00:00And all these things that have come to me through skateboarding, we've become friends over the years, we've traveled around, we've done a lot of stuff together, we've ride pools together, so it's an honor to be here with him, and this is Tony Albaugh.
00:12Thank you!
00:42It's so fortunate to be able to come here and just be here with you guys and just, this is like our church.
00:59I've been a surfer and a skateboarder since I was 10 years old.
01:04Surfing to me was like a passion, it was something that I wanted to do because I wanted to be the best in the world, be a professional surfer.
01:11I was never capable of achieving that because I was this little 70-pound kid with my socks wet, and I could barely even get my arm around my surfboard to carry it to the beach, let alone compete with the guys in my neighborhood that were either professional surfers or guys that lived in the area.
01:30I wanted more than anything to be on this team, one of my guys right here, Torka Johnson, he just showed in that photograph, was a mentor to me, and I wanted so much to just be a surfer and a skateboarder.
01:45But skateboarding came naturally to me, and it got me on the surf team that I wanted to be on, but it was strange because I have just an amazingly magical story to share with you guys.
01:55I was introduced to the Zephyr Jeff Lowe shop in my neighborhood.
02:01It was on Bay Street in Maine, in Santa Monica, where I grew up, because my dad, I was a latchkey kid, and I lived on the north side, so my dad tried to get me away from all the bad influences on the south side by living as a latchkey kid with him in a little apartment in Santa Monica.
02:17And I went to all the north side, and I went to all the north side schools where all the kids that had money went to school and stuff, because in my town, it's the south side, kind of the ghetto side, and the north side, the affluent side.
02:28And it's like little areas anywhere in the world, like different parts of London or whatever, you know.
02:33If I go to certain skate parks in London, I know which ones are rough and gnarly neighborhoods, and I know which ones are affluent and nice, you know, because I grew up around that stuff.
02:42But to really tell you what brought me here, it was an English surfer, a guy that took me to the Zephyr Jeff Lowe shop for the first time, because he lived on the south side with his grandmother and his Russian ballerina mother that had smuggled him out of England.
03:04His name was George William Omar, the Lord of Deerhurst, the Earl of Coventry.
03:08And we all just called him Ted, Ted Deerhurst.
03:15And he was one of the first surfers to surf here with no beach on the surfboard, beaver tail, wet sand, freezing his ass out there.
03:24And the only reason that he ended up back here was because he was blue-blood English, and his father got angry at the fact that his mother had taken him from England
03:34and let him live in California as a latchkey kid as well, you know, and became a surfer.
03:41But he told me, this guy Jeff Lowe is making the best boards in town, you've got to go to this shop, you've got to check this shit out.
03:47And he was like my junior high school, my BFF, he was like my best friend.
03:51He was tall, he was beautifully handsome, he had a slight English accent.
03:56He was like a major influence on me as a kid, as a surfer and stuff, which was so cool.
04:02And I was just like, and he was, he was a big influence on me as far as like his mannerisms and a lot of things about him were very interesting.
04:12But obviously, I was this really tough Mexican-American kid from the neighborhood, and he was a bit intimidated by me at times too.
04:21So we became really good friends, and I had no idea that his father would eventually come to Los Angeles and basically legally abduct him back to England.
04:35And he did this right before, like two degrees of separation before the Zephyr competition team and all of the Z-Boys stuff came together.
04:45So he basically was like a sliver away from being one of the Z-Boys.
04:52His dad brought him back to England, put him in a boarding school right away, didn't give really a hoot about anything other than the fact that he had conquered the conflict between him and his mother by bringing him back to England.
05:07Put him in a boarding school, whenever he got a chance, he would always come to the coast and surf.
05:10He surfed this side of England, like all the different spots from St. Isaac Cornwall all the way here to Nukie or wherever.
05:19He was exploring the coast constantly and surfing and sending me letters.
05:23We were pen pals because this was way before, you know, cell phones and internet, any of that stuff.
05:28And we vowed to each other that when the boarding school thing was over and high school for me, I just kind of did the C plus average student in my high school, Samahai, and got out of there.
05:41And we both met on the north shore of Oahu with like maybe like $100 in our pocket.
05:49And we lived over there surfing places like Pipeline, Rocky Point, Vilsen and Sunset Beach for two to three months out of the winter for the next couple of years as best friends again.
05:59And so that's my connection to your town and to England in general.
06:05And it's like I commemorate this session to George William Omar, the Lord of the Rivers of the World of Coventry.
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