Bam Margera is skating again. The 46-year-old former MTV star and skateboard icon was shown doing nollies and boardslides in a 31-second video, a sharp turn for a man a doctor once told would never be able to skate again because of alcohol-related damage to his knees.
For Margera, who was a star of Viva La Bam and Jackass, the clip is the latest sign that he is trying to climb back from a life that has been rough since the late 2000s. He has been in rehab and has also been to the ICU, after nearly two decades marked by personal loss, repeated rock bottom moments and a close brush with an early grave before 50.
The video does not erase what came before it. It does, though, show something that had been written off: Margera back on a board and moving with the kind of control that defined his rise. Austin Perry summed up the reaction in the clip, saying, “Keep climbing, it’s good to have you back!”
That matters because skateboarding was never just a hobby for Margera. It was the thing that made him famous, and it was also the thing he was told he had lost for good. Now he has done the one thing that undercut that warning, landing tricks again after years in which his health and personal life seemed to be pulling in the opposite direction.
The bigger question is not whether he can skate one more time. It is whether this return marks a lasting recovery for a man whose worst periods have often arrived just as he seemed closest to reclaiming himself. For now, the board is under his feet again, and that is the clearest fact in the story.