Welcome to Level 50 Tony Hawk

Skateboarding legend Tony Hawk decided to land 50 of his original tricks in celebrating of his 50th birthday.  You know what that means.  Yeah, he has really good health insurance.  Freakin' amazing stuff.  Go back and watch the 720 again. Watch the ending.

My 50th birthday was not this cool.  Yet, oddly, I was really stoked to hit 50 for some reason.  That was almost two years ago, I'm creeping up on 52 right now.  I've never met Tony Hawk.  But in the action sports world, "meet" means actually having him knowing who I am at some point, that's what I've never done.  But I was in the same realm as him over the years.  Here's a few of my stories about Tony Hawk.

I first heard of Tony Hawk in a BMX Plus article about a BMX skatepark contest at the Del Mar skatepark keyhole bowl.  They added a sequence of some local skater kid doing a 540 in the bowl.  That kid was Tony Hawk, and that was probably in 1984.

When I moved to Southern California in 1986 for the job at Wizard Publications, my new roommates/workmates, Gork and Lew, had a VHS copy of the second Powell-Peralta Bones Brigade video, Future Primitive.  I used to watch that video every Saturday morning and every Sunday morning and then go on solo street riding sessions all day.  That's where I first saw a bunch of Tony Hawk footage.   Tony does a 720 in the intro of the video. That was 1985.

When I worked at Unreel Productions, Vision sponsored the NSA contests, and I was the guy who made VHS dubs of all the raw footage that came in.  At that point, as a BMX guy who hung out mostly with skaters, we were still mostly focused on getting ready and skating /riding in contests.  But deep down, it was just fun, we new there was another reason we kept doing it, but I never heard anybody put a name on that reason.  In a quick interview by our cameraman at some contest, Tony was asked what skateboarding was all about.  "Progression, it's all about progression," was his answer.  It suddenly clicked to me.  Yes, we practice for contests because that's how you play the sponsorship game and that means something to family and outsiders.  But the continual progression was why we really did it.  I never forgot that.

Getting ready for the huge (at the time) NSA finals in 1989, aka Skate Escape, Tony Hawk came by Unreel to share ideas on what would make the contest better.  I came back from lunch one day, saw his blue car in the parking lot, and got all stoked, "I'm gonna get to meet Tony Hawk, finally."  I saw him walk by with Don Hoffman and the other guys, but I was the lowly "Dub Guy" at Unreel, so I wasn't cool enough to be in the meeting, and definitely not cool enough to get introduced to him.

Another time that year, I got to go with Don Hoffman to Tony's Fallbrook house to shoot video  of both Ken Park and Tony's roommate at the time Joe Johnson (the skater, not the BMXer).  Both times, Tony was off doing demos somewhere.  You can see me in the back ground of the Ken Park's section (in all white at :17, :26, :42, 1:34, 1;41) of Barge at Will, a few times.  If that music in the second half of Ken's section sounds familiar to you BMXers, it's because that's "No More Cheap Talk" by The Stain, which I used as intro music in The Ultimate Weekend.

That was a really cool day, because Frank, Tony's dad was there, and he had me run to buy us all sandwiches and drinks at some little liquor store nearby.  Then I sat in the bed of his pick-up as he and Don Hoffman sat on the tailgate talking about "the old days," of skateboarding.  That was one of those epic moments to just shut my mouth and listen to these two guys who'd seen it all before.

Sometime in the early 1990's, H.B. local Brian Jordan of J'Lofty hired me to make a video promo for the Action Sports Retailer trade show.  I managed to get to the deck of the demo vert ramp to shoot some photos.  It was mostly skaters on it at that point.  Just a big ol' jam session.  As luck would have it, Tony Hawk popped out right next to me at one point.  In the bike skate world, formal introductions are all that important, so I wasn't going to just act like a fan and introduce myself in the middle of a session.  So I stood there next to Tony watching guys skate.  Some newcomer to the scene, a kid named Bucky Lasek, dropped in and started to skate.  I'd never heard of the kid before.  That kid was Bucky Lasek, and on one run he did a backside 360 ollie right in front of Tony and me.  I thought that was amazing, I'd never seen anyone do that before.  It turned out to be far more amazing than I thought, because Tony Hawk started freaked when Bucky did it, and started slamming his trucks on the coping in appreciation.  Bucky does a backside 360 ollie in this video at :25. 

Oh, and then there was the time I nabbed a press pass to the 1999 X-Games.  I ran into Maurice Meyer, who I hadn't seen for years, as BMX vert practice was ending.  We started talking, and the skate best trick contest started at the skate ramp 100 feet away.  So we walked over there and kept talking.  By some weird bit of luck,  we saw this happen.  We were standing right behind the rows of chairs 20 feet from the side of the ramp.  We could see the look in Tony's eyes after the 3rd or 4th try as he walked off the ramp.  We realized he was either going to land it, or go to the hospital from trying.  As luck would have it, I had my Sony Digital 8 camera in my hand... with a dead battery.  I'm kind of glad, though.  Because I just stood there and watched history take place, soaking it in.  That's pretty cool.

Maurice ran out with the guys to congratulate Tony on the ramp.  At 6:04, you can see him in a white hoodie with sunglasses, right behind Tony.  I stayed where I was and just watched.  That was a moment to always remember.