Matthew McAuley speaks with the Def founder and local skateboarding pioneer about how he found his passion, where it’s taken him and what he wants to provide for the next generation of Aotearoa skaters.
To celebrate 10 years of Parrotdog, The Spinoff is partnering with the brewery to share the stories of New Zealanders doing great things. In the first series of Birdseye View, we’re interviewing interesting Aucklanders about their relationship with the city and how it shapes their lives.
Chey Ataria lies face-up on a pier, his limbs marking the rough compass points of the Viaduct Harbour. His board, up until a few seconds earlier diligently responding to the commands conveyed by a well-worn pair of russet-brown Nike Dunks, rolls slowly towards a steel guardrail. From the concrete he lets out a loud, pained, wordless yell.
And then he laughs, and then he gets up, and then he tries again.
We’ve met at a place which Def founder and Aotearoa skateboarding legend Ataria refers to earnestly as “the dream spot”, a couple hundred metres down the road from Silo Park in downtown Auckland’s Wynyard Quarter precinct. It’s a vaguely inexplicable piece of public infrastructure: a 75-metre slab of pristine cement dotted with wide, flat wooden benches, jutting into the water in front of the harbour’s north wharf.
The jetty offers a stunning vantage point for the harbour and downtown Tāmaki, one presumably designed with events like last year’s America’s Cup regatta in mind. With the billion-dollar-boat people long since departed, it’s now a space seemingly used by few outside of seabirds and smoko-breakers from the nearby scenic flight hangars and engineering workshops. And skateboarders.
Ataria’s arrived with a small crew, among them Eisei Toyota, Def’s in-house designer and photographer, and Deacon King, a young Hamilton-based Def team member. Eisei’s behind the lens today – “I’m a bowl skater,” he laughs – but after quick intros and handshakes, the others are quickly into their work. King is trying to capture something clip-worthy for an upcoming team video, while Ataria is just trying to land a clean nollie frontside tailslide on one of the benches. Into his fourth decade on a board, it’s normally a bread-and-butter trick for Ataria. Today though, at the tail-end of a long, wet winter, he’s feeling a little out of practice.
“I’ve probably only had like two, maybe three skates in the last few months,” he admits between attempts. But while there’s a bit of rust to shake, a layperson would struggle to tell that he’s operating at less than his best. Ataria cuts a somewhat unexpected figure on a board – solidly built and north of six feet tall, you’d half expect to see him coming off the back of a scrum rather than borderline effortlessly throwing flip tricks – but as a skater he’s preternaturally smooth. Nothing looks rushed, nothing looks forced, and – even when the tricks aren’t quite coming off – nothing looks particularly difficult either.
Given how comfortable he seems with a board beneath his feet, it makes sense that he first took up skating in his very early years. “The first time I touched a skateboard, I would have been four or five,” he recalls. “It was a Christmas present, just a little plastic board, but even then I was obsessed. I remember when I was like six, one day I did tic-tacs all the way to school, not pushing with my foot. I was so stoked.”
That early infatuation receded for a while, but towards the end of the 1980s, with Ataria in his early teens and with skateboarding exploding in popularity worldwide, he found himself drawn back in.
“By the time I was like 13 or 14, kids would bring their boards to school, you’d look at everyone else’s boards… skateboarding was like a real big thing. I was into whatever, like I was pretty good at rugby, into RC cars. But for my 15th birthday my parents got me a pro setup – this Jeff Kendall Santa Cruz board, which was like the shit for back then – and everything else just kind of faded away.”
“Yeah, I’m possessed to skate too”
For skaters and fans today, between brands self-releasing videos on YouTube, the near-constant rotation of clips on social media and the movement of iconic magazines like Thrasher and New Zealand’s own Manual to hybrid physical-digital publishing models, there’s a basically endless torrent of new, boundary-pushing and trend-setting skate content available literally on demand. In the 1980s, though – and especially in rural Aotearoa in the 1980s – the situation was very different. So even as skateboarding exploded in popularity worldwide, it was an unexpected spark that properly ignited Ataria’s teenaged obsession.
“There were no magazines – or at least I didn’t know of any magazines,” he explains, “But there was a music video by a group called Suicidal Tendencies that I used to watch on Radio With Pictures; this song called ‘Possessed to Skate’. We had that on VHS, and I just used to watch it over and over.”
The clip is an early classic of the “teenage chaos” genre – a kind of trans-coastal companion piece to the Beastie Boys’ iconic ‘Fight for Your Right’ – wherein a constantly multiplying crew of thrash punks and skate rats lays waste to homes and pools across the suburban idyll of 1980s Southern California, but there was one image in particular which stuck in Ataria’s young mind.
“There’s a bit where this kid’s doing his homework and there’s this board on the wall with a pentagram on it, and then the pentagram starts burning into the paper. I paused on that bit for so long that it ruined the tape!” he laughs. “I didn’t even know what a pentagram was, but after that I sanded the bottom of my board and drew one on there. Because I was, like, “Yeah, I’m possessed to skate too.”
Things moved pretty quickly from there. A natural on the board, Ataria was soon entering and winning competitions around the Hawke’s Bay and picking up sponsorships from local skate shops. He moved to Wellington after finishing high school, but when his first flatting situation went pear-shaped – ”my two friends there ended up becoming enemies, so they didn’t really want to live together anymore” – he soon set his sights on Auckland instead. “Basically I just wanted to be in a bigger city… somewhere with skaters.” So when Justin and Secombe Watene – family friends who’d already made the move – offered him a place to stay, he jumped at the opportunity.
“They were just as good… they just didn’t have the machine behind them”
With many of the country’s best skaters – names like Levi Hawken, Jeff Sanders and the aforementioned Watene brothers – and the vast majority of its skate brands concentrated in Tāmaki, the move north opened up a whole new world for Ataria. And as his star rose locally, it wasn’t long before he started considering the world outside Aotearoa. But while he’d long been paying attention to what skaters were doing in America and Europe, it wasn’t until he visited those places that he realised exactly how their skills matched up against his Aotearoa contemporaries.
“By that point, everything was about magazines and videos,” he explains. “Coming from New Zealand, that’s what you thought skateboarding was…because you’d never see how many hours it might have taken someone to film a trick, you thought that was how good they were everyday. So it wasn’t until I went there that I was like, “Oh shit, I’m actually on the same level as these guys.” People back home like Jeff Sanders, they were just as good. They just didn’t have the machine behind them.”
After spending a year abroad, Ataria returned home with a new purpose: he wanted to create something that’d give New Zealand skaters – and the artists, designers and musicians who moved in their circles – the same opportunities as their international equivalents. Encouraged by the success of longtime friend Dan Buckley, cofounder of the then-burgeoning streetwear brand Huffer, he launched Aotearoa Board Company, or ABC, just prior to the year 2000.
Looking back, Ataria laughs at the slight chaos of the early ABC days – “I spent $1,500 on a magazine ad, and I didn’t even have any product out!” – but at a time when skateboarding was riding a wave of renewed popularity, it wasn’t long before the brand became a staple of early-2000s Aotearoa streetwear. When that success saw him pulled into a sales leadership role at Huffer, around the same time that he and his partner had their first child, ABC “kind of just fizzled out”. And when an attempt to revive the brand under the Huffer umbrella a few years later went pear-shaped, Ataria chose to cut his losses, selling them the rights to the brand and planning to use the proceeds to make a start fresh. With his profile already well established, he didn’t have any trouble devising a name for the new project.
“We had a bit of momentum, so we didn’t want it to feel like it was a whole new thing…we’d already used ABC, so we thought why not just use the next three letters? D-E-F.”
A few weeks later, I’ve ventured to the uptown quarter of Auckland’s CBD. This is where Ataria now spends the desk-bound part of his working hours, in a hybrid studio-mailroom-shopfront about a block away from the cultural epicentre that is the St Kevin’s Arcade block of Karangahape Road. It’s a compact and nondescript space from the outside, but while there’s only a few of us here today – Ataria, Toyota and dispatch manager Will Godfrey – there’s a palpable energy in the small room. Def has just released a long-in-the-works collaborative range with iconic local activewear brand Canterbury, and orders are coming through at pace.
“I want to give these kids an opportunity”
Toyota is editing a video, Godfrey is taping up parcels to be sent to Def retailers, and Ataria is tending to a heavy admin backlog, the family terrier dozing at his feet. For someone who openly acknowledges that he’s most comfortable, most secure in himself when he’s skating, he seems almost surprisingly in his element here. More than a decade into owning and running his own brands, though, it’s clear in speaking to Ataria that he sees Def as having a purpose above and beyond the product on shelves.
“When I started ABC, because I was in the streets, I knew guys like Toby Locke, Mohamed Farhad. I’d see those dudes down at Victoria Park, and I could tell they were the ones that’d be, like, the next Justin Watene. So ABC had a pretty tight crew – we had a bunch of cats down in Wellington too – but with skating most people get to a point where they just can’t do it as much. They get older, they have to work, they have to make money. With Def, I want to give these kids an opportunity where they don’t have to have that shitty job that just takes them away from skateboarding.”
Talking about that next generation of talent, he returns often to himself as an example. “I think about when I was 16 and winning comps, when I came to Auckland and found that bigger community I progressed so much more as a skater.” His ultimate dream is one that could properly change the lives of some of those young skaters. “If Def starts cracking it, I’ve always thought it’d be cool to have a house for our skaters,” he explains. “Where someone like Deacon can come to Auckland, he can get a little part-time job or whatever, but he can live rent free. He just needs to go out and get clips.”
He acknowledges it’s an optimistic projection. But in an era where skateboarding’s arguably more professionalised than it’s ever been, its inclusion as an Olympic sport – and one in which New Zealand plans to field a team in 2024 – further legitimising the sport in the eyes of the public and sponsors alike, it doesn’t feel like an entirely unrealistic one. In this environment you’d be forgiven to expect there to be an element of the gatekeeper about Ataria, the old head implicitly shaking his fist at what skating’s become since back in his day. But while he agrees that the landscape has undeniably shifted dramatically over the past few decades, he says that its core remains unchanged.
“You’ll always have people – even in the young gen – that just want to skate every day, that kind of frown on that more commercial side of skateboarding. But I don’t think it’s that they’re haters, it’s just that thing when you have something that you really love…you want to keep it “true”. I kind of compare skateboarding to hip hop in that way. Like when I came up in the early 90s that was like the Golden Age, where it was still kind of underground, it still felt new. If you saw someone in the street with skate gears on, you’d know that the two of you had a connection that no one else knew about. But like with hip hop, even though it’s not a secret now, that essence is still there.”
It’s rare to find someone who’s steadfastly clung to a passion from adolescence through adulthood, even rarer when that passion, as Ataria jokingly admits, is centred around “a kids’ toy”. But talking to him, it’s immediately clear why he’s followed this thread for so long. “Skateboarding has always been this thing I can come back to,” he explains. “When life gets stressful, it lets you zone out from the world. It’s almost like a form of meditation for me.”
There was one moment, he tells me, when he almost gave it up. “It was after my mum died,” he explains, “in 1999, exactly a month after my birthday. I was kind of in my prime at that point, and I had all these sponsors around me asking me to do interviews and film parts, but I was just trying to process a parent passing, and my other parent not handling that so well. I felt like quitting then; I just didn’t want to think about anything.”
He eventually found his way back, and has rarely strayed far since. And although, like any physical pursuit, skateboarding gets a little tougher each year that the body that gets older – “you keep the muscle memory, so the tricks are there…you just can’t move fast enough to do them” – he doesn’t plan to hang it up any time soon.
“I was on the way up north to go camping a while ago and we stopped at a toilet on the way, and these kids were skating nearby. One of their boards rolled into me, so I jumped up and did a tre flip on it. And I had seen him looking at me going, “What is this old man going to do with my board?” So he just freaked out. I have this thought where if I can be in my 60s and do that; just roll into Aotea Square, grab a kid’s board and do a tre flip? I’ll be happy with that.”
Listening to Ataria talk, seeing how his face animates as he explains his 20-year plan, I’m taken back to that day at the dream spot; sitting cross-legged on the pavement as he determinedly tries to nail his line for Petra Leary’s hovering drone. To speak with him in isolation, you could feel skeptical about the depth of his calm, his positivity, his optimism, his magnanimity. But watching him skate, you see all of those characteristics personified and in motion. You see it in how he rarely takes his eye off King; making sure we’re catching clips of his young protege too. You see it in how after each run he rolls silently back to the west end of the pier to start attempt after attempt after attempt.
Most of all, though, you see it in the way that no matter what hard he might seem to fall, he always gets back up. And he gets up smiling.