Most skaters can ollie. Most pro skaters can ollie high. Keith Hufnagel, who passed away last month after a yearslong fight with brain cancer, could levitate. He got twice as high as everyone else, going three times as fast—frequently while bombing a vertigo-inducing San Francisco hill.
Among the under-14 skateboard crowd in San Francisco—my peer group in 1995, when Keith was newly pro for Real Skateboards—there was a lot of speculation about the secret to Keith’s pop. Some thought it was cross-training. Others believed that ankle weights were somehow involved. I had no concrete theories, but figured it was an alchemical byproduct of Keith's East Coast origins. Everyone knew that pizza and bagels were superior in New York; I considered Keith's pop a similar phenomenon—inexplicable yet undeniable.
Keith was a Manhattan guy by birth, but he helped lead the vanguard of East Coasters who would redefine the West Coast skate scene in the mid-’90s. The new crop of skaters was technical, powerful, and, above all, stylish. They charged every ledge, bump, and handrail in their path, making it all look easy.
Keith’s stamina in the matter was legendary. Our mutual friend Aaron Meza told me about a skate session in San Francisco in the mid-’90s where Keith attempted to grind the side of a waist-high metal dumpster for hours. “He was jumping as high as he could, off flat ground. It got to the point where the rest of us were tired just from sitting there.” Keith took deep breaths between attempts, refusing to leave until he’d landed it, which he eventually did. “It was the first time I’d seen someone try something that big, for that long,” Meza remembers.
Yet, to attribute Keith’s abilities to sheer athleticism is to sell him short. Beyond a supernatural ability to blast bigger than everyone else, Keith also had the analytical mind of a natural-born problem-solver. I remember skating a steep hip with Keith and having trouble sticking the landing. Keith suggested I shift my angle of approach, so that I landed across the top of the incline, rather than aiming myself straight down, into the steepest part of it. The suggestion unlocked everything for me. While I had been struggling to physically intuit my way through the situation, Keith approached it like a physics problem.
Keith’s inimitable talents secured him a roster of top sponsors, including Real Skateboards, Spitfire, DC Shoes, and Stüssy, with whom he traveled the world. It was during these tours, particularly to Japan and London, that he observed a growing global enthusiasm for sneakers and street style-influenced clothing lines—this was around the turn of the decade, long before “streetwear” was a word, much less a money-minting category unto itself.
As Keith began looking toward a life beyond professional skateboarding, it became clear that the logical next step was to open a sneaker store. He and his wife at the time, Anne Freeman, pooled $30,000 — their combined life savings— and secured a storefront at 808 Sutter Street, in San Francisco. Rent was $2,200, plus a few months security, and the build-out cost another $12,000. Keith and Anne did most of the work themselves, painting walls, installing display shelves, and when the work became too unwieldy for them, calling friends to pitch in. (I lived up the street at the time, and remember a late night call to see if I would help Keith carry in the heavy glass display cases, as Anne and their chihuahua Bones supervised.) The remaining $10,000 went toward inventory.
Everything went smoothly until a few nights before the store’s official opening, when Keith and Anne realized that they had done nothing with regards to marketing. No website. No PR team. No media outreach. “We looked at each other with panic,” Anne told me. Then came a literal knock at the door. “It was 11 at night, we were by ourselves, on the edge of the Tenderloin, the windows completely covered with butcher’s paper, so we couldn’t see out. We weren’t sure we should answer it.”
They did. Outside stood a trio of Japanese tourists, clutching a Japanese-language magazine.
“Are you lost?” Anne asked. The men shook their heads, and pointed to the building address.
“This… HUF?” they asked.
The couple’s despair vanished. “As soon as the door closed, we were like, ‘Holy shit!’, just jumping around,” Anne said. Even though they'd never promoted it, word had gotten out, and the enthusiasm was growing.
It got better: Fifty people lined up on opening day. The store sold out its entire stock in eight hours. Suddenly they had a business.
The three-way intersection of skateboarding and sneakers and fashion seems obvious in 2020, but 18 years ago, few people could envision the potential. Even fewer were willing to bet their life savings on it. Anne credits Keith’s conviction to his Manhattan upbringing. From a young age, Keith was given tremendous freedom to navigate the city, alone. With this freedom also came tremendous encouragement and support. While his parents were accomplished professionals, instilling the importance of education in their sons, they also encouraged Keith’s skating at a time when skateboarding was viewed as dangerously anti-establishment—an activity for rebels, punks, and losers. The family apartment in Peter Cooper Village often hosted sleepovers involving dozens of energetic pre-teen skaters. Keith’s dad was cool with all of it, with one condition: that Keith also do a school sport, in addition to his skating. Ever the dutiful son, Keith ran cross country before grabbing his board and meeting up with his friends. For those wondering where the big ollies came from, I think we have our answer.
By the early aughts, the HUF brand had grown to five stores and launched a full-fledged apparel line. While it may have looked like Keith was laying the groundwork for a streetwear empire, according to those that worked with him, nothing could be farther from the truth. The reality, Anne said, was that “there was no grand strategy to anything. Not becoming a pro skater, not starting a business, not building a global brand. It was just hard work and a positive attitude.”
Which isn’t to say there weren’t missteps. Keith’s enthusiasm for one collaboration caused some problems when one leather jacket wound up costing $900 to produce. “There was no way anyone was buying them for $2500, or whatever, so we ended up selling them for $600,” head designer Hanni El Khatib told me. When Anne discovered that they were selling the jackets at a loss, she panicked. “But then Lupe Fiasco came in and bought one,” El Khatib said, and the jackets blew up. Mos Def became a fan, along with Dave Chappelle, Robin Williams, Guru, and Bun B. “I used to call Keith and Hanni the perfect morons,” Anne said with a laugh. “Back then, this stuff made no sense on paper, but nowadays we’d just call that a marketing budget.”
HUF’s most iconic item was another near debacle. “Everything we did back then was some kind of inside joke,” El Khatib says. “We thought it would be funny to do novelty socks, like some bad Haight Street merch.” So they printed up a bunch of weed-print socks. But a decision to make them in four colors meant the minimum order ran high, and when the highly anticipated drop finally happened, the socks...didn’t sell. After a few months languishing on shelves, the team sent them down to the Los Angeles store and marketed them as an “LA exclusive.” Only nobody in LA wanted the socks, either. They were boxed up and stored in the rafters.
Around that time, a crew of rowdy young skaters were running wild up and down Fairfax Avenue. They used to badger Anne for free products. Climbing up to retrieve the unwanted inventory, she made it rain socks on the teenagers. One of them was Tyler, the Creator. Soon Lil Wayne was also repping. After years of being utterly unsellable, the store couldn’t keep the weed socks in stock.
With the economic crash of 2008, the HUF stores fell on tough times, and the company quickly racked up several hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. Keith and Anne applied for loans, reached out to friends, pitched investors in Silicon Valley, but no lifeline materialized. Still, Keith refused to give up. Eventually, he found an investor in Jai Baek, a Korean factory owner and fan of the brand. Baek provided enough capital to keep the apparel line going, even if the five stores had to close. “Keith used to tell me ‘Don’t worry. We’ll bring the stores back. It will get bad, and then it will get good again.’” Anne recalls. “And he was right.”
Within a few years, HUF was booming again, and after several years of major growth, the partners decided it was time to sell. The process stretched out for over a year, with negotiations taking place at ridiculously long conference tables, surrounded by lawyers, accountants, and all kinds of suits. “We couldn’t stop laughing on the elevator rides to and from these meetings,” Anne said. “There was never any ambition or desire to grow HUF that big, it’s just that every time an opportunity arrived, Keith rose to the challenge. The best part about it, too, was that he did it with kindness.”
Keith’s kindness was legendary. It radiated from him, whether he was hooking up talented young skaters with shirts and gear, or hiring my 16 year-old, utterly-sneaker-illiterate sister to work in the Sutter store (and never getting mad when she updated her LiveJournal on the clock, or repeatedly broke the cash register).
In Keith’s mind, there was room at the table for everyone. It wasn’t enough that he succeeded; he wanted others to triumph, too. It was a rare attitude then. It’s rarer now.
Alex Klein is a New York City-based writer.