A Portrait on jamie thomas
Video by Jordan Lovelis. Photography by Ryan Allan. Presented by OTIS.
The skate legend opens up in our new film.
From the outside looking in, it would appear as though Jamie Thomas always had his shit together. Notoriously disciplined and driven, few have left an indelible mark in skateboarding like the Chief. As a pro skater, filmer, editor, brand builder, entrepreneur, and designer, Jamie has built a legacy on being meticulous, laser focused, and detail-oriented that hasn’t been matched since his meteoric rise to the top. If you grew up skating in the ’90s or 2000s, there’s a very solid chance that Jamie was your favorite skater and Zero was your favorite brand. Hell, even Graham Coxon, guitarist of Blur, wrote a song called “Jamie Thomas” at the height of their collective fame.
Now approaching 50 with a new perspective on balance and life, Jamie reflects on his decades of experience, acknowledging that his obsessiveness was actually a self-destructive coping mechanism—a fatal flaw preventing him from being the well rounded family man he’s become today. That’s isn’t to say he’s not still completely obsessed with everything he does. It’s just that he’s learned to compartmentalize his time in order to live a more balanced and fulfilled life.
Don’t think you’ll see him slow down anytime soon, though. As he says, “I don’t really think about retirement. I don’t want to just sit somewhere. That sounds like purgatory. I just want to keep learning and growing.” Without further ado, we’re proud to present A Portrait on Jamie Thomas, a short film about Jamie in 2022. The good, the bad, the Chief.
“My plan was very basic. Move to California, make a life in skateboarding. Growing up in Alabama, I never could have imagined… I mean, I tried to imagine what it would be like to be a pro skateboarder, but I don’t know if I was able to fathom the reality of it.”
“Looking back, I was very regimented, really young. Like 12 or 13, where people are playing on their skateboards, I’m skating to school because I feel like I’m training for something and I don’t even know what I’m training for… Thinking that if I spent more time on my board, I would get better, and that would give me a better chance of making a life in skateboarding. So even though I wasn’t thinking about this long term goal, I was always working on it. But I never thought of it as discipline. I thought of it as dedication. I’m dedicated to what I want to do. I’m dedicated to the goals I have. I’m dedicated to executing whatever it is I’m dreaming about in a certain way. And I didn’t really have discipline when I was young. It was all based on my desire. And I think coming back from injuries was how I discovered being disciplined in a consistent manner, outside of doing something that you love to do. The more disciplined I got, the more free I felt and I thought that was so interesting. I always felt the opposite and I always fought discipline because of that.
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