 'Oscar and Friends.' At this
point is more about cameos than full-on
video parts. And a couple of months ago,
he shot this ETN ad in Copenhagen. Maybe
he's staying there now. I don't know.
He's 40 years old now, and whether he
comes back to the US, or if he ever cares
to come back to the US, time will tell.
But that is what I was able to find
about Tom penny. Share your favorite Tom
penny stories below. I know there's a lot
more. I wasn't able to cover all the ones
that I found, but in the meantime, until
my next video, here are a couple more
videos you can check out. There's also a
big logo right in the middle of the
screen that you can tap to subscribe, and
that way you can keep learning new
things about skateboarding three times a
week. Thanks for watching.
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