The Birdman Drops In (Cont.)

Outside Online

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	This bird has flown: Riley drops in as dad and mom look on. (Peggy Sirota)

WAY BACK IN THE MISTS of Southern California history, back when the surfboard first sprouted wheels and rolled onto the kelp-strewn shores, in the dark time of teen endeavor that's come to be known as B.E. (Before Extreme), the youth dwelled in a world that wasâ we now realize, pitifully dull. Gravity was a despot, feared and respected. During these primordial years—the late sixties and early seventies—the skateboard was a pale derivative of its aquatic parent. Skaters, by and large, were surfers who wanted something to do when the waves were flat and junky. They skated like surfers, too, with a hang-five style that was sinuous and cool but fundamentally uneventful.

Then one summer, during an even darker period known as the Late Jimmy Carter Administration, the swimming pools of Southern California went dry. A historic drought was on, and cement ponds were deemed a frivolous waste. In one of those crucial moments of Darwinian advance, packs of kids started sneaking into empty backyard pools to experiment with their skateboards. They discovered that, in a pool with a nicely curved bowl, they could go up and down and up again, almost endlessly, like human pendulums. If they gathered enough momentum, they could soar over the pool's lip, do a little flippety trick in the air, and safely land to do it all over again—in one continuous splooge of adrenaline. And so the board, having shed its fins for wheels, developed wings and broke gravity's tyranny. It could fly.

Tony Hawk was growing up in San Diego when all this was taking shape. At the time, his father, Frank, was the president of the local Little League, and naturally he wanted his son to play baseball. But Tony hated America's pastime, hated it to the core. He hated the rules, the funny pants, the yelling parents, the peer pressure. And the truth was, he wasn't very good. As his older brother, Steve Hawk, 47, fondly recalls: "Tony wasn't what you'd call a natural athlete. He kind of throws like a girl."

One afternoon, after striking out in a game, seven-year-old Tony leaped into a nearby ravine and hid. Frank peered over the edge and implored him to come out. Tony wouldn't budge, so Frank had to go down and drag him back up. Shortly thereafter, Tony worked up the nerve to tell his dad he was quitting baseball forever. At which point, Frank did a curious thing. Instead of getting angry, he quit baseball, too. And then he devoted much of the rest of his life to facilitating Tony's growing love affair with skateboards.

Team Hawk eventually became an unbeatable combination, but Tony's rise to prominence was far from preordained. To begin with, there was the fact that Frank and Nancy Hawk were not trying to have a fourth child when Tony came along. Frank, a champion swing dancer in Montana in his younger days, had flown torpedo bombers in the Pacific during World War II, winning the Distinguished Flying Cross. After the war, he and Nancy settled down in California and started a family—two girls (Lenore and Patricia) and then Steve. Twelve long years passed before Tony was born. Nancy, who was 43 when she had him, says he was "a complete surprise."

Tony was a vexatious kid, full of what his mother calls a "ferocious determination" that was primarily directed at driving his parents crazy. "We said, 'Wow, how can he fight two grown adults like this?'" That all changed when Tony turned nine. Steve, an accomplished surfer who would later become editor of Surfer magazine, gave his little brother an old Bahne fiberglass skateboard. Tony took to it fast, and his mood became sunnier. He'd practice for hours at a time, never tiring of the endless repetition, until he nailed a trick that had taken root in his mind.

Frank aided the cause by building Tony a series of increasingly elaborate ramps. He was a salesman by profession, but his real love was carpentry; when a Home Depot opened in Oceanside, it became his tabernacle. When Frank learned, to his dismay, that skateboarding had no formal sanctioning body to oversee competition, he created one—the National Skateboard Association—and became its first president and guiding force. Many kids are drawn to skateboarding as a means of rebelling against their parents—and authority in general. In Tony's case, his father was the sport's ultimate authority figure, the original skateboard dad.

In the early days, Tony was considerably handicapped by his pipe-stem physique. "People didn't take him seriously at first, because he looked like a puppet," recalls Stacy Peralta, 45, a famous skateboarder and promoter who in the 1980s tapped Hawk to join the Bones Brigade, a handpicked troupe of young skaters who traveled all over the world and appeared in Peralta-produced skater documentaries like Future Primitive and The Search for Animal Chin. "He was so fine-boned and brittle-looking, we thought, If he ever falls he's going to break apart like porcelain."

"The guy was just a stick man," agrees Grant Brittain, the photo editor of Trans-world Skateboarding magazine. Brittain, 47, ran the Del Mar Skate Ranch when Tony first started skating there in 1981. "People called him 'Bony Cock' and made fun of him because his skating wasn't very cool," says Brittain. "It wasn't surfer's style, and getting that fluid style was all that mattered back then."

Tony compensated for his gangly style by concentrating almost exclusively on tricks, perfecting a kind of human origami on the skateboard, torquing and compressing his body while launching himself in the air. These were viewed by the surfer-influenced skating establishment as technically impressive but seriously dweeby. "He became a very brainy skater," Brittain says. "He was always a bit of a geek, anyway. He took that love for technicality and applied it to his sport."

Gradually, however, Tony's twisty-spinny contrivances were accepted as the norm in halfpipe competitions, and as that happened, his career took off. He turned pro at 14. By 17, he had moved out of the house and bought his own place. Three years later, he acquired a four-and-a-half-acre property out in the desert hills of Fallbrook, California, where his dad built him a "monster skate ramp."

Rodney Mullen, a fellow conscript in the Bones Brigade who, at 36, is generally regarded as one of the most accomplished street skaters around, recalls how he watched Hawk with admiration and awe back then. "He was never satisfied with himself," Mullen says. "He's got this nagging for perfection. It has nothing to do with money or external praise or even the push of his father. It's something inside of himself—a duty he feels to his gifts."

That sense of duty sustained Hawk through the ups and downs of his early career, and even now helps him deal with the maelstrom of fame. His father, however, never got to see that part of the story; he died of cancer in 1995. After he passed away, Tony and Steve decided to honor him in quintessentially Hawkian style: They swam out to a little cove and dumped their father's ashes into the Pacific. But something about the ceremony seemed . . . off. Fortunately, Tony had saved a reserve baggie of his father's cremains. So a few days later, he and Steve did it right. They went to Home Depot, snuck down Frank's favorite aisles, and when no one was looking, sprinkled him around.

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