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SALT LAKE CITY — On sunny winter afternoons at a Salt Lake-area skate park, Austin Namba’s skateboarding buddy turns heads.
That’s because Namba’s friend, his best friend, is a bulldog named Tofu.
“Yeah, when he was, like, 11 weeks old, we gave him a skateboard, he just got right on it,” said Namba, a sign painter and skateboarder himself.
Now Tofu’s board, a Steve Douglas New Deal model with a Dalmatian on the deck, is well-chewed. Tofu thinks of little else besides riding it.
“He just lives to skate. Every day he sits there looking at me. If I can’t take him skating, I feel bad,” Namba said. “If he doesn’t get the skate for, like, two days he gives me this really dirty look like, ‘what you doing?’”
Tofu rides his board, chews his board, rides down stairs and, at the skatepark, even “drops in” bowls.
“He kinda teaches me how to be, like, stoked to be alive, because it doesn’t take much to make him happy. You take him outside and you get him a little exercise he’s stoked,” Namba said. “He kinda gives you a sense of what life is really about. It’s not about, like, impressing everybody. It’s more about just enjoying life.”
To see more videos of Tofu skateboarding, visit his Instagram page @tofuthebulldog.