Cole Wilson stumbled out of his favorite local Louisville bar right into the Turn Yeto party bus, never taking a minute to sober up or look back. Since the Foundation team kidnapped Cole two years ago, he’s been on a non-stop bender out in Long Beach and has done some of the heaviest skateboarding we have ever witnessed. Drunk or sober, he’ll amaze you with his path of destruction. Get out of the fucking way. Cole Wilson is here for last call.
How important of a role did Paul Zitzer’s wife, Renee, play in you getting to where you’re at right now?
Almost the entire reason. She just vouched for me to the point where you took a chance.
So she called me out of the blue and told me I was blowing it unless I fuckin’ sponsored Cole Wilson.
Yeah, exactly. She had my back.
And then I was off it ’cause you had a ponytail. I think in your next footage update there was no ponytail and I was, like, “This is a different dude right here. He’s fuckin’ killing it. Renee was right.” So I might have to hire Renee to scout some talent out there in the Midwest.
There’s a lot of rippers out in Louisville.
Let’s talk about growing up there. Well, not even in Louisville–Rineyville. Let’s talk about Rineyville.
It’s about an hour south of Louisville. It’s a little tiny town. It has a post office, a gas station, a store, fire station and an elementary school.
Any good spots in Rineyville that we should know about?
Dude, surprisingly we had a couple. We had an elementary school with a couple handrail and then there was this apartment four stair that we’d always get kicked out of.
Any Rineyville spots gonna make the new Foundation video?
I dunno. Let’s take a trip.
Okay, so you went to Japan on an AYC trip. You met Tommy Hilfiger’s daughter and–take it from there. What happens next?
Well, I don’t know. We broke up.
Wait, you broke up? You’re already broken up?
Yeah.
You had the heir to the Hilfiger establishment and you broke up? Who broke up with who?
I broke up with her.
Why?!
There’s some reasons. I was going up to LA pretty often throughout the week and I would miss out on sessions. I would just stay up there ’til traffic died out and I missed out on so many sessions with the bros and I kind of just wanted to focus on skateboarding. There was the deadline coming up and I thought it was super important to be out there skating. It started to give me a bit of anxiety and I kind of had to call it. I mean, I was bummed too.
Any chance of you and Elizabeth getting back together after the deadline?
Who knows, man. Too soon to call. That’ll figure itself out if the time comes.
So a video deadline destroyed a beautiful relationship.
Yeah, in a sense it did. Exactly.
So you told Tommy Hilfiger that he’s the OG Tommy Guns. What did he say when you told him that?
Oh, man. Yeah. So we’re just sitting at dinner and I was, like, “Dude, you’re the original T-Guns,” and then everyone was just, like, “What the fuck?” We’re all just cracking up and if I remember correctly he said something, like, “I don’t know what that means but it sounds like it’s really cool.” And then we all just fuckin’ started laughing. He was psyched on it, like, “Yeah, that sounds super cool. I love it.” And then tell me about going from being dead broke to being with Elizabeth and going out to his house and having your own personal chef. How did it feel to go from rags to riches overnight?
Dude, I’d go to the bathroom, catch myself in the mirror and trip the fuck out. Like, how am I hanging out with this entire family? How is this happening right now? It’s pretty wild.
Cool family?
Super cool family. Everyone’s such a unique individual. They’re rad. It’s a trip, man. I’ll tell you what, I was nervous a lot of the time. The personal chef would be, like, “What kind of beers do you guys want?” It was crazy. I don’t wanna get too far into that because that’s their business.
I hear you. Well, let’s get into this: you went outside Tommy Hilfiger’s house and you started digging in the backyard looking for buried treasures, right?
Dude, I don’t know. Everyone was gone and it was pretty much just me and a few people there and I just walked around the whole property. It’s a super massive property and there’s all these little signs. It looked like someone placed them as markers or something. And I was just super curious because it looked suspicious. And then I come to find out the dude who owned the house before was some eccentric art collector and I was told that he might have buried stuff. I didn’t know that at the time so that’s the weird thing. I was just out there digging on my own.
You were just out there and something came over you?
Yeah, I might have been, like, smoking weed and just roaming around.
So you got so high and then you started digging up Tommy Hilfiger’s backyard looking for gold. Basically that’s what it comes down to.
Looking for the buried treasure.
And what were you gonna do? What did you think that you might find back there?
Who knows? Anything. A relic of some backpack.
What if you’d found a Hilfiger time capsule from the ’90s? Would you have fuckin’ stole it?
Nah, I’d never steal. They hooked me up so much.
You’d have just brought it to them and been, like, “Hey, my senses told me to start digging. I dug up a 1994 Tommy Hilfiger time capsule. Can we open it together?”
I’m sure he’d be down. He’s a sick ass dude.
I bet he’d be down. Shit, I thought you guys were going good. I thought you were gonna pop the question. I thought you were gonna change your name to Cole Wilson-Hilfiger before long. This is kind of fucking up the interview now that you guys are broken up.
I know. If anything I would have probably just taken the Hilfiger name and dropped the Wilson.
That’s what I’m saying: Cole Hilfiger.
There’s already a couple Wilsons in skateboarding. I need to stand out.
There ain’t no Hilfigers in there. Cole Hilfiger? Who the fuck is that guy? Then they see him grinding up handrails and they want a fuckin’ piece. So I thought you were about to move out of Leabres’ closet into Tommy Hilfiger’s guest house but now you broke up with her and you’re back in the fucking closet?
Yup. I’m just fuckin’ skating every day.
Skating every day, back in the closet.
I’ll take that over a guest house any day.
Yeah, you’d take the closet over the guest house?
Staying with my bros? Yeah.
So you just turned pro last week. Out of the team, who do you think has the next shot of going pro?
That’s a good question. I think Glick’s sheer talent is good enough to turn him pro. But at the same time, that’s not all that it comes down to. I feel like in my mind it would be Aidan. No offense to anyone else, but Aidan’s just such an all-around solid dude and he’s got the God-given talent as well. I just love Aidan. It’s not like I’m biased towards anyone because I’ve lived with them but–
Yeah, you’re not picking favorites here; this is just your opinion. Who impressed you the most filming for Oddity?
It has to be Glick. I’ve seen him do so much gnarly skateboarding. He’s nice and young. His body’s feeling a lot better than ours, I’m sure. Yeah, he’s impressed me the most, for sure. He’s scared me at times and the tricks that I’ve seen him do, I didn’t think that some of them were possible.
Yeah, he’s killing it. You got a bunch of NBDs in your part. How did you come up with some of the shit you got in there?
Honestly, it’s just coming from the Midwest out here and so many tricks have already been done. I think you show up to some spots and I feel like a lot of people don’t test certain things that are there. Like, different approaches or different ways to skate the spot. Like if it’s a tall rail or something, maybe it gets overlooked.
It almost seems like you don’t have the monkey-see-monkey-do thing where it’s, like, “Oh, this guy back lipped it so I wanna go back tail it.” We take you to a spot and you’re fuckin’ nosegrinding from the top or something. Something super weird and different. One of the craziest things I’ve ever seen was the nosegrind where you grinded and then you dropped down into a nosegrind on the other handrail and kept going. That’s insane. That stuff’s never been done, that I know of, and it’s just shocking to see someone think that it’s possible and then to be so confident and just do it.
Thank you. That means a lot.
It’s awesome to see, man. I’m stoked to fuckin’ take you guys around and see you do all of this shit. I never thought any of that stuff would ever happen, you know?
Well, I never thought that skateboarding could happen so I’m equally grateful for you.
So Duffel gave you a real backhanded compliment the other day. I don’t know if you heard it but he was saying how amazing you are and how awesome it is that you can sit on nosegrinds and crooked grinds and then he goes, “Yeah, he’s really awesome. He can sit on that stuff and I don’t know how he does it. He’s kind of like a rollerblader.”
Oh, what?! Nah, I didn’t catch that one.
Do you got rollerblade roots?
Yeah, for sure I do.
Yeah? How old were you when you stopped blading?
I probably only bladed for, like, six months after I started skateboarding. I kinda just lost it.
It was like training wheels.
Yeah, because we would just go to all of the same spots that we ended up skateboarding later–we were going around the neighborhood finding gaps. You know the rollerblades don’t fuck it up too much so people would let us skate their houses in the neighborhood.
People are more blade friendly because the wheels aren’t as noisy, right?
Yeah, exactly. And when you’re trying tricks down a set of stairs and your axles are hitting the ground and chunking up the ‘crete, that leaves marks so we eventually started getting booted from people’s houses.
Do you want to backhand Duffel right now? Do you want to give him a compliment in a fucked-up way?
Nope. No, I do not. I mean, it’s too easy.
So you’ve always been a working dude. Ever since I started giving you stuff you’ve always worked.
Yeah, the first job I ever had was working at a truck stop for a year outside of Rineyville. It was only semi-truck drivers that would come in and get fuel. It was gnarly–some of the meanest, most racist, fattest, smelliest dudes I’ve ever come across. I think one dude had six full-grown dogs in his truck with him. He was the stinkiest dude. He comes in, smells like a port-a-potty. He smells like shit and on top of that he’s got the gnarliest pet-dander smell. Then I moved up to Louisville and it just worked out. I delivered pizzas at one point. Then my friend Jimmy had this pool crew and I worked for him five days a week, got paid in cash every Friday. The most we ever built was five pools in a day and it was honestly the worst day of my life.
Cement pools or those fiberglass things?
Above-ground pools. You have to dig up the land to where it’s perfectly level and assemble the pool and make sure it’s a perfect circle. Or as close as you can get to it. It’s hard work, especially in the middle of the summer in Kentucky when the humidity is 95 percent and it’s 95 degrees out.
And then you did demo work too, right? Didn’t you tear down old houses or something?
That was the last job I had until I moved out here. It was emergency response. Say someone’s house flooded or caught on fire, we’d be there the next day taking everything out of their house, itemizing it and then do demo work if necessary. The fire ones were gnarly. You’d feel bad for the homeowners who were just standing there while you’re cleaning up their burned-down house. It was a bummer.
Back to your current job: what’s been your biggest struggle so far filming for Oddity?
Honestly, it’s kind of, like, the pressure of being in a video for the first time. That’s what it comes down to the most. I just want to have the best part that I can. I just want people to be psyched.
Well the pressure should be off now. You turned pro before the video dropped.
Yeah, that blew my mind because, like, never having a video part before it almost didn’t make any sense. Like, “How could that be?” If anything, the pressure is on more now than ever. You turned me pro; now I gotta prove it.
The first time I met you, the first day we went out skating I was, like, “Ah, Cole’s the next pro.” It was that easy for me. I just thought you were rad from the first day we saw you skating. So we owe all of this to Renee Zitzer. So she’s gotta get a board. Are you gonna send her a board or do I have to send her one?
I’m going home for Christmas. Maybe I could–
Hand deliver it to her and sign it? She’d loe that.
Yeah, I think I’ll do just that.
Well, this interview’s gonna come out before Christmas so you just spoiled her Christmas present. Ah, fuck it. She doesn’t read Thrasher.
Everyone reads Thrasher.
You’re right. Alright, Cole, can’t wait to see you finish your video part. You’ve already killed it so you’re only gonna kill it more.
Thanks so much for everything. I appreciate everything you’ve done.
Alright, your career starts now. Let’s get it!