This article appears in VMAN43, now available for purchase. 

“I am not a skater…I am me,” Tyshawn Jones says over the phone. He’s calling in from sunny Los Angeles, where he’s killing time, before moving to a newly purchased home in New York. “I am from [the] skateboarding [community], but I wouldn’t [label] myself as just a skateboarder. Skateboarding is [just] the foundation,” he continues. The Bronx native’s skating roots run deep: He first made waves at 14, after appearing in skate videographer William Strobeck’s Supremefilm Cherry, followed by 2018’s Blessed. The latter performance earned Jones Thrasher’s coveted “Skater of the Year” award. However, he shrugs off the accolades: “I don’t really watch myself [on video]. I just watched it once, and that’s it,” Jones insists. “It’s not strategic. I am just doing me. If people fuck with it, they fuck with it. If not…I like it.”

But don’t mistake his nonchalance for passivity. Instead of the slacker energy often associated with street skate culture, Jones exudes the entrepreneurial spirit of New York. It’s here that he’s continuing to lay down roots, opening up a Caribbean-American restaurant, TasteSo Good, in the Bronx in 2018. “I just wanted something of my own,” he says. “The sponsored stuff is cool, but that’s not my thing: I am just like an employee in a sense. I’d rather have my own thing, and I thought it would be cool to give back to the community and start something dope.” The same train of thought prompted Jones’s other business venture: Hardie’s Hardware, an apparel brand that sells unique bolts for skate decks. “I want to see a bunch of people wearing it everywhere. I want it to be a big brand,” he says, noting a desire to become a brand himself, rather than work for someone else’s. “Why not try to be like Supreme or Off-White?” he asks. “You only get one chance,” Jones speaks confidently and passionately, summing up his ambitions as an endless pursuit of more. Eschewing specifics, he forecasts,“fly shit only…It’s not proper English, but I’m an everything-doer. Skateboarding was…what got me everywhere [I am today], but I think I am more than that these days. New lanes, period.”