The Birdman Drops In (Cont.)

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The Birdman Drops In (Cont.)

HAWK IS SITTING at his computer, talking to himself while he reads his e-mail. "They can really do that?" he murmurs. "Cool."

His wife, Erin, a former competitive ice skater, is about to turn 30, and Hawk wants to surprise her with an ice-skating party so she can do some triple lutzes, just like old times. "It's amazing what this company can do," he says. "I looked into renting out a public ice rink, but it turns out that for 12 grand they can just come over here with Zambonis and stuff and turn our tennis court into a rink for a day."

"The sanctuary," as Hawk calls his office, is a big, bright room off the back of his house, pin-neat and stuffed with a carefully arranged assemblage of computer equipment. This is where he edits his skate videos for 900 Films, test-drives the newer versions of Pro Skater, and responds to e-mails from fans. He gets about 3,000 a month, and he's diligent about responding, no matter how mundane the message:

Hey Tony. What's your favorite pizza topping?
—Artichoke hearts, sun-dried tomatoes.
Favorite interstate highway?
—The 5 leads me to most necessary destinations.
Or inane:
Hi—I am looking for information on Tony Hawk. My nephew loves him! However, as I am trying to research this name on the Web, I am gathering that he is not, in fact, an actual skater but the name of a character in a video game. Is this correct? Is there a real Tony Hawk? Thanks.

Standing in one corner is a Marvin the Martian gumball machine. Along the wall there's a framed Snoopy poster signed by Charles Schulz, and a photograph of Hawk straddling a motorcycle with his boyhood hero, Evel Knievel. Above his computer there's a signed basketball jersey under glass: Chicago Bulls No. 23. I ask him how he came by this little gem.

"One night I was ahead at the blackjack table at Mandalay Bay, so I went over to this sports memorabilia place," he says. "The jersey cost almost exactly the same as my take, so—what the hell—I bought it."

Over the years, media people have compared Hawk to Michael Jordan with such frequency that his handlers have taken to reversing the analogy: Jordan, they like to say, is the Tony Hawk of basketball. Yet the comparison falls short. Hawk will be the first to tell you that skateboarding is vastly different from basketball or any other team sport. It's unrealistic to expect any one person to represent all of skatedom—let alone dominate it. "Who's the best skateboarder in the world?" Hawk asks. "That's all a matter of personal opinion."

Certainly Hawk's skating M.O. isn't for everyone. Some old-school skaters tend to view him as a sellout, a circus act, or worse. Hardcore street skaters—renegades in extra-baggy pants who aggressively trail-blaze urban obstacles and tend to flirt with the illicit thrill of getting arrested—could care less about the Tony Hawks of the world. If they think about him at all, they're inclined to blame him for commodifying, and therefore dorkifying, their pure underground pursuit.

Hawk has been hearing such gripes since he was 16, and dismisses them. "Pro skaters have always had ties to the skate companies, since the beginning," he says. "So what? You could call me a sellout only in this sense: My stuff actually sells out."

Not that many skaters seem to begrudge his success. "Even the most hardcore noncommercial skater says, 'Tony Hawk deserves what he gets,'" notes Grant Brittain. "We all remember the guy when he was destitute and eating at Taco Bell."

Rodney Mullen concurs. "You can say that skateboarding has been sold out to some extent, and Tony's been part of that, but at the same time he's got so much integrity. Skating's the only thing he knows. It's his expression. It's the pen with which he writes his verse."

Hawk gives me a tour of the house, which is a fair workout. The place looks like a sumptuous cross between Pier 1 and Circuit City. There are walls of speakers and big-screen TVs, with remotes and joysticks neatly stashed everywhere. He leads me to the great room, where the oversize couches are piled high with throw pillows. "You can't really sit in here," he says. "Erin has a bit of a pillow obsession."

He shows me the command center for all his electronics. Discreetly lodged in a massive piece of distressed furniture, it connects every imaginable system—VHS, DVD, a 100-disc CD changer, laserdisc, Dreamcast, and a few generations of PlayStation, all wired to high-end pre-amps and equalizers and sliding control switches for each room in the house.

At one point, Erin comes dashing in with their one-year-old son, Keegan, and their three-year-old son, Spencer. Keegan's smelling pretty ripe, so Erin tells Hawk to go change him. As he dashes down the hall, the baby tucked under one arm, Erin says, "Honey, you're not going to belieeeeve what happened today." She has a prom queen's effervescence, but she's clearly had a tough day in the child-rearing trenches. Spencer apparently bit one of his playmates. Erin says she spanked him, which she'd never done before.

Meanwhile, all afternoon, Riley's been out by the garage, feverishly skateboarding. I'd seen his room earlier; it's a gilt forest of skating trophies. "I really don't pressure him," Hawk says. "It's just that he's been at it since he was three." Riley's practicing up for a little stunt that will involve jumping over the Lexus SC430 in an upcoming advertisement for Hawk Shoes, Tony's own line of Adio skate footwear.

"You're not going to be mad at me if I scratch up your car, are you, Dad?" Riley asks later.

"Don't worry about it," Hawk deadpans. "If anything happens, we'll just take it out of your college fund."

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