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| Tas Pappas, recalling his rollercoaster lifestyle. Now a high rise window cleaner in Melbourne, Australia. |
After the fall: Tas Pappas soared to the top of the pro skateboarding world, then crashed back to earth with multiple thuds. Now he's got his wheels back. Garry Maddox meets him.
In the yard on a freezing winter morning, a fit figure in prison greens walks with a limp towards the high wall. Reaching it, he spins around and grabs at his feet. Then he walks back the other way, turns, heads back towards the wall and spins twice. Suddenly,
Tas Pappas realises every eye in the yard is watching him. For many of the inmates at Sydney's Long Bay jail, he is clearly just another a fruit loop in the yard. A nutjob. Which is fine. If they think he's mad, they'll leave him alone. So Pappas continues: walking, spinning, grabbing, walking, turning.
It is 2009, less than a decade since he and his younger brother, Ben, were professional skateboarders leading rock-star lives in the US, Europe and Asia, ranked No. 1 and No. 2 respectively in the world on the vertical ramp. Two young Greek-Australians from Melbourne's tough St Albans who were triumphing on the circuit.
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| In 1990 young brothers Tas and Ben Pappas went to the US for the first time to pursue their professional skateboarding career. |
But then just about everything possible went wrong, with one exception. Unlike his brother, his brother's girlfriend and his father, Pappas is still alive. Haunted, grieving and serving three years in jail for a disastrous attempt to smuggle cocaine from South America - but somehow alive. And to stay sane while he serves his time, Pappas is visualising his tricks as he paces the yard, imagining the wall is a skateboard ramp. He paces and spins, paces and spins - 180, heel flip 900, 1080 ...
Five years later, at the Prahran skate park in Melbourne's south-eastern suburbs - now heavily graffitied and waterlogged on a rainy afternoon - Tasou Micah Pappas recalls the moment he fell in love with skateboarding. In the late 1980s, he was 12 when he watched in awe as American pros showed off their tricks at the ramp.
''It was just crazy,'' he says. ''I saw Christian Hosoi about 10 feet above the ramp right about there then flying into massive airs over here. I remember thinking these guys are floating. It was like, 'This is what I want to do.' That was it from that point. I'd be daydreaming at school, I'd fall asleep in class. I'd say, 'I don't care, I'm going skating on the weekend.' '' Pappas's then nine-year-old brother, Ben, quickly became just as obsessed. The two were regulars at the ramp, ambitious skate rats who drove themselves harder than anyone to learn tricks.
At 38, Pappas today resembles a cut-down Adam Gilchrist, shortish and fit. His tattoos, including "Pappas" across his abdomen, a dragon on his forearm and an angel of death inside a bicep, are hidden behind baggy casual pants and a sweatshirt in muted colours. But that's all that's hidden these days. Having opened up for a new documentary on his life, All This Mayhem (screening at the Sydney Film Festival on June 5, then in limited cinema release from July 10), there are no secrets any more.
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| Tas Pappas today works high rise window cleaning in Melbourne. |
The brothers were the only children of a Greek-Australian father, Bill, who worked for a finance company, and an "Aussie" mother, Kerry, who was in catering. They married young and fought regularly until they separated. Eddie Martin, a fellow skater, met the Pappas boys at the Prahran ramp in the early 1990s, where they were known as up-and-comers with a wild streak. ''I was friendly with them but they didn't always connect with everyone because they were quite in-your-face characters,'' he says. ''They were quite small and young, but they were very loud and competitive and a bit rough around the edges.
"They rocked up to the ramp and it was obvious they wanted to learn. They pushed themselves really hard. They'd go all day from the minute they arrived right until their dad came and picked them up, or if they caught the train home, it was, 'One last ride, one last ride.' They were hell-bent on reaching a certain level.''
Martin remembers the brothers as inseparable and intense. ''They would have outrageous brotherly fights but were thick as thieves. If anyone picked on the other one, they'd team up. They really had an intense bond.'' Another skateboarder at the time, photographer and videographer Greg Stewart, remembers Tas as ''strong-willed and full throttle'', whereas Ben was ''more mellow and free-flowing''.
Brought up largely by their father, the brothers fell under the influence of rougher, older skaters at the park. Their home life was chaotic, too. ''The family was very dysfunctional,'' says Pappas. ''We were hurting as kids from a lot of the fights we saw. I was abused as a child - some bloke who was friends with an aunty molested me - so I always felt like I just wanted to get out of where I lived. I wanted to prove myself.
"I ended up having what felt like a chip on my shoulder because of it all. I just wanted to get to America and become something.'' At 14, after watching videos of the world's best skaters, Pappas decided he wanted to be No. 1 in the world, which meant beating the seemingly invincible American champion Tony Hawk.
He went to the US to skate for the first time at 15, then again at 16. After dropping out of Kings Park High School and working for a skate company to save money, Pappas moved full-time to the US at 17, living with other skaters in Tampa, Florida, while training. His brother followed after finishing year 10. ''It was like Disneyland,'' Pappas says. ''You're getting to live this dream. You're young and you're just caught up in it all, not realising that it's a business - that being a pro skater is your job.''
Pappas had used drugs in Australia: acid, weed, ecstasy, cocaine, speed. But on the competition circuit, heavy partying became a regular part of life. ''There were always two camps in skateboarding - your write-offs and your goodie-two-shoe types who were just dead-straight full athlete, training, eating right,'' Pappas recalls. ''Me and Ben were both. I'd eat right, I'd train, but as soon as the comp was over, I'd do fistfuls of drugs.
"The nights we'd party, I'd take extra vitamins and protein shakes to counter what the drugs were doing to my body. So I thought I had it under control.'' Girls were part of the social life, too. ''There's always girls anywhere there's a bit of limelight,'' says Pappas. ''It's no different to any other partying person: just whatever, whenever, however.''
The brothers became successful quickly, with Tas placing third in his first pro competition in Vancouver just after turning 18. But as their fame grew, so did the arrogance, which led to conflict with other skaters, sponsors and competition organisers. ''A lot of St Albans was still in me,'' Pappas admits. ''I was a bit of a bogan over there and the 'piss off' Aussie attitude came out.''
The high point of Tas Pappas's skating career comes on a sunny autumn day at Universal Studios, Los Angeles, in 1996. A huge crowd is watching the climactic competition of the year: the Hard Rock Cafe World Championships of Skateboarding finals. Tas, 21, and Ben, 18, are vying for the world's No. 1 ranking. Their main competition is Tony Hawk, the tall, smooth American champ who seems like an old man to them at 28.
With an injured back, Ben quickly falls out of contention. Hawk skates brilliantly, then Tas fires off a spectacular run that ends with a slide, breaking a rib. To the brothers' astonishment, he is given the same score as Hawk for what they believe is a superior run. ''He was just doing all his old moves from years before and we were going bigger and doing modern tricks,'' Pappas says. ''He was sticking around the three- to four-foot mark, occasional six-foot air. We were chucking 10-footers in, flipping the board.''
It's tense. A run-off is required. Skating with a busted rib, Pappas nails another run and wins. He gets a cheque for $10,000 and becomes world No. 1, with Ben No. 2. Pappas celebrates with a bender. ''I just chopped straight into the drugs,'' he says now, looking back. ''That night was the first time I did ice. It just looked like glass - the first bit of super meth.''
Pappas continued on the pro skating circuit, but the brothers started to be sidelined by their attitude. They fell out with their skate team, which left them without sponsors. There were injuries, more drugs and, despite further success, a gradual disillusionment with the routines of being a pro skater and the politics of the scene.
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| Spot the Wagtail flipper in the bucket. |
On a trip back to Melbourne from the US in 1999, Ben was arrested for attempting to smuggle 103 grams of cocaine, worth more than $50,000, in the sole of a skate shoe. His pro career effectively ended when he was given a 12-month suspended jail term and his passport was cancelled for three years, which meant he could not return to the US. ''He lost the motivation to skate,'' says Greg Stewart. ''It crushed him.''
Meanwhile, Tas had his own problems. He was training hard to become the first skater to pull off a spectacular trick called a 900 - a 2 1/2-revolution aerial spin - but his outsider status meant he was blocked from competing at the X Games, which focuses on extreme sports. Instead, Hawk cemented his place in skateboard history by landing a 900 in the same competition in 1999.
There followed a series of increasingly dark turns, starting with a serious skating injury. ''After I crushed my vertebra, my legs went really skinny and I couldn't skate,'' Pappas says. ''So I called up a mate and got on steroids. I started pumping the 'roids for a year straight and trained my arse off. By the end of the year, I was huge. I did well that year. But I'd already suffered from speed psychosis. The 'roids just exacerbated all my drug stuff and the extra testosterone makes you all confident and cocky, so I was doing drugs on top of it.''
By 2005, he was married to Colleen, an American he met through skating, and living in San Diego with their two children, when money became a worry. Fighting with Colleen left him depressed, so doctors prescribed Klonopin, which Pappas recklessly mixed with cocaine and alcohol. "I was paranoid that she was on with someone,'' he says. ''I don't agree with what I did, but I ended up hitting her and losing the plot and went to jail.'' Pappas spent two months in San Diego prison for assault, snorting his ''mental meds'' to get high, then upon his release went on a two-week bender, shooting up ice and heroin and smoking crack. His father found him near death, gurgling on his own vomit.
Pappas then crashed his car, violating his parole. The American authorities decided to deport him, meaning he would lose contact with his kids. While in a detention centre, his father called with shattering news: Ben was dead. ''I just wanted to die, too,'' Pappas says. ''It was the saddest thing I've ever heard. I was pissing tears down my face in front of a whole jail pod full of psychos.''
Back in Melbourne, Ben and his girlfriend, Lynette Phillips, had been using heroin. In March 2007, Phillips' battered body was found wrapped in a quilt cover and weighted down at Dights Falls in Abbotsford, just east of the CBD. Then, eight days later, Ben's body was found in the Yarra River near Victoria Harbour, in the city's Docklands district.
The state coroner later found that
Ben, who had both mental health and substance-abuse problems, had killed her then taken his own life. "The poor girl, she copped it," Pappas says. "He loved her. It was just one ugly situation." He was inconsolable when he was deported to Australia that same year. ''I couldn't stand to be sober,'' he says. ''As soon as I was sober I was crying, so I'd just drop a bottle of vodka or gin to take the edge off.'' Pappas was totally broken when his father died of a heart attack a year later at 54. He believes he stressed his dad into an early grave. ''I gave up,'' he says. "I was in the hospital a few times on heroin overdoses. I was deliberately doing too much, hoping to die. I didn't give a shit.''
In 2008, in a desperate, drug-addled haze, Pappas came up with a crazy way to pay a speed debt and get some money to Colleen in the hope she would let him talk to his kids on Skype. He caught a plane to Argentina with his last $5000, asked a taxi driver where he could buy cocaine, found a dealer who sold him a kilogram, ground it up with a cheese grater in his hotel room, then tried to smuggle it back to Australia inside three skateboards. ''I was off my face,'' he says. ''I had all these thoughts - I can pay him off, maybe I can get my kids back with the money - but it was all just scattered because I was shooting speed like crazy and eating zannies [Xanax] like lollies. I was just a blithering mess.''
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| Tas today, with partner Helen & Billy. |
On the approach to Sydney Airport, Pappas suddenly came to his senses and realised he was going to be caught. When he left the plane, he took a handful of Xanax, bought a bottle of gin at the duty free shop and drank it all. As he approached Customs with the skateboards in his bags, the cocaine alarm went off from the residue on his clothes. Five Customs officers wrestled him to the ground.
Hard stints in Kempsey, Long Bay, Silverwater, Goulburn and Lithgow jails followed before Pappas reached the minimum security Mannus Correctional Centre, near Tumbarumba in NSW, at the end of his three-year sentence. Visited by former skating friend Eddie Martin, who'd made films on graffiti artist Justin Hughes (in 2005) and boxer Lionel Rose (in 2008), Pappas agreed to be the subject of a documentary.
And even though his last use of a skateboard was to import cocaine, he was allowed to have one in his cell, provided he welded the bearings so it could not roll. Pappas started training again, skipping for two minutes, then practising tricks ... ollies, switch ollies, kick flips, switch flips.
While in jail, new partner Helen Norman - they had met through her skateboarding son Ben after Pappas had arrived back in Melbourne in 2007 - travelled to prisons all around NSW to see him with their infant son, Billy. On weekend release, they headed to local skate parks to see what he could do - and teach Billy to skate - to find his skills were all still there after two-and-a-half years off the board. ''All that spinning in the yard paid off,'' he says.
Sitting on the couch at home in Melbourne's Clifton Hill, with Helen quietly by his side, Pappas says reading the Bible in jail made him look at himself honestly for the first time. He still reads it now and goes to church on Sundays. Working as an abseiling window cleaner, Pappas believes he is skating even better than when he was world champion. Last month, he became just the 12th skater - and first Australian - to land a 900 at a new mega ramp on Phillip Island. Billy, now five, is a talented skateboarder, too. ''He reminds me of my brother,'' says Pappas. ''Same personality, same everything. I feel like it's Ben back.''
Helen says it was love at first sight with Tas - ''I saw him and thought, 'I've just got to have him' ,'' she says softly - and was confident that he would pull through, even during their early days together when psychosis had him seeing visions and hearing voices. ''I always believed in him,'' she says. ''I knew there'd be somewhere down the road that he'd get on the right track.'' Pappas has discovered he has long had borderline personality disorder, likely triggered by the sexual abuse as a child, which can lead to self-destructive behaviour.
Eddie Martin calls the brothers' story a Greek tragedy. ''He's come ahead in leaps and bounds in terms of his mental health and attitude," says Martin. "And landing the 900 is such a huge monkey off his back. He's genuinely seeming to turn his life around. I find that inspiring.'' It could all have been so different for the brothers. ''If they just played their cards right, they'd be squillionaires living in America,'' Martin says. ''All the guys that they were way better than have earned huge money and are living wonderful lives.''
Pappas hopes All This Mayhem will make everyone who has written him off realise how much drugs changed both Ben and him. ''I don't want people to think my brother was a monster,'' he says. ''It was the drugs. If he was a monster, he would have just pleaded insanity, gone to jail, got out and got on with his life. He didn't. He killed himself.''
With his ex-wife blocking all attempts to contact their two children - Kaia, 12, and Aydin, 10 - for seven years now, Pappas hopes they will see the documentary and come looking for him one day. ''Everything had to happen for me to learn,'' he says. ''Dad had to die, Ben had to die, I had to lose my kids. I had to be humbled. "I was too angry and I had to be crippled and put on my knees to finally realise I'm not in charge.''
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| Working as an abseiling window cleaner, Pappas believes he is skating even better than when he was world champion. |
