Extreme Success : In-Line Skater Chris Garrett at Top of Sport, Now He’s Trying to Become a Tycoon, Too

His skates gripping a rail placed on a ledge 10 feet above the ground, Chris Garrett looks out over the edge of mainstream and smiles.

With a nifty contract from Rollerblade and his own clothing company that caters specifically to in-line skaters, Garrett is the king of this cutting-edge sport.

Who cares if mainstream sports fans cringe when they see him, clad in low-slung baggy pants, flipping across their television screens?

Garrett, 20, is too busy flying around the world for demonstrations and competitions to worry about that. And besides, his clothing company, “Fiction,” is growing so fast he can hardly keep up with all the orders.

This, then, is a story about making it big on the fringe.

It is a lifestyle that requires the ability to utter the phrase “Roll on!” with a straight face and a proclivity for pouncing with wheels on unsuspecting mall hand rails--a move called “grinding.”

“The first time, you just try it,” Garrett said. “There’s no steppingstone. There’s no way of working up to it. You just have to make the commitment and try.”

Wimps don’t grind, they just buy T-shirts. And that’s OK with Garrett, too.

Garrett grew up surfing near his house in Seal Beach and he played soccer during his freshman year at Los Alamitos High. But as soon as Garrett discovered in-line skating, all other sports fell by the wayside.

“Just rolling around is so much fun,” he said. “I just started jumping off things and riding ramps.”

Garrett wasn’t the only guy jumping off things. Shortly after he graduated from Los Alamitos in 1993, a group of skaters formed the Aggressive Skaters Assn. and began to organize professional competitions.

Garrett has been involved with the Santa Monica-based organization from its inception.

“We were looking for a niche, something to call it, because how do you describe it? We were more ‘extreme’ [than other in-line skaters] if you want to use that word. We jumped off the stairs and did the hand rails and rode the ramps,” he said. “The word aggressive just came up.”

Aggressive skaters compete in two areas: street course, in which skaters do tricks on a flat surface, and vertical, in which they use a U-shaped plywood ramp called a “half pipe.” Tricks include “fishbrains,” “McTwists” and “alley-oop 720s” and skaters are

judged on creativity, difficulty and style.

Garrett won the street competition at the Rollerblade Grand Prix in Vienna, Austria in May. He will compete in the ESPN’s Destination Extreme competition, which also will feature skateboarders and bicycle stunt riders, beginning today at the Seal Beach Pier.

Destination Extreme, a spinoff tour from ESPN’s annual X-Games, features competitions in several “extreme” sports and will make stops this summer in Chicago, New York and San Diego.

Because of companies such as ESPN, which has a ravenous appetite for programming, Rollerblade, which needs representatives for its products, and even the NFL, which will use Garrett in its Super Bowl halftime show, Garrett can easily support himself with skating.

For a professional athlete, however, Garrett has an avant-garde attitude toward practice.

“When I think about skating, I don’t think it’s a practice thing. I think it’s just a go-out-and-have-fun-with-your-friends [thing],” he said. “Just roll.”

This Bohemian attitude is captured in Fiction. The idea for the company rolled around for years in Garrett’s head and friends wondered if it would ever materialize.

“It was kind of a fictitious company,” he said. “What better name for a fictitious company than Fiction?”

Skaters had been borrowing their fashion sense from surfers and snowboarders, opting for baggy pants and T-shirts in dark, earth tones. While maintaining that style, Garrett’s idea was to give skating a fashion name brand of its own.

“I came from a surfing background and I would wear surfing clothes when I skated and I didn’t always feel comfortable,” Garrett said. “I wanted to do something to help out the industry and help it grow to give kids their own identity. It’s something they can associate with. If they are wearing it out on the street somebody could recognize what sport they’re in.”

In his first attempt to buy a few dozen T-shirts, Garrett found out that business looks down on the fringe.

“I remember an overall vibe like people not taking me seriously,” he said. “They didn’t really want to help me out. If I would have walked in and I was 35 years old in a suit and I wanted a couple questions answered it would have been easier, but I was 17 in big, baggy clothes.”

These days, Garrett is ordering up to 5,000 T-shirts for a single production run and sales representatives don’t blink at his baggy shorts. Fiction also has lines of hats and sweatshirts and plans to start a pants line in fall.

“This has always been for fun. It’s fortunate that I can get paid for it and start a company. I’m serious about that portion of it, but the skating portion of it always has been for fun. I’ll never look at it like a job,” he said. “What else can you ask for? You travel around the world and get paid for it? It’s not a job, it’s a learning experience. A fun learning experience.”

Roll on.