by Tony Hawk
I told him that I was “that Tony Hawk.”
He shook his head and said, “Yeah? Really? Well, you sure don’t look like that dude.”
I became even more depressed than I had been at Serra. I thought about leaving San Dieguito, so in tenth grade I took and passed the high school equivalency exam, which would have allowed me to graduate early. At that point I would have done anything to escape the hassles of that school. But I knew my parents would be disappointed. They wanted to see me graduate traditionally, ceremony and all. My only other option was to switch schools, so my parents and I asked the principal at Torrey Pines if I could cross districts and attend his school. He had heard of me and respected what I had accomplished in skating. He knew I had good grades, so he invited me to go there. As I walked out of his office, I felt as if the weight of the world had been lifted from my shoulders. Imagine—a school where the principal was hip enough to know about skating.
Courtesy of Tony Hawk.
Copyright © J. Grant Brittain.
12: THE PARENT TRAP
I will be the first to admit that I wouldn’t have been this successful without the enthusiastic support of my parents, but I’d be lying if I claimed that it didn’t cause problems when I was growing up. After my dad had helped get CASL up and running, he turned his attention to the professional skateboard contest circuit. At the time, pro contests weren’t unified and there was no ranking system. So, in 1983, he started the National Skateboarding Association (NSA) to fix some of the problems.
Skaters and people involved in the industry appreciated what my dad was doing, but I felt the pressure right away. I was a relatively new pro, and my dad was running the official contest series. Once again my mom became the official time- and scorekeeper to keep costs down (she worked for free). People started whispering that contests might be fixed in my favor.
My dad’s gruff way of dealing with people didn’t always help. Picture Oscar the Grouch from Sesame Street, take away the green fur and give him a larger nose, and you have my dad. He’d yell at skaters for practicing when they weren’t supposed to or for goofing off. I had always been basically well behaved at contests and he rarely had any excuse to yell at me, so sometimes it seemed as if he was favoring me. Eventually, skaters realized that he cared about them, and he just communicated by pretending he was a tough guy who grumbled and complained all the time. His bark was a lot worse than his bite.
THE WORST-SELLING BOARD EVER?
Stacy told me to think about ideas for my first professional board. I had a friend draw up a picture of a hawk swooping down and gave it to Stacy. Unfortunately, I didn’t let Stacy know that it was just an idea, so it was printed on my boards, almost exactly as it was drawn. It wasn’t the coolest graphic—everyone else had things like skulls and crosses; I had something from the Discovery Channel. In 1983 I sold one board in my first month as a pro. One person in the entire world liked me enough to buy my deck. I made a whopping 85 cents. A few months later I had upped my sales to five decks and almost made five bucks. But I didn’t care. What did I need money for? My house and board were covered.
NEW AND IMPROVED
Stacy decided to kill the swooping hawk and create a new graphic for me. A Powell artist showed me what they had come up with—a hawk skull in front of an iron cross. Don’t ask me what it meant, but I loved it. My friends and I would jokingly call it the “screaming chicken skull.” The royalty checks for my board instantly improved. Now I was getting a consistent $500 to $1,000 a month. That was serious cash for a fifteen-year-old. It was like winning the lottery.
Stacy was making other changes, too. He decided to create a skateboard video. There had been videos before, but never one focusing on a team and showcasing modern skating. The entire Bones Brigade crew filmed for a month, and we all watched it for the first time after a Del Mar contest while sitting on my sofa, eating chips, and drinking soda.
I put my board to good use that summer and traveled around the United States doing demos with other Bones Brigaders. I won a contest in Florida. I was proud of that because I had skated so poorly the last time I had been there. My win meant that I was learning how to skate different ramps and bowls. But mostly I bounced all over the results. Sometimes I won and skated the best I could, and sometimes I couldn’t stay on my board if I was Krazy Glued to it. I needed to learn to skate consistently, no matter what park it was.
Copyright © J. Grant Brittain.
Courtesy of Tony Hawk.
Copyright © J. Grant Brittain.
13: COOL SCHOOL
I couldn’t have been happier once I skated onto the Torrey Pines school property. It was close to the beach and surfers hung out in the parking lot. Nobody vibed me at all. No one even seemed to notice my strange clothes and bleached blond hair. Most of the surfers also had a similar look.
Things got even better—this school had two skaters. We didn’t get hassled. That year I turned sixteen and bought my mom’s old Honda Civic. As a birthday present, my parents had it painted red. Now I could drive to school and the skatepark. I didn’t really date much because I was too busy skating. I spent every spare minute at Del Mar or goofing around with my skate buddies.
Torrey Pines was great, but I was still the invisible boy at school. I was enrolled in advanced math and English, and maintained a solid grade point average. But most important, that was the year my friends and I discovered independent studies. According to school rules, we could make up a physical education program to take as long as the teacher felt it was something we could learn from. The three of us wrote an outline describing “Skateboard PE.” We explained how we had to train by doing railslides and popping ollies. It was ridiculous—you don’t “train” when you skate-but it got our point across. The teachers okayed the idea, so we spent our regular gym class at the skatepark and we got credit on our report card for it. All we needed to do was have Grant Brittain, the manager at Del Mar, sign a paper saying we skated during our “class time.”
MCFRUSTRATION
Everything in my world that year changed during a contest at Del Mar. Mike McGill blew everybody out of the water when he unveiled the McTwist during his run. It was a 540-degree spin with a flip in it. Nothing like that had ever been done in skateboarding. It became the trick that defined the new era of vert skating. It was a dividing point between skaters. In a few months there were skaters who could land a McTwist and those who couldn’t. Eventually, you had to do one in your run to win a contest.
After that contest almost every vert skater went home and practiced the McTwist. I spent every afternoon and all day on the weekends at Del Mar trying to land it. I started to go a little insane, because I became so frustrated with myself. After a month of failed attempts, it was all I could think about. In school I’d doodle absent-mindedly and look down at my work to see that I’d written “Pull a McTwist.” I’d picture myself doing it, trying to figure out the key that would allow me to land it. I slammed so many times that I became scared of even trying it, which only made me madder. I forced myself to keep going.
After two months, I finally landed one. It was the most awkward sight you can imagine. My butt was so low it scraped the bottom of the pool, my feet were hanging off the board, and I wobbled all over trying to keep my balance. But I had landed one, and once I knew I could do it, the trick became a lot easier.
WORLD CHAMPION
Contests were becoming more fun for me. I learned something before every one. I’d always brainstorm ways to create a better, more exciting run. Even though I enjoyed winning, I was still frustrated with myself a lot of the time when I didn’t skate as well as I knew I could have. They were also fun because I was friends with most of the pros, and going to a contest meant that we could all hang out for a weekend and everything was paid for by our sponsors. Contests were like the perfect vacation, and I got to have at least ten of them a year.
There was one contest in 1984 that wasn’t too much fun. It was called “The Booney Ramp Bang,” and i
t took place on a ramp in the desert. A fellow pro, Neil Blender, did an invert on the deck right in front of me. I thought he might crash into me, so I backed up. Unfortunately, whoever built the ramp had decided that guardrails were not a needed safety precaution. I found myself waving my arms and doing a perfect imitation of Wile E. Coyote after he runs off a cliff. Neil, seeing that I’d backed off the ramp, tried to catch me, but all he did was grab a leg, which flipped me into the air. I did a quarter-flip and landed ten feet below on my back. I got the air knocked out of me. I guess I was a little lucky, since I just missed hitting a glass Gatorade bottle that was on the ground a few inches to my right. Had I landed there, I’d have been picking glass out of my back.
I didn’t even come close to winning every contest that year, but I won a few and placed high enough in the others to have more points than anybody else. I was awarded the NSA’s first world vert champion title.
A lot of people still made fun of my style. I hated it and would have changed it if I could have. To hear fellow pro skaters ripping on it behind my back made me even more bummed. My friends Chris Miller and Christian Hosoi didn’t do as many tricks as I did, but they had the best styles in skateboarding. They looked super smooth when they skated, almost as if they were surfing the ramp instead of skating it. Everybody loved watching them skate. I tried to change my style, but the way you skate is the hardest thing to change. It can evolve as you grow, but to ask your body to relearn how to look when you’re skating is impossible. Because I couldn’t change that, I concentrated on the things I could change, such as inventing new tricks.
Courtesy of Tony Hawk.
Steve Caballero, popping a fakie ollie while I admire his technique. Pomona, 1983.
14: BALANCING ACT
I spent the summer between my sophomore and junior years skating in contests and touring around the world with the Bones Brigade. Skating’s popularity was increasing quickly. I was making more money than my parents and teachers. My dad ran the NSA on a slim budget and barely paid himself at all.
When I returned to school, my schedule didn’t slow down. Winning the world championships made me one of the most popular skaters, and every other weekend I was taking a day off from school to attend demos or contests. Most of my teachers understood my situation, but for the first time my grades started to slip.
I had to drop out of advanced classes because the workload was too heavy. But I still kept my grade point average up as high as I could so that I could get into a decent college. Nobody made a career out of skating. I knew I would have to get a “real” job someday; it was only a matter of time.
SKATEBOARDING 101
After years of skating contests I finally had enough confidence and tricks to start winning consistently. I won my second NSA world champion title, and after winning contests at Del Mar, Upland, and Virginia Beach, I became the first pro to win three contests in a row.
Even though skating was becoming more popular, nonskaters were clueless about it. There were no skating movies, no video games, or X Games. At school, only the two other skaters were aware that I was pro. It was weird—I’d skate a demo for thousands of fans and sign autographs for hours afterwards, and then return back to school an unknown.
Courtesy of Tony Hawk.
Courtesy of Tony Hawk.
15: DAD SLAMS
Over the years people have commented that I’m reserved, but they have to understand that I learned from the grand master. One night when I was sixteen years old, I thought I was spending a regular night at home watching TV with my dad, since my mom was at school (she eventually earned her doctorate when she was in her sixties).
Suddenly, he grabbed his chest. “Um, Tony?” he asked as my eyes were glued to the TV screen. I looked over at him and saw him gritting his teeth.
“Yeah?” I answered.
“I think I’m having a heart attack. Maybe you’d better call an ambulance.”
I freaked and started jumping around. My dad was waving me down, telling me to calm down and call the ambulance. I called 911 and we waited the longest five minutes of my life.
This was it, I thought, my dad’s life was leaving him like water going down a drain. I had precious little time left with him, and I had to let him know that I was sorry for all the bratty things I’d ever done to him. I had to let him know how much I appreciated his support. We had had a few massive fights about him being too involved in my life. Sometimes I had just wanted to skate with my friends at a contest and not have him around. I felt that sometimes he pushed himself into my life. But I knew how much he helped skateboarding, so it was a trade-off. Most important, I had to let him know I loved him.
This was my moment—I had to let him know what he meant to me before he died! I opened up like I never have before, and expressed my love.
“Dad,” I said. “I want you to know I love you.”
“Yeah, I know,” he said matter-of-factly. I waited for his declaration of love. I was ready.
“Dad, I said I loved you,” I repeated.
“I heard you. I know you do.”
“I want to thank you for all you’ve done for me.”
“Okay. You’re welcome.”
“Dad—”
“Hey, is that the ambulance I hear?”
The ambulance finally did come and took Dad to the hospital. He recovered quickly and went back to being his loving, gruff self and running the NSA. For a man in his sixties who was overworked, had an extra twenty pounds around his gut, was diabetic, listed Sizzler as his favorite restaurant, and ordered prime rib by the pound, he was asking for health problems. But nothing as feeble as a heart attack was going to take him out.
After a short stay in the hospital, Dad was released and had to take a handful of pills daily. But the pills never slowed down his Sizzler intake, and he refused to stop working.
CRAZY CAMP
I finished my junior year with Bs across my report card. I was invited to skate and teach at a summer camp in Sweden over the vacation with fellow Bones Brigader Lance Mountain, and I accepted eagerly. I thought a few weeks in a warm camp with a nice ramp would be perfect. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Lance and I slowly went insane from being stuck in one place for too long. We had no transportation and no city to distract us, because the camp was in the boonies. We had to solve the problem. I bummed a ride into the city and bought a car for $500 from a used car dealership.
The car was awesome. Lance, the more talented artist, painted it with various Powell logos. We drove it like stuntmen through a nearby field. Once we even took it on the beach and spun donuts all afternoon. Sometimes we’d get carried away and take it to the nearby forest for some off-roading. (This car was definitely not designed for the dirt.) Lance drove like a professional, swerving around trees and bouncing over dirt mounds. Eventually the car died and we pushed it back to the dealership and left it there at night. My friend from Sweden said that he saw the car, fixed up and painted a different color, for sale a few weeks later.
Copyright © Dan Bourqui.
16: FUTURE PRIMITIVE
The success of the first Bones Brigade video encouraged Stacy to make another one, which he called Future Primitive. We filmed for a few months and had a real movie theater premiere in Los Angeles. At the time, it blew away every other skate video with its originality and quality. It captured the fun of skating perfectly. But the most important part occurred when we weren’t filming. Stacy had driven down to Del Mar, and while we were taking a lunch break, we talked about the tricks we’d filmed so far. Stacy, between bites of his sandwich, said, “You have the talent to win any contest you want from now on.”
I was blown away. Stacy wasn’t one to say things just to make you happy; he meant what he said. I was knocked speechless, because it meant so much coming from him. It gave me even more motivation to keep improving.
FREEDOM
My last year of school was rough. My grades dropped because I was so busy with skating. I was forced to balance my home
work with my crazy schedule. It went from demos every other weekend to being in a contest and at least two demos a month. I would fly all over the world on the weekends and be back in school on a Monday or a Tuesday, so I missed a lot of classes.
At the end of the year I won another NSA world championship title, but still nobody at school had a clue about what I did. That is, until I did a small Mountain Dew commercial. It aired on TV the last month of school and everybody saw it. Suddenly I was famous. People I’d never talked to before started conversations with me in the hallway. It was weird after being ignored all those years. I wasn’t bitter; I just wasn’t used to it.
I became even more popular when I got my own place. I was told that for tax purposes, I should invest my skateboard money in a home. I found a house a few miles away from my parents and bought it a few months before graduation. My mom was bummed. She tried to convince me not to move out, because she loved hanging out with all my skate friends. She said she’d miss all the different hair colors and hairstyles my friends had.
After graduation, I went on a U.S. tour with the Bones Brigade. Now I could fully enjoy the life of a professional skateboarder. Until then I had been the only skater on the team still in high school and had missed a lot of events because of it.
Copyright © J. Grant Brittain.
Copyright © J. Grant Brittain.