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Overview
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.
Synopsis
Tony Hawk has won more than 60 contests, invented close to 50 maneuvers, and, in the 1999 X Games, made history by landing the first 900-degree aerial in skateboarding history. With his appearance in nearly 20 televisoin commercials, including one for the Gap, Disney's Super Bowl Tarzan spot, and the milk-mustache ad, he's one of the most recognizable of modern-day athletes. But his road to superstardom hasn't been steady or easy. In Hawk, Tony takes a look at skateboarding's most recent history while telling the exhilarating story of his rise to fame and multimillion-dollar fortune in the '80s, his crashing descent to near pauper in the early '90s, with barely enough money to pay for lunch at Taco Bell, and his meteoric ascent to legendary skateboarding virtuoso today. He also describes his father's undying support for his unconventional son: not only did he drive him daily to the local skatepark, but he also started the National Skateboarding Association. Hawk is the touching, inspiring tale of one man's perseverance and determination through incredible ups and downs to become the greatest skateboarding master of all time.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
Our ReviewSoaring to New Heights
Like no other, skateboard legend Tony Hawk has soared to fame and acclaim in the "extreme sports" arena, coming back from hard-hitting slams and industry nosedives to retire on top at 32. Chosen by ESPN as 1999's Alternative Athlete of the Year, Hawk is greatly responsible for skateboarding's current, unprecedented resurgence. Hawk: Occupation: Skateboarder is his personal journey from childhood to manhood, from taunted schoolboy to celebrated champion.
Although he may seem rather young to be producing his memoirs, in the youthful world of skateboarding, Hawk is considered an old-timer. But the same competitive drive that led him to become skateboarding's most successful pro has also kept him on top of his game and unmatched in the contest arena for almost 20 years.
In so many ways, 1999 was a signature year for Hawk. His last as a competitor, 1999 was also the year Hawk landed "The 9" -- a 900-degree aerial spin -- long considered an impossible maneuver. Although broad television and media exposure had already made him a household name, Hawk was unprepared for the accolades and airtime he received for accomplishing The 9. The maneuver was captured by ESPN cameras at the annual X-Games contest, the footage was distributed widely, and the network later awarded Hawk its coveted ESPY prize for Alternative Athlete of the Year.
After two decades and innumerable titles, Hawk left skateboarding competition on a high note. Hawk is the story of his unlikely rise to prominence in what was an underground sport and of the sport's hard-fought quest for legitimacy. Much of the book deals with an undersized teen's inability to integrate into the non-skateboard culture of early '80s high school, when the sport was distinctly out of fashion: "I wore weird clothes, was obsessed with a 'loser' sport, and looked like I had gotten lost on my way to elementary school."
Growing up skinny, unpopular, and covered with scabs, Hawk had to overcome peer pressure and a scrawny physique to nurture his latent talent for rolling, grinding, and flying in the dying skate parks of southern California. Skaters were giving up the sport in droves, but Hawk and a handful of his peers were obsessed, stuck it out, and developed new, exciting styles of skating that eventually attracted a whole new generation of aerial acrobats, a few of whom -- like Hawk -- would attract sponsors and compete. He describes his professional debut: "To put early '80s skating into perspective, imagine being a professional Frisbee thrower today -- that's the equivalent of a pro skater 15 years ago. I skated the contest and placed third. There were at least 18 people in the stands. I didn't win any money."
From obscurity to fame, and back and forth, Hawk tracks this icon's thoughts and actions through an incredible career and some crazy episodes, like nearly dying from food poisoning in Brazil or refusing to wear a translucent costume for an Italian television appearance. Hawk also recounts emotional periods: from the heartache of losing his father, his biggest fan, to cancer -- "I went on tour never thinking that when I said good-bye to him it would be the last time I saw my dad alive." -- to the joy of developing a bestselling video game -- "The best part of the deal was getting to sit in front of the TV playing video games, and I was working."
The Year of The 9 -- known by some as A.D. 1999 -- was also the Year of the Hawk, as every major network and publication sought an audience with skateboarding's "unofficial ambassador." One journalist, a writer for The New Yorker, even joined Hawk on the road to immerse himself in the sweaty and exhausting life of the touring skateboarder. "He was a nice enough guy, a poetry teacher on the side," writes Hawk. "He could probably relate to skating better than most writers because poetry seems a bit on the subculture side of things, except you don't see 'No Poetry' signs everywhere you go. You know skating has become popular again when a stuffy magazine like The New Yorker (I always picture long-nosed aristocrats reading it in their spats) does an article on skating."
Hawk offers an insider's perspective on the world of skateboarding from someone who's seen and done it in all its phases and forms, a participant who's experienced the hardest slams -- "I don't remember everything that happened, except that I tried to put my hands in front of my face two seconds after my face punched the wall." -- and the realization of lifelong personal goals -- "After thirteen years of trying unsuccessfully to land The 9, all I could think was, finally!" Tony Hawk offers a detailed and insightful narrative that completely describes the evolution of a champion who chose a skateboard over more traditional sports but found fulfillment and fame in pursuing his passion nonetheless.
Miki Vuckovich is the editor of SKATEboarding Business magazine. He resides in southern California.