Jeff Phillips (skateboarder)

Jeff Phillips was an American professional skateboarder, born on 11 June 1963 and died on 25 December 1993. He grew up in Dallas, Texas, and started skateboarding at ten, when his grandmother Annice gave him a Shark skateboard with steel wheels in 1973, and he and his father Charles crafted skateboards at home from scraps of birch and plywood. As a teenager he frequented Wizard Skateboard Park in Garland and then Skate Time at Bachman Lake in Dallas. He won his first contest as a sponsored amateur in July 1982 at the Kona and Variflex Summer Nationals, placed third at the opening NSA Pro-Am event in Houston in March 1986, and later that year won the NSA Pro-Am final in Anaheim. He also appeared in the film Radical Moves about Expo 1986 in Vancouver.