Following Rodney Mullen‘s new skate part on the Ride Channel recently (below), Almost brand manager Luis Cruz was interviewed this week at Boardsource and mentioned that Mullen “went through a really rough time the past few years” with a leg injury. He went on to say:
“I remember having coffee with him over five years ago and he was saying that doctors told him that he’d never skate again and have difficulty walking. His leg injury was that severe. He went through a long and painful process to heal himself—that’s why he didn’t have a part on 5-Incher. Fast-forward to now, he’s skating again, legs are stronger and looks like he just started putting out footage again. Rodney is back! He and Daewon are the founders of Almost and are a big part of what we do and why we do it and how we do it.”
This has been an ongoing injury explained in Huck interview back in 2010 which makes for painful reading:
“Some scar tissue wrapped around my femur and pelvis and clasped together, pulling my femur into the hip socket. It was calcifying and was going to be the end of me walking normally. I don’t want to be that guy that milks it so I was planning to disappear. Doctors told me they couldn’t give me surgery and the only way to fix it was to break it, and that’s a very violent process. The bones had already started to fuse together so I had to physically put enough pressure on myself to break my own bone. I did that for an enormous number of hours. I stuck my leg in the wheel well of a car and grabbed the bottom of the frame and tweaked and tore as much as I could. My wife couldn’t be around me. After two and a half years, I broke the scar tissue and some of the bone. When I did break it, it scared me to death. I heard it break and after the nausea and the adrenaline, I was lying on my garage floor at three in the morning screaming with my face covered in snot and tears. I just thought, ‘I can skate!’”