Tony Hawk

b. 1968 Specialist

A hyperactive kid with a 144 IQ found something to do with his energy

Portrait of Tony Hawk — Cmichel67 — 2023 — CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Anthony Frank Hawk was born May 12, 1968, in San Diego, the youngest of four children of Frank Hawk, a Navy veteran turned small-business owner, and his wife Nancy. He was hyperactive enough as a child that a psychologist evaluated him; the tests found an IQ of 144 and no obvious outlet for it. His parents settled on skateboarding, and his older brother Steve handed him his first board at age nine. Within three years he was beating adults at the Oasis Skatepark in San Diego; by fourteen he had turned professional, and by sixteen he was sponsored by five companies and had already bought his first house with skateboarding money, a career trajectory almost nobody around him, including his own parents, fully understood yet.

Hawk won seventy-three of the 103 professional contests he entered and held the vertical skating world championship for twelve straight years, 1984 to 1996, inventing more than a hundred tricks, including the varial, the stalefish, and the Ollie 540. None of it made him rich; when skateboarding's popularity collapsed in the early 1990s, he refinanced his house to keep his company, Birdhouse, afloat, and was close to broke by the time he negotiated the deal that changed everything: a licensing agreement for a video game, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, that grew into an eighteen-title franchise and introduced the sport to a generation who had never set foot on a board. On June 27, 1999, he landed the first documented 900, two and a half mid-air rotations, on his twelfth try, before a crowd that stormed the ramp.

Success in skateboarding and financial security turned out to be two separate problems. Hawk dominated his sport for over a decade and still, according to former Activision CEO Bobby Kotick, was living out of his car around the time the company came calling about a video game deal — a champion of an outlaw sport had almost nowhere legitimate to cash a paycheck before it went mainstream. Once it did, part of the skate culture that raised him treated the crossover as betrayal, the commercials and cartoons and amusement-park rides bearing his name read as rebellion sold back as a brand. His private life absorbed its own cost: three of his four marriages ended in divorce, and he has been candid that constant travel and competition left little room to get any of them right the first time.

Hawk retired from competition in 2003 but never really left; he was still landing the 900 at forty-eight, in 2016, and still showing up on X Games podiums into his fifties. The Skatepark Project, the foundation he started in 2002, has funded more than 660 public skateparks across all fifty states, on the theory that the sport that once had nowhere legal to happen for him should have somewhere legal to happen for everyone else. Skateboarding entered the Olympics in 2021, and Hawk, still an owner of Birdhouse and still occasionally landing tricks that skaters half his age won't attempt, has outlasted nearly every argument about whether his sport was ever going to last.

Lifespan

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Tony Hawk's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

Notable works

Birdhouse Skateboards company
Founded during skateboarding's early-1990s commercial collapse 1992
The 900 other
First documented two-and-a-half-rotation skateboard aerial, landed at the X Games 1999
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater other
Video game franchise that introduced skateboarding to a mass audience 1999
The Skatepark Project company
Foundation that has funded more than 660 public skateparks nationwide 2002