Jay Adams Released...

[OldSkateGuy]

and featured in the New York Times.

[Hmann]

Originally Posted by OldSkateGuy

and featured in the New York Times.

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[Hmann]

Once was fine. If you want to be an ass: www.4chan.org.

--Mod

[AWDPirate]

jay is the man. my next board will be a zflex.

[quuz]

I have a z-flex board

[skategeezer]

July 30, 2008
A Lord of Dogtown Re-emerges

By MATT HIGGINS
COSTA MESA, Calif. — A specter from the grittier past of skateboarding has reappeared, ready to reconnect with his past without letting it drag him down.
The X Games are scheduled to begin in Los Angeles on Thursday, and Jay Adams, whose skateboarding career has been the subject of two major films, wants to attend. Adams, 47, does not compete anymore, but he hopes to watch and visit with friends he has not seen in years. More important, he wants to reunite with his wife and a daughter he has never seen outside of prison.
The decision about the X Games will not be up to him. The relationship with his family will be.
Adams was transferred from a federal prison in Oregon on July 7 to a halfway house in Garden Grove, Calif., where he will serve the final months of a four-year sentence for his role in a major drug shipment scheme. Although he has enjoyed increased freedom, his schedule and movements remain strictly supervised.
“They like to keep tabs on you, and know where you are at all times,” Adams said Tuesday of those running the halfway house, who will decide whether he can attend the games.
In the late 1970s, Adams was a leading figure in a seminal vertical skateboarding scene rising from a seedy section of Santa Monica and Venice known as Dogtown.
Adams had been a talented teenage member of the Dogtown-based Zephyr Skate Team, known as the Z-Boys. Together they helped shape modern skateboarding with an aggressive attitude and style born in the streets, and maneuvers inspired by their favorite surfers.
“Jay was one of the biggest innovators of skateboarding in his time,” said Danny Way, 34, who will compete in the skateboarding Big Air event at the X Games on Thursday. “He brought a carefree personality to skateboarding, and skateboarding has always been a little rebellious.”
Although Adams initially rode the rising popularity of skateboarding to fame, he eventually chafed at the sport’s increasing emphasis on commercialism and contests. Soon his rebelliousness overshadowed his skating.
“We were wild and acting crazy and not being very positive role models,” he said of his fellow professional skaters.
This led to serious legal problems for Adams in 1982. While hanging out in Hollywood after a concert, he taunted a gay couple, which led to a fight. Adams said that he fled, but that a crowd joined in and stomped one of the men to death.
Adams was convicted of felony assault and sentenced to six months in prison.
He spent the next two decades in and out of prison as he battled drug addiction and his own demons. After the deaths of his brother, father, grandmother and mother in less than two years, he hit bottom during the late 1990s. Adams was, in his words, “a down-and-out junkie.”
In 2001, an award-winning documentary, “Dogtown and Z-Boys,” chronicled his early rise and fall and catapulted him back into the limelight. At the time, Adams was serving two and a half years in a Hawaiian jail on drug charges.
He was released in 2002. In 2005, Hollywood followed up with a feature film, “Lords of Dogtown,” in which Emile Hirsch played a young Adams.
By then Adams had begun trading on his renewed status. He signed endorsement deals, but failed to pay taxes for three years. He relapsed into heroin addiction. And in June 2004 he was overheard on a federal wiretap introducing a crystal meth dealer in California to a buyer in Hawaii.
He was not arrested until November 2005. In the meantime, he stopped using drugs, got married and was expecting a child. All of which weighed at his sentencing when the judge showed leniency.
Still, if he breaks the law again, Adams expects to be locked up for a long time. “My good-luck chances with judges are through,” he said. “I can’t make those mistakes anymore.”
Since emerging from prison, Adams has spent most of his time at an indoor skate park at the headquarters of the surf apparel maker Hurley in Costa Mesa. That was where he was on Tuesday morning, sitting on a skateboard in the middle of the cavernous space, tattoos scrawled across his face and outstretched arms and legs.
He works there as the facilities manager, keeping the park clean and making sure that skaters have signed liability waivers.
A condition of his release, the job requires him to wake at 5 a.m., followed by an hour-and-a-half bus ride to begin work at 8 a.m. He is back at the halfway house and in bed by 9. On some nights he attends drug or alcohol treatment.
The simple schedule is designed to help Adams, a recovering drug addict, readjust to civilian life.
“We’ve got to make sure he gets on the bus and gets to work on time,” said his agent, Peter Townend, a former world surfing champion who has known Adams since the late 1970s. “If he gets too much too soon, he’ll go off the tracks again.”
Family and friends are watching him closely. His wife, Alisha, and 2-year-old daughter, Venice, are in Alabama biding time while Adams demonstrates that he can control his addictions. He also has a 14-year-old son, Seven, who lives in Santa Cruz, Calif.
Adams, whose fearsome appearance belies a soft-spoken demeanor, said his faith in God and the routine of work would help him remain drug free.
“My ideal future would be to be with my wife and family and to be somewhere where I’m helping young kids not make the mistakes I’ve made,” he said.
Meanwhile, he looks forward to resuming surfing and skateboarding.
With the X Games just 45 minutes north on Interstate 405, those dreams seem tantalizingly close.
Whatever happens this week, there are the matters of a future with his family and another five years of probation. For Jay Adams, there is a long road ahead.

[skategeezer]

after reading that story, I just feel sad.

[Xgecko]

yeah it kinda does, I only knew him for a short time but he is truely amazing to watch skate and a realy nice guy. I hope he can get his life back together

[TexasBomber]

True "core" skater. I idolized him, Stacy and Wentz back in the day.
That crew scared the shit out if me. Hall of famer for sure.
Really sad he never stabilized his life. I feel sad about Gator as well.

[boardtothelord]

sad...thanks for the article though skategeezer

[SpeedFiend]

much as I like his flow in dogtown, natural talent all that, he should be in jail for causing that guys death. still.