Somehow I witnessed two first 900's live...

Tony Hawk, during the best trick jam at the 1999 X-Games in San Francisco.  I think it was on the 11th attempt he landed the first 900 on a skateboard ever.  He'd been trying the trick for nearly ten years.  

Ride a bike, it will take you places.  SE Bikes brand manager Todd Lyons says that a lot these days, and he's right.  There were about 5,000 stories of Tony Hawk landing this 900, the first ever on a skateboard, that night on a pier in San Francisco, a different story for each person in that crowd.  This is my version.  I was standing behind the pro skaters, less than 20 feet from the side of the ramp, talking to San Francisco BMX freestyle legend Maurice Meyer.  My Sony Digital8 video camera was in my hand... with a dead battery.  I'm glad actually, that was a moment I was happy to just stand there and witness, without trying to capture it on video, and keep him well framed during each try.  More than a decade later, in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Sean Penn's character sums up that feeling better than I've ever heard it described.  

I had finagled a press pass to the X-Games that year, planning to write an article or two for Dig Magazine in the U.K. about the contest.  Maurice had nabbed a VIP pass, too.  I rode with him and the other Golden Gate Park locals, most weekends, during the one year I lived there, in 1985-86.  We ran into each other near the end of the BMX vert practice, and started talking about "the old days" and how much BMX and action sports had changed over 12 or 13 years' time.  

While we were talking at the bike halfpipe, a red helicopter with a World Industries logo on the side of it, hovered near the ramps, and started dropping stickers.  The handful of kids around the area ran around picking them up.  Then we realized that something else was getting thrown out of the chopper, little wadded up pieces of paper.  Because of the breeze, most were falling on the empty BMX ramp area, where we were, not on the skateboard crowd.  Someone grabbed one of the pieces of paper, and unraveled it.  "It's money" they said.  Suddenly all of us jaded Old School guys were picking them up, too.  Mike Dominguez Jr., amped up after an afternoon of free Mountain Dew, sprinted around and grabbed 30 or 40 of the wadded up dollar bills, I think.  I wound up with four of them, each with a World Industries skateboard character, like Flame Boy or Wet Willie, rubber stamped on them.  We laughed at yet another example of Steve Rocco's crazy promotion methods.  When in doubt, just throw money on the crowd.  I literally had real helicopter money in my pocket when Maurice and I decided to walk over and watch the skate best trick jam, which had just started.  

Dusk was descending on the huge pier that housed the 1999 X-Games, next to San Francisco Bay.  With our passes, we just walked over and stood behind the rows of chairs there for pro skaters and their girlfriends, wives, and a few kids.  In some of the wide shots in the clip above, you can see two really bright lights, that look lke stars on the video.  We were right below, and maybe 20 feet in front of those lights, they were shining over our heads, lighting up the skate halfpipe for the TV cameras.  

Maurice and I kept talking, as the world's best skaters tried their newest and best tricks.  As I recall, Pierre Luc Gagnon was trying to land a heeflip Caballerial, as Steve Caballero himself sat 10 feet in front of me.  Bob Burnquist was trying a one footed Smith Grind to revert, I believe.  Other skaters were trying their "Merry Christmas" tricks, the things they could land once in a while.  For Tony Hawk, that was the varial 720.  About 12 or 15 minutes into the half hour jam, he landed one.  Then he went back up, and just stood on deck a few minutes.  

Skaters dropped in, sometimes snaking each other, to try to pull that one big trick.  It was the closest thing I'd seen to "real," everyday skateboarding in a contest environment.  The best trick jam was a concession to the vert skaters, who still weren't really happy with ESPN's take on skateboarding, in their 4th year of the putting on the X-Games.  The big TV contest idea for action sports was evolving, as skaters got more involved and vocal about how they were portrayed to millions of viewers.  

It was obvious the bigwigs at ESPN didn't give a shit about the best trick jam, but they had a big crowd, around 5,000 people in the stands on the other side of the ramp, so they kept the cameras rolling.  It would make for soem good highlight clips, I think that's how they saw it.  Old School skater and announcer, Dave Duncan, called the action out live from the deck.  Maurice and I watched and talked.  

Then Tony Hawk dropped in again, and no one paid that much attention.  Until he opened up out of what looked like a over-rotated 540.  We stopped talking, "Did he just try a 900?" one of us asked the other.  I can't remember who said it.  Tony walked back up to the top of the ramp, and did the same thing a couple of more times.  The second rotation got tighter and tighter.  After the 3rd or 4th try, he walked off the side of the ramp, facing us, He was 15 or 20 feet away, and we could totally see his eyes, he had the stare, the "thousand yard stare," as I've heard some call it.  He was looking right towards us, but saw nothing.  Pure focus.  I asked Maurice, "Did you see his eyes?  He's serious.  He's either going to land it or go to the hospital trying."  Maurice agreed.  

The whole aura of the place shifted.  Other skaters stopped dropping in.  The skaters on the deck knew Tony really wanted the 900, and stepped back in respect.  It wasn't planned.  No color commentary guy had to spew stats and percentages to hype people up.  The energy in the whole area changed.  This was real skateboarding at it's best.  

A top skater just got a taste that tonight was the night to land the unlandable trick, and Tony just laser focused on it.  Everyone stopped skating after a couple more attempts.  It wasn't about trophies or prize money anymore.  We all wanted to see Tony Hawk progress vert skating to the next level.  Tony kept trying, getting more and more determined, and closer to landing it.  Dave Duncan kept talking into the mike like only a hardcore skateboarder could.  This was a moment, one way or the other.  

I think it was on the 7th attempt that Tony landed on the board, made it a few feet, then washed out on the flatbottom.  I jumped up in the air screaming, I gave that one to him.  But he didn't ride away, it wasn't clean, he wanted it 100%.  He kept trying.  On the 11th attempt, I believe, is when Tony Hawk landed the first skateboard 900 air, totally solid.  Everyone went nuts.  

If you freeze that video above at about 6;03, you'll see Maurice right behind Tony, in a white hoodie, with sunglasses.  He ran up there with all the skaters to congratulate Tony.  I, for some reason, stayed right where I was, 30 feet away, watching the pandemonium.  The place went nuts.  But I had seen that happen before, 10 years earlier, up in Canada.  

Mat Hoffman's first 900, at 14:43 in this clip, in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, in the spring of 1989.  After the intro with Eddie Roman's girlfriend, this is the footage that I shot from that contest, with Eddie and friends doing their funny color commentary over it.  This is from the 1990-2-Hip video, Ride Like a Man, edited by Eddie Roman.  

Riding a bike did take me places.  I was a dorky, unathletic kid who grew up in Ohio, spent 9th grade living in New Mexico, and then lived in Boise, Idaho through high school.  The summer after my sophomore year, I got into BMX riding, then BMX racing, and then new sport of BMX freestyle, in 1983.  A year after I graduated high school, my family moved to San Jose, California.  I worked at Pizza Hut, started publishing a freestyle zine, and met the Bay areas freestylers, like Maurice, Dave Vanderspek, Robert Peterson, Hugo Gonzalez, and a couple dozen more.  My zine led me to a magazine job in Southern California.  I wasn't punk rock enough for that place, and I got laid off.  I got a job editing a newsletter, which led to working at Unreel Productions, the Vision Skateboards video company, in late 1987.  I was out riding three hours a night like everyone else, but didn't have the balls to make it to pro caliber as a BMX freestyler.  By 1989, I was Unreel's camerman, traveling to all the 2-Hip vert and street contests to shoot video, because Vision Street Wear sponsored the contests.  

While I was bouncing around the BMX and industries, the early skatepark riders inspired a bunch of great quarterpipe riders around the U.S. and Europe.  In 1987, Haro pro Ron Wilkerson started putting on halfpipe contests.  Riders like Todd Anderson, Josh White, Joe Johnson, and this kid from Oklahoma, named Mat Hoffman, moved up the amateur ranks and into pro.  They pushed the older guys like Eddie Fiola, Brian Blyther, Mike Dominguez, as vert riding progressed.  

The first 2-Hip King of Vert of 1989 was in Kitchener, Ontario Canada.  The less than epic 2-Hip halfpipe was set up in a college gymnasium for the weekend, and the riders, amateur and pro, gave it their best.  The talk of the weekend was that this crazy, unknown guy from Canada, called The Terminator, was going to do a backflip abubaca or fakie or something.  No one except lake jumper Jose Yanez had done flips on a BMX bike then.  No one had even tried them on vert.  The Terminator was an amateur, and when his final run came up, he did a high fakie, leaned back a little, and crashed hard.  The weekend up hype fizzled.  

The rest of the amateurs rode their runs, blasting high and pulling their best tricks.  Joe Johnson landed the first double tailwhip air, which was amazing.  I was on the deck, with a $50,000, 35 pound, rented Ikegami Betacam, shoulder checking photographer John Ker for a good angle to shoot from.  I was doing my best to get good footage of the days events.  

Then came Mat Hoffman, in what I believe was his second pro contest.  He won his first pro contest.  At the end of his final run, with about 300 people watching, mostly Canadians, he nearly landed a 900.  Mat got up, and went for it again, landing the first BMX 900 in a contest, and the first recorded 900 in any action sport.  Even snowboarders hadn't pulled a 900 air at that point.  I caught it on video from the deck, and Eddie Roman and another guy caught it from two angles below.  Mat Hoffman, new pro vert rider and wonderkid, broke the 900 barrier in action sports, with video and photos to prove it.  Word was the Mike Dominguez had landed a 900 or two on his own ramp.  But there were no photos or video.  Mat made it official, the 900 was possible.

By some weird quirk of fate, me, the goofy kid from Ohio and Idaho, was there to get video.  And by an even crazier quirk of fate, I was in San Francisco a decade later to watch Tony Hawk do it, live, on a skateboard.  The only other two people that I know were in both places were Mat and his buddy Steve Swope.  But they were running the bike contest in 1999, and I don't think they were watching the skate best trick jam.  I'm not sure.  There may have been a couple of people who saw both happen live.

We live in a weird Universe, and really crazy coincidences happen now and then.  It still trips me out that I somehow saw both of these happen live, right in front of me.  Riding a bike did take me places, for the first 20 years of my adult life.  I met alot of cool people, traveled around the U.S., and into Canada a couple of times.  

Then I got injured, became a taxi driver, and things went into a downhill spiral.  I think life wanted to kick my ass for a couple of decades to teach me some other lessons.  One of the things I've learned is that there are a lot of ways to spend your time in life, and goofing around on bikes is one of the best ways.  You never know where it will lead you.  Ride on!

Tony Hawk just broke his femur... here's a classic Hawk/Hosoi showdown from BITD

On March 7, 2022, three days ago, 53-year-old pro skateboarder Tony Hawk broke his femur on a bad McTwist attempt.  In an article linked on his Twitter, he said he didn't have enough speed, and caught a sketchy grab, and crumpled on landing, breaking his femur.  For those of you who don't know, that's the really big bone in the top half of your leg, one of the worst things to break.  So good vibes and much luck healing to Tony, as he heals up and makes the long recovery back from that injury.  

If you've read my blog much, you know I was a BMX and skateboard industry guy in the 1980's and early 1990's.  So my stories I tell in this blog, and previous blogs, are my memories of working and hanging out with the riders and skaters back in the day.  I never actually met Tony Hawk, but I was at a couple video shoots at Tony's Fallbrook house, and saw him at contests events now and then.  I just never introduced myself, because we didn't really do that in those days.  

In 1988, I was working at Unreel Productions, the video company owned by Vision Skateboards.  I was basically a production assistant, mostly making copies of different videos for people in the Vision empire all day.  But Don Hoffman, the head of  Unreel had this crazy idea of getting action sports on TV, which WAS NOT happening in the 1980's.  So Unreel produced five well produced TV shows, called the Sports on the Edge Series.  We ended up syndicating the series across the U.S., six years before the X-Games started in 1995.  The series included bodyboarding, skateboarding, BMX racing, BMX freestyle, and snowboarding.  Unreel actually tried to sell the series to ESPN in 1989, but the suits there said, "No one wants to watch skateboarding on TV, and what the hell is snowboarding?"  So we hired a woman to syndicate the series, which actually played really well, and got good ratings, across the U.S..  

For the skateboarding show, we at Unreel worked with National Skateboard Association to put on the biggest skateboard contest ever at the time.  Following the huge progression in ramp construction in the Bones Brigade 3/Animal Chin video, we had a vert/spine/mini ramp combo built, as you can see in the video clip above.  Spine ramps were brand new then, and mini ramps were only a couple of years old, so this contest broke new ground in that way.  It was also unusual then to have a skate event in a big arena then, with a "huge" crowd of 3,000 spectators.  Most skate contests at that time were outside, where you could just walk up and watch in most cases.  

Someone also came up with the idea for this crazy, head to head format, rather than a big jam format like we see today.  I think I was there was a jam to figure out the top 10 or so skaters, and then they skated head to head against each other, which you can also see in this clip above.  So one guy would skate, and then the other, and you had to lose twice to get eliminated, much like a basketball tournament or something like that.  The main result was it wore the skaters out.  So this was a really huge, crazy, big event for skateboarding at the time.  Unreel hired SoCal radio D.J. The Poorman from KROQ to host, with Skatemaster Tate and Vision pro skater Ken Park for color commentary.  To top it all off, Unreel hired this crazy punk band called the Red Hot Chili Peppers to play after the contest.  

Not surprisingly for vert skating in 1988, the contest came down to Tony Hawk versus Christian Hosoi for the win.  Hawk was the master of hard, technical vert tricks, and Hosoi was the master of big , high, super stylish airs, and flow.  Crazy, head-to-head format aside, it actually made for a really cool live event, and a great TV show.  When you watch the video above, you see why Tony and Christian were continually battling it out for the top spot in vert, they both ripped, in completely different ways.  Tony got the win on that day, but it could have gone either way after those final runs.  

That's it for my look back at an epic skate contest from the 80's.  You can find more clips of Skate Escape on YouTube.  The show got made into a home video later, their may be a few VHS copies in someone's collection still.  Here's the Joe Rogan podcast from 2020 with Tony, which I was listening to while writing this blog post.  Again, best wishes to Tony as he heals and recovers from his broken femur.  Like everyone, I hope he's able to get mobile again, and back on a ramp as soon as possible.  

 

Tony Hawk's Last Trick Ever NFT collection just dropped

This is the intro video for Tony's Last Trick Ever NFT drop.  The drop is happening as a write this, it started half an hour ago.  Working with Draft Kings and Autograph, they are dropping 16,600 NFT's, each a digital "container" which can be opened to find out what specific NFT buyers got, on 12/21/2021.  Just for the record, that's a $664,000 NFT drop, providing they all sell, and they should.  Not a bad afternoon's work.  To the best of my knowledge, this is only the second big NFT drop in action sports.

If you have started checking out this blog again, since I've come back to it, then you know I've been learning about these "NFT things."  On the surface, or to most people my age and older, they sound absurd.  "OK, so let me get this straight, people are paying $3 million in crypto for a jpeg file of a funny looking ape, which doesn't even exist in the physical world?"  Yep.  That's what's happening, on the high end of the spectrum, anyhow. 

OK, very few people are paying millions of $ (actually Ether usually, or some crypto), but tens of thousands of people are paying $40-$2,000 worth of crypto for either "digital collectibles," or digital files of someone's artwork, as well as gaming items.  Yes, that's nuts, in a sense.  But paying $100,000 for a tricked out 1964 Chevy Malibu is also nuts, and people are doing that, too.  People have been paying $1 for songs on iTunes for 20 years now, and those don't exist in the real world.  Gamers have been paying for cool weapons, added features, to skip missions, level up, or to get "skins" in games for years now, as well.  And now most people stream movies and TV shows, we don't own the DVD's or VHS tapes.  So part of our whole technological "progress" in the last 25 years is buying shit that doesn't physically exist.  Most people do that at some level already.

NFT's, aka Non Fungible Tokens, are digital files tied to a blockchain transaction, which can prove one digital file is the "only one," or one of a series.  Among many other uses, NFT's work really well to sell digital collectibles, and for artists to sell a digital version of a piece of art, whether it's digital art or physical art.  

Over the last 3-4 weeks, I've learned the basics of NFT technology, and realized, "shit, this is for real, and it's going to be around for a while" (unless us humans start World War III or something stupid like that).  Then I realized that there's an absurd amount of money being paid for some of these things.  Crypto wealth is not the whole point, but it beats doing a drawing that takes 45 hours, and then shipping the original to someone for $150 plus shipping costs.  That's what I've been doing for 5 years.  Fun, but very unprofitable.  Also, NFT's allow artists and creators to program a royalty payment in the transaction, because of smart contract technology.  So if a piece does sell for a crazy price down the road, the artist gets a cut.  That's real cool, from a creative person's perspective.  

The next thing I realized in my intense research is that only a tiny part of the overall population is into NFT's right now.  But this technology is growing and evolving at light speed, and new uses and ideas are popping up all the time.  This is opening up new markets.  NFT's will be something virtually everyone deals with in 2-4 years, maybe sooner.  So for all those reasons, I'm diving deep into this world.  I've already created my first two NFT's, both at really high prices, just to learn the basics, and get a handle on the process.  I have several more ideas stacking up in my head already.  

Back to Tony Hawk.  He's the biggest name, to average people, in the action sports world.  You can argue, but nearly everyone knows of Tony at this point.  Tony has always been a gadget guy, and an early adopter trying out new tech.  He's also super smart, a good businessman, and has been into buying Bitcoin for "about ten years" according to an interview from last spring.  The price chart I found goes back to 2014, when it was $327 per Bitcoin.  Ten years ago, it was a lot cheaper.  So whatever Tony bought back then, if he kept some, has made a serious return on his money.  It's $47,500+ per Bitcoin now.  

All that NFT talk out of the way, I think Tony's idea of retiring 5 tricks, and getting good video of the last time he pulls each them, then working with Autograph and Draft Kings to make it a cool NFT drop, is a cool idea.  On the business end, they all make a good chunk of money.  For Tony, he can say, "I'm not wrecking myself trying varial 540's or frontside Cabs anymore."  For collectors, I think his NFT's will hold up better than some others, like Simone Biles's NFT's, over time.  But it will take years to see on that.  

I'm writing this post just getting word out that Tony Hawk, someone everyone from the Old School Action Sports world actually knows, or knows of, is doing a cool NFT project.  I hope that will get some other action sport people looking at this technology, and looking for good, solid, legit ways to put it to use.  Like using NFT's to fund a documentary or a new video project, or maybe as a fundraiser for someone after a serious injury, or just to make some decent living money as an artist.  I think there are a ton of really good uses for NFT's, as well as the shady uses some people are trying.  Action sports people are a creative bunch, and I think once the basic idea of NFT's seeps into action sports culture, I think we'll see a bunch of cool NFT's come out, a part of many amazing projects.  That's my hope, anyhow.   

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.