The thirty-five-year-old pro skateboarder Justin Bishop stands at the lip of a skate ramp, loosely gripping a slim metal cane. He curls a muscular arm, adorned with red-and-black tattoos, and cups a hand around his ear to listen as his companion completes the run ahead of him. He hears the scrape of his friend’s board on the quarter-pipe. “Woo!” he exclaims. “A little grind-y.”
Bishop, who grew up in Las Vegas, began skateboarding at age ten, after witnessing his neighbor ollie up a curb and thinking that it was the coolest thing he’d ever seen. In Leo Pfeifer’s new documentary about him, Bishop describes practicing the same run over and over for a month before his first tournament, where he won first place. In the years following that competition, his skateboarding career was marked by a sense of urgency. When he was eight, Bishop was diagnosed with a rare degenerative eye disease called retinitis pigmentosa. His doctors told him that he would eventually go blind, though probably not until middle age. But, by twenty, his vision had deteriorated so much that he was forced to quit his job at a skate shop and stop driving. Still, he skated every day, squinting at a blurry half-pipe and filling in the gaps in his vision with memory. For five years, he kept at it, in what he calls “a mad dash to max out your talent before you lose your sight,” until one night, in 2011, when he could no longer see his feet. Over the course of the next week, his vision deteriorated so much that all he could see were shadows and blurs.
Pfeifer focusses on Bishop’s emotional journey as the skateboarder loses his sight and relearns how to live life. He used Hollywood-grade equipment to give his film the look and feel of a feature, rather than a “topic” film about disability. The camera zeroes in on Bishop’s face as he recalls that even daily tasks felt impossible at first. “I would just fail: defrost my food and not fully cook it, get on the wrong bus,” he says. After a year, he started viewing every day as an opportunity to fail, like he did when he learned his first trick. “I failed, I failed, I failed, I landed it. I used the microwave correctly. I got to the mailbox,” he says. Pfeifer captures some of Bishop’s achievements, showing him cutting up onions, sitting by a fire he made, and watching a movie with his wife, Carol.
In one of the film’s most poignant scenes, Bishop reluctantly returns to the skate park, at the request of a friend. He eases down a ramp, gliding along sightlessly before tripping and slamming hard onto the ground. But he surprises himself by laughing and smiling through his tears. “It was the best feeling ever,” he says. “It was four years since I took a fall.”
A decade after losing his sight, Bishop is skating competitively again, sponsored by Zappos, and working to make his sport part of the Paralympics. He recently skated in a Ruffles commercial narrated by LeBron James. He retaught himself tricks—including a kick flip that he’d learned when he could see—often using a small beeping device that signals when he’s near an object. Bishop says his only regret is not realizing sooner that he could adapt. “When you’re blind, people protect you,” he told me. “I missed being reckless. I missed controlling my fate and what I get to do.”
