SDK History Pt. 2
Today is part two in this weekly series about the history of SDK, last week I talked about some of the very early days before we even had the name Stompdown Killaz. Today I would like to go back a little bit further and explain how we all met. I know I’ve talked about this in the past but I’m sure some people have never heard the story or might have forgot. So here we go!
I graduated high school in 1997 and immediately began working at a warehouse loading trucks. It wasn’t a terrible job but I knew there was something else for me out there. I stuck it out for six years but in 2003 I just couldn’t work full-time anymore and made the decision to only work part time. I suddenly found myself with a lot of free time to wander and that’s exactly what happened. There wasn’t very much money coming in so I had to sell my vehicle and walk everywhere I went.
I was broke and in debt but other than that life was fairly stress-free, it was strange to have so much free time alone. Sick of walking everywhere, I managed to get a BMX bike and it felt like the greatest thing in the world after being on foot for so long. I lived in the country and there were no buses so there was some really long days before the bike. Now I could really go places!
One day I was riding my bike through a place near where I live called Brookswood and I found a skate park. BMX was a big part of my youth, but when I was growing up there were no skate parks where I lived so this was something exciting and new. It was a busy day at the skate park and the weather was starting to get a little bit warmer so everyone was out skating and riding. At first I was nervous to ride in the park with a bunch of strangers, so I peddled slowly around the edge of the park and that’s when a couple of the older guys recognized me from when I sold weed for a short time in the area.
The first two people to approach me were named “Milk Money” and “Dirty Joe”. And they were some greasy shady fucks! But they offered me a Pilsner beer and asked me to come over to the grass hill where a large group of people were drinking beer and smoking weed. This hill had a name “Pil Hill” because Pilsner was the only type of beer they drank. They all began introducing themselves, with fascinating names like Doug Drealer, Keep6, Craver, Brown Josh, Hash Brown, Rad Chad, Nick The Red Headed Stepchild, Fat Head, Surgen, Rad Dad, Palm Trees. There was probably about 40 of them.
It was during this first meeting that It became clear, I had found my people! This is what I had been searching for all along, a group of guys and girls just like me. People that didn’t really fit in anywhere else so we all gravitated to the skate park for various reasons. I was home! Summer was just around the corner and for the next several months we would show up to the park every single day. We had no idea at the time, but this was the group of people that would be known as the Stompdown Killaz just two years later!
These were some wild times in the beginning and it is what made us such close friends, like Keep6 would later say “I’m surprised we even made it out of that”. But that was the fun of it all, we were lawless vagrants, willfully homeless, days turned into night so fast there was times when all I did was sleep on a couch or at the park, I hardly ever went home. Fist fights, being hassled by the police, angry civilians that blamed us for all the crime in the area. It was beautiful and terrible at the same time. We did some petty crime but it was mostly just to get food or beer, we would steal loaves of bread and pepperoni sticks from the local store and make super dry nasty hotdogs. We always felt terrible because we abused our bodies so much, but looking back now it was the greatest time of my life!
As I write these stories I’m starting to realize that this is not going to be a few weeks, this is probably going to take a few years each Thursday to write the story from the beginning struggles to where we are now, globally successful. Please join me next week for part three! SDK!
-Q