Tony Hawk Pro Skater Hd Noseblunt Slide
Simone Whitmeyer
The line begins forming shortly before noon, as children and their parents assemble on the sidewalk of an upscale outdoor shopping center in West Hollywood. This is long before the velvet rope is put in place to organize the queue, before the three beefy security officers arrive and before the guest of honor, a gawky 34-year-old "retired" professional skateboarder, takes his place at a table inside the front door of a pristine new skate and apparel shop that bears his name: HawkSkate. The line grows in the cool spring sunlight. Adolescent boys and girls wearing long, baggy surf shorts and clunky skate shoes carry battle-tested skateboard decks plastered with Hawk logos. Older shoppers shuffle past, befuddled. "Tony Hawk?" says a bald man in plaid Bermuda shorts. "Never heard of him."
You and three other people on the planet, Grandpa. For nearly two decades, Hawk has been a legend in the world of skateboarding, a waif genius who began competing at age 11 and was soon reinventing the underground sport, creating close to 100 tricks, dominating competitive vert (halfpipe) skateboarding and, by age 27, ushering in the X Games era. "He's the Michael Jordan of skateboarding," says Tommy Guerrero, a former pro skateboarder who competed through the 1980s. "He's the guy with all the talent, creativity and competitive drive."
Logically that should have been the end of the story: "The doctor, the best contest skater there ever was," says Jake Phelps, longtime editor of Thrasher magazine, one of the edgy publications that speaks to skateboard culture. But it has not ended there. Long past the age generally associated with skateboarding yet still at the top of his game, Hawk has crossed over, dragging his rebel sport (and several others in the X Games bracket) into the mainstream. If you are between ages six and 18, or are the parent of a child in that demographic, Hawk probably resides somewhere in your house. In the Xbox, perhaps. Or the PS2 console. Maybe in the CD player. On the bookshelf. On the television set. In the garage. In the dresser drawer. In the freezer. "He's the man who skates with a wallet in his back pocket and a Lexus in the parking lot," says Phelps. "Tony Hawk means ka-ching."
In an online poll conducted by teen marketer Alloy last week, Hawk was voted the "coolest big-time athlete," ahead of Tiger Woods, Jordan and Derek Jeter. "If you're a manufacturer and you've got a product that you think will appeal to an audience that's under 21 years old, you've got to look real hard at Tony, maybe even more than some of the big names in mainstream sports," says Keith Bruce, senior vice president and director of sports marketing for Foote, Cone & Belding, an international ad agency that does not have a relationship with Hawk.
In the past four years Hawk has become a one-man marketing phenomenon. Sales of Hawk-branded items generate more than $250 million annually, and Hawk himself has earned an estimated $10 million in each of the last two years. He is represented by the William Morris Agency and has a personal publicist. His sister Pat, a onetime backup singer for John Denver and Michael Bolton, runs Tony Hawk Inc., which employs 75 people. The Tony Hawk's Pro Skater video game series has amassed about $450 million in sales since its introduction in the fall of 1999.
Hawk also has licensing agreements with Adio Shoes to market Hawk Shoes; with Mattel Toys, which uses his name and image on Hot Wheels miniature cars and a remote-controlled skateboard; and with Heinz, which pays him to serve as the spokesperson for Bagel Bites and Hot Bites frozen snacks, a product line that has enjoyed a 20% jump in sales since signing Hawk. "Face it, the guy is totally golden right now," says pro skateboarder Bucky Lasek, who performs on tour withHawk. "He could put his name on toilet paper and sell it to the world."
Hawk began skateboarding at nine and was instantly hooked, a kid with long, unruly blond hair who had found no joy under the restrictions of team sports. His father, Frank, would drive him to Oasis, a skatepark beneath a ramp to the 805 Freeway not far from their house in San Diego, and later to the Del Mar Skate Ranch, next to the famous thoroughbred racetrack. "He was a skinny little kid, all padded up," says Grant Brittain, who managed the Del Mar park and later became an accomplished skateboarding photographer. "There were a lot of kids back then who got dropped off as a babysitting service, or who got into lots of drugs. Tony just kept busy, skating."
Tony had come into the late-'70s world that Peralta captured in Dogtown and Z-Boys, in which gnarly surfers worked moves on the curved walls of empty swimming pools. They were the precursors to the vert skaters most often seen today by mainstream audiences. Tony entered his first competition at age 11 and turned pro for Powell Peralta Skateboards' team, the Bones Brigade, at 14. By 16 he was changing the sport. "People were blown away by the things he was doing back then," says Peralta. "His style was so different, so creative...so dangerous." Hawk didn't have the upper-body strength to snatch his board into midair moves, so he became the first skater to Ollie--or spring into the air with the board on his feet, as if it were stuck there--into vert moves. His style was initially derided by veteran skaters, but it later became the foundation for almost every move in vert-ramp skateboarding.
As a teenager Hawk was an integral part of Peralta's Bones Brigade videos, which underscored the freedom and joy of skateboarding and are revered by skateboarders to this day. Hawk's contracts became more lucrative, and he dominated vert contests. By 1987, when he was 19, Hawk was earning more than $200,000 a year from video royalties and sponsorship deals. Skateboarding is relentlessly cyclical, however: up in the '70s, down in the early '80s, up in the mid- and late '80s, back down in the early '90s. By '93 the sport had been devastated by an internecine battle between vert and street (rails, stairs and other urban features) skaters and by liability issues that forced many swimming-pool-style skateparks to close. Hawk was married, with an infant son, and struggling to pay his big mortgage bills. "I did demos [skatepark demonstration performances] where I could count the spectators on two hands," he says. According to a survey done by American Sports Data, Inc., there were 5.4 million skateboarders in the U.S. in 1993, only half of what there had been six years earlier.
Yet Hawk kept skating and trying to build a business. Birdhouse survived, although it did not prosper. In 1995 ESPN debuted what was then called the Extreme Games. Curious, Hawk went to Rhode Island, where all the events were staged, won the vert competition and finished second in street. People began to recognize him in public. Birdhouse sales spiked.
"Never underestimate the power of television," says Hawk. "I never liked the way they manufactured rivalries between skaters, but TV made a difference." In 1999, competing in the Best Trick event at the sixth X Games in San Francisco, Hawk became the first skateboarder in history to complete a 900, a dangerous 2 1/2-revolution spin off a vert ramp. He had tried the trick several times before, never landing it; in the process he had suffered a cracked rib and a spinal injury that required several adjustments. Yet on this night he succeeded. He promptly retired from competition, and since that night his life has been a blur.
Early returns were not good. "Nintendo had this one guy who was a little bit into skating, so they brought me in for a meeting," says Hawk, "but as soon as I got there, the guys in the suits were like, 'Why do we want to do a skateboarding game?' They didn't get it. I remember standing up across a conference table from a guy from Midway and yelling at him to at least try developing the game. No luck."
In September 1998 Activision, which is based in Santa Monica, Calif., called Hawk and expressed interest in doing a skating game. It was a natural partnership. Activision is to gaming what skateboarding is to sports: iconoclastic, contrary, rebellious. "We wanted to get into sports gaming," says Kathy Vrabeck, Activision's executive vice president for global publishing and brand management. "Other companies were already there. The one area where we thought there would be room for growth was extreme sports." Programmers from Neversoft (then an independent company, now owned by Activision) developed a demo and showed it toHawk, who tinkered with it and gave other feedback for almost a year. In May '99 Tony Hawk's Pro Skater was unveiled at a trade show in Los Angeles, and it created enormous buzz. It debuted in the fall, and by Christmas it had shot to the top of the sales charts. Pro Skater 3 was ranked No. 7 among all video titles and second among sports games in 2001 (after Madden NFL 2002). The game has earned Hawk royalties of more than $6 million per year.
Through those three incarnations the game has created a large portion of Hawk's wealth, and Activision is now the No. 3-ranked software publisher, behind Electronic Arts and Nintendo (and ahead of such mainstays as Sony, Sega, Midway, Acclaim and Microsoft). The company's stock price has more than tripled since '99 and was largely unaffected by the post-Sept. 11 market swoon (as was the entire gaming industry, which, according to a March article in FORTUNE, outsold the movie industry in 2001).
Meanwhile sales of Hawk clothing have flourished on the strength of his name and the growth of skateboarding, and sales of Hawk-endorsed snack foods and kids' toys have been pumped by his personal appearances. John Carroll, managing director for Heinz frozen potatoes and snacks, says that when he hired Hawkto man a Bagel Bites booth at the 2000 Winter X Games, "we needed to get extra security because our line was so long that it was spilling over into other booths. The way he made a connection with each person in line was amazing. We also have relationships with Kristi Yamaguchi and Larry Bird, and Tony is as good as, or better than, anybody I deal with in this business."
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