WORKOUT WITH BAM!
The real skating ethic lives on in the indestructible Bam Margera
By Dean Kuipers
The only real physical attribute that pro skater Bam Margera really needs is cast-iron balls, and there's no pleasant way you can train for that. Oh, in the course of making his juvenile MTV prankfest, Viva La Bam, and episodes of Jackass and three full-length CKY (Camp Kill Yourself) videos, he's broken his foot, pulled hamstrings, and earned scrapes and bruises from stunts like skiing discarded furniture through the streets towed behind a car. But really, the only serious injury he can recall was when he squarely racked his nuts on a 13-stair handrail, and couldn't walk right for about a week.
Fitness, then, just might not save Margera from himself.
"Some of my favorite skaters are just full-blown alcoholics who wake up to a beer and then they smoke loads of cigarettes and weed, and they skate so good!" admits Margera, laughing as he talks on the phone in his home state of Pennsylvania. "I guess all the drinkin' and smokin' has got to take a toll eventually, but some of those guys are still skating really well.
"I guess you don't really have to [train]," he adds, "but with me, I just do push-ups and sit-ups every once in a while, and occasionally I'll jog. But I haven't really done that lately."
That is, until he met the "loop" - a high-speed skate ramp that makes a full 360-degree upside-down curl. Not many make it and many are destroyed.
"I just did the loop on Tony Hawk's Boom Boom Huckjam," Margera says reverentially. "Right before the Super Bowl goes on, they're going to show me doing the loop in Phoenix, Arizona. For 10 days, I just did nothing but leg-ups and leg things. I just made sure my legs were strong and I didn't drink any alcohol for like two weeks!"
Hawk's Huckjam guys represent a different kind of skater. They eat right and train and stay off the sauce. Vert master Bob Burnquist, one of the stars of that show, is a full-on vegan. They're not as funny as Margera, but he learned a thing or two from them.
"The first time I tried [the loop] was in Orlando, and I pretty much got wrecked," he says. "I tried it at Bob Burnquist's house and I made it all the way around 20 times, and my legs were just giving out. I just could not ride away. A week ago, I finally did it."
Viva La Bam only discourages physical training, since the MTV lawyers have asked him to stay away from the hardcore physical stunts that made Jackass a magnet for lawsuits.
"I came up with a show about more dialogue and messing with my uncle and my dad and wrecking cars. But if you light yourself on fire and try to cook meat on ya, then that's a perfectly good lawsuit if a kid tries to do it," he chuckles.
Not that he has any less appetite for destruction. At a recent skate demo at the Mall of America in Minnesota, Margera dropped into a mini-ramp off a huge stack of TVs. The angle was bad and he ate it. The guards moved in immediately and shut it down. Then there's the unscripted, onscreen fistfights with his dad, Phil.
"I've got to get his adrenaline flowing. He always rants and raves about how when he was younger, all the fights he'd get into, but now he's just like a fat baker," Margera says. "He's getting more and more out of shape as the days go."
Now, Margera is relying more on outrageous behavior to get laughs, and he says the MTV safety man "sits in the corner and eats his Dunkin' Donuts." "In the new season," he says, "We take this trip to Europe, and I rented a Ferrari and drove from Zurich to Romania with Ryan Dunn and it rained the whole time, so I just put the top down and flew a kite out the back. We invited Don Vito, and we stayed one block away from the Eiffel Tower, and he's like, 'Why would I want to see that? It's just a run-down Texas oil well, it's stupid. I want to go to the Leaning Tower of Pizza.' He thinks it's Pizza, not Pisa. He thinks there's a pizza parlor at the bottom of it. Don Vito is the Stupid American."Published: 02/03/2005
DIGG | del.icio.us | REDDIT
