THE 540, OR AS MY FRIENDS CALL IT the "McTwist," was first conceived in my head when I was twice the size of Jamie Godfry's little ripping brother Dean. I had just maxed out on my seventh Gatorade when I saw Fred Blood, the roller transbiker, do a 360 and a half-Cab pirouette in the Egg Bowl at Cherry Hill, New Jersey. "Wow, that would actually be cool to see if you put your legs together on a skateboard somehow," I said.
At least two years had past and I found myself trying this crazy 540 thing with Caballero in a hotel swimming pool full of water. Of course he had no idea what I was doing; we mostly just tried contorted handplants in the shallow end as water went up our noses. The next summer of '84 I returned to Per Welinder's hometown in Sweden to skate a big ramp by a lake for three weeks, with Sir Lance and the Mutt from Gainesville, FL. It was really cool; we hung out with skaters from all over Europe like Claus Grabke, Hans Jacobson and Bod Boyle, to name a few.
Well, after skating the ramp for three weeks straight, every day, two to three sessions per day, I had made every trick that I could think of with the exception of riding my board backwards, which was way too circus for me; not comfortable and not fun. Anyway, three days before we left, the rest of the 40 or so Swedish summer camp skaters went to our daily dinner routine restaurant, which I skipped to finally try the trick I had dreamt about. Or was it going to be my nightmare?
There were just two other skaters who had skipped the Swedish cuisine that night. I came to the ramp padded up more than Kevin Staab. I had two layers of hip pads and had Duct-taped my wristguards into temporary casts just in case. I told the two younger skaters to check out what I was doing and let me know what it looks like. "Okay," I thought, "if I could just get past the 400-degree mark I could bail out to my knees and not land on my head." After a couple dozen tries it happened and I landed one with speed, just like that. Bod Boyle, the English youngster, jumped up and said, "No bloody ####### way!" and ran all the way to the restaurant to tell Mr Mountain and the crew. Before long everybody showed up, saying, "Okay, let's see it." So I did, but it wasn't half-way up the wall as they all suspected; it was about four-feet out, which was actually easier for me to see what I was doing. Lance proceeded to grab his skate stuff and did a full body jar with his body over the coping trying it. The next day he took a sequence of it with a single shot camera for the Bones Brigade Intelligence Report, and made me do it 27 times in the same spot. Rodney Mullen then named it the McTwist.--Mike McGill
A Del Mar memory of the McTwist
NONE OF US were expecting it, let alone knew anything about it. We were just skating Del Mar's keyhole in the daytime when it happened. McGill shows up out of the blue, carves a few walls, does a few rocks, maybe a backside air or two--then you hear the crack of his tail ring out as he tumbles through the air. It was surreal; I freaked out like the time Cab unveiled the Caballerial at Marina years before.
We'd just witnessed the 540 air, and it went down in a bowl with coping and tile. How tad. The move to me seemed too advanced to learn. To this day when I see digital clocks at 5:40 I get a little nervous. Props to you, McGill.--Neil Blender
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