Most of us don’t decide our lifelong-career when we’re nine years old – but then again, most of us aren’t Tony Hawk. Born in San Diego, California in 1968, an elementary school age Tony was first drawn to skating while watching his 21-year-old brother. “I was nine years old and my older brother was skating in the alleyway,” Hawk recalls of the first time he saw a board, ” I asked him if I could ride it and he said, yeah, but you can only ride board over there – and his old board became my first skateboard.”
Despite the 12 year age difference, a tiny Tony quickly became obsessed with his new hand-me-down. “I overtook [my brother] within the first year,” he tells me, with a grin. Riding his tattered board every day to school, it was love at first skate. Yet once he made his way down to the local skate park, Hawk’s battered board was no longer just a fun replacement for the school bus, it was an all-consuming passion.
“Once I got to the skate park and saw the possibilities, that’s when I was all in,” Hawk recalls,”I turned pro when I was 14, but back then, that just meant that when I filled out an entry form to a competition, instead of checking the amateur box, I checked the pro box, and I was competing for $100 first place prize money. It didn’t seem like a life career choice at the time.”
While skateboarding was achingly cool in the 70s, by the late 80s and early 1990s, its popularity had begun to wane. With Hawk doubling down on the more niche vert skating – a skating style defined by half pipes and pulling off gravity-defying aerial feats – he tells me that he was only just scraping a living.