Watch for This Skateboard Phenom in Woodinville

Mitchie Brusco was 3 years old and about 3 feet tall when he first stepped onto a skateboard and started riding back and forth on a tiny wooden half-pipe at a little skateboard shop in the Totem Lake area.

Now at 14, he’s still a regular down-home Kirkland kid. But he’s jetting all over the planet and flying above mega vert-ramps while riding with the best skateboarders in the solar system, in places like Times Square in New York City.

He won that event, by the way, “Air in the Square,” earlier this month with huge skate names like Bob Burnquist and Andy Macdonald.

“It was amazing,” he says. “It’s a lot of fun, traveling and seeing the world. But I mean, I’m just a normal kid. That’s my goal, seeing the world and being a kid.”

I first saw “Little Tricky,” as he came to be known, at that long-gone Totem Lake skate shop called Trickwood, where I’d take my then-skate-punk son to get stuff like decks and trucks--as the boards and wheels are called. Here was this tiny little guy with uncanny balance, totally focused on riding that little pipe, back and forth, back and forth.

“I knew there was something there,” says his mom, Jen Brusco, who now accompanies Mitchie in his world travels--this week he’s in Brazil, where skateboarding is, apparently, the second most popular sport to soccer.

The rest of us knew he was good, especially for being 3, but never imagined he’d go so far. The list of his accomplishments could hang from the highest air he can get--and that’s plenty--to the bottom of the vert ramp.

He’s been on national television about 20 times: Good Morning America, The View, Jimmy Kimmel, etc., etc.

He was the youngest athlete ever to compete in the Gravity Games.

Two months before he buried the wow hammer at Air in the Square, he iced first place in the Tampa Am Vert Contest in Florida, with tricks like his switch backside air.

In the whole world there are 12 to 20 top-level extreme vert skateboarders, and this 14-year-old is one of them.

This is a kid who last year toured Australia with skateboard legend Tony Hawk. Seriously, check out the attached You Tube video of the pair doing simultaneous 720s--double aerial spins--high over a ramp down under.

“Normally when I go out of the country it's with Tony,” he says with absolute nonchalance.

Yet he seems modest and unpretentious, almost embarrassed by his success, and for a 14-year-old, even spiritual. He says skateboarding is not really about competition, it's about expression.

“Some people use drawing, some people use music, and I skateboard,” he explains. “It’s just what I do all the time. It’s never the same beat or the same painting. If you’re down, you go skate it out.”

Back home in his Juanita neighborhood, what he enjoys best is hanging with his buds, walking around, to Juanita High School, Dairy Queen, 7-11.

“I love Kirkland. All my friends are there. There’s nothing I would change.”

The first skate park he ever rode was the tiny, outdated one (circa 1993) at Kirkland’s , and he has fond memories of hanging out there and at the across the street.

When he’s at home now, he usually sharpens his technique at the Skate Barn in Renton, but sometimes he’ll ride at the fairly rockin’ outdoor skate park at Woodinville’s .

That’s were we met him recently, and watching him ride, he seemed indistinguishable from all the other kids on wheels.

“He’s just so humble,” says his mother. “He’s so easy to be with. He takes nothing for granted.”

Mitchie seems like a pretty clean-cut kid, and says one thing he doesn’t like about skateboarding is its image--or more accurately, the perceptions others might have of it.

“Everybody thinks it’s all these rebels, smoking weed, breaking things and getting into trouble. It’s not like that anymore. It might have used to be, but it’s turning into a sport.”

Remember the bumper-sticker that said: "Skateboarding is not a crime!" Says Jen: "They're athletes, and they're intelligent and very artistic. That's what's frustrating."

What skateboarding means to most riders, Mitchie says, is being yourself.

“Skateboarding is about self-motivation. It’s about doing something for yourself. You can do whatever you want, however you want.”

Mitchie is home-schooled through an online program, which fits his busy schedule, and says he plans on graduating high school right along with his friends.

“It’s really beneficial for me,” he says. “Before, I’d go to school, get home, go skate, eat dinner, do homework and then go to bed. This way I have time to hang with my friends.”

Girlfriends? No time. “They just cause problems,” he says, before reflecting for a moment. “Maybe if I met someone cool.”

Foolishly, I ask him what he wants to be when he grows up.

“I want to be a policeman,” he says with mock seriousness, before breaking into a grin. “I just want to skate for the rest of my life. I just want to do it until I can’t.”

But Mitchie, what about college and all that?

“College is to get a normal job and I never want to have a normal job.”

You leave with the feeling that just maybe, he’ll be “Little Tricky” enough to never need one.