Meet Duane Peters, born in 1961.
Duane was from the original wave of skateboarders who took skateboarding into counterculture territory with pool skating and was also part of the small group of misfits who blended punk rock with skateboarding to create a niche clique of skateboarding that still thrives today. Much like Bam he made a name for himself being a punk rock edge lord, and will admit openly that when a barely teenaged Tony Hawk first started making a name for himself in contests he spit on him constantly and had harassed his father at skateboarding events enough to earn a restraining order, severely limiting his ability to make money since Tony’s dad worked in the California contest circuit. Duane would later have a moment of self awareness during one of his sober phases and admitted during an interview that he didn’t have a father growing up and it irritated him to no end that here was this wonderkid on a skateboard making him look foolish in contests and to make it sting worse he had a supportive dad that loved him and supported him in every way he possibly could. His animosity towards Tony Hawk still continues to this day and has a long and messy history.
Duane had a heroin problem which by the 80s has landed him in prison, causing him to fall even further behind his peers and for the next twenty years or so Duane would fade in and out of skateboarding between prison stays, liquor and drugs, and his mediocre punk rock endeavors. In 2003 he was given a legend award by the industry and was seen as another potential redemption story of drinks and drugs but that went out the window permanently after his son was killed after slamming into a light pole in 2007. This fucked him up bad and since then it’s been the endless cycle of a hopeless drug user who deep down knows he’ll never be truly clean. Something happened in the mid ‘10s and overnight Duane switched from a quiet liberal to a loud outspoken Trump supporter who followed most online conspiracies, ranted about Jews and Muslims and gays, and started creating insane theories as to why he never achieved really success in skateboarding. He now blames Tony Hawk for everything that went wrong in his life including but not limited to the death of his son and the murder conviction of his former best friend, Mark ‘Gator’ Rogowski who fully confessed to raping and murdering a young woman and burying her body in the desert.
For the last five years Duane was mostly contained to Instagram, but finally started receiving bans this year and moved on to YouTube to upload his literal “Old Man Yells At Cloud”-tier videos where he peddles his thousand dollar art boards that keep himself from homelessness and shares his theories about Tony Hawk, Jews, Donald Trump, trannies infiltrating the government and the skateboarding industry (you guessed it, Tony Hawk is a tranny who has a family member working for every single skateboarding magazine or company he doesn’t like and Tony has been going out of his way for his entire career to sabotage Duane ). the gay agenda in skateboarding, I could go on but I won’t. There’s so much material there I’ve barely begun to scratch the surface but it’s all pure, uncut, mush brained, batshit insanity so I can only handle it in small doses.
Feel free to check it out, not sure if he deserves his own thread since he’s only stepped up his YouTube presence recently and it’s too early to know if he’ll be consistent with it but regardless he’s an interesting look into a possible future for Bam.
The real gold seems to be in the hours-long videos titled THE DUANE PETERS SHOW #X, it’s just an old washed up man ranting about whatever’s pissing him off that particular day, completely unfiltered.
ETA: One link to a minute long video that’s my favorite rant of his so far. Here’s Duane drinking alone in a hotel on the verge of crying because of Trump hate and leftard millennials and zoomers
