Words: Danny Wilson 

In a somewhat unprecedented move skateboarding’s more recognisable name, Tony Hawk, inked a contract with Independent trucks at some point in the last few months. This is of note for a number or reasons. Firstly, Tony was never an Indy man and those who have spent hours obsessing over jittery old footage of Tony and other 80’s greats know that the Birdman is always going to be the poster boy for the now defunct Tracker Trucks.

But perhaps even more importantly than giving us all an excuse to look at awesome old Tracker and Powell Peralta ads, Hawk’s decision to move to Indy was heralded this week with the release of a welcoming clip of entirely new footage and not just that but entirely new top quality, Grade A, envelope pushing footage from a 44-year-old man.

It’s because of stuff like this that nobody can really legitimately hate Tony Hawk. Think about it, on paper he should be one of skateboarding’s most reviled figures. There is nothing that the snot nosed, relentlessly negative contingent of the skateboarding community really loath more than success and if there is one word to describe Tony Hawk even ahead of “talented” or ‘lanky” or “wealthy” it’s “successful”. Obviously the early days of Hawk’s career were almost characterised by the begrudgery of his fellow skateboarder’s more so than they were by the young Hawk’s own achievements and the extent to which he was pushing what was understood to be possible on a skateboard. This aspect of Hawk’s career is dealt with in depth in Stacy Peralta’s excellent new documentary chronicling skateboarding culture throughout the 1980’s through the lens of the most important skaters of the area, The Bones Brigade: An Autobiography. Despite perhaps leaning too regularly towards hackneyed seriousness and swelling music over footage of grown men sobbing over their respective pasts it’s still a great insight into perhaps skateboarding’s commercial golden age and the careers of a number of skateboarding’s most significant innovators not just Hawk.

Hawk managed to transcend his role as the reviled savant of the 80s and achieved the seemingly more impossible feat of appearing on McDonald’s ads and Paling around with moto-cross riders for the guts of the 00’s travelling the states as part of something called a “boom-boom huckjam” while still retaining an air of likeability. The wider skateboarding communities’ seemingly total refusal to turn on Hawk as a “sell-out” could be understood to stem from a number of different things but perhaps firstly it really cannot be overstated how significant the fact that he really does just seem like a nice bloke is.

I remember reading an interview with Hawk years ago in the tragically defunct Big Brother magazine where one of skateboarding journalism’s greats Dave Carnie challenged Hawk on his endorsement of McDonald’s. Pressing him on what McDonalds has to do with skateboarding as well the questionable ethics of a great deal of their business practices not to mention the health risks of constant McDonald’s consumption. Hawk’s response was simply that he liked McDonald’s; he travelled the world as part of his job and no matter what varied culinary options surrounded him he would often just go for McDonalds. That was it, no confrontational defensive response, no appealing to some sort of prepared corporate statement just a genuinely sincere reaction from a by all accounts sound lad. A response that though the reader might not agree with they can surely respect simply due to its honesty.

I suppose sincerity is the defining factor that preserved Hawk’s position within skateboarding culture as opposed to his name simply becoming shorthand for “famous skateboarder” within wider pop culture at the expense of his hard earned legacy. Hawk’s relationship with skateboarding has never had an air of the exploitive about it. He come across a man that really loved what he does and has loved it ever since he was a kid. This reputation of everyman likeability really speaks volumes about young Hawk’s nerdom. As he explains in Peralta’s new film at the peak of 80’s Hawk mania he was still in high school, not home schooled or attending some sort of X-men style academy for talented youths but a proper secondary school.

And he wasn’t even massively popular at that. From his career’s get go in earnest Hawk was living a bizarre double life of being one part international youth culture superstar and other part awkward somewhat unpopular teenager. His engagement with skateboarding was for his benefit alone and once he entered into his second wave of wider success in the early 00’s he may well have associated himself with big brands who’s motivations for appealing to a skateboarder as a brand ambassador are somewhat questionable but Hawk himself never seemed to be taking advantage of skateboarding as a whole. Hawk allowed “Tony Hawk” the brand to exist somewhat outside the realm of traditional skateboarding culture but never at the expense of skateboarding as a whole. He never misrepresented the culture itself.

As you watch the new Indy introduction clip and see a 44 year old Hawk fall a good 20 odd feet from the top of a ladder to the strains of Devo’s “Fresh” one cannot help but think that for a man of hawk’s age and considerable means to still be putting himself through that at his age he could only be doing for love of the game. Even the decision to use a Devo track from their most recent album, reminiscent of their 80’s peak brings to mind the weedy teenager that inspired a thousand ludicrous haircuts as opposed to the international icon that sold a million happy meals.

Hawk’s position in pop culture is surely secured at this point and I very much doubt any other professional skateboarder will ever achieve the same level of name recognition but there really is something satisfying in seeing that a man like himself who pushed the widespread commercial understanding of what skateboarding to places that could still be understood as negative really, truly loves what he does still. For many people of a certain age (myself included) their first real exposure to skateboarding was through the Tony Hawk’s pro skater video game series (how many people used to think his name was Tony Hawks?) and Hawk’s continued desire to do padless inverts in back-yard pools while genuinely seeming like a nice old lad in sense legitimizes his capturing the imaginations of so many youngsters that are now jaded, negative twentysomethings. We all want to like Hawk and thankfully he keeps giving us good reasons to.