Shredding It Up Blacksburg Style with Skateboarder Donald Packard Fancher

You won’t find him traveling across the globe or see his pictures plastered across pages of magazines, but anybody who pays attention to skateboarding knows about Packy Fancher.  As Sergie Ventura’s protégé, Packy’s old-school approach and flow on vert ramps and in pools has earned him the respect of many professionals today.  Rambunctious, aggressive, and driven, the guy radiates with energy on and off the board.  What sets him apart from many up and coming skaters today, though, is that Packy has decided to pursue a college degree, majoring in history.  If anyone wants to see what a professional skater can do, look for him shredding the pool at the Blacksburg Skateboard Park while he’s still here.

Q: Who are your biggest influences skating?
Fancher:  I would have to say my buddy Sergie Ventura.  He was pro in the ‘80s, and he was Christian Hosoi’s protégé.  Christian Hosoi was a big ‘80s skater and he’s from the Virginia Beach area, kind of where I’m from.  He taught me a bunch of tricks and stuff on vert.

Q: Where are you from exactly?
Fancher:  I was born in D.C., but I grew up outside of Virginia Beach in a town called Smithfield – ‘the ham capital of the world.’  Smells like ham.

Q: What are your biggest fears when it comes to skating?
Fancher:  Probably just falling in front of girls, haha.  You know you’re going to fall, and you’re going to get hurt, that’s inevitable, but try not to fall in front of girls.

Q: You did the loop at Reedsport 22 consecutive times. Where do you find the audacity to do that 22 times?
Fancher:  This is going to sound, haha, um money.  The first time I did the loop was on a road trip going across country when I was 19 and we were traveling through Oregon and I saw this park on the internet and I was looking at it like I might want to do it and I got there and I was not feeling it.  Then the local kids told me that if you get it on film and send it to the skate park builders you get $500.  So I was like, ‘Alright, I’ll pad up and do it because I’m broke on a road trip.’  They were full of it; there was no money in it.

Q: Really? But you came back and did it again later that summer?
Fancher:  Yeah, I came back later that summer and they had a contest for 1,500 bucks for whoever does it and the year before no one did it and this year three guys made it first try – me, the guy who built it, and this guy Screech.  Screech got it 19 times; and the other guy got it 32.  It was like 72 or 73 loops in a 30 minute time period.

Q: Did you fall on your 23rd attempt?
Fancher:  No, if you bailed you could keep going as long as you made your first one, so I think I bailed one and it was towards the end, after 20 minutes had passed.

Q: How do you bail on a loop?
Fancher:  Well, the force, the centripetal force keeps you glued to the wall so you kinda don’t really know when you’re upside down except for the graffiti on top of the pipe.  But the way it keeps you pressed against the wall, I was wearing knee pads, so I would like kinda be leaning too far forward and bail so I would be knee sliding upside down to the side.

Q: So you’re not falling directly down on your head?
Q: Fancher:  No, you don’t.  I mean, I saw someone fall on their face.  Like I went back last summer and this kid got half way up and was bailing and got to the top and fell straight on his head and like scorpioned.  He kicked himself in the back of the head and broke his jaw and I think he cracked a vertebra, but, yeah, he walked out of the bowl too.  I thought I saw him die.  He walked out.

Q: You saw this past X-Games when Jake Brown fell from 45 feet up.  What’d you think about that?
Fancher:  Yeah, yeah, I saw it after it happened.  I was on the road, but I heard about it.  I heard there was a bad slam and finally saw it and it was pretty gnarly.  But I was pretty impressed with it because another guy did that, Pat Duffy, he was like a mid ‘90s street skater who’s big into rails and he made the super jump, but he’s not much of a vert skater and so he did the same thing.  But he didn’t do that 180 that you do right before you hit, so he just fell down and shattered both his legs.  Just screwed himself up pretty bad.  But I was pretty impressed watching that because you can see him (Jake Brown) still thinking.  I heard him talking about it, he was just telling himself, ‘Not your face mate, not your face.’  He’s Australian so… he just turned around so I think the three-point hit, with the heels, the butt, and the head kind of saved him instead of just crashing directly.  It was pretty intense.  It was pretty impressive though.

Q: What’s your favorite thing to do when you’re not skating?
Fancher:  Probably trying to think of stuff that is appropriate for a school paper.  How can I do this?  Pretty much, we’ll just say appreciate really good beer.  I like to be a beer snob in my spare time.

Q: What’s your favorite beer?
Fancher:  Depends.  I usually like going to pint night and getting Purple Haze or Road Dog.  I like stout beer, oatmeal stout.  It’s like pitch black, super thick.  Oh, I know what it is, okay, you got to write this down.  The D.C. Chop House in Washington, D.C., they brew their own beer and they make their own oatmeal stout, and it is [awesome].  Definitely my favorite beer, for sure.

Q: What motivates you to keep skating and progressing?
Fancher:  Just that I’ve been kind of lucky.  I’ve been at the right place at the right time so everyone and everything seems to work out so I just want to keep on.  I got this special opportunity, so I just want to make the most of it.  People always ask me if I want to be a pro or something, and it’s more about being able to skate a bunch of things at no cost.

Q: What would you say is your biggest accomplishment in skateboarding?
Fancher:  Well, probably the loop.  That is probably the most impressive, but I don’t know, I guess everyday there’s new little conquests.  Anytime I learn something new, I’m excited. The loop is the scariest thing I’ve ever done but carving the loop is easier skill wise, and it was scarier than doing a kickflip-nose-manual, but I can’t kickflip-nose-manual.  So, probably the loop is the biggest thing, but learning technical tricks for me gets me more stoked, it’s more rewarding.

Q: What’s your favorite part in a skate movie?
Fancher:  Probably, either Tony T (Trujillo) in In Bloom, where he was skating to Motley Crue, that was good, and Danny Way in the DC Video, with all the super jump footage.  Have you seen that?

Q: Yeah.
Fancher:  Heelflip-boardslide on a rainbow rail.

Q: He does a 270 lipslide too.
Fancher:  Yeah yeah, it’s ridiculous.  After a 20-foot gap, it’s insane.  That’s like snowboard gaps, same size or bigger.  Pretty insane.

Q: What is the best and worst thing about skateboarding today?
Fancher:  The best thing is that it’s still growing and anybody can do it.  It helps to have your friends skate but you don’t need them there.  You can skate by yourself; all you need is your skateboard and your environment.  So that’s the best thing, you don’t need a lot of extra stuff to skate.  The worst thing, I feel like 99.9 percent of skateboarding is marketing.  Well it’s good and bad because it brings a lot of money to the sport, more people doing it so they build more skate parks so there are more things to skate now because it is such a big deal.  But it sucks because, I don’t know, not to sound like whatever you want to call it, but it’s just not a pure I guess.  I’m probably not as pure as I was when I started skating either, haha.

Q: You did these contest last summer in the huge bowls and ramps and you wouldn’t wear any pads, where all the other skaters were padded up, why did you decide not to wear pads?
Fancher:  The Oregon Trifecta.  The bowl contest, it was just a big bowl, a big full pipe, and another big bowl on the other side, and everything 10-foot plus.  I went there a couple times before the contest just to get used to the stuff and I was wearing pads…I guess another really good thing I’m good at in skating is falling.  Just getting out of it without getting hurt, I can bail pretty much any trick, haha.

Q: That’s a really good skill to have.
Fancher:  It kind of is.  I figured out a way.  If you just wear jeans and its pretty smooth concrete and its pretty big so you have two-foot of vert drop and then a ten foot radius of transition to fall, so unless you do what Jake Brown did in the X-Games, most likely you’re just going to slide out or run out.  But it sucks to run it out, haha, running down a 12 foot wall.  Trying to do a hand plant and running out of that, yeah.  But if you wear jeans, I try to do a baseball slide, that’s what I call it It’s the new knee slide.  And you have magazines like Thrasher, they won’t even print a photo if someone has pads or a helmet.  You have to be pad-less, and its kind of the pressure in skateboarding in general.  Plus I thought I would get a few extra points not wearing pads.  I was the highest ranking skater in that contest not wearing pads.

Q: What’s your favorite trick?
Fancher:  Probably eggplant.  Yeah, it’s kind of a flashy crowd pleaser trick.  Eggplant you have to scoop into it and plant with your front hand and the way you do it, it’s easy to tweak out and I got my eggplants from Henry Gutierrez, he’s got the sickest ones.  Henry Gutierrez, another huge influence, he’s from around Virginia Beach too.

Q: What would you be doing if you weren’t skating?
Fancher:  I don’t know.  I started skating because we moved to the country, Smithfield, and I always played sports when I was a kid.  I’m real competitive, so I’d probably be a jock.  Not a super a-hole but a jock in a fun way. 

Q: Do you excel in any other sports besides skating?
Fancher:  As a punishment in tenth grade I had to play a season of football at my little redneck high school. 

Q: Your parents forced you to play football?
Fancher:  Yeah, for vandalizing the neighborhood or something.  I used to listen to too much punk rock.  So I had to play a season of football and I ended up starting at defensive end towards the end of the season over kids that joked on me for not playing football.  That was big.

Q: So you’re pretty athletic, you could probably pick up any sport.
Fancher:  Maybe.  It’s more that I hustle, not that I have technical finesse skills in things.  I’m willing to hustle.  As long as you can hustle and keep up, you won’t be totally left in the dust.

Q: What’s the craziest thing you’ve done off the board?
Fancher:  Off the board, hmm, that’s not drug or drinking related, probably just jumping off something really tall into water.  Actually the craziest thing I’ve ever done was drive 10,000 miles across this country.  Big loop from Virginia to Georgia to Texas, all the way up the west coast and then back the northern part of the country.  It was a crazy four weeks.

Q: Why do you charge more bowls and ramps than street?
Fancher:  I guess it’s because it took me two years to learn how to kickflip.  I just couldn’t get my foot to go straight out.  So I just got frustrated doing flip tricks and stuff so every time I went to the park my favorite thing to do was a front-side transfer off a quarter pipe into a bank.  Just transfer from ramp to ramp, that was the most fun thing in the world.  I just really like skating skate parks.  Good old Franklin Skate Park.

Q: How do you feel about the new Blacksburg park?
Fancher:  I think it’s pretty good for a small town in southwest Virginia.  They did a good job with it. 

Q: You think they could have done better?
Fancher:  Maybe a little bit.  Okay, I’m going to go off on a Wally Holiday tangent.  Wally Holiday is the worst skate park builder in the universe.  The problem with that guy is that, he’s like this southern California bro, brah, dude, and he knows how to talk to the city council really good and he’ll get the bid.  I mean he does build them good, the skate park won’t fall apart, its built solid.  It’s just like, I think he built everything too mellow, and he used to skate in the 70’s so he doesn’t know anything about street skating or any modern type of skating.  And all his parks look the same, you go to Arlington, Va., Waldorf, Md., Wilmington N.C., and all these Wally Holiday parks he uses the same silvery coping that I don’t like. 

Q: Too mellow? I mean there’s a 6-and 8-foot bowl here, that’s too mellow?
Fancher:  Yeah, if it was just a little tighter and with a little more vert it would be insane because you could do all these airs and handplants easily.  But with not all the vert there, you have to muscle everything more.  If the vert was there you could let the ramp do the work, then its easier.  Then you got parks, like, all the parks in Oregon built by Grindline and Dreamline and Airspeed and all those guys are kind of rough around the edges, like wearing hoodie sweatshirts and flannel to city council meetings, you know, unshaven and probably smell like beer.  But they build the best skate parks and it’s because they skate them as they build them.  So they’ll build a section, skate it, see how it works, and then fit it and adjust the blueprints to make it work best.  They do a really sick job.