The 411
If LeBron James needed special-effects help to sink that dazzling series of full-court shots in his Powerade commercial, who's going to believe that a skateboarder in baggy jeans can sink a basket from 60 feet away, one-handed, over his shoulder and with his back turned? That's just one of the shots on an insane 60-second video on the DC Shoes website (dcshoes.com) highlighting seven pro skaters who can alley-oop as well as ollie. So spectacular are the shots, however, that most viewers assume they're fake.
"It's 100 percent real," says Colin McKay, one of the ballin' boarders. In one scene McKay, 29, skates up to the edge of a 13-foot pipe at the indoor skate park at DC Shoes in Vista, Calif., and tosses a ball into a basket 30 feet away while his miniature pinscher, Reggie (as in Miller), looks on. Says McKay, "We took about 10 tries."
The riders shoot hoops to warm up before they skate or when they get bored. In one shot Rob Dyrdek bounces a ball between his legs to Ryan Gallant, who swats the ball into the basket by swinging his skateboard like a bat. When Mark Woolsey, DC Shoes' vice president of marketing, saw footage of the skaters goofing around, he had it edited into a video. "I thought, Wow this is pretty amazing stuff. And they were like, 'Oh, we do this all the time,'" Woolsey says. As for James's digitized 90-footers, McKay says, "Give LeBron a video camera, and I'm sure he can do a lot crazier stuff than we [can]."
COLOR PHOTO
COURTESY OF DC SHOES (GALLANT)
BOARDER UP!
Gallant swings for the hoop.