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Outside Magazine October 2002

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The Birdman Drops In
What's it like defying gravity for a living? It's pretty sweet, bro. The mega-life of TONY HAWK.
By Hampton Sides


	(Peggy Sirota)

THE GROMS PRESS FORWARD, inching eagerly toward the arena entrance. Mullet-haired rampheads, bescabbed halfpipe urchins, scuffling along in their clompy skate shoes, their laces tied with a precise looseness. Eight thousand zitty faces lit with incipient testosterone, waiting to be shown revolutionary ways in which Newtonian physics can be warped, postponed, and dicked with.

They've come to the Mandalay Bay Arena in Las Vegas for a new kind of entertainment, a show that pumps the raw crude of male adolescence, a hormonic convergence of phatness and sweetness and straight-out sickness. These young acolytes have come for amplitude, for stunts and biffs, for grinds and grabs and serious air, for loud music and fumy motorcycle farts.

They've come for the Boom Boom HuckJam.

Once through the doors, the grommets come face to face with the thing itself. Behind a scrim of netting lies a baroque installation of giant stages, jumps, and ramps glinting in a swirl of strobe lights. Soon the chanting begins—toe-KNEE, toe-KNEE, toe-KNEE—the whole arena surging with raw skate-kid wattage.

Tony Hawk is the mind and wallet behind this unprecedented show. It's his private experiment, designed as a two-hour adrenaline extravaganza, a busy amalgam of motocross, BMX, and live music, with vertical skateboarding taking center stage. Tonight is the live debut of the HuckJam. It represents a huge financial gamble for the 34-year-old skateboarding venture capitalist; nearly $1 million of his own money is invested in this modern vaudeville act, which he will take on the road this fall.

Toe-KNEE, toe-KNEE!

To my immediate left, sitting with his dad in the VIP section, is Jonathan Lipnicki, the bespectacled 12-year-old child star of such movies as Stuart Little and Jerry Maguire. Lipnicki has been a Hawk fan for as long as he can remember. "Oh yeah, Tony's, like, the greatest!" he says.

Now the circus-barking announcer starts whipping up the crowd: Las Vegas! We need a little thunder!

A few aisles over sit Hawk's mom, Nancy, his wife, Erin, and his sister Pat, who manages the business that is Tony Hawk Inc. Near them is Sarah Hall, Hawk's publicist, who used to work as a tour assistant for the singer Michael Bolton back when he had long, curly hair and lived at the top of the charts. "Tony's bigger now than Michael ever was," she confided to me earlier at the rehearsal. "Even at his peak, even with 'When a Man Loves a Woman.' He's that huge."

C'mon, Vegas—we're not with you yet!

In front of me sits an executive from Hansen's, the beverage company. They're poised to inflict a new energy drink on American youth called Monster. The exec says she's been negotiating with Hawk's people to strike up a sponsorship deal. "Tony's hard to walk away from," she says over the roar.

Energy drink? Like ginseng, ginkgo—that sort of thing?

"Caffeine, mostly," she shouts. "And sugar. We use lots of sugar."

Las Vegas, let's hear some more noise!

Now the house lights go out and a bevy of fembots—jiggy young models in silver lamé body stockings, white Lone Ranger masks, and platinum-blond wigs—come out holding signs that signal the start of the HuckJam. From the far stage, swaddled in a dry-ice haze, the punk band Social Distortion cranks up.

C'mon, people, let's DO this!

Here come the skateboarders—zipping down, one by one, from a 30-foot-high perch in the scaffolding. Like buzzy, looping electrons, Bob Burnquist, Andy Macdonald, Lincoln Ueda, Bucky Lasek, and Shaun White—five of the preeminent vert skaters in the world—power through the massive bronze bowl of the halfpipe and launch high over the lip in a dervish of spins and kickflips, ollies and McTwists. And then—

Ladies and gentulmennnnnnnnn . . .

The man we've all been waiting for dives down the ramp, lanky and tough-sinewed and—true to his name—curiously avian, with a beaky nose and flailing arms and big, alert eyes. He soars through the air and lands effortlessly on the platform with the other skaters, Quetzalcoatl among mere mortals: The Birdman.

Calmly drinking in the adulation, Hawk hoists his board over his helmeted head and tips it toward the roaring crowd in a ritual gesture of beneficence, as if to say, "Welcome, children of the pipe, your sins are forgiven!"

Now let's hear some Las Vegas thunder for TOE-KNEEEEEEE HAWWWWWWWWWWK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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