After leaving the drug game behind, Darren Harper found new life in skateboarding

The grand tour of Darren Harper’s old neighborhood in Southeast Washington is nearly complete. There’s the spot where he sold his first piece of crack at age 10, for five bucks. The sidewalk where he saw a man bleed to death from a gunshot wound to the neck. The house where his cousin shot his stepfather after the latter raised his hand to Darren’s mother. The sidewalk where Darren, in his late teens, had a shootout with his partner over a deal gone bad. The corner where Darren, in a rare moment of carelessness, was nabbed by police and caught a cocaine distribution charge.

The tour — no charge, no tips, no air-conditioned bus, no stuffy history lessons — is about to break up when Harper stops and says, “Hold up.” He points to the side of a rundown apartment building on Savannah Terrace SE. “That,” he says, “is where I found my first skateboard.”

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D.C. skateboarding legend Darren Harper overcame a life full of obstacles. He used skateboarding as a way to refocus his life, which had spiraled into drugs and crime.

Where the tour ends, the story of Darren Harper begins: hoodlum-turned-skateboarding-star. A born hustler who left one cutthroat game for another, and used the same attributes — street-smarts and charm and relentlessness — to find success in both.

“One thing I’ve always had, no matter what I’m doing,” he says with a smile, “is hustle.”

And it’s also the story — with Harper, now 29 years old, in the starring role — of skateboarding in D.C., the rougher, edgier cousin to the more polished, familiar California style. This strand of the story saw its zenith arrive over the weekend with the Maloof Money Cup, the biggest skateboarding event in District history, which, among other things, brought the construction of a permanent skate park alongside RFK Stadium. Harper was both the main local ambassador for the event and a competitor.

“You can’t talk about skateboarding in D.C.,” said Mark Waters, one of the event’s organizers, “without mentioning Darren.”

Jagged path to success

The Darren Harper story begins in the early 1990s, beside that apartment building, in a pile of belongings from an evicted family. Amidst this particular pile on this particular day was a bright yellow skateboard, which attracted the attention of little Darren, then around 10 years old. He rode it on his rear end at first, then his knees — rolling down the hill that led to Mississippi Avenue SE.

Eventually, that board — well not that exact board, but the ones to which he upgraded over the years, occasionally by theft, later by endorsement deals — would be his vehicle to escape the ’hood and a lifestyle that, he says, “was like digging my own grave.”

These days, Harper makes a living with his board, through some top-shelf endorsements of clothing and equipment companies, plus a side gig giving private lessons to suburban kids who worship Harper’s urban-ness and wish they could grow up to be half as hard. It’s not an easy living — he has no manager, agent or PR rep, and hustling his own deals is almost a full-time job — nor is it a lucrative one. But in this game, success is defined as not having to take a day job. And Harper hasn’t had one in about five years.

Getting from that point, the little kid with the little yellow toy skateboard, to this point was anything but simple. He may be a local legend and internationally recognized skater, a star of popular skate/rap videos on YouTube, or even an “urban cultural icon,” as top skater Felix Arguelles, Harper’s team leader with the Famous Stars and Straps clothing company, calls him. But instead of a linear path to this status, Harper’s darts from abysmal lows to stratospheric highs. And sometimes the path disappears altogether, for years at a time.