15 Things - Eric Dressen

10. Dressen not only skated their schoolyards, but was also a student at three legendary skate spots: Brentwood Elementary, Paul Revere Junior High and Palisades High.

11. It was happy days for Dressen, whose childhood neighbor was a stepson to Henry Winkler, TV’s Arthur Fonzerelli.
“The Fonz would come by on the weekends and one day he just asked me to teach him how to skate,” he says. “I grew up watching “Happy Days” from Day 1, so to skate with the Fonz was amazing. I loved that show, and I mean, c’mon, it’s The Fonz.”

12. Fair skinned Dressen was always sensitive to sunlight, spending most of his years outside, sun burnt, at demos and contests searching for a sliver of shade. But it wasn’t until a knee surgery at the age of 26 that he inexplicably became ultra light sensitive. Today he avoids sunlight; it gives him nausea and vertigo. His sense of smell was also heightened by the surgery and he breaks out in hives whenever he smells cheap perfume.

13. Dressen was kicked off Santa Cruz in ’93 for being a “constant complainer” He’s since made amends and Santa Cruz recently released its Veterans Division with Dressen and Tom Knox. When he heard his boards had arrived at the warehouse, he called to get a few, but was out of luck; the entire order was sold out within a day, leaving him to buy his own at a local shop.

14. Primarily known as a street and bowl skater, Dressen, while filming for Troops of Tomorrow in ’91, pulled a 540 ollie on vert. Somehow the filmer missed it, and the trick has only been seen by those in attendance that day.

15. Dressen invented the Salad grind in Vancouver, Canada in 1988 at Kevin Harris’s Skate Ranch with John Lucero and Jeff Grosso standing on deck. “We always sorta tweaked out backside 5-0s to slow us down, and I just liked the way it looked so I tried it frontside,” he says. “But it wasn’t until I took the trick back to San Francisco and skated with Tommy Guerrero and Kevin Thatcher that it became my namesake. Thatcher actually named it. I didn’t really care it was called a salad grind and not a Dressen grind, either way, It’s such and amazing thing as a pro skater to have a trick named after you.”