Lincoln's Venom prepares for move to San Diego

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BY MICAH MERTES / Lincoln Journal Star

He’s one of the few professional skateboarders to come out of Nebraska.

And Lincoln’s Steve Andel is, as far as we know, the ONLY guy who’s ever held a garage sale in front of Oso Burrito.

All day Sunday, 33-year-old Andel, known as Venom to skaters, stood in front of the downtown restaurant and tried to get rid of his stuff: skateboards, skate wheels, skate DVDs, skate magazines, skate shirts, skate stickers, good CDs to listen to while skating and a skate helmet with a sticker of David Lee Roth on the back.

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Steve Andel, a.k.a. Venom, works his garage sale in front of Oso Burrito on Sunday. Andel, a 33-year-old professional skateboarder, is getting ready to move to San Diego. (Micah Mertes)

Steve Andel, a.k.a. Venom, works his garage sale in front of Oso Burrito on Sunday. Andel, a 33-year-old professional skateboarder, is getting ready to move to San Diego. (Micah Mertes)

“I’ll be here ’til dark or ’til I starve,” he said. “I’m not leaving with any of this stuff.”

Andel is leaving Lincoln and looking to lighten his load of nearly all his possessions before moving to San Diego in December.

A lifelong Nebraskan, Andel’s skateboarding career stretches back two decades to when he was a teenager growing up in Schuyler. He moved to Lincoln when he was 18. In his early 20s, he started getting sponsorships and was eventually deemed pro.

“I do it because I love it,” he said of skating. “I’ve traveled all over doing it, some for contests but mostly just for fun. In the last 20 years I’ve been skating, I haven’t went two weeks without doing it.”

Andel has been flipping pizza dough for about half that long. He’s worked at Yia Yia’s for nine years, and he got the prime garage sale location because Yia Yia’s and Oso Burrito are owned by the same man.

 So why San Diego?

“I love Nebraska, and I like Lincoln,” he said. “But at this point in my life it’s just kind of stagnant and stale. And this summer, I decided I just needed a change of scenery.”

No job yet, but he’s got a friend he’s staying with. Details like a source of income and a place to permanently stay ... that stuff will work itself out eventually.

One thing Andel knows for certain: He’ll be skating a lot more.

Though he’s learned to deal with the harsh extremes of Nebraska weather, Andel is stoked about San Diego’s consistent year-round temps. Plus, as he said, there will be “more people to skate with, and more places to skate.”

But Andel is certainly popular in Lincoln. Andel knew more than three-quarters of the people who passed by his garage sale Sunday.

“It’s going to be weird to go from knowing everybody to knowing only a handful,” he said. “But that’s what I’m looking forward to, the newness. I want to spread whatever it is I have here to there.”

Reach Micah Mertes at 473-7395 or mmertes@journalstar.com.