Friday, 23 July 2021

A Skateboarder’s Secret Grind


Nyjah Huston’s signature dreadlocks are stored in a box now, an artifact of his early fame. The effects of his complicated upbringing have not been so easy to cut off.
Photo Illustration by Tyler Comrie; Photos by Mark Abramson for The New York Times; Charlie Neibergall and Alessandra Tarantino, via Associated Press

LAGUNA BEACH, Calif. — Nyjah Huston was driving his Mercedes coupe well past the speed limit between his $3 million house overlooking the Pacific Ocean and his private indoor skatepark where he was training for the Olympics.

He was talking about how he got to here and, now, about the distance between public perceptions and inner feelings.

It can be hard to be an adult when you weren’t allowed to be a child. To know who your friends are when you had none as a boy. To learn when you have never stepped inside a classroom. And to build trust when your deepest relationship shattered on the fragile edge between childhood and adulthood.

He idled at a stoplight.

“Nyjah!”

A little voice broke his concentration. Nyjah turned his head. There was a boy on the sidewalk, with a smile, a nod and an enthusiastic wave, as if seeing Santa in a passing parade.

“Hi, Nyjah!”

Nyjah smiled, nodded and hit the gas.

ImageSkateboarding makes its Olympic debut on Sunday. Nyjah Huston, seen after qualifying for the United States team in May, arrives as its biggest star.
Credit...Todd Heisler/The New York Times

At 26, Nyjah belongs to the single-name realm of LeBron, Tiger and Serena. He is the second-most-famous skateboarder on the planet. (Tony Hawk, now 53, may never surrender the title.) He has been famous for three-quarters of his life.

But a new audience is about to experience Nyjah for the first time as skateboarding makes its Olympic debut in Tokyo, starting with the men’s street competition on Sunday.

To put Nyjah’s fame in an Olympic context, he has 4.7 million Instagram followers — about three times as many as Shaun White, twice as many as Lindsey Vonn, far more than Michael Phelps and quite a bit more than Simone Biles.

The Olympics have never had an athlete like Nyjah or a story like his. In one overstuffed sentence, it goes like this:

Born on a living room floor in Davis, Calif., raised as a Rastafarian with little interaction with the outside world, Nyjah was funneled into skateboarding stardom by a strict father, signed a skateboard deal at 7 and made his first X Games appearance at 11, relocated with his parents and four siblings to a remote farm in Puerto Rico, watched his career sputter in social isolation, played the role of the rope in the tug of war of his parents’ divorce, was unleashed as a millionaire teenager and bought a mansion and a Lamborghini and lost all connection with his father, became the best contest skater in history, threw epic parties and built a rap sheet, and is now trying to outgrow that phase — but not all of it, because this is skateboarding — just in time for the sport that he has dominated for most of his life makes its debut at the Tokyo Games.

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Credit...Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Hidden somewhere in that sentence lies the mystery of Nyjah Huston, if not the answer to the central question of his life so far:

Is he here because of his childhood, or in spite of it?

“The thing that I’m most proud of is getting through those rough times as a kid with my dad,” he said. “Always having all this pressure on me, and our family getting split because of my skateboarding career.”

There is often a shrug in his voice, a flat and unapologetic tone that says, hey, this is just what it’s like to be me.

At the Olympics, Nyjah will stand out because of his status in skateboarding and because of his short shorts and long shirts over a body covered in tattoos from ankles to ears. There will be a gauzy rehash of his remarkable rise nearly 20 years ago, a boy among men, dreadlocks dancing behind him with every leap and twisting trick.

There will be less about how the whole thing crumbled, and what it means to Nyjah now.

During the divorce proceedings, according to court documents, Nyjah sent his father a text to say that he was re-signing with an established skateboard company — not the one that Adeyemi Huston hoped to build with his son’s money.

“I guess we’re now rivals,” Adeyemi texted back. “Father to son. I love you and wish you well. Skater and skater and friend to friend you’re like a traitor only to yourself. See ya!”

“Sorry pop,” Nyjah wrote. He was 16. “I gotta do wats best for me and give myself tha chance to b tha best I can be and I wood think dat u wood want tha same for me.”

“Who leaves we don’t need,” his father replied, in part. “Good luck. You will need it.”

That was a decade ago. They have barely spoken since.

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Credit...Huston family

Nyjah is curious about his father’s whereabouts, half-expects that he has a new family somewhere. He deflects questions about his childhood that feel too personal. But he does wonder: How different would this be without that?

“I can’t say I’d be in the position I am if I wasn’t raised that way,” Nyjah said. “I’ve never had a hateful side to it, even though some parts of it are crazy.”

Multiple attempts to reach Adeyemi Huston for this article were unsuccessful. Nyjah’s sister, Isha, and mother described Adeyemi as a charismatic, cultlike leader of the family. They say he was domineering and abusive (an allegation he denied in court), stunting their growth by controlling every aspect of their lives.

“You cannot understand or even attempt to explain who Nyjah is without knowing his background,” Isha Huston said.

Nyjah turned the car away from the ocean. He was almost home now. He hit the gas, and the car roared up the two-lane road, blurring past houses and parked cars and the turned heads of startled walkers. Higher and higher, faster and faster, as if speeding toward a ramp that would launch him.

He took his foot off the gas and pulled into the drive of his house. A room near the front door is devoted to all the trophies, the magazine covers, the contest hardware and the ESPYs. Soon, there might be an Olympic medal.

Somewhere are his dreadlocks. He cut them off a decade ago.

They are kept out of sight, along with all the other secrets of the past that help explain today.

Growing up in grow houses
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Credit...Huston family

The worn little house on K Street in Davis is still there. Nyjah was born in the living room, just inside the door, on a floor protected by a vinyl shower curtain. All five Huston children dropped into the world that way.

“I caught the babies with my bare hands, cleaned mother and child, and clamped and severed the umbilical cord, and proceeded with typical midwife treatment,” Adeyemi Huston later wrote to the divorce court.

Adeyemi Huston and Kelle Hunter met in junior high in Merced, Calif., the flat agricultural center of the state. She was a blond cheerleader. He was part Black, part Japanese. She was smitten, she said, by his confidence, daring and sexiness.

They had all five children in the 1990s, about every two years. Adeyemi Huston instilled in them a strident strain of Rastafarianism. He restricted contact with the broader American culture, which he considered a corrupt and ungodly society, the Babylon of the Old Testament, family members said. There were no friends, no team sports, no candy. The children were vegans, home-schooled by their mother and steeped in the teachings of Haile Selassie.

“When people hear I was a Rastafarian, they’re like, ‘Oh, Bob Marley, “One Love,” yay,’” Kelle Huston said. “No, it wasn’t like that. I wore a head wrap for 15 years — nobody saw my hair except my husband and my children for 15 years. I had a very subservient female role.”

The Huston family business was the cultivation and sale of marijuana, she said. There were grow houses. Bongs were part of the furniture. Isha said she got high from pot brownies at age 8. She was born in a shabby house in Sacramento, where the basement was filled with marijuana plants growing under the lights.

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Credit...Huston family

Because the enterprise attracted crime in a rough neighborhood, Kelle Huston said, the family of seven squeezed into a motor home. They shuffled between parks and parking lots. For exercise, the children shared two bikes and their father’s old skateboard.

The Huston children all took to skateboarding, but especially Nyjah, starting at about 5. He was hard-wired with a high tolerance for fear and the discipline to practice excessively.

“My dad was always pushing me to skate big gnarly stuff when I was a little kid, and nowadays that’s what I have fun doing,” Nyjah said. “I love the adrenaline rush of skateboarding.”

His father saw the potential. He built a pro-style backyard skatepark. The family later bought and operated an indoor park in nearby Woodland.

The Huston boys competed on a loose circuit across California. Nyjah won regularly. He got a sponsorship deal from Element Skateboards at age 7. His father turned his attention his way.

“Nyjah might have learned from the examples of his older brothers, because they were abused a bit here and there,” Kelle Huston said.

(She testified during the divorce that Adeyemi physically abused her and the two older boys. “The physical abuse included grabbing, squeezing, kicking and pushing,” she wrote in a declaration. “The boys felt intimidated by their father.” Adeyemi responded: “I will not waste the court’s time trying to dignify these accusations.”)

“I think Nyjah just said, oh, I’m going to listen to everything he says,” Kelle Huston said recently. “He became very obedient, which is now serving him well.”

At 10, Nyjah won the prestigious Tampa Am in Florida and was written up in Thrasher magazine. At 11, in 2006, he turned pro ahead of his first X Games. He was 4 feet 9 inches. Dreadlocks dangled halfway to his feet. The New York Times wrote a short profile.

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Credit...Huston family

“If he can make it through his teen years, I think he’s the future of street and park skateboarding,” Dan Bostick, president of World Cup Skateboarding, said at the time.

In the same article, Adeyemi Huston acknowledged that the attention was overwhelming. He handled all aspects of Nyjah’s career — management, coaching, travel, filming. From 2006 to 2008, from the ages of 11 to 13, Nyjah averaged $310,000 per year in sponsorships and contest winnings, according to court documents.

“We’re learning,” Adeyemi Huston said. “We’ve set principles to keep the hype and distraction out of his view.”

To truly keep it hidden, he moved the family to Puerto Rico. They found an isolated mountain farm. It was a life of tropical fruit and farm animals, reggae music and marijuana, dirt bikes and board games. Water and electricity came and went.

“The two younger ones kind of liked it,” Kelle Huston said. “But the older ones were miserable, and Nyjah, in the middle, was miserable, too, because there was nowhere to escape. Here he is in 21 acres of dirt. Adeyemi’s like, ‘Oh, don’t worry, Ny, I’m going to build you a training facility out here.’”

The illusion fractured, along with the family, under the competing strains of social isolation and Nyjah’s growing fame. Skateboarding connections withered. Appearances and contests were missed. Sponsors grew frustrated. Nyjah’s earnings in the first full year in Puerto Rico were half of what they were the year before.

Two years into the Puerto Rico experiment, Kelle Huston devised an escape plan. She would take the other children to visit California while Adeyemi and Nyjah, then 13, traveled overseas. She had no intention of going back.

“I had to leave Nyjah behind because it was the only safe route for me to get out,” she said. “Nyjah came out to the van to say goodbye to his siblings and me. Nyjah and I looked at each other, and we both just silently cried. He knew. He knew what I was doing.”

Isha, then 9, fought to return to Puerto Rico to visit her father. Her mother relented, and Isha stayed. She and Nyjah lived with Adeyemi in Puerto Rico for about a year.

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Credit...Huston family

“He brainwashed us into thinking that my mom had abandoned us and that she was out in California living this Babylon lifestyle — how she was evil and how she didn’t care about us,” Isha said.

Nyjah and Isha did not know their mother had filed for divorce in California. Their father was served the papers during a skate contest.

The proceedings were spent largely fighting over child custody and untangling the family’s debts — at least $200,000 to Adeyemi Huston’s mother for a series of loans, plus overdue credit cards, unpaid taxes and an equity loan on the house in Davis used for a down payment on the Puerto Rico farm.

It is unclear where Nyjah’s money went. In a text message to Adeyemi during their separation, according to court records, Kelle Huston wrote: “Between 2007-08, Nyjah earned approximately $690,000. Taxes take about 30%. We spent most of the money on buying the farm and supporting our family. Now he has about $25,000 in a Citibank account and $25,000 in the Coogan account. … Just wanted to let you know. … Kelle.”

“The facts show that the parents have mismanaged the minor’s finances to a significant degree,” the judge wrote in his divorce ruling.

The court gave Kelle Huston full custody of the children. Adeyemi Huston believed “a conspiracy is set up against him because of his race and lifestyle,” a court mediator reported.

“I am the very reason Nyjah is a success today,” he wrote in one declaration.

It was 2010, late in the divorce proceedings, when Nyjah’s stalled career was rebooted. He went to the X Games and the Maloof Money Cup, both in California. He finished second in both.

The new Street League Skateboarding circuit handed Nyjah a roster spot. Kelle Huston requested funds from the court to take him to Phoenix for the inaugural event.

Nyjah won — his first big win as a professional, with a $150,000 prize. He was 15. Most of the money went to pay delinquent income taxes.

To Nyjah, it is where his career truly started, independently.

It is why that particular trophy has a special stand at Nyjah’s house.

Skateboarding as a job
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Credit...Todd Heisler/The New York Times

“Nyjah!”

It was May 2021, and people were running at him. A car stopped sideways in the street, blocking traffic. People jumped out. They ran, smiling, holding phones.

“There he is! Nyjah!”

It was dark in downtown Des Moines, and Nyjah had just finished the first round of a Dew Tour event, the first major international skateboarding contest since 2019. He had slipped through a side gate and was walking to a van parked in a secluded parking lot.

“Dude, let’s get a picture with him!” someone shouted behind him.

Nyjah lives and travels light. He has no coach, no trainer, no cook, no driver.

He stopped and smiled. A man and two women snuggled close. Someone’s social media post surely got lots of likes and astonished face emojis. More fans emerged from the shadows.

When the last giggling one disappeared into the night, Nyjah opened the van’s side door and sat on the edge. The van belonged to the filmmaker Ty Evans, who has devoted the past few years to Nyjah, hoping to release a full-length documentary by year’s end.

Evans has been engrossed in the skateboarding world for decades. He has never known a boarder like Nyjah, the unique combination of talent, discipline and drive. The way he works out, eats, practices, dresses.

In some ways, Nyjah has turned skateboarding’s view of itself inside-out. He rides the rail between contest skater and street artist, between polish and grit, between broad fame and an insider’s credibility. He makes most of his money from sponsors, led by Nike (he has signature shoes) and Monster Energy.

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Credit...Todd Heisler/The New York Times

“There’s this double standard where skateboarders are like, ‘Oh, we don’t care about anything,’ but then those same skateboarders have these unwritten rules of what’s cool, what’s not, what we’re allowed to do, what we can’t do,” Evans said. Nyjah makes his own rules, he added. “And to me, that embodies skateboarding.”

Most see skateboarding as an outlet, an oasis of freedom and expression, a community. For Nyjah, from his earliest memories, it was a job. Well into his teens, he was escorted between contests and cocooned from the culture.

“Skateboarding’s usually a social activity, but Nyjah was not a social skateboarder,” Evans said. “He skateboarded with his brothers, but also on his own, just drilling the repetition of tricks, over and over and over again — almost like an A.D.D.-type thing. I see that in his personality outside of skateboarding. He is a clean freak, and everything needs to be a certain way. Everything is very organized in his brain.”

Nyjah makes his bed the moment he is up. He sweeps the garage after driving in or out. When he bought his first car, a Mercedes CLS, he protected the floor mats with cheap towels. He detests small messes and impolite distractions, like piles of unfolded clothes and the sound of eating.

“If anyone ever wants to prank him, put him in a quiet room and just chew,” his friend Edgar Barrera said.

This is the silent torment of Nyjah. He exudes discipline, calm and orderliness, none of which are traits often associated with youth or skateboarding. But inside is some immeasurable weight of responsibility to his family and the expectations of others, plus the tangled wires of a past that he keeps to himself.

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Credit...Todd Heisler/The New York Times

“He’s very good at acting like nothing’s wrong,” Dolly Kelly, Nyjah’s first girlfriend, said. “But I know those feelings of abandonment are buried in him somewhere.”

Nyjah met Barrera and Kelly at major skate contests more than 10 years ago. Barrera sneaked past a guard at the X Games and skated among practicing competitors. He and Nyjah connected. Nyjah had never had a real friend before.

“His dad was strict and wouldn’t let him do much,” Barrera said. “So me and my few buddies, we had to kind of teach him the ropes — what’s cool — because he had no idea.”

Nyjah and Kelly met as teenagers at the 2010 Street League contest that he won in Arizona. She got his autograph and suggested that he add his phone number. They were together romantically for a couple of years and remain close.

On one hand, Kelly said, Nyjah is catching up after emerging from a childhood bubble. He remains unfamiliar with some pop-culture references — songs, movies, expressions — that connect a generation. On the other hand, he was always well mannered and humble.

“It’s like he’s mature and immature,” she said. “It’s the weirdest thing.”

Family and friends worry that he has not fully processed his past, that he avoids it with distractions and goals, like the Olympics. But he seems to have skated into a period of balance and independence.

“The No. 1 thing that I remember in Ny, when I would see him as a kid, was he looked sad,” Evans said. “And when I see him now, he’s so happy.”

On this night, Nyjah was relieved. The event was an Olympic qualifier for both skateboarding disciplines — park (skating in a large bowl, evoking a swimming pool) and street (a playground of stairs and rails, like an office park or school).

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Credit...Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Nyjah was practically assured of making the U.S. team in street skateboarding, his specialty, but eager to prove that nearly two years away from competition because of the pandemic did not diminish his stature atop the sport.

He built his reputation on daring and nuance, on going bigger and more difficult, but always with a thoughtful, rehearsed meticulousness. It gives Nyjah an outward air of calm and control.

He had stumbled on the first of his two runs. Going last, he needed a high score to advance, at least a 70. Experience taught him what to do — simplify this trick, dial back that one, do not fall. He scored 71.9, squeezing into the next day’s final.

“I’m pretty good at accepting negative thoughts because that’s something we always have to battle when we’re out skating, thinking of all the stuff that can happen to you,” he said, adding, “I’ve learned that you’ve got to accept the consequences.”

Nyjah won the contest the next afternoon. He edged his top rival these days, the other major gold medal contender in street skateboarding, 22-year-old Yuto Horigome of Japan. (Two weeks later, in Rome, the order was reversed when Horigome denied Nyjah a fourth consecutive world championship.)

“He’s definitely the best street contest skater we’ve ever seen, followed by Yuto,” said the Australian skateboarder Shane O’Neill, 31, a rare competitor who has seen Nyjah’s entire career. “He’s just really competitive and really consistent, and he has that edge and that drive to make it happen almost every single time. That’s what sets him apart.”

He is not universally loved. Nyjah knows that. It’s the money, the lifetime of fame, the sponsors, the focus on contests, the way he stands out by not quite fitting in.

Nyjah celebrated his victory by going to a parking lot of a Des Moines cellphone store. It had a steep stair rail. He and others who had just competed against one another played on it until dusk.

He came back to the hotel alone. Fans were waiting.

Testing the neighbors
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Credit...Mark Abramson for The New York Times

Nyjah was at the stove, making lunch — fresh mushrooms, spinach, chicken sausage and cut potatoes in a frying pan, avocado and toast on the side. He bought the house in 2018 for $3.6 million. It is all hard angles and floor-to-ceiling windows with ocean views stretching to Catalina Island.

He pondered the way he was raised, not at all as he lives now, and what he wished had been different.

“I always wanted to experience normal school as a kid, even just one or two days,” he said. “I always wondered what it would be like to be in a classroom. I still do.”

A young woman walked in. It was Alexa Adams. They met at a club a few years ago and became friends, then roommates.

“I didn’t want to live by myself,” Nyjah said. “Alexa was the best option.”

She laughed. “That’s a good way to put it,” she said.

At 18, newly freed from childhood, he bought a home in San Juan Capistrano. A “luxury frat house,” his mother called it.

Friends and brothers moved in and found no reason to leave. Parties lasted days, like something on MTV. Neighbors repeatedly called the police, and local news repeatedly covered the complaints.

“It was so crazy that I would be somewhere else and there’d be, like, 50 people waiting outside of my house expecting me to throw a party,” Nyjah said. “I would have friends calling: Do you understand there’s a huge group of people outside your house? I’m like, what the hell? What’s happening?”

The house parties became enough of a joke in the skateboarding world that Element issued a Nyjah Huston Party Animal series of boards.

It was a phase, and it is safe to question whether Nyjah has worked through it yet. After disconnecting from his father, Nyjah cut his dreadlocks. He got his first tattoo; he now has too many to count, an armor of ink and autobiography.

He bought a $350,000 Lamborghini Aventador. He surrounded himself with friends. He met a lot of women. He drank. He ate meat.

He did the things — still does the things — that he was not allowed to do as a boy.

“A lot of it is making up for lost time,” Nyjah said.

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Credit...Mark Abramson for The New York Times

Being a professional skateboarder means cultivating a persona of rebelliousness, of recklessness, sometimes lawlessness, of throwing your body to the pavement and your cares to the wind. Nyjah, from a background of isolation and restraint, still looks for proper balance.

“It was good, good times,” Nyjah said of his first few years of independence. “Now I’m just thankful I got through it and didn’t get into too much trouble.”

In 2016, Nyjah was sentenced to three years’ probation and 200 hours of community service for being a public nuisance and resisting a peace officer.

In 2017, he was charged with felony battery for punching a man at a party. The case was dismissed in 2019 when Nyjah, insisting it was self-defense, pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge of disturbing the peace.

He has had about a dozen traffic violations in recent years, most for speeding in Orange County. His record includes trespassing citations for skateboarding in places that do not want skateboarders, even ones who are practicing for the Olympics.

In 2018, the neighbors in San Juan Capistrano finally chased Nyjah away. He sold the party house and relocated to nearby Laguna Beach, into another hilltop neighborhood of big homes with big views. He limited his roommates to Adams, if partly to abide his neat-freak instincts. He does not know his neighbors.

“I haven’t tested them yet,” Nyjah said with a smile.

He limits social gatherings mostly to weekends at a second home in Los Angeles. In January, he held a catered dinner party. By his telling, there were 30 people there, spread out at two tables straddling an indoor-outdoor patio. All was fine until it got late. The doors were open and the music was loud and neighbors called the police.

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Credit...Mark Abramson for The New York Times

Nyjah received a misdemeanor nuisance citation. Global headlines considered it a superspreader event. Charges were dismissed in June.

“I wasn’t even having a party, but in reality I shouldn’t have had so many people,” Nyjah said. “I do need to be more cautious about the things I do. Especially with the Olympics coming up.”

The Olympics, he knows, will bring a new audience, a new scrutiny, a new wonderment over who he is and where he has been.

Skateboarding is different, which is why the Olympics added it. It is a kids sport, where even the grown-ups dress and talk like younger versions of themselves. At skateparks, 6-year-old wannabes charge into bowls alongside 40-something dads wearing Vans and Thrasher shirts.

The usual lines of maturity are blurred.

‘The hard role in the family’
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Credit...Mark Abramson for The New York Times

Nyjah is the father figure now. He looks today the way his father looked when Nyjah was a boy. He is 5-10 and 165 pounds, beefy compared to a lot of competitors, some of whom are half his age.

At his private indoor skatepark, in an industrial complex in San Clemente, are offices that have been converted to rooms. Friends in need and Nyjah’s troubled brothers have lived there, because Nyjah supports them.

His mother is on his payroll as chief operating officer of Nyjah Huston Inc., and receives a paycheck to handle his day-to-day affairs.

Nyjah paid for Isha’s college education at New York University. Her application essay was about having no formal education until age 12, living in Puerto Rico with her “strict father and hardworking brother.”

She graduated in May and has a job with an investment company that oversees Nyjah’s money. Eventually, she may take over as sort of a chief financial officer of her brother’s company.

“When my dad left the picture, Nyjah’s the one that helped us get on our feet,” Isha said from New York. “He put me through school, he helped my mom financially. Even today, still dealing with all the family issues, Nyjah has taken on the hard role in the family.”

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Credit...Todd Heisler/The New York Times

It was a weekday morning at Nyjah’s house, and Kelle Huston was at the table, papers and a laptop spread before her. She lives in a nearby beach bungalow. She needed to talk to Nyjah about travel, a photo shoot, logistics for the Olympics. She brought a stack of mail, all autograph requests for Nyjah. He receives dozens a week.

Nearby, Nyjah flipped through his phone. A man had posted a photo of himself on social media. He had just gotten a tattoo of Nyjah’s face on his leg.

“That is so aggressive — I’m going to have to fly this guy out or something,” Nyjah said. “He’s probably going to get a lot of hate.”

In January, Nyjah split from Element Skateboards after most of 20 years. In late June, Nyjah unveiled his own skateboard line. He called it Disorder.

“There’s too much order in this world and ppl telling you that you need to live life a certain way,” Nyjah wrote on Instagram. “Be different and live outside the rules.”

Nyjah admits to wondering if his father sees all this, what he thinks of Nyjah starting his own skateboard company, a decade after turning away from his father’s plans. Nyjah said he last saw him seven years ago. He came to the house once, and they met at a skatepark.

“He wasn’t the type of person to apologize for anything,” he said.

They are still divided over more than three years’ worth of video clips, called “parts,” that Adeyemi presumably has and that Nyjah wants. They span from when Nyjah was 12 to 15, a critical time capsule in his story. In the final divorce edict, the judge noted Nyjah’s request for them: “Father is ordered not to destroy any footage of minor.”

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Credit...Mark Abramson for The New York Times

Beyond skating, there are few outward reminders of his childhood. He has remade his look, covered himself in ink and thrown himself full-throttle into the American capitalism and celebrity trappings that his father avoided. He shows little interest in racial identity and, beyond an Instagram post declaring support for Black Lives Matter after the George Floyd killing, the social movements of the day.

There are small signs of his past, if you know where to look. Nyjah’s favorite tattoo is on his right forearm, depicting a rope-style Rasta string, like a necklace he wore growing up, with an Ethiopian cross.

Nyjah rested on a massive white couch alongside his friend, the skateboarder Dominick Walker. They watched YouTube videos of other skateboarders on a big-screen television mounted over a fireplace. The Pacific stretched across a window to the right.

They clicked through videos of others, like Mark Appleyard and Chris Cole. (“He’s sick,” Nyjah said. “He’s who I looked up to growing up.”) They watched the Puerto Rican skateboarder Robert Lopez, who had recently died.

“I used to skate some of these spots when I lived there,” Nyjah said, his voice rising. “I grinded that!”

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Credit...Mark Abramson for The New York Times

Soon he was in his car. Nyjah thrust the Mercedes from the on-ramp to the freeway. For someone globally famous for the art of maneuvering through self-propulsion, he sure likes the feel of an engine and the sense of speed.

Nyjah darted through traffic, talking about other things he enjoys, like hiking and riding dirt bikes and watching sports. He was telling stories, listening to music, changing lanes.

“I did go 190 recently in this car on the freeway,” he said.

Scary?

“It was chill,” he said. He shrugged. “I could have gone faster.”

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Credit...Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Susan C. Beachy contributed research.

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