jackassworld

Long before the televised family dramas, back tattoo, diamond accessories, and shirtless bro poses, a 12-year-old Ryan Sheckler once gave Johnny Knoxville a skateboard lesson for what we’d hoped would make a television-worthy segment on the second or third season of jackass in 2001. But it didn’t.

In theory we had assumed there would be something funny about Knoxville getting tips on how to ride a skateboard from a really little kid—well, that and we also knew something bad was obviously going to happen to him in the process (right from the start you can see he is well aware of this fact, too, what with his deadpan demeanor and all). It was just a matter of exactly when this “bad” was going to happen and, knowing this upfront, we should have just rolled him off or down something ridiculous to begin with instead of dicking around with the basics. While Knoxville does have a knack for turning the elementary into entertainment (as witnessed by his bewildering attempts at logging onto his jackassworld profile), this particular struggling instance just didn’t equate to the best (read: worst) possible outcome. So only a few low impact moves into the lesson he sprained his ankle while dropping off a foot-high platform—pretty anticlimactic.

There was, however, one lesson we did take away from this stillborn segment and that was to “fuck the small shit and just go big and get it over with.” A year later, Knoxville did just that when he forthrightly applied his non-existent skateboard skills to the handrail over at Hollywood High for jackass the movie.

(photo by Sean Cliver; Huntington Beach, CA; 2001)