Tony Hawk Breaks Down His Skateboarding Career

Skateboarding has given me the best sense

of self and validation, of living beyond anything

I ever imagined, a way to support a family,

a way to see the world,

and a way to appreciate diversity, like nothing else.

[upbeat music]

Hi, I'm Tony Hawk and this is the timeline of my career

as a skateboarder.

I got my first skateboard from my older brother

and it was a hand-me-down when I was about 10 years old.

He was skating in our alleyway

and I picked up his old board and I said, Can I try this?

And he said, Yeah, sure.

I proceeded to go down the alley

and run into the fence and get splinters in my fingers.

He just let me keep that board after that.

Within the first year of that,

I got to go to the skate park.

I saw people flying out

of swimming pools and flying over bowls.

I was like, I wanna do that, I wanna fly.

I basically gave up all the other sports

in my life to do that.

The first time I ever got hurt it was pretty bad.

I ended up getting to the top of the pool,

but hanging up on the coping and falling to the flat.

That's what people told me because I was knocked unconscious

and I had knocked my front teeth out.

I think that in that moment, especially as I was going

to the hospital, I realized that I wanna keep doing it.

I don't know, I can't explain it any better.

A lot of times that becomes the sign

that people should quit.

In that moment, I knew that I wasn't gonna quit,

even though it was against my maybe better judgment

in terms of my own health and safety

The Bones Brigade in the early 80s

was considered the most elite skateboard team.

It was curated by Stacy Peralta

who founded Powell-Peralta Skateboards

and Bones was the name of their wheels.

I got chosen as the youngest member when I was about 12.

He saw something in my motivation

that maybe I didn't even realize.

I was always trying to evolve my skating.

I was always trying to make it better,

even when I was getting hurt along the way.

I got ridiculed for my style when I was a kid,

mostly because I was so small

and I didn't look like I was smooth and flowing

like a surfer.

And that was what was considered cool at the time.

I didn't have the strength

or the the flow to make that happen.

So, I just kind of it in my own style.

I started learning really avant-guard moves right

at the coping level of the pools.

And people thought that I was like a circus freak.

They used to call me a circus skater

because I would do tricks or I'd spin my board with my hand,

or I would spin different directions with my body.

It was hard because it made this sort of outcast

in an already outcast sport.

Skateboarding wasn't very big.

So, that set me apart in the first place

from say my schoolmates, my peers, and kids my age,

and then I'm a weirdo in the skate scene.

So, I'm just like on this island of isolation.

As I rose through the ranks of the pro circuit

when I turned 14, 15, I started to see people pick up

on some of the techniques and tricks I was creating.

I think that was probably the most validating

is when I saw people that I read about in magazines

or hat I was inspired by, learning my tricks.

Like that was something that I never expected.

By the time I was 16, I was ranked number one in the world.

And that went on for about 10 years after that.

In 1992, skateboarding had taken a big dive in popularity

and my income was dropping rapidly every month

because it was based on royalties.

I was a consultant on a few commercials and movie sets.

I had a very primitive video editing system

and so I edited videos for a few different companies,

including ironically, a video game company.

My wife at the time was a manicurist.

And so, we would use her cash tips for food money.

And so, I ate a lot of Taco Bell.

I ate a lot of Top Ramen.

And a lot of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

I decided to start my own skate company

which seems crazy at the time, but I had already lived

through two cycles of skating's popularity.

I basically took what equity I had in my house

and put it into a skateboard company and started over

and became the team manager, the vice president,

the marketing director, the video producer.

At that point, I was just hoping

for Birdhouse to be in the black.

It was hard.

So, we kept decreasing our salaries.

I had a partner, Per Welinder, who was also

an ex pro skater and he and I, every time,

every few months would have another meeting

about how we have to cut expenses

and probably take less of a salary.

And we were just barely scraping by.

So, what I hoped for was to be a self-sustaining business

and that I could provide

for the skaters who also devoted their time

and maybe gave up other lucrative contracts

to be part of our team.

When the X-Games first started

it was called the Extreme Games in 1995.

And it was just a random collection of fringe sports.

So, whatever they decided wasn't mainstream was extreme.

It was weird.

It was rock climbing, and it was bungee jumping,

and it was eco surfing.

There was skateboarding, and BMX, and inline skating,

which they had parallels because

we all skated the same type of terrain.

But all the other ones were just kind of throwing whatever

at the wall and see what sticks.

Obviously I was excited to do well at the inaugural X-Games,

but for me in general,

it was just another competition through the year.

And there was so many at the time.

The next year is when I realized how much more

the X-Games resonate to the general populace.

And I started getting stopped

in public around that time, getting recognized.

And I used to only ever get recognized by skaters.

My dad was an advocate for skating early on.

So, he helped to organize a sanctioning body

for skate competitions in the 80s.

He got cancer in the early 90s

and actually passed away shortly after the first X-Games.

So, for him to see skateboarding on ESPN

was kind of his big accolade, for sure.

I do remember him being very excited

that there was a skate contest

on ESPN and I was featured in it.

He'd be blown away with what's happened since then.

When the '99 X-Games happened,

they decided to include a best trick event.

And that was more of a novelty that they had done

in previous years where after the main competition

they let skaters try whatever they want

for about 20 minutes.

It's chaos, everyone's dropping in

and they're trying one thing at a time.

It's just everyone falling endlessly,

but maybe a few people make their dream trick

in that timeframe

and those are the ones who get the awards.

A 900 is basically a two and a half somersault in midair.

So think of it as a dive,

you go off a diving board and you go one and a half

and then one more around and go in face first basically.

Through the years, I kept coming back to it

and trying it, trying to get a little bit closer.

And sometime around 1995 or '96, I really was chasing it

and ended up getting very close landing on the ramp

on my skateboard,

but leaning too far forward and falling into

the bottom of the ramp, breaking my rib.

And I kind of hung it up after that because I felt

like I had given it my all and gotten hurt,

paid the price, and then came the '99 X-Games.

The emcee, Dave Duncan said, Hey, let's see that 900.

'cause he didn't realize that I sort of stopped trying it.

I thought, sure, why not?

I don't know what else to do.

I'll try a few.

The intention was not to make it.

It was more here is the next stage

of what I would like to do.

And after about my third try,

I started realizing that I had a consistent spin.

The ramp was well built,

probably better than anything we've ridden prior to that.

And so I could keep my speed up

and I started to spot my landing.

And when you start spotting your landing,

especially on a spinning trick, that's half the battle.

And then when I didn't get hurt, I realized like, oh,

I'm definitely doing this.

And I'm either they're gonna make this

or you're gonna take me off in ambulance.

Those were the only two outcomes

of that night that I was going to accept.

I had no intention of winning the event

or that it was going to be this big moment

on ESPN or otherwise.

I just wanted to make it.

When I finally landed it, I kind of didn't believe it.

I was riding across the ramp

and once I got to the other side

and I looked up and I saw all my peers rushing to me,

that's when I realized it happened.

I walked into the best trick event

having no intention of a 900.

I know there's plenty of folklore that says otherwise,

but that was absolutely the case.

I was always a video gamer as a kid.

When I had the opportunity to work

on a game with skating in it, I went all in.

I worked on it with Neversoft

and Activision for about a year and a half prior

to the release.

I just wanted to make a game

that skaters would enjoy playing.

That was the goal.

I was very involved in the making of the game.

I would get disks sent to me every week.

And then I'd put 'em on a,

play 'em on a modified PlayStation

and send them immediate feedback about tricks,

or locations, or skaters, or names,

just to keep it authentic.

But, I was very involved in picking all the other skaters

and the music.

I had no idea

that it would resonate way beyond just skateboarding.

Once the first game was released

it had such stellar reviews

that they immediately signed on to do a second one.

And once we got going on the second one,

I realized that we had a franchise

because the second one was even better.

I think what made Tony Hawk's Pro Skater

such a big success was that it was fun to play

even if you didn't skate.

There was an energy to the game that people identified with.

It was very much in line with do it yourself ethos

and people started to appreciate the aesthetics

of skating and the idea of skating,

that it's sort of it's on your own terms.

And it actually inspired a lot,

a new generation of kids to pick up skateboards.

The idea for Boom Boom Huck Jam

came from doing a lot of exhibitions

in the early 2000s, skate exhibitions

that always felt like side shows to a bigger event.

We would put up a halfpipe

and it was usually in the parking lot

of say the concert, or the football game, or the festival.

And I felt like we had come far enough

and we were getting enough of a crowd

just for that part of it

that we could justify doing our own tour.

I decided to build a whole ramp system

that fit into an arena floor setting,

invite the best skateboarders, BMX riders

and motocross riders, and have live music

as an element to it as well and make it a show.

'Cauxe the only time that people usually saw our sports

on that level in an arena was through competition.

And it felt like we could create a show

that was more choreographed and something

that we were more intermingled,

where we're all riding together

and nothing like that had ever been done.

And it was risky for sure.

I remember writing a check literally

for a million dollars to build the ramp setup,

not knowing if we could even book venues at that point.

For those who have ever done any sort of concert tours,

our show was 16 trucks, which is probably double any

of the biggest rock shows because we had all these ramps

that we had to carry around.

We had two buses of just the athletes.

We were performing for anywhere

from five to 10,000 people a night.

[Commentator] Boarding legend, Tony Hawk.

[upbeat music]

Psst, Mr. Hawk, may I have a word with you?

An extreme word?

Sarah Hall in New York is my publicist

and has been for over 20 years.

And she pitched them on the idea

of me being in episode and they bit

and little did I realize that I would be the focus

of the episode and it was a huge honor.

It's still, to me, one of the biggest accolades

I could ever imagine.

The idea that they would even recognize me was amazing,

but the idea that they would have

a whole show focused on me and me trying to help Bart

through a hard time was even more unreal.

And I feel like The Simpsons is such a touchstone

of pop culture and to be featured

on it in my own voice is a big honor.

The table read for The Simpsons

is probably the most fun I had

on the whole project because everyone that is

in the cast is there around the table.

Little did I know that a lot

of them do multiple voices of characters.

It was just fascinating to see this eclectic group

of people and the voices that you have come to recognize

so fondly come out of their mouths.

It's crazy.

It was daunting though

because it was mostly just me in the sound booth

and everyone else had already laid down their vocals.

So, I had to just sort of fill in the blanks

of these scenes and a lot of times

they were already animated.

So, that was a lot of pressure.

You're going down, Homer, then back up,

then down, and back up again.

That's how the game is played.

Hello, I'm here with Mr. Tony Hawk and Mr. Mat Hoffman.

Today they're going to attempt the loop.

We had just returned from a Hawk Jam Tour

that was five weeks, 30 shows.

Bob Burnquist, who has a big ramp set up at his house

and he called me up and said,

Hey, they have an orangutan that skates

that they're gonna bring over to my ramp for Wildboyz.

Do you wanna come see it and bring your kids?

And I was like, Yeah, that sounds awesome.

In true Jackass Wildboyz fashion, they had costumes

for me and Bob to wear

so that we would sort of match the orangutan.

And so he and I ended up doing

this double's routine dressed as monkeys.

Bob has this loop that's really weathered.

And I remember him saying,

We should do the loop, monkey loop.

And I was like, Yeah, let's do it.

He and I both tried it a couple times

and I should have realized then that there was a problem

because neither one of us made it on our first go.

And when we were doing it on tour, we made it every night,

every time, never a problem.

I ended up trying to adjust for my speed

and I just missed the timing

on how I should have pumped through my legs.

The next thing I know I was being carted into an ambulance.

I ended up falling on my way up

which is the worst place to fall

because you go and you fall and then you fall upwards

and then you drop that entire 12 to 14 feet.

Mostly it was embarrassing

because it was something that I've done many times.

And that one time I just screwed up and paid the price.

For me it was a tough pill to swallow in terms of pride.

But I ended up breaking my pelvis, fractured my thumb,

fractured my skull, I got knocked unconscious, obviously.

It was really hard to get my range of motion back,

but also to get my sense of confidence back.

I imagine skateboarding had what it took

to be an Olympic sport

because of the physical dedication, the artistry of it.

I always imagined that it could be there.

I didn't imagine it would be because

it was never on their radar.

It was always more of an alternative type

of sport associated with outcasts and outliers.

And so I felt very lucky to be in Tokyo during the games

because most of the athletes

couldn't even have their families there.

I got the golden ticket in that

I was able to be there watching in person

and being a skater,

I just jumped on the course without permission.

[Tony laughing]

I ended up following some of the street skaters around

with my phone, getting clips, sort of follow cam clips.

And that's what got me kicked off the course.

The voice from above, whoever was the emcee,

live in the venue said, I'm sorry, Tony Hawk,

please get off the street course.

This isn't coming from me.

This is coming from someone in my ear.

But, I knew I was on borrowed time.

I mean, I knew I wasn't supposed to be there.

I knew that they were literally practicing

for their Olympic debut.

And I asked the riders like, Do you mind if I shoot

And they're like, Yeah, man, let's go.

Check out this 270 lip slide.

And I was like, sweet.

And so I got my clips.

I keep skating

because it's always brought me the most joy

and it continues to evolve.

I love seeing how far it's come in terms of acceptance,

in terms of availability, in terms of accessibility,

in terms of inclusivity, I still can do it.

So why would I ever quit?

I can still be creative while getting older

and not be at such risk of jumping 12, 15 feet in the air

and hoping for the best.

So, still the most fun I have.

And I mean, when you guys wrap up here,

I'm on my ramp right now, I'll be skating.

[light music]