After hitting up some of Mitch Pryma's friends in
Toronto, key words like "positive", "effortless" and "underrated", as well as combos
like "laid back" and "casual brews" were used by all who
described both his personality and skating.
"He's not one of those guys who jumps down anything
at anytime," resident Hut filmer Chris Quick explains Mitch's board-work. "He
chooses his battles wisely, and usually comes out victorious. Mitch is stand-up
guy who works the swing shift, and shreds for the love of it."
Hill
Sulpher adds: "He never ceases to blow my mind with the most effortless
and ambidextrous man-beast of a style he's got. Watch this Orangeville local
skate flat for 10 minutes and you can just tell he knows the secret to
skateboarding."
Mitch, a working class hero of the OV, was
skate-influenced early on by the likes of Adrian Teles, Andrew Gordon and Dave
Lapchuk. He also refers to Scott Kane's Bootleg 3000 part as "the most epic thing", and fully utilizes the "Random Motivation"
routine to emphatically conclude any given sesh.
Age: 22
Hometown:
Orangeville, ON
Current
Residence: Still the OV
Stance:
Regular
Sponsors:
Change
Skateboards, Adio shoes, Icarus Skate and Snow (Orangeville).
Video Resume:
Fireworks Dancing and Cartwheels (Change),
2007 – "For this part,
I got to leave the GTA for the first few times to meet up with Change and skate
with Jesse Tessier, Dallas
Ives and Hill Sulpher. I was
hyped to meet up with everyone and get the Windsor experience."
Midnight Lumberjacks (Change), 2009 – "This was all about going down and skatin' Toronto all the time with the
crew. There wasn't any pressure or anything, we were just havin' fun and Quick
ended up throwing together a sick-ass video."
Favourite
movie quote:
"They've done studies, you know. 60 percent of the
time, it works every time."
—Brian Fantana, Anchorman:
The Legend of Ron Burgundy
What's it
like to localize Orangeville?
It's a small town of around 23,000 and it's in the
519, about an hour from Toronto depending on traffic. The skate scene went a
little hurtin' for a bit after The Edge indoor park closed down, but now we've
got the outdoor park and people are gettin' right back on it. There's no GO
busses to the city on the weekends, so it's pretty chafed that way.
Aren't you
building cars out there or something?
I'm working at Johnson Controls building car seats
for Chrysler. It's a factory, so I'm standing there in front of a conveyer belt
buildin' rear seats; I don't even get the privilege of building the front seats
[laughs]. We do shift work, so it's
either 3pm to 11:30, or 6 in the morning until 2:30. I like the days a lot
better because it's way easier to work and go skate than it is to wake up and skate,
then go to work.
How did you
first link up with the Windsor Hut dudes?
When I was about 17 I got a call one day from James
Denomme, the owner of Change. He was sayin' he saw a video of mine and wanted
me to ride for them. So I hopped on a bus from Orangeville to Windsor with no
idea who I was meeting. They had a little Change sign when I got there, and I
met up with Hill, Quick, Jesse Tessier and all the locals. About a
year-and-a-half later they moved
to Toronto. I take the bus down and loc out at the Hut for as many days
as I can, until I have to work or I run out of money [laughs].
You put on a
switch clinic in your Midnight
Lumberjacks part, but I hear you're retiring the switch flip?
Yeah, I feel like I'm getting' too many of those.
I'm just waiting for one last banger, I guess. I've gotta move on [laughs]. No, I don't think I could ever
retire them, they're too fun. It was just a joke we always go at because at
every spot it's: "Yo, switch flip? You got a switch flip?" We
go to shoot a photo and it ends up being a photo of another switch flip. I'm
like, "Oh, man!"
Switch backside 5-0. Caissie sequence.
Is it true
that you use the Skate video game as
a reference to learn tricks?
I have too much fun with that
game. Sometimes if I'm skating something in the game, I'll go out and
find similar stuff. It's a lot easier to learn a trick in the game, so once I
watch how it's done and see it in slow-mo, I'll go out and try to mess around
with it. One time I played Skate for
like 2 hours doing crook pop-overs on all this shit, then I went to the
skatepark and in 3 minutes did a crook pop-over out of nowhere. I'd never done
one before.
Can you
explain the "Random Motivation" routine?
I always just play it mellow, I never really have a
game plan. I just enjoy skating flat and watching people skate. When the mood
strikes me, I figure maybe I should try and do something; just try to throw it
and get a little clip [laughs]. When
we get to a spot I'll cruise around, get a coffee and get comfortable with my
board. A lot of people just show up and start goin' at it. By the time I get
into a session it's usually a little bit later [laughs]. I've got to skate off a curb before I can skate off a
10.
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Related:
On The Horn with Hill Sulpher
An Inside Look: Skate 3
Midnight Lumberjacks