Neal Hendrix

Lewisville, North Carolina is about as far from the center of the skateboard world as you can get; that is where it started for me. Growing up in a small town that didn’t even have a stoplight, we skated on cobbled together ramps in our driveways and backyards, and the streets of nearby Winston-Salem on the occasion when we could get a ride. When I was 16, a nearly perfect indoor skatepark opened in Winston.  From that moment on, I basically lived at the skatepark every waking hour that I wasn’t at school. This was the time when skateboarding opportunities quickly started appearing for me. I got sponsored shortly after and turned pro for New Deal Skateboards in the spring of 1991, right as I was turning 18. Immediately after graduating high school, I flew to Europe for 6 weeks of competing in pro skate contests and demos for New Deal. My friends were going to college and I was going off to try and make it as a pro skater.  

Somehow, I would make the pro skater thing work for the next 14 or 15 years. The early years were rough. It was perfect at the time, but when I look back on it now, it was driving back and forth across the country in my little Honda, lots of Motel 6’s and unorganized overseas skate tours. It was sketchy but perfect, and exactly what I wanted to be doing. Skateboarding was still pretty small in those days.  This was before the X Games, before giant shoe deals and energy drink sponsorships, and bigger things in pro skating that would come later. 

Things started to change for us around 1995. That year I won two silver medals in the first X Games and skateboarding was starting an attempt to become more palatable to the television viewing mainstream.  Also for me, the Vans Warped Tour was in its first year.  Combining punk-rock music and skate demos, this is where I would end up spending a few months a year living on a tour bus doing those demos for the next 11 years. At this point, as a vert skateboarder, we felt more like entertainers than skateboarders. Vert skateboarding wasn’t cool or marketable to most of the brands; the street skaters had inherited that, but we were the ones who did all the TV contests and exhibitions. It was a pretty fun ride and there weren’t many more Motel 6 stays or Honda Civic tours after that. 

I never knew how long it would last, it honestly seemed like it could end at any moment, but we were able to make it work for quite a while. I always thought about what I wanted to do after being a pro skater.  I even entertained the idea of going to school after my pro career, but I realized that the years on the road living my dream had been the perfect education to remain in the skateboard world after my competitive days were over. On January 1, 2005 I started working for Camp Woodward full-time as their Brand Manager. I had been going to Woodward in Pennsylvania every summer since I turned pro, but now I was going to help oversee marketing and business development as the family owned company was rapidly expanding. Woodward allowed me to continue to take skate opportunities as they came up, as long as I kept up on my work.  Probably one of the proudest moments of my life was winning the Tampa Pro in March 2005. Tampa Pro is one of the biggest core skate contests of the year, and I finally won it while I was taking a couple days off from having a full time job! Other opportunities started coming is as well; this was when I started dabbling in broadcasting. At first, it was reporting from skate contests for a show called The Weekly Updateon FUEL TV, and then later that turned into play by play broadcasting for various events and networks like the  X Games, Dew Tour, Vans Park Series, Red Bull, etc. I never wanted to be a TV guy, but I was passionate about skateboarding and I knew a lot about the competition side of it because it had been my life for so long. I started to get my first taste of working with the global sport community during the mid-2000 when the owner of Woodward, Gary Ream, was involved in discussions with the International Olympic Committee about skateboarding possibly being added to the Olympic Games. We weren’t necessarily lobbying for skateboarding to be in the games, but we knew that the IOC and TV broadcasters desperately wanted new sports to spice up their elderly viewership, and we wanted to protect the heart and soul of skateboarding when that time came. 

Working for Woodward was an amazing learning experience. When I started in 2005, it was still a smaller family owned company that I helped to grow and expand, while helping the ownership with ideas on growth and business development opportunities. We continued to expand by opening new locations and signing new partnerships.  In 2011, Powdr Corp, a ski resort owner and operator, bought Woodward and retained the existing management. The Powdr acquisition meant we now had much greater resources to build and grow, but also meant getting used to working with a much larger team based at multiple locations on different projects. One of the huge successes of this time period was our “Camp Woodward Show”.  The series started as a reality show on FUEL TV that followed kids during their trip to summer camp.  When the FUEL TV network shuttered, we took it to YouTube and grew it into a franchise that garnered over 10 million views a year.

In August of 2016 skateboarding was officially announced as part of the program for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics and for the next couple of years my workload was even further stretched with these new responsibilities in helping to set up a national governing body for skateboarding in the US; and also being the athlete representative representing skateboarding in the planning for Tokyo. At this time, I was still working full-time for Woodward and broadcasting 20+ events a year all around the world. 

At the end of 2018 my world was rocked and changed forever. I was falsely accused of inappropriate behavior with a minor in a claim that supposedly happened over 10 years prior. I was temporarily suspended by all of my employers while the claims were investigated, and although I was cleared only a few weeks later, the investigations by multiple groups dragged on for months while my professional life was completely put on hold. The next few months were by far the toughest of my entire life. There were so many things in the accusations against me that were obviously completely untrue, and for that reason I had a lot of support from my close friends and family; but my name was now being dragged through the mud and it was painful to just sit silently while the investigators sifted through the accusations against me. 

I buried myself into creativity.  I started to write some stories and put together collections of photographs from my travels during last few years and I have shared them here on my site. I know life will never return to the previous normal, but I continue to be excited to start the next chapter.

Today, over 300 days since this nightmare began, each and every organization that has investigated the allegations against me, has cleared me. The most recent being SafeSport, who wrapped up their 11 month investigation in September 2019. SafeSport is the independent organization set up by the United States Congress and the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee to investigate inappropriate behavior within sports in the Olympic movement. 

I have no idea what the future holds, but I am excited to start the next chapter and once again be involved with fulfilling projects in the skateboarding world.

Neal Hendrix October 2019