The skateboard accident that caused Action Bronson to lose his voice for three days
Rapper, chef, TV presenter, Action Bronson is a man of many talents, but one thing he decidedly is not is a skateboarder.
Reflecting upon his lack of skateboarding prowess during a conversation with Thrasher magazine, Bronson recalled that his mother once bought him a board, but he wasn’t up to the task of mastering it. On the contrary, it went very badly wrong.
Bronson was on the board when, as can happen to novices, he fell off, but this wasn’t a typical fall that left him bruised and scraped. He ended up veering into the middle of the street, and a passing car smashed into him.
“That was,” he said, “the last time I got on the motherfucker”.
Bronson did later jump on a different board than the one his mother had gotten him, but this next experience also went badly wrong. He was at the Alchemist’s house in LA, where he hopped onto a smaller board than a typical skateboard. For a while, he felt comfortable on it.
As he skated around, he felt like he was “getting kind of nice” on the thing, but, eventually, he “hit a bump”. This was disastrous, as the board slipped from underneath his feet. In his own words, Bronson “flipped into the air” and landed on his back, like he “had been crucified”.
The impact had been so severe that he claimed to have lost his voice as a consequence. “I must have bruised my lung or something crazy,” he said of the fall, “because I couldn’t talk for three fucking days after that”.
The Alchemist, despite the severity of the fall, was unsympathetic. He “laughed” at Bronson, advising him, simply, not to use the board again. “He said my fat ass shouldn’t be on that motherfucking little board,” Bronson recalled.
The rapper and chef looked back on the fall as “a learning experience” that taught him, unequivocally, that he was “not meant to skateboard”. For all his skills in other fields, this was a practice that remained “a mystery” to him.