The Birdman Drops In (Cont.)

Outside Online

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	The business of play: Hawk sticks an inverted hand plant at his private test lab in Oceanside, California. (Peggy Sirota)

A FEW DAYS BEFORE I FIRST MET Tony Hawk, I was skiing down a chute on California's Mammoth Mountain when I hit a patch of ice. The next instant I was pinwheeling, out of control, for 300 terrifying yards. I ended up in the hospital with a broken humerus and a messed-up shoulder socket. Alex, the ski-patrol guy who sledded me down to the clinic, kept asking me questions. "Who is the president? What do you do for a living?"

I'm a writer, I said. I'm working on a story about a skateboarder named Tony Hawk.

"The Birdman?" Alex's expression changed completely: No longer was I just another boring casualty. I'd seen the same look of reverence on the face of my nine-year-old son, whose room is pretty much wallpapered with Hawk posters. "Growing up, I worshiped him," Alex told me. "I still do. He's like a god."

Three days later, I'm at the Four Seasons Resort in Carlsbad, California, my arm in a sling, trying to interview the god himself through a fog of Vicodin. The Four Seasons seems like a weird lunch spot for a skateboarder, a very staid, adult establishment with Haydn pomp-and-circumstancing in the background and, in one corner, a bridge game in full swing. But Hawk suggested the place and raved about its buffet. As we settle into lunch, I have a hard time cutting my prime rib with my slinged arm, and there comes an awkward moment when Hawk is clearly thinking, Should I help the poor wretch? He decides against it.



	My three sons: clean family fun and foam fashions at Chez Hawk with, from left Keegan, Riley, and Spencer (Peggy Sirota)

Maybe he doesn't want to seem patronizing. Just as likely, he's unimpressed by my puny injury. Here's a guy, a professional human projectile, basically, who is intimately acquainted with words like meniscus and arthroscopic. A guy who's knocked himself out a half-dozen times, fractured his ribs, broken his elbow, sustained several concussions, had his front teeth bashed in twice, all while collecting stitches too numerous to count. You broke your arm—so what?

But as we sit there, Hawk's initial reserve wears off, and he projects an endearing, youthful innocence. Though he's the father of three boys, though he has three stockbrokers and two agents and rakes in eight digits a year, he still somehow carries himself like a kid, a man-teen in the promised land.

Hawk seems bright in the same way a bright 16-year-old does—sharp, watchful, with quick reflexes but little use for introspection. His dirty-blond hair is neat and clipped short, almost to the point of spikiness. His voice still has an adolescent crack to it, and he speaks in Ridgemont High dialect, the stoner-surfer vernacular of Southern California, in which declaratives are haphazardly turned into interrogatives with a little last-second inflection. ("I don't know why, but I've always had, like, a fetish for watches?") His taste in movies is refreshingly juvenile. (Favorites: Caddyshack and Aliens.) He has a young person's radar for musical infractions by artists he views as "lame" and a hypervigilance for the cool currency of brand names (just now he's down on Swatch, a former sponsor).

I don't even think of Tony as an adult," said Phil Jennings, a 12-year-old I met at HuckJam. "HE DOESN'T ACT LIKE THE THE BIG MAN. He's one of us."

After lunch, Hawk tips the valet and we hop into his Lexus sports car. As we glide onto Interstate 5, he steers with one hand and recalibrates his driving environment with the other, his long, bony fingers floating over the dials and buttons in the wooden inlay of his $70,000 ride. He adjusts his Arnette sunglasses, checks his Nixon sports watch, plugs in his Apple iPod, and scrolls through tunes until he finds one he likes, by The White Stripes.

"I can fit 1,800 songs on a single disk," he says, with a geek's pure faith in the righteousness of electronics. As we head north, the console's navigational screen charts our blipping progress, as if we're trapped in our own private GameBoy.

The Lexus—an SC430 in a metallic plum color that the sales brochure calls "amethyst pearl"—is a recent acquisition, a product of the phenomenal success Hawk has enjoyed since rising to the status of Zeus (or is it Seuss?) in the pantheon of kids' idols. Nowadays, Hawk regularly commands up to $25,000 per skating appearance and has reportedly earned $10 million in personal income in each of the last two years. Hawk owns Tony Hawk Inc.—a San Juan Capistrano, California-based company that employs 15 people—and co-owns Birdhouse Skateboards, 900 Films, Blitz Distribution, and SLAM, an action-sports management firm. Through these he markets clothes, shoes, films, skateboards, gear, events, and even a slightly scary-looking remote-control action figure. Hawk's got a foothold in retail, too, with new Hawk Skate stores in Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, and Paramus, New Jersey. Combined with the licensing deals he's made—lending his name to "signature products"—his mini-empire pulled in $314 million last year.

Looming over it all is the astonishing success of Activision's three-game series Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, to which Hawk licenses his name, likeness, and expertise. Since hitting the shelves in 1999, Pro Skater has become one of the most popular video games of all time, generating $473 million, with more than 12 million copies sold. The game's impact has helped make Hawk a fixture on every cable channel aimed at kids. Recent TV triumphs have included stints doing color commentary for skateboarding competitions; an ESPN2 reality-based show, Tony Hawk's Gigantic Skatepark Tour; and a guest appearance on Nickelodeon's hit cartoon Rocket Power. His autobiography, HAWK—Occupation: Skateboarder, which came out in 2000, was a bestseller and has been optioned, perhaps inevitably, by Disney.

Thus the toys have increased in quantity and quality. Cartier watches, plasma screens, Armani suits. Over the summer, Hawk surprised Erin with a new BMW sport-utility vehicle. And then there's the house, practically a zip code unto itself. A few years ago the Hawks bought a home on a lagoon in Carlsbad for more than $1 million. The bodacious 5,000-square-foot gated mansion has been duly featured on MTV's Cribs. Things have actually reached the point where Hawk has started buying cars for his friends, like Elvis used to do. Because he's a nice guy. Because he can.

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