Eight months ago I sat down with Chet Childress to discuss his abrupt departure from Black Label Skateboards. Well, Chet is sponsorless no longer. Today, the UK's Heroin Skateboards announced that Chet is their newest pro and their second American acquisition in the past month, joining fellow Nike SB teammate, Daniel Shimizu. I caught up with Chet as he was boarding a plane, heading home to Portland, Ore., from a filming mission in Denver, Colo., to discuss his new board sponsor.
ESPN: How did this Heroin thing come about?
Chet: I don't know, it just did. Shimizu kind of said something to me. I didn't know what I was doing. I got offers to ride for some random stuff and then I talked to Fos (owner of Heroin) and it just seemed like a real cool thing -- and I dig Fos' art.
Did he call you or did you call him?
We called each other at the same time. It was weird -- we both missed each other's calls.
You were without a board sponsor for eight month -- were you ever at a point where you thought you weren't going to get another board sponsor?
No, because there was other random things going on. People always were asking so that was never in my mind. But if it did happen like that, so? I'm still going to skate, maybe I'll get a job serving lattes; I don't care. But this Heroin thing psyched me up.
What made you go with them instead of these other brands that were hitting you up?
I talked to Erik Ellington at Baker and Deathwish and just the association of Heroin, (distributed by Baker Bros.), with such a radical crew of people had a lot to do with it. A lot of the guys over there are my homies and I was psyched to be part of that crew of madness. Like The Nuge, Figgy, Lizard, all those guys are just radical. Obviously you want to be on a team with radical dudes and as long as there are no marks on the team that you're embarrassed of then that's all that maters. Then again, at this age, I don't really have any room to criticize anymore. I'll criticize something other than skateboarding.
Heroin is just starting to pop off here in The States. What's the plan moving forward for the brand?
The board should be out soon and I'm going to be filming a video part, which I'm psyched about doing again and again and again. The main thing about this is that I'm re-stoked. I spent a couple months not really bummed on skateboarding but not really that motivated. I was skating, I love skating but I didn't care about any of the other stuff and this got me fired up to do a couple more things before I disappear into this dumb world.
