Sean Mortimer on how to help people tell their stories

By

A man in a hooded sweatshirt, embodying the essence of unboxed, looks slightly to the side with a neutral expression. Sean Mortimer elegantly captures this moment, overlaying it with a gradient of green and brown hues that subtly invite viewers to delve deeper and help people tell their stories.

season 6

Episode 6

Sean Mortimer on how to help people tell their stories

By

Alec talks to Sean Mortimer, co-author of autobiographies by Tony Hawk, Rodney Mullen, and Joe Namath, about how to help people figure out how to tell the stories of their achievements—whether they’re pro skaters or educators.
Alec talks to Sean Mortimer, co-author of autobiographies by Tony Hawk, Rodney Mullen, and Joe Namath, about how to help people figure out how to tell the stories of their achievements—whether they’re pro skaters or educators.

listen to us on any platform

TITLE

Sean Mortimer on how to help people tell their stories

by

Media

published

November 20, 2024

tags

share this

Podcast Notes

Episode Transcript

Sean Mortimer:
He literally was like, “You want to write a book?” And I was like, “I don’t know how, but yeah, sure. Let’s do it.”

Alec Patton:
This is High Tech High Unboxed. I’m Alec Patton, and that was the voice of author and skater Sean Mortimer. Sean co-authored Tony Hawk’s first autobiography, Hawk: Occupation: Skateboarder, Rodney Mullen’s autobiography, The Mutt: How to Skateboard and Not Kill Yourself, and Joe Namath’s autobiography, All the Way: My Life in Four Quarters. Sean’s co-written, ghost-written, and just plain written other books too, but those are the three we’ll be talking about today.
I met Sean at a skate park. When we met, I’d already read Tony Hawk’s autobiography and really enjoyed it. And as the editor of Unboxed, I spend a lot of time helping people tell the stories of the cool stuff they’ve done. The people I talk to are educators rather than pro skaters, but I had a suspicion that the underlying principles were the same so I asked Sean if I could interview him about how he does what he does. I found this conversation really interesting and also just a lot of fun, and I’m excited to share it with you. Let’s get into it.
What we’re talking about here is how you help somebody who has a story to tell, but not necessarily the skill set to tell that story and write it themselves, how you help them tell that story.

Sean Mortimer:
Yeah, I mean, I would probably answer that at first by thinking most people I know think they don’t have the skill set, but they do. I think most people think writing, maybe because of school or certain ways they were taught, is a binary or black and white thing. They have it or they don’t. And when you think of it as just, hey, if you can talk and articulate and explain that, you can write. You may have to have a different way of going about it. Maybe you record yourself and do it, maybe you work with an editor or whatever.
But I have found a lot of people, they almost shut something off in their brain when they go to the act of writing, especially specifically if they’re trying to do an autobiography or whatever, instead of just going like, oh, if I just think of this as a conversation, then they can do that. Because I mean, honestly, for the books I do, a lot of it is just a straight conversation. You record it and then you figure out ways to edit it and move it around. You always want to maintain their voice. That’s the big thing about doing that.

Alec Patton:
Yeah, I was wondering about that because, and I mean this as a compliment, the books that you’ve co-written that I’ve read don’t feel like writing. They feel like talking. They feel like you’re chatting to somebody. They have-

Sean Mortimer:
And that was the goal, it was conversational. We want it to be, especially when it’s a book about your life, I was hoping you’d open the book and it would feel like after a while, at least in some part of your brain, you’re just sitting having coffee, talking like you do with your friends, especially those books.
Because for Tony’s book, it was difficult. That was the first of its kind. That was, I think we started in ’99 and nobody knew honestly, are skaters going to buy books? What demographic are you going for? Do you write to little kids? Do you write to adults? So we really had to experiment and find, and we did a couple different drafts where, ooh, maybe this is coming off a little too harsh, or maybe this is coming off too kind of stale and academic. And then we settled on, Tony’s very, if you’ve heard him talk, he’s got a gift for being really articulate and relatable. So that was easy. But that was definitely part of what you’re doing is you’re trying to go, okay, the people that read this, what’s going to be the most enjoyable way to get the information to them?

Alec Patton:
So when did you start writing?

Sean Mortimer:
I guess I could always write. My report cards were strong in that. I was a pretty bad student at the beginning. I was a really late talker. I didn’t talk till three and then I was super slow reading, crazy slow, reading kindergarten books in grade three. And then back then, I grew up in Vancouver, Canada, and it was a little more relaxed, so they were like, hey, he’s smart enough in this other stuff, he’ll catch up. And I did.
But after that, my report cards would always come back just specifically talking about, oh, when he has to write, he can write. So I never even realized it was anything. I didn’t go to college or anything, but I moved to San Diego and then got into skateboarding, and then I just as a way to make money, it wasn’t a lot of money, I was like, oh, I’ll just start writing for the skateboard magazines. And that was honestly a pretty low bar at that point because they were like, “You want to write something for us? Sure, here’s 200 bucks.”

Alec Patton:
So when I came in here, you were reading a Don DeLillo book. So in some way reading clicked in for you. Do you remember a point where you were like, oh, this isn’t hard anymore?

Sean Mortimer:
I remember more specifically the points of, for me, the student volunteer would come in and you’d go out and you’d try to read, and I couldn’t read, you know, back then they had one way of teaching, and I was never diagnosed with anything, but I can’t, I still mispronounce words all the time. I can’t phonetically spell something out. It’s like a total nightmare, just jumbled, but on sight.
So eventually I think I taught myself, I used to memorize the pages they were reading me, and then they found out I was memorizing them just from what they were saying when they were speaking. So I remember that more than when it clicked. There wasn’t really a clicking. There was more of a, oh, I’m definitely the slowest in the class. This isn’t cool. And then I never thought of it as reading, but I just loved reading once I could.

Alec Patton:
When did you start skating?

Sean Mortimer:
I saw Back to the Future, ’84, I think I was 14. Back then, a lot of people didn’t start sooner because also skating wasn’t, you weren’t exposed to it. So there was nothing on TV. Nobody I knew skated, and I’m in Vancouver, Canada, so it’s even at that point way behind any sort of trend that was in California.
And I just walked into there, saw the movie, and came out just like my brain was just cooked. And then I had to go find a skateboard shop. Luckily, there was one skateboard store in Vancouver at the time, Petey’s Hot Shop, and I went there and I was just this total nerd suburban kid and super scared. And you go in and you’re trying to learn things. And that was a big shift at that point where you sort of have to cross these thresholds just to enter that subculture. And it’s super welcoming, but for me on the outside looking in, it was pretty intimidating.

Alec Patton:
Was there a point where you’re like, oh, no, I’m not on the outside anymore?

Sean Mortimer:
Yeah, there was no sort of consciousness. I think there was a consciousness of you kind of turn around and go, whoa, everything that I was into is so far back there. I can barely see it anymore. It wasn’t like, I don’t care what people think. It was just like no brain cells are being activated to think about fitting in or the stuff I used to because I’m just so into this sort of misfit passion at the time that I found.
And then there was one other kid at my school who skated, and his brother actually happened to be Kevin Harris, who was a pro for Powell-Peralta. He’s like 10 years older than me. So I mean, socially it was probably people would look like, what is going on? How do you have a guy who’s 14, 15, his best friend’s in his mid 20s and he is married? But skating was such a bond and nobody else did it. We would just skate every night.

Alec Patton:
Yeah. How’d you end up in San Diego?

Sean Mortimer:
So I rode, eventually got on Powell-Peralta, and then I met Tony Hawk coming down here to do Powell stuff. I was still in school. And then we just hit it off one time and he was like, “Oh, when you graduate, come out.” And I took him up on his word for it and showed up. And that was 1989.

Alec Patton:
So you came to San Diego, 1989, you’re skating for Powell-Peralta. When did you start taking the magazine gigs?

Sean Mortimer:
Skating used to always go through these cycles where it would peak in the 70s, and then it would sort of age out. It was a very teenage fad-ish thing. So then it would drop down the industry, all these companies would go out of business. And then in the 80s it peaked up when I was there and I moved in with Tony. And then a couple years later in the early 90s, it lost popularity again, to the point where most of the companies went out of business, the big ones, or at least had bankruptcy.
I was living with Tony, and all of the guys on Powell went from making over $100,000 a year to sometimes like a thousand dollars a month. So it got really tight. And so I was like, oh, what can I do? So I didn’t need that much money, but I was like, I’ll start writing as sort of a side gig, because by then I’d been in Transworld and I knew Grant Brittain and the people who ran that, and they were just like, “Cool.” No one really wanted to do it at the time.
And then that led to, because I knew that culture you could reach out to, eventually, once you’re published, you can use that to open other doors and then go to the LA Times and pitch them a story. And they go, “Oh, I see what you’ve written. You were published,” whatever. “I like your style.” And then if it’s really specific on something that they don’t have somebody in-house to do, they might go, “Okay.”
So you’d get a little piece, like 300 words or something on how skaters at the time wore plain white shirts and blue jeans. But if you show up, if you write it and you meet a deadline, you have a connection now with a bigger publication, and then you just, at least for me, I tried to work that out. So, “Hey, do you know anyone who’d be interested in this?” And then they’ll send you to a magazine.

Alec Patton:
So you kind of weather this, you weather the dip. When did the two of you start talking about the book as a concept?

Sean Mortimer:
Well, what happened was skating picked up again, and Tony was still the world champion. So through two generations he was. And at that time it started to get a little more, there were, you know, snowboarding, all these quote-unquote extreme sports. So when I started, there was no such thing as extreme sports. There was no alternative sports. You were just a loser who skated on a toy essentially.
And then it turned into, you have a lot of the energy drinks coming in, you get this sort of different level of support. You never got it from Coke and Pepsi, but when you think of Monster and Red Bull, they’re like, we want to be the anti, so we’re going to go almost like the anti sport. So they really pumped a lot of money and a lot of events and framework into that. And that helped get noticed by, at this point, ESPN was like, we can clump these together and sort of make an extreme Olympics.
And so that started happening. And then Tony, because of who he was, and he’s articulate and was a good interview, a lot of the focus was put on him. And he got an agent at William Morris. And when you get an agent, they were like, “How about a video game? How about a book?” Because they have a literary department in there. So they went to him and he literally was like, “You want to write a book?” And I was like, “I don’t know how, but yeah, sure, let’s do it.”
We worked on a pitch deck. So when you sell a book, a lot of times, most of the time you have to create a pitch deck, which is a lot of work. They’re usually 40 pages-ish. You’ve got to have a couple samples of a chapter, you’ve got to have who it’s going to sell to, all of this. And you present that to publishers and they either say yay or nay. And I think the agent sent it to 20 and 19 were like, nah, not for us. And then one took it and it did pretty well. So [inaudible 00:11:21].

Alec Patton:
You have an unusually large amount of knowledge about the story you’re telling because you were there for a lot of it, but you’re kind of going, okay, so we’re writing this thing, we’re co-authors but it’s going to be your voice. I’m not writing a biography. This is clearly an autobiography. How did you get started? What was step one?

Sean Mortimer:
Well, the pitch deck, actually, I don’t even know if it was in his voice. A lot of times, almost every book I’ve done, the pitch deck just gets, it opens the door and then you just throw it out. So even though you have sample chapters or whatever, usually they help people go, this works, this doesn’t, how about this, blah, blah, blah, or let’s change the structure.
So I don’t think Tony’s initially was in his voice,. I could be wrong. And then we had a junior editor who picked it up just because her boyfriend skated, so she sort of knew skating, and she just said, hey, we had these discussions. And she said, “How about this voice?” And like I said before, we did a couple different drafts of what tone we were searching for. Do we want to be really edgy and hard? And then we wrote 10 pages and went, nah, that just doesn’t work.

Alec Patton:
What was that going to look like?

Sean Mortimer:
I mean, really when you’re doing a biography, people who read the biography probably go, oh, this is someone’s life. But when you write it, you’ve kind of got to have a theme. And that theme sort of decides you, it’s kind of like, it’s almost like you’re digging a little stream or a creek through someone’s life. You’re not getting everything. You just want this thing to navigate and keep the flow going. So there’s certain things you’d be like, we don’t need to highlight this because thematically it is not carrying the narrative through.
And then if, for Tony, the skateboard story, it’s kind of like the Cinderella story. It’s this nerdy, skinny kid who finds his passion, he becomes the best in the world, and it means nothing outside of that world. So he goes to school, he’s still getting bullied, he swaps schools, teachers make fun of him, even though the guy’s making more. There’s a famous story we always tell about his career teacher made fun of him in class and basically used him as an example of, he was 17, and used him as an example of you’re never going to be successful because you can’t follow instructions and blah, blah, blah. And Tony already had his own house at that time.
And Tony didn’t flex and go like, “Dude, what are you talking about? I make six figures. Whatever, I’m 17.” But that was the world he was in. So for that, it is very easy to go, oh, this is something everyone can relate to. Everyone looks at him now and goes, oh, you’re Tony Hawk, you’re a superstar. And you kind of think, you’re just so talented and you didn’t have to struggle. So we picked what would help show what he learned through those struggles to get where he was.

Alec Patton:
It seems like you needed to get a kind of wide almost map in order to figure out what path to go.

Sean Mortimer:
And also for me, I always interview people. Tony’s super articulate. He’s been one of my best friends for 35 years. So I knew three quarters of the book because I was actually with him during a lot of it. So at the beginning I would just interview his mom and then his sisters, and then just real casual. And then when you see something interesting, you go, oh, kind of like a dog with a bone. You go, “Tell me about this.”
His mom had a super interesting story. His mom was an amazing person, super smart, got her doctorate in her sixties, was a teacher, super funny, super accepting of everybody. And she tells me this story that I’d never heard before about Tony having problems in school. And they’re basically, he’s hyperactive. He’s like, “Nowadays, they probably just would’ve given me drugs.” But his mom was like, “No, no, I don’t agree with you. He is not disruptive. He’s not that. Let’s have an IQ test.” And he had 144 IQ. So he was bored. He wasn’t the opposite, like they were trying to pigeonhole him into.
So you find a story like that and you go, oh, and then you ask Tony about it. But Tony on his own probably wouldn’t have mentioned that. I mean, the worst way you can interview somebody is say, “Tell me about your life.” You’ve really got to figure out a way to get a conversation going instead of just putting all the work in their lap. I mean, some people, they’re not going to shut up. You go, “Tell me.” And you’re like, “Okay, okay, I get it. I get it, I get it.” But most people I’ve talked to want to have a certain amount of details that you can kind of keep going in. Oh, how about this? Because it’s really hard to reflect back on your own life and go, this is what’s interesting, this is what’s not.

Alec Patton:
And were you recording everything or were you taking notes?

Sean Mortimer:
No, I recorded that. And I knew Tony’s voice and I knew enough to fill in all the background, all of that, if I had something. And then Tony and I would review stuff and he’d go, “Okay, maybe I wouldn’t use this word or that.” Or, “I said this, but it sounds totally different when it’s on the page.”

Alec Patton:
How many people did you interview?

Sean Mortimer:
What I would do is when I interviewed other people, I would ask Tony about that. So it wasn’t necessarily me putting their words in the book. And if there was something where he didn’t really remember it, but he’s like, “Oh, my sister Lenore would remember this,” there is a way you could put that in still in his book because it’s him telling you the story. So he could just say, “Hey, Lenore told me that I did this and this and this when I was this old, this specific thing.” But basically I would talk to them to get stories to ask him about.

Alec Patton:
So you’re almost looking for triggers to remind him about things.

Sean Mortimer:
Yeah, yeah. And then you might say, even when someone’s telling you the story, you might say, “Oh, so-and-so remembers you being really depressed at this point when this happened.” Or I would talk to Stacy, for example. There’s another part where Tony was, I mean, this shows skating versus traditional sports. Tony was winning so many contests. Somebody came up to him, another pro at a contest, and said, “Oh, I’m just trying to go for second.”
And I think he obviously meant it as a compliment, but Tony, it really affected him because he was like, “I want to be here with, I’m part of this culture. I mean, yeah, we skate, but then we all go back and once this contest is over, we’re laughing and trying to learn tricks together, and I don’t want to be ejected from that culture because I’m winning all the time.” So Stacy would tell me something that reflected on that because at that time, Stacy was his Powell-Peralta, sort of his mentor, and they had that connection. So you’d keep triggering Tony on that, like okay, what did that specifically feel? What were the details when that happened?

Alec Patton:
Were you making an outline? Were you making a map? Were you putting something on the wall? How were you charting?

Sean Mortimer:
I have, but not for Tony’s book because I think I was there for so much, and it was very straightforward. I mean, one part about writing someone’s biography is, unless like for Joe’s, we had a different structure, but for Tony’s, it’s kind of A to Z.
So you’ve got to be original within that framework, and that was, okay, even consistently when he’s reaching these goals, it’s not the end of the story because there’s a certain amount of struggle that he either finds and he’s pioneering what skating can be. And as he’s pioneering it, he’s creating all these obstacles that he’s got to get over because he’s the first person to be there. Sometimes they’re within the culture, sometimes they’re outside the culture.

Alec Patton:
And as you say, the book is one specific stream through somebody’s life, and it’s not going to include everything. When you’re looking at this stuff, it seems to me there’s three categories of story. You have interesting, boring, and interesting, but not for this book.

Sean Mortimer:
I would think more thematically, it’s almost like a magnet. If you understand the theme, then everything you’re hearing, you’re either like, okay, it’s sticking to the magnet or it’s not. And it doesn’t mean it’s boring or not relevant even to his life, but you’re like, if I’ve got to take the reader through this, there’s got to be a narrative pull that is true to his character. Because sometimes you have these crazy stories and you’re like, that’s a crazy story, it just doesn’t say anything about him. It doesn’t reveal anything. It doesn’t, we just can’t put it in there. You know what I mean?

Alec Patton:
Yeah. Do you have it in your head a sentence of this was the theme of the Tony Hawk book?

Sean Mortimer:
I don’t think I had it for Tony’s, probably because it was my first one, but honestly, I had lived with him and been friends with him for so long, and we really had the same sense of humor, had the same sense of navigating life that I think that it was, luckily it was just intuitive. It was like, here’s what’s interesting to us without knowing what that theme was, because we definitely knew we didn’t want it to be, I mean, the thing we were afraid of is a lot of autobiographies are just, I did this and it was great, and I threw this and I won this game. Like, let’s check out how great I am. And if anything, that guided us because we really wanted it to be relatable and not like that. It wasn’t chest beating at all, hopefully.

Alec Patton:
And then Rodney Mullen, did you have a theme in mind for that?

Sean Mortimer:
Rodney’s was really based on abuse because that was when you really, there’s Rodney, what he accomplished on a skateboard, which was similar to Tony, mind-blowing. They were the two, I would argue probably the two most progressive skaters in history for how they invented and sort of the isolation of that innovation. But then Rodney had a dad who was very anti-skateboarding, as anti-skateboarding as almost you could get. So Rodney, just a lot of his life was figuring out how to keep skateboarding.
So just naturally when you’re talking about, okay, what’s it like when you’re this old and when you’re this old and this old, it’s really just, okay, this is when this got taken away, and this is when I literally couldn’t skateboard and I developed an eating disorder, and this is when the teachers were calling my parents, saying, “Something’s wrong. He’s not talking.” And all of this is tied to skateboarding.
So you definitely, when the next book came up, it wasn’t like, okay, Tony’s book was a success, let’s copy it. It was like, oh, who’s almost got got a super divergent story from that? And so I knew Rodney and I was like, “Do you want to write a book?” And we didn’t really discuss it. We were just like, nothing’s off limits. And we talked about it, and he was very open about that stuff.

Alec Patton:
Yeah. How was your process with that similar, and what was different about it from the first book?

Sean Mortimer:
It’s just much more intense and emotional with Rodney, because you’re talking about these, I don’t care how old you are, when you’ve had trauma in your life, especially repeatedly, and you’ve got to rehash it detail by detail, it was like, we would just leave these interviews like we’re just totally fried. I would actually have to sleep most of the day the next day. I mean, also, Rodney keeps the craziest hours. So his day starts, you’re like, all right, come by at 10 at night, and then you’re talking till three or four, which are not my hours.

Alec Patton:
Did you do the same thing where you interviewed other people?

Sean Mortimer:
Yeah, so I talked to Steve Rocco, who had a close relationship with him, Tony, and by then I’d kind of learned, okay, here’s how you do a book, this type of book. So it was a lot easier to know who might have a type of information about him or types of stories, and then, so I could talk to them in more of a shorthand basis.
When you explain to people what you’re looking for, like, I don’t want a crazy story, do you have anything that shows his determination? Or do you have anything that shows there? And maybe you bring up this contest or something you know about, then they’ll go, “Oh.” It jogs their memory. And then they bring up a very specific thing. And sometimes the really small specific things are the best.
And really that lets you, a reader feel like they’re going more into their world instead of like, okay, Tony doing the 900, for example. It’s like everyone saw it on TV. Yeah, we can talk about what was going on inside his head. And that’s interesting, but when you talk about Rodney, when you’re talking about the abuse and you have a detail that nobody would’ve known except if you lived in his house about how he used to hide things around the house in case his dad attacked him, that I think really opens up. You really think like, oh, Rodney’s telling me something very, very intimate in a way.

Alec Patton:
Yeah. So you do these interviews, it sounds like pretty long interviews a lot of the time.

Sean Mortimer:
There’s multiple. You’re doing, I don’t know, 40, 50 hours. I mean, whatever your deadline is, Tony’s book deadline was crazy short. It’s usually a year for most books I do. But Tony’s was four or five months just to get the first draft in.

Alec Patton:
So you’re doing all these interviews and then you’re taking these things and you write, so you write a draft. Are you going through chapter by chapter or vignette by vignette?

Sean Mortimer:
No, I’m writing a chapter, on those two, chapter by chapter.

Alec Patton:
So then you share a chapter with your subject, your co-author?

Sean Mortimer:
Yeah.

Alec Patton:
So they read it and give you feedback?

Sean Mortimer:
No, that opens up more conversations. There’s just the line editing, like okay, let’s change this for that. And then there’s like, you know what, everyone I’m doing a book with is really invested in doing it. So they’re looking at it going, “You know what? I got a better example now about this.” Or, “You know what? This kind of is like, blah, let’s try to find something else that talks.”
And sometimes it doesn’t have to be exactly their life. They can write about something that impacted them, that happened to somebody else. So sometimes that might be like, oh, let’s bring in this because I saw this happen to this person. I witnessed this, and that really impacted me.

Alec Patton:
Do they write stuff as well, or are they mostly editing the stuff?

Sean Mortimer:
No, no one I’ve been with has written. I mean, they definitely edit it. I have Rodney’s pages. There’s writing all over them. Rodney was really, really into the just precise, I mean, that’s just how his mind works. It’s like an engineering mind.

Alec Patton:
But they’re not going like, “Hey, I read that chapter and actually it reminded me of this other thing. So here’s 25 things.”

Sean Mortimer:
He might go, “Let’s talk about this.” And you just figure out how to put in three graphs of whatever that story was or something. But it’s not like, okay, let’s take apart this chapter. Let’s do this, or let’s do that. You’re kind of, at that point, you’ve maybe initially when you’re going, does this work, does that work? And then you just get in the flow and you’re like, okay, here’s sort of the flow we have for it. We can move things within that flow, but it’s got to keep going in that same tone.

Alec Patton:
So how did the Joe Namath book come about?

Sean Mortimer:
An editor I knew brought me in to ghost a political book, somebody who was running for office or whatever. And so I was doing that. And then he was also doing the Joe Namath book, and they were having some trouble with the Joe Namath book. And then they said, “Hey, would you think about meeting Joe and writing this?” And I was like, I know nothing about football. I mean, I don’t know how you even, I don’t know, touchdown score. I don’t know anything. I literally know nothing. He’s like, “Come on, just go to Florida and meet him.”
So I walked in the house. I knew who he was because he’s kind of an icon like Muhammad Ali, beyond the sport. And so I walked in and shook his hand, and the introduction from the editor was like, “This is Sean. He skateboards. He knows nothing about football.” And he was like, “There’s more to life than football.” And he is just the sweetest, nicest guy. So we talked for that weekend, and then I flew back and we were like, okay, let’s do this.
So then I would fly out to Florida and same sort of thing, interview him, and we’d figure out what, for Joe, it was really much about being the underdog, because he is responsible for one of the biggest upsets in professional sports. They were beyond the underdog, I think. Nobody had them winning. They had them getting crushed. And he famously kind of jokingly, but said, oh, he made some sort of promise or oath or whatever before, like we’re going to beat them. And people are like, what is this guy talking about? And then they did beat them.
And so that book, the theme was how do you operate as an underdog all the time? So that was really interesting to me because the format for that book was, let’s watch the 1969 Super Bowl and have him as if you were watching it with him, and then you could bring parts of his life in, instead of going A to Z for his life. So we would watch the game and talk about stuff and then come back and touch on it. And then he would go, “Okay, I want to talk about this part,” this part of the culture at that time or this part on there. But everything was how do you use being an underdog to your advantage?

Alec Patton:
So is it not chronological?

Sean Mortimer:
No, it’s got his life story in it, but it’s not A to Z. So it’s not like I started off doing this and then I threw my first, but we have the story in here about how he and his brothers would make their own baseballs because they didn’t have money or what it was like being on his high school team, all of these, they’re in there, but we had to find ways to connect them to the football game. So there would be something that would happen in the game or first down, or somebody gets injured and then he would talk about an injury.

Alec Patton:
That seems harder.

Sean Mortimer:
It’s harder. That structure came from Phil, the editor, and he’s amazing on structure, and he’s just like, “This will make a more interesting book.” And really this is what defines Joe for the audience. So the fact that you could watch sort of the highlight game of a lot of their lives, if you were a New York Jets fan, I don’t think they’ve won since then. But again, I don’t know anything about football. So to be able to just go, oh, I can relive this experience with him, I think was a pretty rad call to have as the gravitational pull of the book.

Alec Patton:
And that brings me to something I was really curious about, is how you choose the opening. So Tony Hawk starts with the 900, which is, it would be a striking choice to make it anything else, because that’s so-

Sean Mortimer:
Yeah, and honestly, at that time, he wasn’t that popular. The 900 really put him on the map, and then the game came out. All of these things sort of happened within a year. So now it seems obvious because the 900 is so celebrated. But we were kind of like, oh, that’s the first thing that actually got you on SportsCenter, which used to be this sports show. We were all sitting there in San Francisco going, holy crap, they talked about skateboarding on the same program they talked about the Chicago Bulls. It was crazy to think about that. So we were just like, okay, that’s something that more eyeballs had seen at that point, so let’s use that one.
But it also, more importantly, he fails like nine times. So if we’re like, okay, if we’re talking about his determination, if we’re talking about perseverance, that’s a perfect example that people think they know, and then we can really go into his head and give them a perspective hopefully they can’t imagine, and that will bring them closer to Tony. But if it was just a 900 and there was nothing, if he just dropped in and did it, we wouldn’t have used that. It wouldn’t have had the theme involved in it.

Alec Patton:
It’s one of my favorite TV clips I think I’ve ever seen, because it’s just, you know, when the camera catches his eyes, it’s like he doesn’t seem like-

Sean Mortimer:
No, his eyes are pointing inside his skull.

Alec Patton:
Yeah, exactly.

Sean Mortimer:
And it was crazy. I was there watching it, and also I’d been there, I’d filmed Tony at Plan B when he came the closest and broke his rib before that. So for almost 10 years, it had been this thing that’d been chasing. And he always says, he goes, “I did the 720.” I think he did it in Sweden. And he’s like, “There’s four other skaters there.” All of his other tricks that he pursued and got beat up and actually was the first to do within the skate culture, it’s like Mike’s 540.

Alec Patton:
Quick explanation. A 540 is a trick in which you go up in the air over a bowl or a ramp and spin 540 degrees with your skateboard. That is one and a half times. Mike McGill invented the 540, which is more commonly known as the McTwist, at a skate camp in Sweden in 1984, the same camp where Tony Hawk would later land his first 720. And to make sure we’re totally clear, a 900 means spinning 900 degrees. That is two and a half times. Back to Sean.

Sean Mortimer:
If Mike had done that at the X Games, it would be that same, you know, at that point, I mean, it’s mind-blowing, but we’re so used to doing skating, going, okay, yeah, you clap and you’re like, it’s cool. And then you leave the parking lot at Del Mar, at the skate park, and nobody cares at all. So that’s what was really surprising, I think, to Tony. Like, isn’t this what we do? Yeah, this is something we’ve chased for a long time, but this is what we all do.

Alec Patton:
Which brings us to Del Mar and the beginning of the Rodney Mellon book, which is the competition that he thinks is going to be his last when he’s 16.

Sean Mortimer:
And again, that was, you’re like, okay, what theme is baked into this? And that’s the abuse. And when you have something that feels like your life preserver and somebody’s constantly taking it away, how do you cope with that?

Alec Patton:
Yeah. And then, out of the three, the odd one out is Joe Namath’s starts with picking up a book about the Boston Strangler.

Sean Mortimer:
Yeah. He was really, about being scared by it. Yeah, I mean, he had some really good, strong feelings about the book. That really impacted him. And I think he wanted it to be that fear and what you do with that fear. Because a lot of his, he’s really, really good at, fear is probably going to sound wrong to people, but I remember him telling me about how he would watch, before you go to a football game back then, part of the deal was each team had to send the film reels of their last game to the team they were going to play and you could study them. So you literally had to wait for a film run.
At that time in his apartment, he had a film projector, and he’s like, “I would just watch it and watch it and watch it until that feeling went away.” And he was like, “I couldn’t really articulate what the feeling was. It just was like this, oh, I’ve still got to figure something out. I’ve still got.” It wasn’t fear, but maybe it was in a certain way of … So a lot of his motivation, and that’s why that played into that opening, the Boston Strangler intro.

Alec Patton:
Your chapter titles are really evocative. How do you come up with chapter titles? How’s that work?

Sean Mortimer:
I just try to get something that’ll hook people. And within our culture, I think skaters are pretty creative, so they always have, so much of our culture is defined by how we speak and lingo and alliteration. So I think that’s what was just a natural, even on this book I have coming out, it’ll be like a year from now, it’s the same thing.
And then once your editor starts hearing a couple of these, then they’ll be like, “You can come up with a better title here. Come on, this one’s boring.” But when you set that tone of here, it’s got to be this sort of, hopefully a title that has a little bit of humor in it, but also makes you think, like what, you get it, but then you’re also like, where’s this going?

Alec Patton:
So if you got right now a book deal that you decided to take or somebody who wanted [inaudible 00:35:15] thing for somebody, to ghost write for someone who you’d never met, what would be your first steps?

Sean Mortimer:
I would definitely investigate and wait for a theme to come out. I’m not a big thinking person. I don’t trust thinking, I trust doing a lot of work, and there’s sort of this level at an unconscious, definitely out of sight and stuff just bubbles up after a while. But when I’ve gone into things and been like, “I know this. I got this,” it never works out. If you are really invested in something, there’s just a part of your brain that’s always working on it.
So I would read about this person. I mean, for that, it depends. If there’s an editor, they might have already a direction they want, and maybe it works with you and maybe you’re like, “Nah, it’s not going to work. You need someone else.” But if it was just like, “Here you go. Do what you want to do with this, totally free,” that’s what I would do is just read up and then all of a sudden you go, oh, this is what’s kind of defining what this person is. Because I think people, when you know them, there’s an unconscious sort of theme to how they approach life.

Alec Patton:
Yeah, I think that’s a great spot to leave it. Thank you so much.

Sean Mortimer:
No problem. Thank you.

Alec Patton:
High Tech High Unboxed is hosted and edited by me, Alec Patton. Our theme music is by Brother Herschel. Huge thanks to Sean Mortimer for this conversation. We’ve got links to the books we talked about in the show notes. Thanks for listening.

 

Skip to content