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Where did Ben get his nick names ?

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Back in the day when Ben was a rookie skater in the 80's Tim Payne, now owns and runs Team Pain, was one of the judges for amateur contests, nicknamed Ben "Ben10" because he said he always scored 10's.

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After winning his first pro contest as a rookie skateboarding kid at Raging Waters in 1988, Ben Schroeder rode for Dog Town and his Big Ben Clock graphic reads at 10 O'clock . During that contest Ben revolutionized skateboarding then and for many years to come. 

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+ Tailslide

Alley oop Lipslide

Lipslide revert

Alley Oop 50/50 to Fakie

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1989 was one of Ben's best skateboard year traveling the world and 1990 he had a compound fracture in his arm and by the time his arm healed 1991 street skating took over. 

 

1993 at 23 years old Ben's car broke down half way on the way to a skate warehouse.  They waited all night for his car to be fixed and somebody said that his friend had a truck that you all can hop into the back of the pick up bed and head toward the Grateful Dead same direction as the Kennedy Warehouse.  Everyone was asleep in the pickup truck. Ben later learned after he was out of the hospital by a passenger who told him she saw a balloon fly in the air and the driver had a Nitrous oxide tank. But she never disclosed this to the officers. The truck had a head on collision going 60 mph on Blood Alley , the most dangerous HWY in the CA . A person in the other vehicle was killed instantly and Ben was the second worst . Ben flew on the road and was also ran over by another car. Ben was in a coma for 2 weeks then in the ICU for 6 months after. 

 

Ben proved the doctors wrong and was not expected to survive his injuries let alone come in 1st place in his second pro contest win at RVCA in 2006. Ben never surrendered and with rigorous rehabbing his body and mind by skateboarding flat roads on mountain roads and neurology classes at Cal Tech to learn all about rewiring his dendrites (rewire & grow new pathways in the brain - like a tree branch) . 

 

Ben focused on what he loved , creative writing, designing skateparks & eventually was head of the Skate Park Design Division in a Southern California Landscape Architect Firm. 

 

Ben's eccentric brain & leg rehabilitation methods were performing daily tasks switching hands to hold a fork and knife, skate goofy & switch regularly and balancing on a rope with a ilizarov apparatus attached to the tibia bone in his leg from another time years later when he got ran over by a car when a car didn't stop at the stop sign.  Ben was going to lose his leg if his bones didn't connect.  His bones weren't healing and the doctor gave him two weeks for a miracle to happen for them to connect with the ilizarov apparatus.

 

Photo from ESPN. Ben working on stimulating his bones to strengthen and repair with slight pressure while in a bone stretching device.