THIS ARTICLE ORIGINALLY RAN IN THE ART OF STORYTELLING MAGAZINE ISSUE #1.

Conversation with Fred Gall’s Mom:

Freddy got his first skateboard on the boardwalk in Seaside Heights, New Jersey. He won one of those real cheesy boards. Freddy was playing one of those big spin wheel games and he won, but it was one of those games where you could win really big prizes. They had washing machines, TVs, and things like that, but all Freddy wanted was the skateboard. So what were we supposed to do? He wanted the skateboard so we got him the skateboard even though we could have gotten all these expensive prizes. But he took that cheesy skateboard and that’s all he cared about and he did really good with it. So next Christmas, I got him his first real professional skateboard, a Lance Mountain. I can’t remember what kind of wheels or trucks we got him but that doesn’t matter. Freddy loved that Lance Mountain.

“Tracker Trucks called, all the way from California they heard about Freddy, the little guy with the big moves, and they wanted to come see him.”

After that I would take him every weekend to the contests under the Brooklyn Bridge. I remember the fourth time we went there Freddy put his skateboard down and charged the bank. At that time Freddy was just a little kid. He put the board down and rushed right toward the bank and over into the street in the middle of traffic, like a mad man. I almost had a heart attack.

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Some time after that Fred started to get famous from doing the contests under the Brooklyn Bridge. They started to call him “the little guy with the big moves.” He was even in the Daily News, the local New York City newspaper. Fred was in there could you believe it? The headline read, “The little guy with the big moves.” I still have the article. When you walk into my house, it’s right there by the front door.

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So anyway every weekend I took Fred under the Brooklyn Bridge to go skate. I remember Harold [Hunter], God bless his soul, Jeff Pang, Bruno from Zoo York – there were so many people that would go there. I remember I would go to the store, get a beer in a paper bag and come back and sit down and watch them all skate. I would go to McDonald’s and get french fries and hamburgers for all the bums at the Brooklyn Banks haha. They would go crazy when they saw me. When they saw me coming they would get all excited because they knew I had food.

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Freddy started getting really good, I mean REALLY good, and then it happened. Tracker Trucks called, all the way from California they heard about Freddy, the little guy with the big moves, and they wanted to come see him. I couldn’t get over how they heard about him all the way out in California. So we arranged to meet two of them.

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They met us in Pennsylvania at a skate park right outside of Philly. What was that skate park called Fred? Fred: [from the other side of the room laughing]. “I don’t remember. Dude are you getting all this? This is good shit right?”

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Anyway, Freddy went to school that morning and when he got out of school we drove all the way, three-and-a-half hours to Pennsylvania. Once we arrived we found out their plane was delayed. They didn’t end up meeting us until after 11:00 at night. This poor kid, he went to school all day, drove three-and-a-half hours, and on top of it didn’t eat anything because he was so nervous. Freddy looked drained, but when they got there Freddy kicked ass.

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Half way through, they even stopped him. They were like, “Enough, your signed!” So that was Freddy’s first sponsor, Tracker Trucks. Alva was next then New School, Alien Workshop, then Alien Workshop split and the list goes on. I signed him out of school when he was 15 and he became pro.

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And do you know what Freddy did with his very first pro paycheck? He took me to the Bahamas. It was awesome. I remember it like it was yesterday. Fred: “Haha. Somehow I got a $10,000 check and I took my moms to the Bahamas. It was chill.”

Here is a little piece from the video, but check out the entire video at Thrasher.