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Limping on a gimpy knee, shredded by years of hard living and acrobatic skateboarding, extreme sport legend Tony Alva is now remarkably mellow. And reflective.
"I'm 48 years old," Alva tells the Sun. "It's different. It's experience. And you gain wisdom with that experience."
We're sitting on a ramp at Shred Central, an indoor skateboarding facility in the heart of downtown Toronto, the kind of place he used to own with his breathtaking rides.
Looking haggard but talking sense, Alva is on hand to promote the DVD release of Catherine Hardwicke's skateboarding drama, Lords Of Dogtown. That is the feature film which tells the story of the Z-Boys, a loose gang of surfers who become pioneers in the skateboard subculture of L.A.'s Venice Beach in the 1970s. Alva was one of them.
Their story was also told in the 2001 documentary film Dogtown And Z-Boys, which was directed by one of their own, Z-Boy Stacy Peralta (who also penned the screenplay for Hardwicke's feature film, so it's all connected).
If you want to see Alva in action as a youth, "carving" beautiful lines into drained swimming pools as onlookers gasp, look at chapter 25 of the documentary. You can also see his giant ego at full burst as he is called both the Michael Jordan and the Dennis Rodman of his sport.
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Lords also portrays Alva's cocky, aggressive side. "It's easy to turn into the egoed-out rock star," Alva reflects of how he went out of control. He recalls sex, drugs, booze, "and violent encounters with people you probably could have sussed things out with. You could have talked it out instead of punching it out. Just crap like that. Immaturity."
Alva is nonplussed about being portrayed this way by actor Victor Rasuk in Lords Of Dogtown, although he does claim: "In the movie, I think the ego was a little bit blown out of proportion." Nevertheless, it's reasonably accurate.
"It's pretty surreal," Alva says of watching himself as a movie character. "At the same time, you have to learn as a person to accept the flattering and the not so flattering aspects of your character. Even Stacy feels this way because he felt that his character was a little too straight-edged, a little too stockcar, a little too conservative."
The personal stories are why Lords is important, even with the documentary already on hand, Alva says.
"I think that Catherine used that (the documentary) as a template for a lot of the facts that her movie is based on. But what she did was go much deeper into the characters, like the personalities of the kids.
"(We) were three kids growing up at a time when there was a revolution, not only in skateboarding but also in morals and ethics. After the hippie era, it kind of got a little hardcore and punk rock and then changed again in the '80s. But it shows the beginning of a youth subculture that exists today and is centred around surfing and skateboarding. And it eventually affected, like, the entire planet."
Totally rad releases, man ...
There are two ways to learn about the roots of extreme sports in the California skateboarding subculture, according to Tony Alva, who helped start it all.
One is the Catherine Hardwicke film Lords Of Dogtown, the feature film version just released on DVD. The other is the documentary, Dogman And Z-Boys, already available. Alva is featured in the doc and he worked as a consultant and skateboard trainer for his pal Hardwicke on Lords.
"It doesn't matter what order you watch the films in," Alva tells the Sun. "If you watch both of them in one week, it's going to be like a crash course in the history of, not only surfing and skateboarding, but also where extreme lifestyle and culture and sports came from."
The feature film dramatizes the events; the documentary methodically deconstructs the era with archival footage and new interviews. Both films share a compulsive rock music soundtrack and intense editing style that Alva believes create rhythms that invoke the period.
As DVDs, both releases are excellent. The fullscreen doc offers an optional extended version with raw extra skateboard footage dropped in. There is also a commentary.
The DVD of Lords Of Dogtown is an Unrated Extended Cut that plays in widescreen with four extras minutes of footage edited into the film. The disc is loaded with extras, including deleted scenes, a gag reel, a Z-Boys commentary, a Rise Against music video and various other treats.
The best bits are the various featurettes showing everything from the spectacular crashes and injuries on set to the construction of what Alva calls "the Taj Mahal of skateboarding," the Pacific Ocean Park location.
The two films and the extras are invaluable because they show why youths are so committed to skateboarding, Alva says. "It's something that kids are really zealous and excited about and it kind of shows why kids are so into adrenalin and into individualized things like skateboarding.
"Skateboarders, for some reason on a mental as well as a physical level, are pushing it to a higher level of consciousness instead of just sitting around and bumming out."