Elder Skatesman
Tony Hawk, Person, Business.
It is so easy to dissociate the various incarnations of Tony Hawk that it’s become a recurring bit. He runs into someone at a restaurant or in an airport who knows what “Tony Hawk” is in theory but has trouble accepting that it’s something that the person in front of them, the actual Tony Hawk, could be. This apparently happens all the time.
Fame has a tendency to distort its subjects, fragment them into exaggerated images of something less than whole humans. There’s the lanky teenager silhouetted against the sky at an angle gravity barely allows, board in orbit around him. The figurative video game character turned literal one. The veteran, medal-collecting fixture made to stand-in for a whole sport. There’s also the very, very rich guy who owns Birdhouse skateboards, 900 Films, and has at various times controlled pieces of DocuSign, surveillance horrors Nest and Ring (now part of Google and Amazon respectively), the perfectly early aughts-named Boom Boom HuckJam tour, Blue Bottle Coffee, and Black Plague brewing. And there’s the advocate, who drives around throwing swag to kids and appears genuinely interested in providing access to the thing that’s brought him so much.
That these identities can not exist separately from the still-skating fifty-two-year-old who slogs through TSA checkpoints and shops in stores like most everyone else can be hard for people to resolve. The thinking goes that athletes are not supposed to age, at least not this way, and icons are not supposed to be unassuming or complicated. (Is it even legal for adults to skateboard?) One of the tragedies of this construction is that it obscures the things about Tony Hawk that have made him so fascinating in later years.
On social media, between sponsorship synergies and highlights of tricks that would be improbable for all but a statistically insignificant fraction of everyone who has ever lived, Hawk has taken to posting about these interactions where people do not recognize him. It’s the kind of endearing behavior that helps fuel all this dissonance.
How “The Birdman” was converted from person into concept goes back to June 27, 1999, where a Tony Hawk who is not worth $100 million dollars is standing atop a halfpipe. By this time he is already the world’s greatest vert skater, co-owner of a more-modest Birdhouse, and, in a post-Jordan world, certainly a brand. But he had not yet reached that level of business unto himself. By skateboarding standards he is also, in his words, “already old.” Thirty-one. He had gone pro at fourteen, been in a Mountain Dew commercial in 1986, and bought his own home before he was out of high school. He has retired and unretired from competition, survived the lows when the sport’s popularity had ebbed and the money had dried up and is now riding its most recent rise in prominence. This was due in no small part to the X Games, which is why Hawk was in San Francisco, battering himself in front of a rapt crowd.
In the proceeding half-hour of the Best Trick competition, Hawk landed an impressive varial 720 after only a few attempts. Having nailed the only thing he had planned, he started making speculative efforts at a 900. Two and a half rotations. It was thought to be stretching the realm of possibility on a skateboard. Hawk did his first 720 on an oversized ramp in Stockholm in 1985, and was taking shots at adding another half turn within the decade. Danny Way, Tas Pappas, Rob “Sluggo” Boyce, and others had been contemplating the trick for years, but it had never been verifiably landed.
Even for those physically capable, it was difficult to fully commit to that much spin. On one earnest effort in 1996, Hawk came close before splaying out on a flat bottom and cracking a rib. He figures his attempts over a decade numbered in the hundreds but admitted in a 20th anniversary video, “Really, you can only try it so many times because it takes so much out of you. The impact of the spin and the force that you hit with when you fall, it’s like getting in a car wreck every time.” From his first few exploratory runs, it appeared that at Pier 30 that day he might at least have the rotations in him. He had already completed his primary event in vert, and if he ended-up in the hospital he was at least in his home state. He decided to go for it.
The 900 is a hyperbolic example, but this is the nature of peak skateboarding. At any level, skating involves repetition, iteration, and massive amounts of failure. Trying, falling down, trying again, falling down more, and maybe, eventually, making it work. If you are Tony Hawk, this happens faster than it does for other people, but the pattern holds, regardless. On a platform rolling on unforgiving surfaces, at high speeds and great heights, that process entails bodily damage. At the limits of the cumulative body of work of every skater ever, it can be brutal.
Hawk was improving each run, but this meant smashing into the ramp over and over again. “It was starting to hurt to watch,” recalled Sal Masekela. Announcer Dave Duncan yelled endless variations of “NINE! NINE-HUNDRED!” while Hawk obstinately pulled himself off the ground, marched back up the steps, and kept trying until he ran out of time. History would not be made within the bounds of the competition, but he popped to his feet again, sweaty and breathing visibly, and stomped up the ramp anyway.
Had anyone been concerned with the bylaws, the contest might have been Colin McKay’s. X Games organizer Dan Bostick told Jenkem that the winner was to be decided by text message fan vote, but that version of the vote never happened. The X Games of that era grasped at a “rules are for squares in suits” ethos that felt more than a little bit corny on a heavily-corporatized ESPN broadcast, but in this case it paid off. The only deliberative body was whoever decided not to cut the TV feed, but the collective concurrence was “Fuck it, let Tony keep trying.” The four other competitors and thousands in the crowd cheered Hawk on in an effort to convert goodwill into centrifugal force. After yet another near miss, McKay, who’d by now had time to change his outfit, could be heard muttering, hand over his heart like Fred Sanford, “That’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”
The consensus is that it took Hawk eleven tries (though there is recut footage from a Saturday morning show called RAD that counted only ten). A recording of the last attempt from an alternate angle, further back than the television feed and in slow motion, makes it seem like he’s spinning for a million years. When he comes down, you can watch the raw physics crunch his 6’3” frame into a squat on the transition and his legs wobble just barely absorbing the force. A beat after he landed his mouth opened, dumbfounded, and it stayed that way until he was mobbed by his friends and family. He kissed his wife and his baby and said “That’s it, I quit… All I needed.” He called it the best day of his life.
In two months, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater would be released for the Sony Playstation. A last-minute change was made to add the 900 to the game. Since, there have been something like 20 more Tony Hawk games on at least as many platforms, including a recent well-received remaster of Pro Skater 1 + 2. The number that gets thrown around is $1.4 billion in sales. The same year Hawk formed 900 Films, who now operate Youtube’s RIDE Channel and whose work, based on their contact page, includes “brand building with Kraft, Sony, MINI, Nike, Adobe, and more.” In 2002, Activision sponsored the inaugural aforementioned Boom Boom HuckJam tour. Hawk did a Bagel Bites commercial that he wrote on Facebook, “was the tipping point for being called a ‘sell out’ at the time.”
His take on these matters is, to paraphrase, that he convinced wealthy companies to pay him and the people he cares about a lot of money to do cool skateboarding stuff. That all this was effective promotion for the much-maligned sport and that it has helped his foundation build hundreds of public skateparks. And that he legitimately likes Bagel Bites. According to an interview with Jenkem, Bagel Bites built him a giant ramp in downtown L.A. that he and Bucky Lasek got personal use out of. He recalls that Jeep once paid for a shoot of him doing tricks in the desert, and then years later, a different Jeep advertising regime bought the footage back from him for a new ad. By 2003 he was in a Super Bowl commercial for Doritos. He talked them into shooting a real slide down a stair rail. He values creative control and as much authenticity as possible in the skating that ends up on the screen.
In 2008 he bought out his founding partner, Per Welinder, to take full ownership of Birdhouse. For a time, their sponsored riders included his son, Riley.
Hawk stopped competing but just kept on skating. When Sports Illustrated contacted him for a “Where Are They Now?”-styled report, his reaction was, “I’m still here. I never went anywhere.” In 2016, at forty-eight years old, he decided to try to squeeze out one last 900. It had taken five more years for someone not named Tony Hawk, Giorgio Zattoni, to land the trick, and while a list of others have managed since, particularly on larger ramps, it’s still nothing like routine.
The footage on Hawk’s RIDE channel is a marvel. “So, I’m going to try a 900 today,” he says and shrugs. “Because I feel like I can. I never thought I’d be doing this at my age, when I was young. I really didn’t think that was a possibility. But I’m still going and… keep going ‘till the wheels fall off, I guess.” Most skate videos are the result of countless bails and slams left on the cutting room floor, leaving an impression of effortlessness. Competition routines are whittled down to the techniques that can be executed consistently after years of practice. This work is of another genre entirely, Hawk’s speciality in this era, and something different even than the build up to his original 900.
What’s on display now is a middle-aged man turning his particular genius to the problem of wringing magic out of a body that does not operate like it once did. He doesn’t naturally generate the height he used to and his spins are slower, too. He makes adjustments. His legs aren’t as good at dispersing the shocks. All the seams are on full display. He hits the ground a lot and very hard, sometimes at frightening angles. In the quiet of an empty warehouse the impacts echo horribly. One of the thumps is his helmet. He needs a minute.
And then he wipes the sweat from his face on his shirt sleeve and drops in another time. Once again, the rotations extend on forever. He grits out the final half-turn as his wheels hit and somehow he stays upright, dragging his hand like he did on that day seventeen years before. There’s a smattering of claps and he spikes his helmet in triumph. He hugs the son, Spencer, who was there as an infant when he succeeded for the first time, and who is now a young man witnessing the last. They drive off in a Mini, which is conspicuously featured throughout.
It’s a truly exceptional accomplishment and yet still deeply human, a fusion of the professional and the personal. This is impeccably Tony Hawk stuff.
In the video that accompanies the SI interview, Hawk says, “My job description, firstly, is father,” and, “My goals are to provide for my family for the long term, in doing this or whatever is associated with this.” It’s an admirable mindset, and explains his embrace of all the investments and skating-adjacent promotion. But it’s hard to parse exactly what that means for someone a decimal place or two past the point where likely even his children’s children should ever need to worry about money again.
Securing a living, being fairly compensated for your work by the people trying to exploit it, pursuing the things you love, providing the next generation with a chance to do the same: these can all entail making compromises to claw back resources from the entities that have hoarded them. The pizza bagel barons, or what-have-you. If you get lucky enough, though, and the wheels keep turning in your favor, there’s no clear line that warns you when you’ve become one of those entities yourself.
Hawk has made a whole series of videos revisiting, and in some cases retiring, his earlier tricks. They’re all engrossing. He introduces his “50 tricks at Age 50”, a reel where he recreates moves he’s patented throughout his career, with stark reality. “I realized very quickly that they’re not as easy as they used to be. Some of these, this will be the last time that I do them,” he says holding up a bloodied finger. “But that’s okay, we had a good run.” The aftermath of the trick positioned as 49th, a 720, sends him flying from the ramp and caroming off a pillar. He’s relatively okay. “One more,” Hawk says, rising up off the concrete. “Let’s try a new one. I can still move.”
In January of this year, now 52, Hawk took another shot at that 720. He wouldn’t fully commit to it being his last, but he’s open about the fact that time is not in his favor. Recently dislocated fingers made grabbing his board taxing. After a long sequence of crashes, he stomps defiantly into the landing, yells, and chucks his board across the pipe. It’s powerfully cathartic. In a good blog, Defector’s Kelsey McKinney wrote, “I have watched this video like 10 times since yesterday, and each time I tear up when he throws the board. He’s so proud of himself! He should be! This rules!” He announced he would auction off that board to raise money for The Skatepark Project.
Most recently, in March, Hawk set down his final ollie 540. Unlike the 900 and 720, there’s no grab involved; it requires keeping the board in place through technical wizardry. The video begins with another montage of punishing falls. He skids off the side of the ramp and wipes out a camera, quipping, “Sorry.” When he finally lands it he breaks down crying. “I’m a little sad,” he says. “I’ve never had much finality to anything, but that definitely is the last one I’ll ever do. Fuck it, I’m happy I made it. Thanks guys for hanging in there with me.”
When he uploaded the footage on Twitter, he shared it along with clips of his first ever ollie 540, thirty-two years earlier. The account posting the video of a much younger Hawk is called Ethernity Chain, “a digital platform that produces authenticated #NFTs.” If this sounds like something that a Winklevoss might be involved with, it is because there are Winklevosses involved in this. Bitcoin.com bills it as “a way for stars to support philanthropic causes while participating in events that are close to their hearts.”
NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are the cryptocurrency-esque blockchain technology being used for things like cryptoart and NBA Top Shot highlights. The reasons to find the trend cynical and foreboding are voluminous, but the environmental concerns alone should give anyone pause. The reasons why people are excited about it, as Dan McQuade wrote, “can more or less be summed up as To Make Money From It.” On Instagram, Hawk added that filmer Chris Gregson’s angle of his last ollie 540 will be offered as an NFT through Ethernity Chain.
For the overwhelming majority of people, an idea of Tony Hawk is all there is to work with. Celebrity operates on superficial, mediated impressions. A replay of a contest on late night television. A revealing interview. A sequence of photos of an intricate trick or an appearance in a commercial for a product we use. The proximal association with a good time playing a video game with a friend. But we can, at minimum, account for the things we do know in good faith, and make an effort to tether them to a lived experience. This does not necessarily mean recognizing Tony Hawk if you meet him in person, but accepting that he’s not an animated character or impervious to the passage of time, that he might still enjoy the thing he’s dedicated so much of his life to seems like a healthy start. With that comes reconciling that he’s a magnate now.
This approach can be less than convenient. “Tony Hawk has a similar energy to Guy Fieri for me, in that even though I know better than to trust famous and powerful men who are often later revealed to have done terrible things, I like him,” McKinney wrote. “I would be sad if he turned out to be bad.” I don’t know Tony Hawk, but I like my approximation of him, too, which makes his more industrialist elements even harder to square. Tying messy abstractions up into reductive narratives with tidy little bows is satisfying, but it doesn’t do justice to people. In Hawk’s case, it would require forgoing the candor that has made his late-model exploits so riveting in the first place. For all the thrills that Tony Hawk has provided, the most interesting one might be the chance to watch him be human.
