For Tony Hawk, it wasn't enough to skate for two decades, to invent more
than eighty tricks, and to win more than twice as many professional
contests as any other skater.It wasn't enough to knock himself
unconscious more than ten times, fracture several ribs, break his elbow,
knock out his teeth twice, compress the vertebrae in his back, pop his
bursa sack, get more than fifty stitches laced into his shins, rip apart
the cartilage in his knee, bruise his tailbone, sprain his ankles, and
tear his ligaments too many times to count.No.He had to land the 900.
And after thirteen years of failed attempts, he nailed it. It had never
been done before.
Growing up in Sierra Mesa, California, Tony was a hyperactive demon
child with an I44 IQ. He threw tantrums, terrorized the nanny until she
quit, exploded with rage whenever he lost a game; this was a kid who was
expelled from preschool. When his brother, Steve, gave him a blue
plastic hand-me-down skateboard and his father built a skate ramp in the
driveway, Tony finally found his outlet--while skating, he could be as
hard on himself as he was on everyone around him.
But it wasn't an easy ride to the top of the skating game. Fellow
skaters mocked his skating style and dubbed him a circus skater. He was
so skinny he had to wear elbow pads on his knees, and so light he had to
ollie just to catch air off a ramp. He was so desperate to be accepted
by young skating legends like Steve Caballero, Mike McGill, and
Christian Hosoi that he ate gum from between Steve's toes. But a few
years of determination and hard work paid off in multiple professional
wins, and the skaters who once had mocked him were now trying to learn
his tricks. Tony had created a new style of skating.
In Hawk Tony goes behind the scenes of competitions, demos, and movies
and shares the less glamorous demands of being a skateboarder--from
skating on Italian TV wearing see-through plastic shorts to doing a demo
in Brazil after throwing up for five days straight from food poisoning.
He's dealt with teammates who lit themselves and other subjects on fire,
driving down a freeway as the dashboard of their van burned. He's gone
through the unpredictable ride of the skateboard industry during which,
in the span of a few years, his annual income shrank to what he had made
in a single month and then rebounded into seven figures. But Tony's
greatest difficulty was dealing with the loss of his number one fan and
supporter--his dad, Frank Hawk.
With brutal honesty, Tony recalls the stories of love, loss, bad
hairdos, embarrassing '80s clothes, and his determination that had
shaped his life. As he takes a look back at his experiences with the
skateboarding legends of the '70s, '80s, and '90s, including Stacy
Peralta, Eddie Elguera, Lance Mountain, Mark Gonzalez, Bob Burnquist,
and Colin Mckay, he tells the real history of skateboarding--and also
what the future has in store for the sport and for him.
