Marx Masters didn’t have the best of childhoods.
As a teenager he spent time in and out of foster care, and was homeless for a while. He’d been in more than his fair share of violent street brawls.
But for the last nine years, the 25-year-old has had something better to spend his time on – the urban extreme sport of parkour.
“I used to get in a fair bit of trouble when I was younger,” he told The Feed.
The Islander Australian was charged with violent assault when he was 20.
“I thought I was going to end up just like everybody else in my neighborhood, there wasn’t much hope,” he said.
That changed when he saw some parkour videos online.
“I used to have a youth mentor who would take me around to different places, and one day he showed me parkour on YouTube and I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “It was like a huge green light saying yes.”
He said that parkour has helped him turn a corner after some rough times as a teenager.
“Now that I’ve been doing parkour, I sort of realised that that’s because I wasn’t really interested in anything I didn’t really have anything to do,” he said.
He says he’s also found a welcoming home.
“The general atmosphere within the parkour community is just positive just in general. Everybody is accepting of one and other, age race gender doesn’t matter, everybody is welcome,” he told The Feed.
Masters went on to co-found Crew 42 in Sydney with internationally renown parkour superstar Dominic Di Tomasso. The six-member group has turned the hobby into a profession, performing internationally with gigs about once a month.
"We have a strong team of six and we do, professional work quite often - probably once a month at this stage - and we’re training together twice a week,” Di Tomasso told The Feed.
“We’ve done a few different things – like a car show performance in China,” he said.
Dominic Di Tomasso’s background was quite different to Masters’.
"I had a full-time background in figure skating. I also did ballet and dance,” he said.
Dominic Di Tomasso came to parkour from a background in ice skating. Source: Supplied
But he discovered Parkour in the exact same way as his crew mate.
“I was always doing sports and channeling my energy into sports with all these guidelines and restrictions, and the one day on the internet I saw a parkour video,” he said. “I was like, people can do this legitimately they just run and jump they don’t need guidelines or rules.”
“It’s something that can really teach people to overcome obstacles mentally or physically and to be more confident in themselves,” Di Tomasso said.
It’s definitely helped Masters.
“Everybody is dealt cards, it’s just like whether you just get on with it or not,” he said. “Parkour is my life, I can’t see my life without it at all.”
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