Pro skateboarder Rodney Mullen is legendary for inventing the kickflip, and there is a book that explains the genesis of the trick that changed street skating forever.

The Mutt: How to Skateboard and Not Kill Yourself is Mullen’s autobiography written with Sean Mortimer. He writes about how he had to overcome childhood struggles growing up in Gainesville, Florida to get to where he is today.

Mullen says how he grew up as an underdog and how he never fit in with other kids and even his own family. He writes how his dad pushed him to be the perfect baseball-playing son and how skateboarding provided another pathway to greatness.

With skating, Mullen writes, “there were no coaches standing over your back. It is just you. You are your own coach, and you are the only one pushing yourself to get better.”

Mullen says that he progressed in skateboarding by entering more freestyle skate competitions. As he got older, he started to understand the physics behind skateboarding. Mullen mastered fundamental street skating tricks like the flat ground ollie, a basic trick when skaters use their boards to jump.

Once Mullen landed his first ollie, he writes that everything in street skating started clicking into place for him. He used his experience and developed more technical tricks like the first kickflip, which is where a skater kicks his board to flip it during an ollie.

This led Mullen to create more advanced tricks like the varial kickflip and the heelflip. In the book he also talks about some of his most famous tricks that he developed like the darkslide, or sliding on a curb with the board upside down.

The Mutt is a great book to read if you are a skateboarder or you are into learning about historical figures from Florida. Pick up this book from Amazon or your local library.