Board Games with Mathias Ringstrom

Sep 19 2006 / Los Angeles, CA

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Encinitas, California has evolved from it’s roots in surf culture into a skateboarding melting pot. A good chunk of the world’s best vertical skateboarders have migrated to this sunny skateboarding mecca, and now most of the best live there. Mathias Ringstrom made the move from Sweden over ten years ago, and has been there ever since. We already know that Mathias is an amazing skateboarder, but how did he get here, and what’s this we hear about board games?

JS: What prompted you to move from Sweden to the US?

MR: I was 17 when I quit school, packed my bags, and moved over here by myself to skateboard. Skateboarding, especially vert skating, was pretty much dead in Europe at the time. I was 17, so that must have been ’95. I felt like I’d done pretty much everything I could in Europe, so the next step was to come over here to the US. My goal when I came here was just to skate with all the pros, and skate all the ramps here. Southern Califonia, and especially Encinitas, was and is the capital of vert skating. You had the riders and you had the ramps. My goal was just to come over here and get a chance to ride with them. I never thought I was actually going to become one of them.

JS: Since you’ve left has the scene in Sweden evolved at all?

MR: Well, skateboarding in general has grown so much. Europe has its own scene now. They’ve built all their own brands and there are always contests and demos… it’s huge over there, especially in the last 10 years. With technology, you don’t have to live here in the States anymore. When I started you had to live here. The magazines, the coverage, the companies — to do anything you had to be here. Now you can get a good camera and you can film anywhere. You can basically get your work done anywhere. But for vert skating, Encinitas is probably the best place in the world. We have the YMCA, we’ve got Clairmont, we’ve got Tony’s [Hawk] ramp, we’ve got the DC ramp, we’ve got Bob’s [Burnquist] ramp, Monster Energy Drink are building a ramp, and then on top of that you have all the best pro vert skaters that live right here. There’s no better place in the world than right here for vert. There’s always a good session here. Always. 

JS: So who would we expect to show up for an average, every day session?

MR: Jake Brown, Tas Pappas, Pierre Luc Gagnon, Bucky Lasek, Buster Halterman, Colin Mckay, Rune Glifberg…the list goes on. It’s everyone.

JS: So if you take the start list from the finals at any given contest, that’s pretty much the group that’s skating together every day?

JS: We’ve talked in the past about some of your other interests outside skateboarding, like woodworking. How did you get into that?

MR:[Laughs] That’s actually a simple answer. I’m cheap. When I bought my first house, I had some people come by to give me bids for stuff, and I was thinking ‘Are you out of your mind? $5000 for that? I can do this on my own.’ I bought some tools and started building some stuff. I figured, if I had that tool I could build something else, and this tool I could build something else, and all of a sudden I had a complete wood shop. I have a two car garage, and I got to park my car in it once when I moved in, but now it’s a shop.

JS: What kind of stuff do you build out there?

MR: Mostly I’ve been doing furniture like entertainment centers and stuff for the house. 

JS: And outside of that, you have a company that makes a Swedish board game?

Yeah, we started working on that last year. It's called Pentago. The toy and game industry is the last industry I ever thought I would end up in. Basically the way it started is that I went to Sweden for Christmas, My mom gave me this game for Christmas, and I was like ‘Come on mom, I’m almost 30.’ I started playing it with my brothers, and I brought it home and started playing it with Tony Magnussen. After a while we looked at each other and were like, ‘We have to sell this game, it’s such a great game.’ It has the potential to become one of the classic board games. So we got in touch with the Swedish people, and they actually ended up being friends with some other friends of ours. We made a deal with them where we did all the patent work for them, and they gave us the rights to the game for North America in return. We’ve been working on it ever since. Right now we have seven or eight awards for the game. We won Game of the Year in Sweden, France, Finland, and it won the MENSA game award, along with other awards. It’s going really good, we open a couple new accounts every day here.

JS: So who does the back office work on that kind of stuff like sales? Are you involved in that?

MR: Yeah, Me and Tony do everything. Between the two of us we do everything. Tony does the accounting, and I do a lot of sales. 

JS: So before you go out skating you’re out peddling board games to toy shops?

MR: They treat us well as skateboarders. They take care of us. The events are unique. We we're in front of the Eiffel Tower… we went to Moscow. It’s fun to go to different places. For years and years we would go to the same places over and over again for the same contests. They are fun contests. 

JS: Looking to the San Diego stop next weekend, do you think that since So Cal is so Action Sports oriented, is that going to be a good draw?

MR: It’s always been hard to get a good crowd in Southern California just because on any given day you can go down to the skatepark and see most of the pros skate anyway. So we’ll see how it goes.

JS: At the other events you had the hometown heroes, like Jean Postec in France, Juerguen in Germany… In San Diego pretty much everyone is the hometown hero — heck even Jean lives there now — so who should we be looking out for?

MR: Everyone, there’s going to be a really good field. Pretty much everyone will be there. I think Pierre Luc is going to try to skate the contest. He’s just coming back from his knee surgery, and he’s really trying to be back for this contest. He’s a bit rusty from a few months off, but we’ll see how he does.

Mathias will miss the Action Sports US Championships this coming weekend in San Diego for an event in Zurich, but you can catch him on the rest of the tour, including at the LG Action Sports World Championships, taking place in October in Dallas, TX. In the meantime, check out Mathias’ skating buddies in our coverage of the US Championships, this weekend on lat34.