It’s Nice To Have An Ender — An Interview With Tyler Surrey

🔑 Interview by Adam Abada
📷 Photos by Leandro Terrile & Tyler

While we have been fans of Sk8mafia since forever — as evidenced by a decade-plus of Quote of the Week installments — QS is likely not the first news source you would go to for an interview with one of San Diego’s brightest sons. But we have been Tyler Surrey fans for a long time, admiring the dude’s ability to drop video parts that feel wholly complete and thought-through, without a moment ever feeling it’s its veering into a footage dump.

Tyler’s Indy part from late last year was a QS office favorite, so we got him on the line to discuss life as a working skateboarder, evolving your eye with age, and what’s good with living in Barcelona circa 2024, er …2025.

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You’ve been in Barcelona for about 8 years now, how often do you get back to San Diego?

Eight years, yeah. It goes by fast. I’m back probably once a year on average. I try to kill a lot of birds with one stone when I come here. Skate with the Sk8mafia guys, try and film with them, see the New Balance guys in Long Beach, and also see my family.

You need a residency visa to live in Spain, yeah?

I’m on my second five-year, long-term residency visa. After that, I think I can apply for citizenship, take the test and all that stuff. I’ll probably be living in Barcelona then, and will for sure go for that.

When you were growing up, for the most part, people had to come to the United States to make it as professional skaters. Here you are, almost a decade in as an American living in Europe. What’s that been like for your career?

Exactly like you said – you used to have to be in the small radius of where the industry was. That was probably – what? – certain parts of Southern California and maybe New York? The distances and borders sort of got wiped out, and it’s not as monopolized. For example, Sk8mafia’s international distribution is in Spain right now. Go figure. It used to be out of somewhere nearby in Southern California. Now, north Spain is the distribution for everywhere! That’s just a coincidence. It’s pretty crazy. I’m the closest person besides Javi [Sarmiento] to the distribution for getting boards.

It seems like you keep involved with all your sponsors in a more traditional way, despite being so far away.

Well, the Euro New Balance program that Mark Baines and Dave Mackey run is pretty big. I have the best of both worlds, because I stay in contact with the U.S. New Balance guys all the time – Levi Brown in the office and Chad Tim Tim. They keep me up to date, and I try to talk with them as often as possible. I stay on their radar and don’t get forgotten. If I’m free, I try to go on trips with the Euro team – it’s usually just a couple hour flight and I know most of the team. I keep one foot on both sides there.

Sounds like the tradeoff for being able to be anywhere in the world is being more in communication.

It feels like the skate industry and world moves faster and faster every day. It’s almost like a quantity over quality thing going on. Don’t get me wrong – there’s a lot of quality videos coming out – but shit’s coming out every day. You have to be pretty available all the time and communicative. And if you’re not around or there when you need to be, you might miss the one that hits. You have to be around and available if you want to stay relevant.

“It’s sort of the strategic side to having skateboarding as your job.”

You seem to be skating all the time and naturally at the fast pace you mention the industry keeps. What’s your mindset like about skating?

I need it to stay mentally calm and healthy. It definitely feels like a job when it comes to the stress of having to film and produce on command when you go on trips, but I try to take advantage of every trip I’m offered. That’s my happy place – to be constantly moving, skating, and not stagnant.

I’m way more in my head than I should be at all times, so I probably overanalyze the situations and different variables on different trips. When you’ve been on so many trips and have seen so many end results, you get a feel for what’s going to be good. If you know on a trip they’re only filming a certain way – say VX fisheye – you try to look for spots that will translate with that type of filming. Depending on the company, it could be more long lens or HD filming and you might have a different mentality and perspective on the spots you’re looking for. If they’re shooting an article, you may be saving your body and looking for more photogenic spots. It’s sort of the strategic side to having skateboarding as your job. I guess it comes with age and getting to know yourself.

So you’re saying you may see skating differently if you’re out filming with Gustav [Tønnesen] versus being on, say, an Independent trip?

Yeah, exactly. Those are pretty good contrasts for an example right there. I live right next to all the Sour guys in Barcelona and even though I’m not on Sour, they treat me like one of their own and I go on all their trips too. I get around; I’m pretty chameleon-ish. I always feel like I absorb the energy of people I’m around.

What would you say are some patterns or things you’ve found yourself gravitating to over the years?

More recently – I guess past ten or more years now – I like to find unique spots with banks and different angles. I don’t really like skating just ninety-degree angle spots. I really like finding spots with different angles. If you want to get mathematical – anything in that obtuse range. Anything 90 degrees to 180 – 90 degrees to flat. I’ve always thought there were two types of skaters: there’s the person who has a trick and needs a spot for the trick, and then there’s the type of person who likes to look for a spot and then figure out which trick can be adapted to that spot. I’ve always been more of that latter style.

Why do you think that is?

It’s good to dive into yourself and see what kind of person you are as an individual. Skating is one of those things that has no formula. It’s a very subjective individual process. You have to find parallels between your own personality and skating and what works for you. This sounds dumb, but it’s kind of like a synesthesia process. You can put feelings to different thoughts and overlap your physical experiences with your senses and feelings. It’s not a direct “you can taste colors” thing, but relating your personality to skating. It’s really hard to put into words.

You skate, or see skating, and skating gives you a certain feeling, then you see what style of skating resonates more with you. To do that, you have to put yourself and your skating in more different environments, which are sometimes uncomfortable at first. You need to be around different people who you may not know well at first. The more you put yourself in different scenarios the more you can hone in what style of skating and people and cultures resonate with you the most. Be open to it and try to be in tune with it. If you find it, follow it.

Are there any tricks that you can’t do?

Haha, for sure. Shit, I’ve never done a back smith. I’ll let everyone else handle that. I can’t impossible, either. That’s something that doesn’t compute with my feet – wrapping that. I was never really around people learning those growing up. That’s my excuse.

What are some of your favorites?

I’ve always been drawn to frontside flips and fakie frontside flips. Switch frontside flips. Nollie backside flips. If those can be applied to a spot at any time, that’s a bonus for me, I would say. It’s hard to do without having your mind race, but it’s nice to go to a spot with nothing in mind and just see what your brain comes up with. It’s almost like a puzzle – fitting pieces together and seeing what compliments them.

“The more you put yourself in different scenarios the more you can hone in what style of skating and people and cultures resonate with you the most.”

I wanted to ask about Barcelona, which is obviously one of the most epic skateboard destinations we’ve got. We’re from the era from when it was the destination. It’s not like it’s fallen off as a place to skate, but it’s no longer the trendiest. What’s it like living there as someone who knew it as that destination and now is a resident?

When I lived there at first, there was a honeymoon phase. Then you sort of get callous or numb to it. You skate by a spot and have skated it hundreds of times, so you don’t care about it anymore. But then when somebody comes to visit, you take them to classic spots that you’re sick of already, you see how hyped they are and it helps you re-feel that feeling again.

Sounds similar to people going through larger destinations in the U.S.A. – Los Angeles or New York – and being hyped on the most played schoolyard or downtown ledge.

Yeah, exactly. In Barcelona, a lot of those classic spots are still there, but have seen many decades of skating by now. They’re all pretty rinsed, for sure. That’s why it was pretty nice meeting the Sour guys. They’re almost all outside-the-box skaters; it put a whole new filter on the city and they found so many new spots. Even if it was next to a spot that people skated all the time, they’d find a new nook and cranny that they knew how to work their magic on.

You met those guys when Sk8Mafia made Stee, a collaboration with Sweet, right? Who set that up?

I met Gustav back in the day on a Vox trip. He was on Vox Norway and we met through that. Wes knew Josef [Scott Jatta] through DC Europe trips. They came to San Diego for a month when the company was still [called] Sweet, we hung out with them there and then a few of us went to Sweden in the summer for a month and hung out there. It’s one of those things where you can’t really remember the beginning, and it just feels like you’ve been homies forever.

Do you have a car in Barcelona?

I actually just got my first one under a year ago. In San Diego, you live half your life in the car, so I didn’t have a car [in Barce] for a long time. It doesn’t really make sense to have a car, but when you’ve biked every street in every city and taken every train to every metro stop and every far-flung station, the next step is to get a car to get a little bit outside the city. You gotta expand the radius.

Southern California driving culture and European mecca street life culture – how do they compare?

I remember tripping out the first few video parts I made with Gustav and Simon. When we were done and I’d look back, it felt crazy to film a whole part without using a car. That’s a crazy concept to me, coming from where I couldn’t even go to the grocery store without a car. When you live in a city with public transportation and then visit a place where you need to rely on a car, the difference in day-to-day routine is crazy. You lose the intimacy with the city when you’re isolated in your car. When you’re going a little slower on a skateboard or bike, you end up finding more detail and get to see things that exist outside of the normal flow.

“I’ve always thought there were two types of skaters: there’s the person who has a trick and needs a spot for the trick, and then there’s the type of person who likes to look for a spot and then figure out which trick can be adapted to that spot.”

What do you do other than skating?

I used to do ceramics a lot and kind of picked that back up. I like to have something non-physical, but mentally calming to do. I’m in the process of setting up a little ceramics studio in the house. I just got back into that like six or seven months ago.

You put out so many video parts, but some of my favorites are the ones with Gustav. What’s working on those like?

Gus is always doing his projects, but since we’re getting older and can’t skate all the time, we try to coordinate it so that when maybe he’s not skating, he’ll take the camera out and come check out what I’m doing. We’ll go out and see what we get. My last Free mag part was one of my favorite parts I’ve ever put out, and that was just us skating in our spare time and working when we could.

You hopped over onto a bank and powerslid over some skatesoppers.

That was in Madrid, we were there for like three days with all the homies and were at this spot. I remembered there was this museum up the street – I forget which one – and Gus and I went up there and were like, “fuck, it’s all skatestopped!” But we had that Sour filter on. We figured it out even with the skatestoppers and filmed it in a few minutes and met back up with the homies with a clip.

That was the part with that big huck as the ender.

Oh yeah. That was the only thing about that part that was premeditated and stressful. I had wanted to do that for a year or so and it stressed me out. I remember taking Gus and Simon there, and he said: “this is the scariest spot I’ve ever seen.” When he said that, it motivated me and I decided I had to do it.

It’s sick to have an ender.

Yeah, it’s nice to have an ender randomly and just know you have it in the back of your head. This was a more conventional style actually, because we had all this footy and the part was pretty much done, but I wanted to do this for the ender, so I had to get it by a date we set to finish it.