by Tony Hawk
17: WINNING CONTESTS IS NOT ALWAYS FUN
The year after Future Primitive came out, Stacy started filming his most ambitious video, The Search for Animal Chin. This would be more like a movie starring the Bones Brigade packed with tons of skating. We filmed in Hawaii, Las Vegas, and all over California. The point of this video was to show skaters, who had gotten wrapped up in getting sponsored or being better than their friends, that skating was about having fun. A lot of people tell me that Chin is their favorite skate video of all time.
I needed to listen to what Stacy was saying in his video, because skating contests were quickly losing their appeal for me. By the end of the year I had won my fourth NSA world championship title and seemed to win a majority of the contests. But after a few years of pushing myself to create the best contest runs I could, I burned out. It had gotten to the point where I was expected to win. If I skated into second place, even if I had a good run, people said I “lost.”
It really hit home when one skater told me during a contest that he didn’t even think about winning, he was happy getting second place to me. I had won every vert world championship title since the start of the NSA. But it was too much pressure for me. I felt that some skaters, and most of the judges, had unfair expectations of me and my skating. Even though I often won, I had to outperform myself, not other competitors. Each contest run had to be better than the last for me to score the same. One of the head judges told me later how he had to instruct the other judges to score me fairly. He said other judges thought that a 720 from me should be scored the same as a 540 from somebody else.
I was miserable and started to get depressed. I spoke to Stacy about quitting contests. To my surprise, he supported me. He understood the pressures that went along with being world champion, because he had once been one. Even though I was Powell’s most popular skater at the time, due in large part to my contest results, he wanted me to be happy. Both of us were unsure of what lay ahead if I stopped competing. Would I continue to be able to make a living? Would I have to get another job? Would Powell lose money?
He told me that if I ever decided to compete again, I should keep my practice mellow so that nobody would know what to expect in my run. It would be fresh for them. He later told me that he knew I’d return to competition.
MY OWN WONDERLAND
Iwon another NSA vert world championship title and decided to stop skating contests. I made some other big changes in my life. I bought a house in Fallbrook, a desert town far away from the beach cities where I had always lived. I would miss the beach, but moving inland meant I could buy a huge piece of property for a cheap price and build my own vert ramp in the backyard. My girlfriend, Cindy, and another pro skater, Joe Johnson, moved in with me.
While I was in the middle of building my ramps (I decided to put a miniramp right outside my bedroom sliding glass door), I filmed skate parts for the movies Gleaming the Cube and Police Academy 4. But even out in the boonies, where my nearest neighbor was acres away, my ramp annoyed some people. My neighbor told me that I was going to have to stop skating it and handed me over a list of rules that I was supposed to obey. That was insane! My dad exploded. He had been the mastermind behind the ramp, designing the first wooden bowled corners. He told the neighbor to take a hike and let him know that he wasn’t welcome on my property.
Courtesy of Tony Hawk.
Copyright © J. Grant Brittain.
18: FUN AGAIN?
After three months of no contests, I began to itch to compete again. I missed the pressure. Stacy was right—in some way I still needed competition to drive me. I started skating contests again and did what Stacy suggested—I held back in practice and nobody knew what to expect during my contest run. I won; but more important, I was having fun again. I wasn’t as worried about how the judges scored me against other skaters. I was skating for fun, and if people thought I lost when I got second place, it didn’t bother me anymore.
During the summer of 1988 I went on tour with the Bones Brigade. I had been out of school for two years. Everywhere I looked I could see kids pushing around on skateboards, and Powell was the most popular company at the time. I was making loads of money, which I could never manage to spend (at least, it seemed that way to my twenty-year-old mind). My board was one of the best sellers in the world, and I had a perfect ramp in my backyard. I could skate anytime. I felt like I had accomplished everything I had ever wanted.
The Bones Brigade tour was insane. Thousands of fans showed up at each demo, and the Brigade would have to sign autographs for over three hours straight. Sometimes the police would be called in to control the crowds, and once (I wasn’t on the tour at the time) the police had to stop the demo and break up a full-scale riot of hyperactive skaters.
PAPER OR PLASTIC?
After the tour ended, Lance and I traveled to Naples, Italy, for a TV show appearance. Barely anybody we had to work with spoke English, and we didn’t speak Italian, so from the start there was little communication. The ramp they’d built for the program was awful. It was so thin that if you bailed, your knees would go through it. One wall beside the ramp was covered with expensive mirrors. I bailed and my board shot off and broke one of them.
But all of that wasn’t bad compared with when we were being dressed for the show. The designers brought out a pair of plastic see-through shorts for us to wear. Lance quickly grabbed the blue pair, which were a little darker, but mine were like looking through a window and would have left little to the imagination. I had to go back to the hotel and get a pair of swim trunks to wear underneath. After all of this, they only let us skate for a few minutes before sending us back to the States.
Copyright © J. Grant Brittain.
Courtesy of Tony Hawk.
19: TROUBLE!
Skating became more popular than anybody ever expected. Part of this was due to the introduction of street skating. Most skaters street skated because it was cheap (you didn’t have to pay for a park membership), and also because it was sometimes hard to find a skatepark or a neighborhood ramp to ride on.
I always felt most comfortable on a ramp. I enjoyed street skating and won some street contests, but I had trouble keeping up with all the crazy stuff the top street pros were pulling off. But the new breed of skaters rode both street and vert well. Bucky Lasek, Danny Way, and Colin McKay were a few young kids who brought a whole new style of street-influenced skating to ramps.
I loved the new style of skating; so did the magazines, and they made a big deal out of it. After a while, vert pros with the old, less street-influenced style were being called “dinosaurs.” I felt as if I was an old man and couldn’t keep up with the kids anymore. I was only in my mid-twenties, but I wondered if I was too old to learn a new style.
Seemingly overnight, the industry began noticing that fewer people were skating. New, smaller companies were starting up, and they had a raw, hardcore image—something the street skaters liked. Powell was seen as an old, out-of-touch company, after having been on top for so many years.
Things were going downhill fast, and then I traveled to Japan and wrecked my knee. I landed a 720 on a demo ramp, squatted too low on my landing, and tore my cartilage. I had to use a wheelchair at the airport, because I couldn’t walk.
After taking a week off, my knee felt a little better, but if I bent down it would still lock and shoot pain up and down my leg. I skated a miniramp contest with it tweaked, and then had surgery to repair the cartilage. I felt better after surgery but had to go to physical therapy for two months. I hadn’t been off my skateboard for that long since I’d started skating.
Running contests all year long wore my dad out, and he couldn’t keep going. In 1989, my parents retired from the NSA, and the skaters threw a party for my dad. He loved it because it showed him they appreciated all that he’d done for skating.
GETTING WORRIED
By 1990 I could tell something was amiss with skating’s popularity. Skateboard sales were down and lessening each month. I w
asn’t too worried, because I never believed that skating could become as unpopular as it had been in the early 1980s.
One day in Los Angeles my girlfriend, Cindy, and I were shopping and saw a cool-looking ring. I bought it and asked her to marry me. She said yes and a few months later we were married in my backyard beside the trampoline and the swimming pool.
Shortly after my wedding I won another NSA vert champion title. I was happy, but in the back of my mind I wondered how I was going to make a good living if skating continued to drop in popularity.
Copyright © J. Grant Brittain.
20: THE SKY IS FALLING!
It was obvious by 1991 that the skateboarding industry was in trouble. Companies began going out of business, and the few that were left were doing everything possible to cut costs. A year earlier, the Bones Brigade had skated demos in front of thousands of fans; now we’d skate demos and barely a hundred people would show up. There were fewer contests and skaters competing. I won another NSA vert world champion title at the end of the year, but it didn’t matter because there weren’t enough skaters to notice.
Stacy was burning out on the skateboard industry and told me he was thinking about leaving Powell and Peralta to pursue directing in Hollywood. He would later direct the award-winning movie Dogtown and Z-Boys. Stacy revolutionized skate videos and picked a team that’s still unsurpassed in contest domination. He felt he didn’t have the creative energy to go on with another generation of skaters.
I had been doing a lot of thinking, too. I spoke with another Powell skater, Per Welinder, and we decided to start our own company. If skating was going to die off again, I wanted to be in control of what little bit of it I had left. I called George Powell and Stacy and told them I was leaving. I put all of my money into the new company, which we called Birdhouse. If it failed, I would lose my houses and cars and become almost completely broke. I had confidence in our vision, but I was scared. What would I do if I couldn’t skate for a living?
BIRDHOUSE
The first year of Birdhouse sucked. I made just enough money to survive and thought for sure I’d made a mistake. I needed money more than ever, because Cindy was pregnant. I was happy about the fact that I would be a dad, but I became even more worried about my family’s future. How would I support them?
Hudson Riley Hawk was born in December 1992. Unfortunately, the movie Hudson Hawk came out at around the same time and was a box office bomb. So we called my son by his middle name instead.
I loved skating my backyard ramp, but I had no money to fix it. I had to dodge holes that were rotting into it. I spent a lot of time skating by myself and figured out how to land a varial heelflip lien air, a newer trick similar to ones that skaters like Colin and Danny were doing. I had been trying to land a flip trick for months, so this was a major breakthrough for me. Older skaters with a different style had a difficult time learning flip tricks. To keep progressing, vert skaters had to be able to flip their boards. Like the McTwist, these flip tricks were dividing vert skaters, and I just made it by.
As much as I loved having my own backyard ramp, I couldn’t afford two houses. So in 1993, I put the Fallbrook house up for sale, and Cindy, Riley, and I moved into the house I had bought when I was still in high school. Shortly after that I organized another Birdhouse Summer Tour. Birdhouse was barely making money, so I had to cut costs and use my own minivan to travel. It was too small, but we jammed five skaters with all their pads and clothes in it and drove around the country for one month straight. A lot of times skate shops refused to pay us for demos (our fee was $400 to cover expenses), even though they said they would. By the time we drove back to California, Birdhouse had lost thousands of dollars on the tour just paying for gas and other expenses on the road.
Copyright © J. Grant Brittain.
21: A NEW LOW
The following year was even worse than 1993. Per and I had a meeting to discuss dumping Birdhouse. It wasn’t making money, and we figured we were destined to lose everything we’d invested in the company. But we decided to give it one more year. We had nothing better to fall back on.
Vert was almost extinct. There were barely any skate contests. The few that took place were poorly run and the checks usually bounced. Skaters lost money going to contests because they had to cover their own expenses. Skate companies were reluctant to sponsor NSA events, so the new organizers spent all the association’s savings and it went out of business.
Per and I stopped making my pro model, since it wasn’t selling anyway, and I retired from skating competitions. Or, more accurately, because there was no demand, I was laid off.
At home, things unfortunately weren’t much better. Cindy and I realized that even though we were good friends, we weren’t working as husband and wife. We agreed to get divorced, and we are closer now than when we were married. We live a few miles from each other and, I’m proud to say, have always kept Riley as our top priority.
SNOOPY HELPS FIND A DATE
In 1994, a request for a skateboarding demo was a rare thing, but Charles M. Schulz, the creator of the Peanuts comic strip, organized a demo with skaters, bikers, and Rollerbladers. On my flight to Santa Rosa, where the demo took place, was a cute blonde named Erin, who was in the show. We started talking and got along well. I was also blown away by how natural she was with Riley. They painted together and played for hours. After the demo we started dating.
Copyright © Jeff Taylor.
Courtesy of Tony Hawk.
My dad, who died in 1995. He’s the one person I wish could see how far everything has come.
22: CANCER STINKS
By 1995 I was convinced that my involvement in the skateboarding industry was coming to an end. Skating was on the upswing, but it was a very slow process. I wasn’t sure if Birdhouse could last another year without a big jump in sales. But as much of a bummer as 1994 was (except for meeting Erin), the following year was like riding an out-of-control roller coaster. One month I would be up, happier than I thought possible; the next I’d be more depressed than I had been in years.
My dad had a nagging cough that wouldn’t go away. After many visits with the doctor, he was diagnosed with lung cancer and was told he had less than a year to live. He had flown airplanes through World War II and the Korean War, waved off a heart attack like it was an annoying gnat, and outworked skaters who were a third his age when building a ramp, and was now getting weaker by the day. Many of the skaters he had known during the previous ten years started visiting or sending cards when they heard the news. It meant a lot to my family to have that show of support. And it validated everything my dad had done for skating, even if he could be hardheaded sometimes.
EXTREME GAMES
At the start of the year there was a rumor that ESPN was organizing an event that would be like the Olympics, but for cutting-edge activities like BMX, skateboarding, rock climbing, and a bunch of other alternative sports. They were holding it in Rhode Island and calling it the Extreme Games, a truly horrible name. Skaters didn’t know if the event was a positive or negative thing for skateboarding. In the movies, skateboarding had always been treated like a pastime for rebels, so skaters were suspicious as to how a TV network would handle it.
I skated in the games and won the vert contest. While I was there, my dad was in the hospital, so before a run, when the camera filmed me, I looked into it and said, “Hi, Dad.” I knew he’d get a kick out of that, because nobody bragged about me as much as my dad. I was surprised at how many people recognized me after the contest aired on TV, but, more important, I was excited that skating had been seen by millions of people around the world.
WORST TOUR EVER
I was planning on canceling the upcoming Birdhouse summer tour to stay home with my dad, but he wouldn’t let me. “What? Do you think I’m going to die in a month?” he asked me.
I called him every night from the road, and during these conversations I let him know how much he meant to me. I wanted him to know that I appreciated all th
e effort he’d put into making sure I was happy. He’d crack jokes, but I could tell he knew what I meant.
I was skating Woodward Camp as part of a series of demos in Pennsylvania when I got a message that I had an urgent phone call. It was my mom telling me that Dad had died the night before. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t start crying. There were crowds of skaters asking for autographs, but I just walked off the street course and into the woods to grieve in private. I wanted to be alone to think about what my dad had meant to me, and how much I’d miss him. It still blows me away to think of how much he did for me. I flew home that afternoon.
We had a wake at my sister Lenore’s house. People who had been involved in skating over the previous twenty years came over and exchanged affectionate stories about my dad grumbling and complaining around skate contests, but loving it at the same time. Skaters who were troublemakers told me that my dad’s influence helped change their lives for the better. I knew that would have pleased my dad and meant more to him than anything else he’d done for skating.
Courtesy of Tony Hawk.
23: MORE CHANGES
In 1995 skating was finally making enough of a comeback that I could relax for the first time in years. My board was rereleased and was selling well, and with the help of other popular skaters on the Birdhouse team, the company actually began making money.
Even though it was expensive, I convinced Per that we needed to build a private ramp for the team. I found a massive warehouse in Irvine, which is between San Diego and Los Angeles, and had a ramp built. It wasn’t as close as a backyard ramp—it took me more than an hour to drive there—but at least it was a private ramp, where I could skate anytime.