Aging, well . . .

Andy Mac, Miles Silvas, and Aging Gracefully in Skateboarding

I started writing this last year as an introduction for a Miles Silvas interview for Thrasher Magazine, but quickly realized it wasn’t really about Miles. It became more about Andy MacDonald. But then, it’s not really about him either.

I was standing on the side of the highway with a fifteen-year old Miles Silvas when Andy MacDonald finally waved down a car. It was two in the morning and we were in the middle of the woods about thirty miles outside of Philadelphia. As the car crept up behind ours, its headlights blinding us, I suddenly felt very responsible for the young prodigy. Who just pulled over? What were their intentions? And if push came to shove, how was I going to protect Miles?

I initially spotted him during our flight from San Diego to Philly. He wasn’t wearing his signature yellow helmet, but I could picture it on his head as he walked down the aisle.

“Check it out,” I whispered to Eric and Miles, seated next to me. “It’s Andy Mac!”

The next time we saw the X-Games super star was at our gate in Philadelphia, where we waited for a connecting to flight to State College, PA. The wait lasted hours, and we eventually established some contact with the vert-skating legend.

“You going to Woodward?” I asked.

“Yup,” he said.

“We are too.”

Andy Mac was frustrated with the delay, and we were bored.

“Want some Red Vines?” he asked, whipping out a fresh pack from his pocket.

“No thanks,” I said. Miles and Eric also declined his offer.

“I love Red Vines,” Andy Mac said.

It was almost midnight when they announced that the flight was cancelled. Andy Mac told us he was going to rent a car and drive to camp, and said that we could catch a ride with him. We were down, since we had no idea where to stay or what to do until the next flight in the morning. Eric went with Andy Mac to retrieve the rental car, and Miles and I waited outside the airport. After about twenty minutes of standing on the curb, we heard some yelling from a car. Andy Mac was pissed, and it seemed his airport confusion was somehow our fault. In the car we thanked him for giving us a ride, and then sat in an awkward silence as we left the airport. It felt like we were in trouble with someone else’s dad. When we hit the first tollbooth, Andy Mac demanded Miles use the money his parents had given him for food. I could tell Miles didn’t want to, but he was the only one of us who had cash.

“I rented the car,” he said. “One of you should pay the toll.”

To stave off the tension, I tried making small talk with Andy Mac. I asked him about where he grew up—Massachusetts. He told me how he’d been going to Woodward since he was a teenager, that he’d been a counselor. I was relieved to find we had a mutual acquaintance, the photographer named Rhino. They’d lived together when Andy Mac first moved to San Diego. Thirty minutes into our conversation, on some dark and empty highway, the car started making weird noises. He drifted across the lanes as it puttered to a stop. We had run out of gas. As it turned out, I was partly responsible for this.

“You were distracting me,” Andy Mac barked, as we sat in the car on the side of the highway. “If you hadn’t been asking those questions about San Diego, I would have noticed the gas gauge was empty.” 

Andy Mac was angry and didn’t know what to do. He started waving down cars. He blamed the car rental place, and called them to express his vitriol, but there was nothing they could do. I offered to use one of my free AAA pickups, though I hoped my offer would simply remind him to use his own. Despite him blaming everyone but himself, this was his fault. We’d been driving for a while. He could have checked the gas meter. Instead, Andy Mac asked me to call AAA and use one of my own precious pickups.

It was during my call with AAA that the car pulled over. After a few seconds, the roof illuminated with flashing red and blue lights, and I sighed with relief. The young state police officer got out and walked toward us, and Andy Mac frantically explained the situation.

“Can you believe the rental car place would do this?”

The cop appeared suspicious after asking our ages and relations to one another. Eric and I were twenty-three, Andy was pushing forty, and Miles was visibly a teenager. 

“No, we’re not related,” I said. “We’re . . . friends, driving to skate camp.” After the cop seemed convinced that we hadn’t abducted little Miles, he drove Andy to get some gas and then we continued on our way. Later, when we stopped for a proper fill up, Andy Mac asked Miles if he wanted some Red Vines.

“They’re the best,” he added.

“I’m good,” Miles said, politely. After Andy Mac walked away, Miles asked me, “What’s this dude’s deal with the Red Vines?” 

“I don’t know, man,” I said. “But it’s freaking me out.” 

Back on the road, Eric and Miles passed out in the backseat. Sitting passenger, I was tasked with giving Andy Mac directions to skate camp. It was a long drive, and although Andy Mac was a professed Woodward East veteran, he didn’t know the route from Philadelphia. With my iPhone in hand, the maps app open so I could direct him when needed, I guided our path.  

I continued to pepper Andy Mac with questions, mostly to make sure we both stayed awake, as I told him where to go and when to turn. His was an interesting life. I was newly pro, and I found it unfathomable that someone could still be making a living as a professional skateboarder at nearly forty years old. Andy Mac wasn’t much interested in me, so the conversation was more like a three-hour long interview.

“You have a turn coming up,” I told him at one point. He was telling me about the Boom Boom Huck Jam demos he used to do with Tony Hawk. Synchronized routines in front of thousands, Tony Hawk’s credibility and safety in his hands (and feet). A traveling circus of sorts for skateboarders and BMXers. I could never imagine performing like that. Most skaters never will. It was invigorating stuff.

“OK, this is the turn,” I said, waiting for him change lanes for the exit. “OK, take this.” 

I watched the exit pass. 

“Um, that was the turn back there,” I said. 

“What?” Andy Mac yelled, glaring at me. “How’d you let me miss that turn?” 

The tension in the small car returned. I didn’t know what else to say besides reminding that I had, indeed, just told him about the turn. He didn’t want to hear it.

“You have a map, in your hand, with a blinking blue light that tells you exactly where we are! How could you let this happen?” 

I bit my tongue as the map in my hand readjusted our route. I kept my eyes on the blue dot, and we found our way back to the intended exit. It’s strange, being unjustly scolded by someone you don’t really know. Even more strange when it’s someone you thought you had once looked up to. Had I looked up to this guy? I wondered, seething with frustration. As much as I wanted to argue, to defend myself, I knew it wasn’t worth it.

“Sorry,” I submitted. “It won’t happen again.”     

We made it safely to skate camp as the sun came up. It felt like we’d really been through something significant on that drive. A journey. There was drama, there was confusion, there was victory. We talked the entire time. By the morning, I knew so much about his life. Had I become friends with the one and only Andy Mac? I couldn’t wait to tell my friends back home.  

Andy Mac isn’t what you’d call a skater’s skater. At this point in my life, he had come to exist outside of the world of skateboarding I paid attention to. I didn’t watch X-Games or World Cup Skateboarding. I was fully enraptured in the anti-contest, “core” world that operated more like a diasporic high school than the multi-billion dollar industry it was. Throughout that drive with Andy Mac, I couldn’t help comparing him to his street skating contemporaries. Who from his generation were still out there getting paid to do their thing? Not many. Andrew Reynolds kept coming to mind. Though a few years younger, he was beginning to age, but was aging with relevance. Reynolds was a skater’s skater, still filming video parts and influencing the culture. Andy Mac didn’t seem to care about that culture. It wasn’t where his money came from. And wasn’t that, somehow, even more admirable? While Reynolds made the drug and booze infused Baker videos, Andy Mac partnered with Drug Free America and promoted sobriety at the White House. While Reynolds put out street parts for his skate shoe sponsor, Emerica, Andy had secured corporate sponsorships and developed a line of boards sold in Walmarts and Targets across America.

Much like his demo-mate, Tony Hawk, Andy Mac had found a mainstream audience and was more of a bonafide, “professional athlete” than most pro skaters I’d met. And by that point in my life, I felt like I’d met most of them. While my initial instinct was to write him off, by the end of that drive I found myself begrudgingly respecting him as a pro. His sponsor list was vast, filled with multinational corporations I didn’t know sponsored skateboarders. One of them, not surprisingly, was Red Vines. How can you knock a guy in his late thirties, supporting his family by doing the thing that he loves? Would I be in my late thirties, I wondered then, still getting paid to film street parts and appear in magazines? Would any street skater be able to do that? The brutal terrain and padless nature, the exponential level of progression, the lack of a mainstream market—made that prospect seem highly unlikely. 

That week at skate camp I learned a lot about Miles Silvas. How gracious he could be with other kids, how calm he acted in strange situations, and how destined to be a professional skateboarder he was. Despite being a visiting “pro,” who are generally exempt from the strict helmet rules of Woodward, as a minor Miles still had to wear one. But unlike any other teenager put in that position, Miles didn’t complain once. He wore no ego, demonstrated no self-importance. He was just one of the kids that week. Skating with them, joking with them, cheering them on. Showing them what a once in a generation talent looks like, all with a friendly smile.

That week I also learned that Andy Mac and I had not, in fact, become friends. We were not colleagues, fellow pros visiting camp. He was on the mega ramp and we were on the street course. We watched his one-man demo on the ramp, in awe as he flew across the impossibly long gap and soared ten-foot high benihanas above the enormous quarter pipe. He did not watch us skate the three-block or the 13 inch concrete ledge. When I tried to say hello after his show, he looked at me like he’d never seen me before. 

The other times I saw him that week involved the most bizarre brand promotion I’d ever seen with—you guessed it—Red Vines. It must have been some sort of test run endorsement, part of a pitch to the candy manufacturer. Carrying huge boxes of branded T-shirts and candy packages, Andy Mac went around handing the shirts to kids, telling them that if he saw them wearing the shirt throughout the rest of the week, he’d give them candy. Now it’s not my place to judge a man’s sponsorship hustle, but I don’t know. I found it weird. Not weirder, though, than rounding up a bunch of kids in said shirts to make them crab walk backwards up a grassy knoll, where in their path they stumbled on more shirts or Red Vines candy, all while filming them with a GoPro. By the end of the week, I no longer envied his prolonged skateboarding career. Making kids crab walk for candy was not something I wanted for my future.

.

Looking back on that week, some thirteen years later, I was correct in my assumption that I would not maintain skate sponsors at his age. At thirty-six, two years shy of Andy that summer, I do not have a paying sponsor to my name. But that is not to say that’s what the industry and market demands. Andrew Reynolds, for example, still maintains a hold on the culture through his street skating, as do many of his contemporaries. It’s not unusual for forty-plus-year-olds to keep their names on boards and contracts with corporate shoe companies like Nike, Converse, Adidas Vans, and New Balance. Some of them aren’t even really expected to skate!

 In December, 2023, Miles Silvas was anointed Thrasher Magazine’s “Skater of the Year,” arguably the highest honor one can achieve in skateboarding. Miles is sponsored by Adidas and Primitive, two of the biggest brands in the industry, and he’s one of the small handful of skaters his age making a solid living from street skating. As I wrote for his Thrasher feature, “He is the embodiment of a professional. And unlike so many other talented phenoms we’ve watched come and go in this strange industry, he has not wandered into other, some might say, easier pursuits. He’s not influencing; he’s not training for contests; he’s not entrepreneuring. Miles is in the streets doing the hard shit—pushing himself to his limits while giving us groundbreaking video parts.”

They say that getting SOTY adds a decade to your career, but even without the coveted trophy, Miles Silvas is no doubt going to be one of the few skateboarders holding down a big shoe deal into his late thirties, still humble and down to earth, still fakie tre flipping enormous sets of stairs. And who knows? Maybe by then he’ll get that Red Vines deal.

Andy Mac, on the other hand . . .

Well, Andy Mac is pretty much killing it, too! His Instagram page boasts of over ten sponsors, some of which I assume are paying him. Red Vines, I should mention, was not listed. The videos on his page show continued progression, which is astounding for a fifty-one-year-old. In August, 2024, Andy Mac even competed in the Paris Olympics, and while he didn’t make the finals, his runs were flawless and impressive. I’m not talking, “Impressive for a fifty-year-old,” either. He’s still objectively better than most competitive pros skating bowls and vert.

Andy Mac continues to exist in this adjacent pro skateboarding world, one that has grown in the last decade thanks to YouTube and social media. And now, years removed from Woodward, there’s still something I really admire about his career. He’s still doing his thing, on his own terms. Not starving for approval from the cool guys or cool brands. While I still feel a bit slighted from our intimate drive and subsequent week at camp together, I’m happy for the guy. Kooky candy endorsements aside, I find his path even more admirable than, say, the aging street skater who has clearly lost the passion, but holds onto sponsors because it’s the only thing they have. Do we really need to keep advertising and giving money to the guys who were big in the eighties and nineties, but today no longer seem to try? Are their contracts, however bloated or not, holding back opportunities for up-and-coming younger skaters? Shouldn’t “Aging well” mean honorably stepping aside when the juice dries up?

There’s something amazing about Andy Mac working his ass off at fifty-plus to make it into the Olympics. He’s still got some juice. He’s out there trying. And I love that. As Hansel from Zoolander said when discussing his heroes: “Sting . . . the music that he’s created over the years, I don’t really listen to it, but the fact that he’s making it. I respect that.” I wouldn’t go so far as to call Andy Mac a hero, but it gets me hyped to know he’s still out there doing it. I respect that.