Tony Hawk Forever
Tony Hawk Forever
The greatest sports redemption story ever, a legacy that keeps going and why Tony Hawk will always be the best
Your heroes are supposed to be indestructible. That’s why Vin Diesel has it in his contract that he can’t lose a fight in the Fast and Furious movies.
After watching Tony Hawk break his femur doing what he does every day, what he’s supposed to be better than everyone else at, what we all just take for granted as what he’ll always do, it became unavoidably clear that heroes aren’t indestructible.
He didn’t just fracture it. He broke it broke it. Like cartoonishly snapped in half. – no insignificant injury for anyone at 53, not just professional skateboarders
That could’ve been it. It could have easily been it. No ceremony, no big send-off, just no more Tony Hawk skateboarding. And no one would have blamed him, either. The man has done enough to become synonymous with multiple subcultures – skateboarding and video gaming. He has absolutely nothing left to prove anyone.
Before that crash, Tony Hawk’s career did seem to be winding down in his own way. He was still skating every day, but he was consistently “retiring” tricks that just weren’t worth the physical toll they took on his body, or worth the risk. He did his last 900 at 48. He put out a whole video collection of his “last tricks” (and released them as NFT’s, but we’ll forgive the Birdman for this).
Over the months that followed the injury, Tony Hawk regularly posted his progress on Instagram. He had to re-learn how to walk and put weight on his injured leg (which he did the next day). His terrified wife filmed him while he hobbled on a skateboard just on the flat of his ramp. He started pumping up and down that ramp again. He got to the coping. He did a few lip tricks. He got up in the air. He was spinning.
Tony Hawk, the man who practically invented modern skateboarding, was re-learning how to skateboard, and we were watching it in real time.
And just like that, he was coming back.
It’s tough to deny that this is an all-time great sports comeback story. This isn’t someone like Michael Jordan recovering from an injury during the season. This is Michael Jordan literally re-training himself how to dribble and shoot a basketball at all, but also if he was less of an asshole so we all wanted to root for him.
What makes it so great when looking at it through the lens of skateboarding specifically is that this was just for him. He wasn’t training for the Olympics, or the X-Games, or any commercial entity. This was for him.
“I’ve said many times that I won’t stop skating until I am physically unable,” he wrote on Instagram. “A broken leg - with plenty of hardware - will probably be the biggest test of that creed. I’ll be back… maybe not at full capacity but I resigned to that notion years ago as I approached ‘mid-life.’”
And though skateboarding has gone through its own commercial revolutions – many of which were put into motion by or directly centered around Tony Hawk – it is, at its core, a solitary activity. You do it for you. There are no teams. There’s no score unless you attribute one to it, but plenty of purists in the Olympics age argue that doing so kills its very spirit.
He was re-learning to skateboard because he needed to re-learn how to skateboard. That’s it.
Days after the injury, HBO released a life-spanning documentary on Tony Hawk, aptly titled “Until the Wheels Fall Off.” A couple more days later, he attended the Oscars with an extremely dope custom cane.
The focus of the documentary is how he found his love of skateboarding as a kid, how involved his parents were and facilitated that obsession, the complicated relationship it created with his father, pursuing your unpopular bliss, buying a house in high school, the ups and downs of fame as skateboarding faded in and out of public interest, the video games, the revitalization of his career, his own part in commercialization of skateboarding, and his life now as the elder statesman of the whole sport. That last part is really where the documentary sticks the landing.
It ends on a storyline that has absolutely nothing to do with skateboarding: How he checked himself into an in-patient therapy program in order to get his life under control and be the father and husband he didn’t think he had been and wanted to be.
Had he broken his leg while the documentary crew was in his warehouse, there’s absolutely no doubt his subsequent recovery would’ve been a focal point of the documentary. It might’ve even partially overshadowed the story of Tony Hawk the man in addition to Tony Hawk the skateboarder, the story that made a guy who is a hero to so many people across the world that much more human.
Instead, the movie came out, and rather than the story ending, it continues with each update filmed in real time, where we all get to watch him continue to be human in front of us – struggling, getting frustrated that he can’t do the things he literally invented and he things he was the best at for so long, feeling discouraged that things weren’t getting better as quickly as he had hoped, understanding his new limitations but not letting them dictate his recovery.
He posted motivational shit like this, talking about embracing small victories and any incremental progress.
Maybe the documentary gave more people a reason to get behind the guy who might’ve felt like a larger than life video game character first, but through the documentary and his unlikely recovery became an Earthly man who goes through things that us normal people go through.
Patton Oswalt even referenced it in his new standup special, saying he “Jackie Channed his way into even more coolness.”
Maybe in the future we will look back on this era of Tony Hawk’s career as a defining one. Right now, watching it happen, it’s undeniable that it stacks up against the best theatrical sports story you can think of without a hint of embellishment or creative license. He’s not out there pushing any narrative other than “I love skateboarding, so I want to do it forever.” And he’s not making it look easy. He’s not afraid to show the falls. He tells you when he feels discouraged, but he makes sure he ends it by telling you he’s still chasing that purpose in his life skateboarding has provided since he was a kid, so it’s worth it to keep moving. The lessons are applicable whether you like skateboarding, knitting, carpentry, landscaping, arson, baseball or cooking.
Do the shit you like, even when it seems impossible, and do it because you like it. It might be tough sometimes, even if you were once the best at it. And that’s cool. Celebrate success when it happens, even if it’s not the milestone you were expecting.
Tony Hawk is the best, man. Not just because of spins on a skateboard, or video games, or soundtracks he’s willing to discuss with excited young journalists who get flustered that Tony Hawk is calling them. He’s a hero. He’s my hero, at least. Maybe part of my attachment to this moment is because I’m looking forward to pretty much re-learning how to skateboard myself after a long, unintended break. I even have a Tony Hawk Falcon 1 board set up waiting for me in the basement for when I do, and I hope I have the patience he’s shown.
He’s a hero because when everything pointed to cementing his legacy where it was, a point where no one would’ve faulted him for chilling for the rest of his life without a single clip or public demo again, he went and added another chapter.
Tony Hawk has been getting the shit kicked out of him every day for more than 40 years. It’s not in his contract that he can’t lose. He just hasn’t yet.
Today’s Snakes and Sparklers musical guest is Wild Pink.