Still Awesome

By Jason Ellis and Michael Tully

Picking up the moment his action-packed first autobiography left off, Still Awesome: The Trials and Tribulations of an Egotistical Maniac takes readers on a whole new adventure through the life of outspoken SiriusXM host Jason Ellis.

In the New York Times bestselling I'm Awesome: One Man's Triumphant Quest to Become the Sweetest Dude Ever, readers learned Ellis' inspiring backstory: Surviving a troubled childhood in his native Australia and becoming a professional skateboarder, then moving to America to realize his dreams, first as an athlete and then as a radio personality.

In this highly-anticipated follow-up, Ellis details his subsequent divorce, substance issues, and most importantly, a series of startling realizations about his childhood sexual abuse.

In remarkably frank terms, Ellis addresses the struggles to embrace his sexual identity, nurture a successful relationship with the love of his life, and transcend his many demons.

Still Awesome is a gripping, hilarious, and ultimately inspiring story that is sure to captivate Jason's fans - and create plenty of new ones.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Grey Books
• Release date: May 26, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393187790

Jason Ellis

Jason Ellis lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Katie, his two children, three dogs, three cats, and a pet dragon. He is the author of two other books, the New York Times bestseller I’m Awesome: One Man’s Triumphant Quest to Become the Sweetest Dude Ever and the follow-up, The Awesome Guide to Life: Get Fit, Get Laid, Get Your Sh*t Together. He is the host of SiriusXM’s The Jason Ellis Show and co-host of the High and Dry podcast.

Book preview

LEGAL SHIT

This is the part where I cover my ass.

First off, I am not a doctor. I am a retired professional skateboarder who talks on the radio for a living. Any advice in this book is my opinion and might well be completely wrong.

In other words: This book is written as a source of information only. The information contained in this book is based solely on my personal experience and observations of others and should by no means be considered a substitute for the advice, decision or judgment of the reader’s physician or other professional adviser. My publisher and I expressly disclaim responsibility for any adverse effects arising from the use or application of the information contained herein.

Furthermore, legally I have to tell you that I have changed the names of some individuals and the identifying features, including physical descriptions and occupations, of other individuals in order to preserve their anonymity. The dialogue has been re-created to the best of my recollection, which can vary given the circumstances of the moment.

All of the stories and quotes in this book are the way I remember them...not necessarily the way they actually happened. I am punchy as fuck. Also, I have changed details about some people in the book so no one gets embarrassed and no one gets angry and sues me.

But for the record, the story about me getting a standing ovation at an adult movie theater was not altered at all. That shit was real, and it was fucking awesome.

CHAPTER 1

Ladies and gentlemen. After submission by guillotine choke...

I smiled. I shook my head a little, too, in disbelief. I’d heard those words so many times when I was watching fights on TV. But it was crazy to be hearing them in person, about myself.

Sal Masekela dug deep for his best ring announcer voice and continued. ...at two minutes 21 seconds, in the second round! In his professional fighting debut, the winner...Jason ‘Young Wing’ Ellis!

The referee raised my hand. This ref was a legit dude. I’d seen him work real fights on TV. I was standing beside him and the guy I had just choked out in a legitimate cage on the floor of a legitimate venue, in front of a huge crowd. This was the real deal—or as close to the real deal as a guy like me had any business being. It was official. After months of training and suffering and an insane weight cut, I had won my first pro MMA fight. This was the moment the MMA fan inside of me, the little kid, had been waiting for.

When you’re training at the gym, everyone tells you to visualize your fight. All the combinations you’re going to throw. I’m gonna fake with this to set the guy up for that. That kind of stuff.

But they also tell you to visualize getting your hand raised. I did all of my training exactly the way the guys in my camp had told me to, so I had done that, too.

Right, I told myself as soon as the ref grabbed onto my wrist. This is the part where I should think about the thing I told myself I would think about.

I looked up at the ceiling of The Grove in Anaheim. I thought, Oh fuck, that’s a pretty high roof. There was one of those huge metal fans up there, spinning around. I guess I hadn’t looked up there until then. That place was massive.

But I was also thinking about my dad. I knew I would be. That was the plan.

He hadn’t been gone for that long.

I did it. I wanted him to see this.

I amped out hard on that for a second.

A couple years later, when I was back in Australia, Gregsy, my skate buddy from back in the lean years, brought that up. You were thinking about your dad in there, weren’t you? It’s crazy that he knew exactly where my mind was going during that moment. Gregsy can be spot on sometimes, when he’s not shit-faced.

With all the spotlights shining in your face, you can’t really see the crowd when you’re inside the cage. But now that the house lights had come up, I could see my old friend Colin McKay and some other people from skateboarding. There were a lot of them there. It was Ryan Sheckler’s event, for his charity. They were all freaking out.

Greg Lutzka, one of the top five street skaters in the world at that point, was pumped for me. He was like, Dude, you won on behalf of skateboarding!

If you think about it, I guess that means that if I had gotten knocked out, that would have meant skateboarding got its ass kicked because of me, too. Good thing I didn’t realize I had that weight on my shoulders until afterward. I was shitting myself enough as it was.

Chad Reed grabbed my back on the way out of the cage. If you’re reading this book, I probably don’t have to explain who Chad Reed is. But just in case: Chad Reed is the greatest Australasian motocross rider of all time. He’s a really lovable guy and over the years me being a fanboy of his has taken on a life of its own on my radio show. We’ve made an annual holiday for him and we write theme songs in his honor.

I didn’t know he was there. It wasn’t like I was out there mingling and hobnobbing before the fight. Not even close. Everyone else might have believed I had transformed myself into a stone-cold killing machine, but by the time it was my turn to make my entrance, I was regretting ever taking the fight in the first place.

You fucking mad cunt! Chad said.

That’s hilarious, I thought. Chad Reed thinks I’m tough now.

I don’t think my own corner was quite as impressed with my accomplishments as the non-MMA people in the crowd. King Mo was happy for me. Mayhem Miller was too. He loved me. But I think he also needed to remind me that compared to a real fighter I was fucking pathetic. You can see it in his face in the pictures we took after I won. It was a bit of a joke to him. And when you compare what I did to what guys like him and Mo have put themselves through? That’s fair enough. I was a little bit of a tourist in that world compared to the killers they’ve gone up against.

I know my trainer, Ryan Parsons, was proud of what I had done. Right after the fight, he was like, You know, you could have more fights now. (And that was true. A couple weeks later, I even

got a legit offer to keep fighting. A three-fight deal in Canada.)

Andrea, my wife at the time, nipped that in the bud. Oh, that’s not gonna happen, she said.

And that was that. I was informed by my wife that I would be retiring from MMA with a perfect 1-0 record.

I know Andrea was happy for me. She was definitely happy I was leaving the arena on my feet and not in the back of the ambulance. Going in, everyone knew that was a real possibility. But mostly by that point in the night she was just ready to get back to the hotel. I don’t blame her. It was a long card of fights, and to this day I would not describe Andrea as a hardcore MMA enthusiast. Plus, she was very pregnant at the time with our son, Tiger.

Andrea had made all kinds of sacrifices for me to be able to train as much as I did leading up to the fight, and she had to live with me as I went through a brutal weight cut. And now, just like my long journey to fight night was over, in a way, so was hers. She was done.

I got my gym bag from the dressing room, received a delightful bag of cookies from a radio show listener known as the Cookie Lady, and Andrea and I made our way toward the door.

Somewhere along the way I caught wind of an afterparty Ryan Sheckler was throwing. You should go, people told me. You should sit at Ryan’s table. I realized I was kind of the man of the hour.

As humongous as Sheckler still is now, at that point, he was truly a force to be reckoned with. I think he still had his MTV show. And Anaheim was his backyard. At that time and in that neck of the woods, he was the P. Diddy of skateboarding. He was P. Sheckler. Chances were this party would be going off.

And in a roundabout way, Ryan was the reason I was fighting in the first place. I was with my trainer Kit Cope at the Supercross and we ran into Sheckler. Ryan mentioned this MMA event he had coming up for his charity, Sheckler Foundation. Kit was already the main event.

Ryan was like, You should fight, Ellis!

And Kit was like, You could totally fight, Ellis!

And I was like, Yeah! I could totally fight!

And just like that I was having a pro fight. That wasn’t my plan. I didn’t have a plan. I was just filling the void of not being a skater anymore, and of not being on cocaine.

There was no way in hell my pregnant wife was going to be hitting the club for the afterparty. And I wasn’t entirely shocked when she informed me that I wasn’t going either.

Most married people who are reading this would understand. Anyone who’s ever had a pregnant wife would definitely understand. Jason had had his fun and now Jason’s night was over.

But that doesn’t mean I didn’t try.

I argued with her in the car on the way back to the hotel. I worked on her in the elevator. I worked on her in the hallway on the way to the room, and then in the room, too.

At first, I tried to be pleasant. Come on, baby. I won the fight! All my friends are going! Everyone’s gonna be there! She told me she didn’t want to be alone in the hotel room. I moved on to more bullshit angles. It’s kind of weird for me to win the fight and not show up, I argued. It’s almost disrespectful.

Just go then, she said. But needless to say, she was not sending me with her blessing.

Andrea knew who she was dealing with. I had been sober for a little while at that point, but at the end of the day I’m a loose cannon.

You’re gonna drink, she said. You’re gonna get loose. Who knows what you’ll do with all those people boosting your ego. She had an argument. I had been sheltered from all of that for a few years.

Truthfully, at that point, I wasn’t even thinking about drinking. The only thing I really wanted to put in my body was cheeseburgers. I was starving. I had been starving for weeks leading up to the fight.

But you know what can happen when you go the club and get too excited. I might have downed seven shots in 20 minutes and then been completely obliterated before I even saw food.

There were these three girls at the fight who I knew from my skateboarding days. They were going to be at Sheckler’s party for sure. Those three were around a lot when I was a pro skater and I was the funny guy that everybody knew. Now that I was a radio guy and I got all jacked and had won a cage fight in front of a big crowd, maybe they would want to get reacquainted with me again. Andrea had seen them at the fight, and she knew full well how they rolled.

And then there was a guy from that world who really didn’t like me. He had been at the event and he was going to be at the party, too. If I got drunk and started spracking off because I just won a fight, maybe that guy would beat me up.

Maybe Andrea was saving me, from him or from myself.

Relationships are about compromise. There isn’t a right or wrong answer for every question. I had my angles for why I should go and she had her reasons for why I shouldn’t. In all fairness, maybe she was right. I might have woken up the next morning hungover, mangled, and divorced.

But I doubt it. I was far from the greatest husband, but I’d like to think I could have kept my shit together out of respect for my pregnant wife. I think I could have stuck to Shirley Temples and stayed out of trouble.

I don’t really like nightclubs. It’s always the same thing at those places. If you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all. It’s kind of boring, really, once you’re a grown up. All I really wanted was the entrance. Walking in that door and seeing everyone get psyched for me, because I had won. Like a kingpin.

So, I decided to go.

I put all my shit on and closed the hotel door behind me. I made it all the way to the elevator. The door opened just as my guilty conscience kicked in. I realized I couldn’t do it and turned back.

At least food was still my friend.

I was hungry in a way I have never known before or since. Truthfully, in a way I don’t think most people reading this book can understand.

I had lost 30 pounds getting down to weight for my fight. Nowadays there are ways to cut weight that aren’t really all that bad. But my camp was old school. The old school way was how the guys in my camp did it, so that was how I did it, too.

That was the worst part of training. Not all the hours and all the effort. Not getting hurt all the time. Not balancing the training with a full-time radio show and a family. It was the weight cut.

I would never go on that diet ever again. It changes you. In a way, I would compare the experience of cutting weight to going to jail. If you go to jail for a night, that’s pretty gnarly. That’s a story most people will never forget. If you go to jail for a week, then even more so. But if you go to jail for three months? Six months? That changes who you are. Forever.

Thirty pounds is a lot to lose for anyone. But not all pounds are created equal. When you start cutting down near fight shape, your body starts talking to you. All day long, it’s telling you that what you’re doing is a really bad idea.

Put it this way: If you starve for a day, it’s bad. Your stomach hurts. Your body keeps reminding you that you need to eat. It’s a weird sensation. But try doing that for two days...and then three days...and then keep it up for six weeks. It adds up to something different. You hit these plateaus and you think you’re used to it, but then you find new levels of hunger, over and over again. Food starts to literally look different. It looks kind of weird, actually.

You know how I said I had visualized my fight, and getting my hand raised after? Well, I also spent a lot of time visualizing all the food I was going to eat the minute I was out of that fucking cage. Pizza. Burgers. Milkshakes. Apple pie. I was going to give that room service menu a good going-over.

I went back to the room, took off whatever I was planning to wear to the club, picked up the phone, and called room service. If I wasn’t going to the afterparty, then I was going to have a massive food party, all by myself.

The phone rang.

And rang.

And rang.

It was too late. Room service had ended. I was shit out of luck.

Even though we had just been arguing, Andrea still felt bad for me about that. She knew as well as anyone how hungry I was. She did for a minute, anyway. And then she fell asleep. Carrying a small human in your uterus all day will take a lot out of you, I am told.

All I had was that bag of cookies from the Cookie Lady. They were very good cookies. I will say that. But cookies don’t help much when you’re hungry. You need food.

I turned off the light, got into bed next to Andrea, and looked at the ceiling. The fight was still running through my head. Even though I had won, it didn’t go down the way I had wanted it to. At all. I was thinking about how many mistakes I’d made. I had started off pretty shit. I had done a bunch of dumb things which could have cost me.

I thought about how valuable my corner was, and how much they had helped me. I hadn’t really taken any damage. The other guy kicked me in the leg a couple times. And I got punched in the ear pretty good one time. All in all, though, I had walked out of the cage feeling fine.

But I had kind of panicked in there. I had needed to show up in killer mode from the start, and instead I let my opponent bring the fight to me.

I felt like I had gotten a better understanding of what kind of a man I was. And the verdict wasn’t good.

That’s how the night of my first fight ended. By myself. Laying in the dark. Thinking dark thoughts. Scarfing down cookies.

CHAPTER 2

Around the time I had my first fight, if you were on the outside looking in, my life with Andrea would have seemed like it was moving in the right direction.

Right before that fight we had been living in a house in Temecula, about 60 miles north of San Diego. Being the real estate mastermind that I am, I bought the place when houses were super expensive. Then prices immediately went down. Way down.

It was a brand-new neighborhood. They had built a whole bunch of houses at the same time. A lot of them never sold. There was never anyone in the house next door to us the whole time we were there. I used to ride my dirt bike around that place because it was empty.

For a while there we had a little neighborhood going. At Christmastime there were lights on a bunch of places. But then even some of those houses started emptying out. And then one day my manager informed me that I was going to keep losing all kinds of money if I held on to my house.

He told me, You’re going to foreclose.

I was like, What’s that?

And the next thing I knew we didn’t have a house anymore and Andrea and I moved into a one-bedroom apartment in Santa Monica.

Living space was tight there. My daughter, Devin, slept in the living room. And then when Tiger came along he was in a crib in the bedroom.

The last time we had lived in L.A. was when Devin was little. We were in Hollywood. People who have never spent time in Los Angeles might think Hollywood is a fancy, uppity place, but actually most of it is a giant shithole. One night when we lived there, a guy stuck a gun in my face and stole the bike I had been riding home from the radio show. That bike had been given to me by Mat Hoffman, the greatest BMX rider of all time. The guy who stole the bike probably had no idea who Mat Hoffman even is. I bet he turned around and sold it for 20 bucks.

So for the kids’ sake, instead of Hollywood, this time around we moved right by the beach. That alone made my life way better. Although our old house in Temecula was less than 100 miles from Los Angeles, the traffic to and from the city was hellacious. On a Friday night, I could be looking at a six-hour drive home after the show. Just soul-crushing. So now, when work was over I no longer had to choose between rotting on the freeway for hours or staying in a sketchy hotel room in Koreatown.

From that point of view, things seemed to be looking up.

In some ways those years were hard times. Hard because Andrea and I didn’t have tons of money. Hard because we were all crammed together in that one little spot. Hard because anyone who has ever raised kids knows what a challenge that can be.

But it was also a great time. As tough and as annoying as children are at times, they’re beyond worth it. I love my kids. They’re the best.

Seeing my son for the first time was glorious. I was really hands-on when Tiger was born, straightaway. I was like that with both kids. While Andrea recovered from giving birth, I got right in there, bro-ing down one-on-one. Changing diapers. All that shit. Trying to do as much as I could without getting in the way.

I felt like my life at that point was a mission. Things were looking up professionally, and even if day-to-day life could be frustrating and if Andrea and I didn’t click as well as some other couples seemed to, well, we were on our way to bigger and better things as a family. Remembering that struggle would just make it that much sweeter when we got there. That was the vision I had sold myself on. I was amped up.

But something always felt a