BEING shot in both eyes and completely blinded didn’t stop Zion Ricks-Gaines from skateboarding. It made him want to do it even more. “I still want to go pro, I still want to accomplish being a professional skateboarder,” the 19-year-old said as he readied a kickflip at a skatepark in San Francisco. And now he wants to share that enthusiasm with everyone he meets. “I want to start more skate after-school programs for students. I feel like I wouldn’t have really looked in that direction if I had my sight.” Ricks-Gaines’s life was derailed outside a bar late last year when a man who had been drinking began shooting at him and his friends as they made their way home. He was hit twice. One bullet destroyed his right eye; the other smashed the socket around his left, puncturing the eyeball and leaving it deflated and withered. There was a long stretch in the hospital and he was fitted for a prosthetic eye. Not content with a regular iris and pupil, he opted instead for an eye with the logo of his favorite skate brand, Spitfire, a grinning head of flames. He pops the prosthetic in and out of his socket on demand. Very soon he was back out at the skatepark, doing what he had been doing since he was 12. “When I hopped on my skateboard, I felt like I had something to connect to my old life,” he said. “I felt a weight off my shoulders.” “When I approach a new obstacle, I usually feel it out with my cane, or ask friends what they see, how it’s set up, what should I try to look out for. “And I just work my way up and find what I’m most comfortable with.” It helps that with seven years of skating, a lot of what his body needs to do is muscle memory, he said. (SD-Agencies) | 