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That’s Blaize Blouin in the summer of ’87, doing the big mute air, with me in the flipped-up cap behind him. Blaize passed away 25 years ago today. He was in a league of his own as the only pro skater to come out of my childhood hometown of Charleston, S.C. Check out his name phonetically… BLAZE BLEW-IN. Sounds like a name made up for a movie starring a “supremely gifted but rebellious anti-hero skateboarder with too much style and attitude to be ignored, who scorches everything he touches”… and Blaize was all that.
I met Blaize in 1984. I had seen pictures of him in a scrapbook at one of the skate shops, so I knew that he could already do big airs and handplants. I was 14, and he was only a year older, but he was already doing advanced tricks. My friend Barry and I went to Blaize’s backyard halfpipe, called the Rasta Ramp, in late ’84, and as we rolled up, we could hear the noise of the ramp, and it sounded like thunder. Then I saw Blaize do a backside ollie to axle about three and a half feet out, and I turned around to bail the other way. But Blaize saw me and said, “Hey, man, the gate is open. Don’t worry about the dog. He’s friendly.” I thought, “Oh, no, we’ve been spotted. We can’t leave now.” So we went in, and I watched and skated at the end of the day. I started going there as much as possible, and Blaize was always very encouraging and pushed me to try things. The pic of Blaize doing the handplant is from this era… 1985!
Blaize’s ramp was also a great place to hear new music. That ramp was the first place I heard reggae, PiL, Motörhead, Black Sabbath, Jimi Hendrix, and a ton of other stuff. Blaize was always an early adopter of good music. He was also into art—he made homemade T-shirts of Steel Pulse and other bands whose shirts were hard to find in Charleston.
Blaize started to get national attention in the skate mags in early ’87, as can be seen in the pic of him in Transworld doing a sweeper over the channel in late ’86 in Chicago. I was so proud that my friend was making waves. Blaize won the amateur nationals for vert in 1989 and turned pro for G&S. His future looked bright, but the bottom fell out of vert skateboarding about a year later, when street skating came to dominate. The career Blaize had worked hard for was over by 1993 when he was only 24.
Blaize then reached out to me because he was intrigued by what I was doing with the Giant campaign and my print shop and small brand, Alternate Graphics. He moved to Providence to work with me in ’94, and he was a great graphic artist and ideas guy—a constant source of inspiration, even though his self-confidence could spill into ego-tripping now and then. Blaize and I collaborated on the idea for Subliminal as an art-driven skateboard brand, which later became my art gallery, Subliminal Projects.
Blaize and I parted ways when I moved to San Diego in ’96. He died in a crash, driving alone late at night on September 9, 1999. I’ll always be grateful for the inspiration Blaize provided and his model of manifesting things through self-belief and strong will. Thanks, Blaize!
Read more about Blaize and my early years skating HERE.
