The Birdman Drops In (Cont.)

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The Birdman Drops In (Cont.)

SKATEDOM IS A POLYGLOT subculture in which tribes and alliances are constantly metamorphosing according to genre (street versus vert), modes of protection (helmet and pads versus none at all), and music (punk versus hip-hop), among other things. Hawk's rise through this world was not meteoric, but it was relentless. Bob Burnquist, a 26-year-old vert champion and friend of Hawk's, has a phrase for what he brought to the party: tricks on command. "The dude invented half the moves everyone else uses," Burnquist says.

Indeed, over the years, Hawk has created 85 new tricks (and counting), strange contortionist maneuvers with names like the Stalefish, the Kickflip McTwist, the Nosegrind, and the Gay Twist Heelflip Body Varial—loose variations of which have also infiltrated snowboarding and surfing.

Hawk has been something else, too: a leading economic indicator of skateboarding's broader national appeal. By the time he hit 20, he had won 27 pro competitions and was without question the greatest vert skater in creation. But all the tricks in the world couldn't help him when skateboarding experienced a precipitous drop in popularity in the late eighties and early nineties, owing largely to a sketchy economy and a suddenly fickle teen market. Hawk, who had gotten used to owning a Lexus and constantly upgrading his computers and gadgets, was forced to sell the house, get rid of the car, and put himself on a five-dollar-a-day "Taco Bell allowance." Things got so bad that he briefly contemplated taking a job as a computer programmer.

What turned things around was the arrival in 1995 of a curious spectacle: ESPN's Extreme Games. Looking for a way to capitalize on kids' growing fascination with edgy sports fare, the X Games introduced a halfpipe skateboard competition. It quickly became the marquee event, the perfect distillation of what the producers were driving at—totally senseless danger in a controlled environment. And there was Hawk, the leading man in the main act, the pied halfpiper primed for prime time.

It was at the 1999 X Games in San Francisco that Hawk reached the height of his skateboarding career thus far. After 11 grueling tries, he landed a trick called the 900. The maneuver, which involves launching off the lip of a halfpipe, executing two and a half aerial rotations, and landing on the downslope without biffing, was a kind of Holy Grail of skating, a trick that many of the best practitioners had tried to master but given up on. Hawk had obsessed over the 900 for six years, working on it during his financial doldrums and through his ascendancy to household fame. He endlessly analyzed the physics of the thing, and practiced until he knocked himself silly. When he finally nailed it that night in San Francisco, he told the media, "This is the best day of my life, I swear to God!"

Since landing the 900 and officially retiring from competition in 2000, Hawk has transcended his sport to become a pop-culture superstar, crossing a threshold of celebrity from which there is no turning back. Whatever "extreme" really is—flash, speed, exhilaration, freedom, the high likelihood of spinal-cord injury, all tied up in an aggressively marketable box—the name Tony Hawk is shorthand for it. He's the voice and look of a niche that's grown so big that nobody calls it a niche anymore.

Stacy Peralta sees Hawk as "the walking icon of all action sports. He has this bit of magic inside of him, and everybody wants a piece of it." Part of that magic is Hawk's very name. "Mattel couldn't have invented a better one," Peralta says. "It's like a toy name, a name for a cartoon hero. It sounds cool. And—this is important—it gives you the idea of soaring."

Hawk despises the term "extreme" and much of what it implies, and he's ambivalent about the role he has assumed as its leading oracle. "The term's a little condescending to us skateboarders who've been doing our thing for more than 20 years," he says. "Really, I'm doing the same thing I was doing when I was 12."

It seems to make sense that a master of suspended animation would have a quality of arrested development, as if he freeze-framed the person he was when he perfected the thing that made him famous. People who know Hawk well talk about this strange quality he has. Peralta likens him to Peter Pan: "He's shown kids they can be kids the rest of their lives."

During an after-party at the Boom Boom HuckJam, I met a 12-year-old named Phil Jennings who had just wangled a free Birdhouse skateboard with Hawk's signature on it. Grinning fiendishly as he clutched his new swag, Phil put it this way: "I don't even think of Tony as an adult. He doesn't act like the big man. He's one of us."

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