IN 2012, the New York filmmaker William Strobeck was tasked with shooting a commercial for Supreme. When he arrived at the brand's original store on Lafayette Street, Strobeck met a 13-year-old kid from the Bronx named Tyshawn Jones. Strobeck had never filmed with Jones before, but by the end of that first day together, Jones would show the first glimpse of what, a decade later, made him the most famous and respected young skateboarder on the planet.
The two skated about a mile to Foley Square. A landmark in New York skateboarding, the area hosts Lorenzo Pace's Triumph of the Human Spirit, a sculpture set in a fountain adjacent to a downward marble ledge known as Black Hubba. Across the street is the New York State Supreme Courthouse. At one end of the building's grand stairway, beneath the towering columns, sits the infamous Courthouse Drop, a granite platform overlooking a short embankment that ends abruptly some six feet above the sidewalk. Strobeck had visited the Courthouse Drop countless times with pro skaters since he started filming them in the late 1990s, and never left with a single landed trick on tape. Undaunted, the 13-year-old Jones put down a nollie kickflip in fewer than 10 tries, making history and solidifying a bond that propelled them to the forefront of skateboarding.
"There's something about this kid I need the world to see," Strobeck recalls thinking. "That's why he's been a permanent figure in the stuff I've done. He was so brandnew when I met him, and there was a mutual thing: He knew if I documented him that people would see him, and I knew if I documented him, it was gonna be great. We would look back on this. It was the start of something."
After that defining trick, Strobeck pointed his camera at Jones, asking, "What do you want to say to the world? You're in a movie."
"Where's my check?" quipped Jones.
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In Haider We Hope
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