On a September afternoon in 1995, a trio of teenagers from Little Rock share a bench on the Santa Monica promenade. They’ve been in California a couple of months on a quest to become professional skateboarders. They’re low on cash and sleeping in cars. Two of them want to head home.
“We’ll work jobs for the winter and take trips to St. Louis and Texas. We’ll save up and come back,” Mike Liddle says.
He turns to his friend Daniel Haney. “You can live with my parents again. They won’t care.”
Haney tightens his jaw. “I’m not going back to Arkansas. I got nothing there,” he says.
“What are you going to do, then?” Liddleasks, exasperated.
“Sleep in my car. Sleep on Dan Druff’s couch. Go back to the shady French people!”
They fall silent, watching shoppers stroll past and hedging bets.
The next day, they return to the French landlords. Haney improvises a lease on notebook paper, and they move into the $650, two-bedroom Hollywood apartment.
It has gaping holes and free-range rats.
They buy inflatable chairs at Target and apply for jobs with temp agencies.
“We are doing this,” Haney tells them.
Now Haney, 38, runs North Little Rock’s 7,000-square-foot Enjoy Lifestyle Center, a nebulous venture that promotes gardening,recycling and skateboarding. Inside the graffiti-covered warehouse, a small skate shop opens into a large back office. A photo studio and game tables overlook a 12-foot halfpipe and movable modules constituting the only indoor skate park in the metro area.
Since the promenade, Haney has skated on six continents, appeared in dozens of magazines and videos and promoted shoes, clothes and hardware for a bevy of sponsors. He’s also made and spent millions of dollars, compliments (directly and indirectly) of skateboarding.
It’s a circuitous tale of guts and serendipity, and it begins in Rose City.
“My family was really chaotic. My parents were young and poor and not very organized. So we moved a lot; we got kicked out of houses,” Haney says.
Pregnant teenagers and lapsed Pentecostals, his parents didn’t marry until two years after Haney was born. They divorced when he was 7.
At 12, Haney attended church with his uncle and found that he loved the charismatic tradition his parents eschewed. “People run the aisles, they speak in tongues,” he says. “I just let go. I’m dancing and throwing my arms up, and that was the first moment, that was chasing the dragon.” He means adrenaline, which would become his modus operandi.
Haney received a skateboard for Christmas that year. “The freedom, that sensation of being unbound” felt exactly like dancing in church, he says. It was better, though, because “it’s passage into a whole other world.”
He befriended local skaters and “almost systematically broke down the hierarchy of the group. I was like, OK, I’m probably almost as good as that guy … OK, now I’m better than him, now there’s that guy …”
Haney met Preston Acuff in 1989, skating a downtown Little Rock parking lot. Acuff recalls a scruffy kid in a kilt, with blond hair piled messily under a blue baseball cap. (Haney thinks the kilt came a few years later.) Haney could skate, and he was cocky. Acuff didn’t like him.
But within days, they were best friends. They conquered bike racks, trash cans and parking garages, dodging items lobbed from car windows (mostly soda bottles, but occasionally bullets), shooting “sponsor me” videos on rented camcorders and dreaming big.
Upon graduating from Little Rock Central High School, they moved to Los Angeles.
They would become the only professional street skaters from Arkansas, thus far. But they weren’t there yet. They were still living in a rodent-infested apartment, hanging around a west L.A. skate shop and trying to get noticed.
The temp agency found Haney a job at an insurance company. He was focused and systematic, up at 8, in bed by 10. His friends considered him “straight edge,” because he avoided alcohol, caffeine and even preservatives. On weekends he conquered whatever rail or concrete staircase had landed skaters in the latest magazines.
“There was the Chinatown Rail that all the pros were skating, so I went and skated that in the rain one night. And there was another rail in Hollywood that Guy Mariano had legendarily done a trick down. So I did whatever tricks I could do on that,” Haney says.
He documented everything on video, and Druff, with Hot Rod skate shop, sent it around. By mid-’96, he was sponsored by Foundation board company. Haney quit the insurance gig and started working part-time at Hot Rod. That summer, Foundation took him on tour. “It’s just like a band touring.Your company books demos at skate parks, skate shops, wherever,” he says.
There was pressure. If he skated well, Foundation would name a board after him - the official mark of being “pro,” rather than a sponsored amateur.
But Haney couldn’t pull perfect technique on vertical ramps. He was a street skater, “rough to watch … a charger, a barbarian, attacking handrails and big gaps,” he says.
Acuff is more magnanimous: “Daniel became very recognizable … because of having no fear. When it came to anything very large, on the scale of something that didn’t look possible, he made it possible. … There were people doing little 10-step rails, but Daniel was doing freaking 20-step rails. Anytime this guy went skating, it was a bloodbath.”
Nearly 15 years later, no one has landed or even attempted some of the rails that Haney pioneered. In the industry, he’s known as “Dan Rails.”
But early in the Foundation tour, Haney broke his hand. It was an injury he couldn’t shake off. “I was like, I got to get something to put on this hand, so that when I fall, it doesn’t cause my arm to go numb all the way to my neck,” he says.
The Foundation guys were primed to bicker. They were 16 deep in a 15-passenger van, going from gig to gig, without having showered, sometimes traveling all night. No one had time to take Haney to a clinic.
Somewhere in Florida, he woke early, found the van keys and took himself. He and his plaster-casted hand returned to angry teammates. It was midday and boiling, and they’d been kicked out of the hotel an hour before.
Haney says Foundation fired him for taking the van and blacklisted him. At the time, Foundation was one of the top board companies in the world, with an advertising budget that fueled magazines like Big Brother and Transworld.
“So when the owner goes, ‘Don’t run any photos of Daniel Haney,’ the magazine doesn’t run any photos of Daniel Haney,” Haney says.
In the Enjoy treehouse, he flips through a binder of laminated clips. There he is in Big Brother, mastering a sloping rail at a Palisades middle school. There he is in a Foundation ad, hopping a handrail that won’t stop kinking.
“Thrasher kept printing stuff of me. They were like, we don’t care, you’re a skater, and you’re killing it. … This German magazine printed stuff of me.”
He turns another page. There he is, skating atop an “Avenue of the Stars” sign, skyscrapers looming in the background. “Here, I get another sponsor,” he says.
Six months after Foundation bumped Haney, a friend asked him to ride for his new board company, Arcade. In 1999, at 23, Haney went pro, with an orange board he designed and named General Lee, in tribute to The Dukes of Hazzard. He toured internationally in Europe, Asia, South America and Australia, courtesy of Arcade, Billabong, Osiris and Magnavox. He was making nearly six figures.
But professional skating is a tenuous thing, and Haney wanted a fallback plan. And he wanted to relax, to ride for himself again, rather than for a job. At 25, he bought a three-bedroom house in a fast-gentrifying California neighborhood called Culver City. He moved himself and three friends from their cramped apartment, where he was still sharing a bedroom with his brother, Jeremiah; charged everybody below-market rent, and paid his mortgage. Within a few months, the value of the house skyrocketed, and Haney bought another property. This time, it was a four-unit apartment building.
He sold both properties for massive profits, renounced his prohibition on mind-altering substances, took his brother on a five-month trip through Central America and bought about 40 beachfront acres in Nicaragua. There, he broke ground on a hotel.
“It was this place … it was Enjoy,” Haney says. He planned to build a treehouse and a skate park, too. But halfway in, he realized he was lonely in Nicaragua. A decade after that conversation on the promenade, where he convinced his friends to stay in L.A., Haney decided it was time to go home.
One fall day, the smack of wheels on Masonite echoes off the metal walls of the Enjoy Lifestyle Center’s Dream skate park, so that upbeat indie rock comes through in staccato patches. Teenagers flip boards, zip along a low rail and swoop up and down the half-pipe. They’re trailed by ’tweens, scooting along on level ground, intermittently trying a small curve or an ollie (where the skateboarder jumps up and pops the skateboard in the air).
The park is private, but it hosts public skate contests, holiday events and the week-long TeL Terrors Halloween spectacular, with a lock-in, a haunt and parties that draw a couple of hundred people.
Haney and his girlfriend Nikki Killingsworth, 28, run the place with help from interns. They’ve applied for tax-deductible status, in the hopes of getting grants to improve local public skate parks and grow a fledgling recycling program and community garden.
This skate lesson-cum-mentoring costs the younger boys $20 for two hours. The older skaters are part of the Enjoy shop team and have free access to the park. Sometimes they go on road trips to regional events and bigger skate parks. When they’re ready, Haney will send their pictures to magazines and put them in touch with his skate-world contacts.
He named Dream after his new dream, which is to propel Arkansas skaters to national recognition. “The kids that want to work to get there, I will open doors for them,” he says.
Skateboarding is changing. It’s sleeker and more acceptable, more X-games than Thrasher ’zine. Devitrious Shirley-Davie, whom Haney dubs Arkansas’ best up-and-comer, reflects this shift. He’s a homeschooled 11-year-old from Conway, with glossy curls, skinny jeans, stage experience and an agent.
He has an uncanny sense of balance and a confidence that can’t be faked. But he’s not a misfit in a kilt, guided by instinct and desperation, skating 15-hour marathons because the streets feel safer than home.
He’s not Haney or Acuff, and likely, he never will be. But he is Arkansas, and to Haney, that counts for a lot.
Enjoy Lifestyle Center, 543 Oak St., North Little Rock, (501) 414-0195, thenjoylife.com. Enjoy Skate shop hours: 2-7 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, noon-7 p.m. Saturday, noon-6 p.m. Sunday. Skate mentoring 5-7 p.m. Wednesday, $20.
Style, Pages 29 on 12/17/2013