Peter Smolik - Even Murderers Wear Osiris?
Short version: Peter Smolik, a.k.a. ODS (Ol’ Dirty Smolik), had a short part in Etnies’ High 5 (1995) and blew up with his award-winning part in Shorty’s Fulfill the Dream (1998). His Osiris ODS shoe was a huge seller and even turned up as evidence in a 2001 murder trial. He left Osiris over colorways he didn’t approve, got kicked off Shorty’s by an unsigned letter, and grew Sk8mafia from a crew into a board company.
Today we’re talking about Peter Smolik, a.k.a. ODS: Ol’ Dirty Smolik. This one is thanks to Steve-O, who requested it.
Smolik had a huge impact on skating in the late 90s, and he’s still at it, even talking about filming a new part. But let’s go back to the start.
Fulfill the Dream and the snow camo Navigator
He had a short part in Etnies’ High 5 from 1995, only about a minute. He really blew up when he got on Shorty’s and appeared in Fulfill the Dream in 1998. That part won best video part, best style and a lot of other awards from the magazines.
After that, everyone wanted him. He tells a story about putting it in his shoe contract negotiations that he wanted a snow camo Lincoln Navigator, with a matching shoe and a matching Timberland-style boot. Shorty’s had already given him a car, but he wanted another one, and he wasn’t laughed out of the room. He didn’t get it, but he was big enough to ask for something like that. Most up-and-coming skaters just feel lucky to get a deal at all.
What made Smolik important is that he was one of the early guys pushing the next wave of tech skating. He had all kinds of flip-in, flip-out stuff, which was only slowly getting popular again after it all crashed in 1993. Rodney and Daewon were still doing crazy tech stuff, sure, but Smolik was on Osiris, and that was a big deal. Osiris was gigantic in the late 90s and early 2000s. Everyone wore them, even people who didn’t skate. At their peak, Smolik talks about getting $50,000 checks. Someone with that much fame doing that kind of skating made a big impact. See my Josh Kasper post for more on what the Osiris days were like.
The ODS and “sag no drag”
Smolik didn’t just have his name on a shoe. He made new products, like his own cargo pants (doesn’t that just sum up style around 2000?) and his own skate shoe tech in the ODS. They called it “sag no drag”: an extra Velcro flap on the back of the shoe that you could tuck your oversized pant leg into. The idea was that you could sag your pants as much as you wanted without ever stepping on them with your heel. I hadn’t heard of it at the time, but I would have loved it. All my jeans ended up with torn-up cuffs from walking on them. It’s such a ridiculous idea now.
The ODS in a murder trial
In 2001, the ODS ended up as evidence in a murder trial. One of the few pieces of evidence was a shoe print, and an FBI shoe expert identified it as the Osiris ODS. A local store owner said the ODS was a best seller and every kid in the neighborhood had a pair.
Investigators searched their suspect’s house and didn’t find ODS shoes, but they did find Osiris Defcons. That seemed to point away from him, until an Osiris rep testified:
“The Osiris ODS gives ‘more board feel,’ said Elders, and has a special Velcro swatch on the heel allowing skaters to attach a pant leg. The ‘sag no drag’ device allows skaters to wear baggy pants without damaging the cuffs. The Osiris Defcon, on the other hand, was made with extra cushion for jumping down large flights of stairs.”
It read almost like a pitch for owning more than one pair of Osiris. And as it turned out, the suspect owned both, and he was convicted.
The Storm
His fame kept rising. He was in The Storm, one of my favorite videos of all time. His ender is a switch front tail 270 heelflip out. Six years later in Blind’s What If, Ronnie Creager has the exact same trick as his ender, which is also the ender for the whole video. Ronnie’s was a tiny bit higher, but the point is that Smolik’s part held up for a long time. He was also in Shorty’s Guilty and a few smaller videos, and he was touring the world, doing demos and living the rock star life with Osiris.
But that only lasted a few years.
Losing Osiris and Shorty’s
Eventually he lost both of his major sponsors.
Osiris started putting out colorways of his shoe that he didn’t like, especially a bright green one he said looked like ectoplasm. He felt his opinions weren’t being respected, and he didn’t want his name on something he couldn’t sign off on. I can respect that, maybe not how he handled it. He talks about Osiris trying to come to his house to talk, and him refusing to answer except to demand his snow camo Navigator. Still, it sounds like he had integrity. He wasn’t going to let the money keep coming from a product he didn’t really stand behind.
With Shorty’s, he says he got too into Sk8mafia. Instead of wearing Shorty’s and talking it up, he was always repping Sk8mafia and throwing the Sk8mafia sign. He got hurt and was out for a while, and then Shorty’s sent him a letter, signed by nobody, saying he wasn’t doing enough for the team and he was off. He tried to get someone to take responsibility for it, and nobody would.
After that, Smolik decided to take Sk8mafia bigger and launch it as a company.
Sk8mafia
Originally, Sk8mafia wasn’t a company. It was a lifestyle, a community of skaters all over the world looking out for each other. In that sense we’re all members of Sk8mafia; the actual team came later. You can even see Chad Muska throwing it in Guilty back in 2001, so it was around long before it was official.
A guy named Dan Connelly had to make a fake company for a college class, so he used it to build Sk8mafia, doing the graphics and logo. Then they started making T-shirts and stickers and giving them out.
The hand sign came from someone who said it could mean Smolik or Shorty’s, since he was still riding for them. He said no, throw the pinkies down and make it Sk8mafia.
In 2004 they did an official tour and barely had enough money to get to each stop. After that they had momentum, started talking to distributors and locked it down officially, with a pro team and ams instead of a loose homie crew.
Their most revolutionary move was Sk8mafia Saturdays: new footage every week instead of one big video every couple of years. They were one of the first companies with a strong social media program, even if they wouldn’t have called it that. It was like doing demos and tours, but in front of countless people online instead of a hundred at a time.
Sk8mafia survived setbacks too, like Blitz Distribution looking like it would shut down in 2014. They teamed up with Just Live (JSLV) and kept going. Sk8mafia4life.com is still up. Smolik isn’t involved anymore, though.
Where is Peter Smolik now?
My favorite part of his is from a TransWorld video in 2007. It had an urban explorer vibe: he wasn’t hitting the same spots as everyone else, skating rocks and doing all kinds of tech stuff on them.
Sponsors change fast, so this was the situation when I made the video. He had his own company, Real Life Pillage, mostly clothing, though he’d shown concept art for decks. He left Sk8mafia for MNC, which you might remember from my Kareem Campbell post, saying something about an artist needing to express his art, and then dropped out of MNC right away. His Instagram also listed Laced, Jake Brown’s clothing brand, which was hard to tell was still around.
He also rode for Independent, Spitfire and, believe it or not, Osiris again. He and Tyrone Olson rejoined Osiris, and there was a lot of talk about remaking their old shoes. I never saw them come out, and when I made the video they weren’t listed on the team anymore.
