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Photo: Ant
First let’s start with your name and the
name of your company?
Michael Niemann, Cockfight Skateboards.
Congrats on the 10 years making boards
and what are your thoughts on making it 10
years in the business?
(Laughter) There was never any thought on making
it any certain amount of time. I mean, it’s pretty
awesome that we’re still around after all this time for
sure.
When you started, how far did you think
you would make it with the brand?
Never even gave it a thought. We just did it because
we wanted to do it.
Why the name Cockfight?
It’s kind of a long story, but we had a list of names.
And we really wanted a name that made people
uncomfortable, or cringe, just because everything
was so homogenized at the time. It was the early
2000, and skateboarding was in a weird time. So we
had a list of names we were going through, me and
my partner Kevin. And we were like, “What are we
going to call it?” and go through the list and one of
us would hate it and the other would think it was
alright. So finally one day I was at the flea market
over off of Airline, Airline and West Road, or Airline
and Canino. It’s a gnarly flea market. Well anyways,
there’s all these shops or whatever you want to call
them with all this cockfight gear and dudes with
cockfight hats and shirts, selling the stuff for actual
cockfighting at this flea market. I was just blown
away that they were so brazen that they had that
gear on. I was like, that’s it. That’s what we’re going
to call it. So, it really doesn’t have no other meaning
other than I couldn’t believe they had that out there
and we were looking for a name so we just went with
it. It Kind of goes with the industry and there’s kind
of a little sword fight between all the companies. So I
don’t know, it kind of just fit at the time.
What made you start your own business of
making boards?
Around that same time nobody, you know 3 or 4
brands maybe, made boards that I wanted to ride.
And, that bummed me out, always the same one,
same graphic. I was like we should make our own
board and that’s pretty much how it started. We just
talk to each other about it and skated together a lot…
we’re just like… let’s do it and stop talking about it.