Placeholder Image

Subtitles section Play video

  • don't kick my board.

  • I'm so happy to be doing 73 questions with you.

  • Oh, thanks for including me.

  • Thanks for thanks for doing it.

  • So the first question just to get out of the way because the Internet is dying to know how many times this week have you been semi recognized or Miss recognized?

  • Tony Hawk?

  • Maybe three or four?

  • Okay.

  • And who have you been most recently?

  • Mistaken for, uh, let's see.

  • Kelly Slater, Lance Armstrong and the guy from the movie Ghost.

  • Patrick's lazy No, the guy that betrays him.

  • You do?

  • What's most common misconception about skaters?

  • I think they're lazy stoners and I can tell you it's the exact opposite.

  • To be a pro skater, you have to be disciplined.

  • You have to be determined and you have to work at it.

  • And how much you skate in these days?

  • Escaped almost every day.

  • And you been skating for how many years?

  • Full 41 years now.

  • And do you still have any early boards?

  • Ideo.

  • I have a couple special ones in here.

  • You want to see?

  • You want to see him?

  • Yes.

  • So how easily to skateboarding come to you?

  • I was not a natural.

  • It was actually something had to work out very much.

  • And do you remember what motivated you to start?

  • Yeah.

  • My older brother was a surfer and he was skating in the seventies, and some my friends in my neighborhood were skating, so I just picked it up with them.

  • What is your first memory of riding on a skateboard?

  • I remember riding down the alley and running into the fence and getting splinters in my hands and those of the boards right there.

  • Yeah.

  • Here.

  • My boards.

  • Uh, this is my very first professional skateboard model with my name on it.

  • And it's the actual one that I rode.

  • I gifted it to a friend of mine who was an amateur skater back then and recently.

  • He gifted it back to me, so I'm very thankful to have it.

  • This board was actually an auction item for a foundation.

  • I sent this board to surviving members of the Clash and they decorated it and they signed it and they wrote lyrics to London calling on it.

  • And when it went up for auction, I I was high as bitter because I couldn't let this go off course.

  • And then this is actually a replica of my very first skateboard, which I happen to hold onto and now sits in the Smithsonian.

  • That is so cool.

  • Smithsonian.

  • Yeah.

  • All right.

  • Back to your childhood, though.

  • How did your parents feel?

  • As you started spending more and more time in the skate park, they were surprisingly supportive.

  • Most of my friends parents did not want them skating, so I felt very lucky, Right?

  • Do you have to be young to be a skater?

  • It helps with resilience and balance in the beginning, but I don't think so.

  • I feel like you can start a slow as you want.

  • There are plenty of facilities around this.

  • Try if you're older right now, what would you say is the moment your career completely changed?

  • Uh, when our first video game was released, things changed dramatically.

  • I got a lot more opportunity.

  • I didn't have to compete to make a living at skating.

  • The recognition factor was was immense and really tipped the scales for skating in terms of general popularity.

  • It did.

  • And you're being interviewed by a huge fan of these games.

  • Thanks.

  • Uh, but have to ask you.

  • Do you choose yourself as your avatar when you're playing your games?

  • Are you asking if I play with myself?

  • No, no, I didn't.

  • Yes, I play as my character in th PS Siri's because inevitably, I know all my special moves.

  • And that's how I get the highest scores.

  • Because if you have your own video game, people want to challenge you at it, right?

  • And so playing is your own character is more appropriate cheap mood a little bit?

  • What's a trick that video game Tony can do that real life.

  • Tony cannot, uh, the seed 900 to revert to manual to kick flip McTwist on the next wall, not trying at any time.

  • Never, Who's most exciting person that game with you.

  • I play video games with Bruce Willis at a charity event while back, and he and I went head to head camera.

  • Which game?

  • But I want now on a scale of 1 to 10.

  • How would you rate your videogame skills?

  • Uh, I'm about an eight on my game, Siri's, And maybe on any Mario game that I play with my daughter, uh, any of the new games.

  • I'm not, you know, the shooter's Forget it, right?

  • I heard that you gave up violin to become a skater's.

  • This is true.

  • I was playing violin at the same time when I first started skating, and my music teacher at school wanted me to do all these school concerts on the weekends.

  • But I was off in Florida at skate events, and so he told me that I had to choose one of the other.

  • I think you made the right choice.

  • Do you wanna go outside?

  • Yeah, I love it.

  • So, Tony, what is your biggest pet peeve?

  • Oh wow.

  • I travel extensively.

  • And when people crowd the baggage carousel for their bags and drives me crazy like this all stand back.

  • Wait till we see our bags.

  • What's the best birthday party you've ever had?

  • My 50th was a treat.

  • My wife surprised me.

  • We had Mark Mothersbaugh saying, Happy birthday to me on stage John Doe next scene from the Band X played a few songs, and the band pop tone also played.

  • Now, when you fly, do you check your boards or do you care of them on?

  • I carry them on, if possible, but there are a few key international airports where you cannot carry skateboards, including London, Heathrow and Sydney's.

  • So, um, I have to check him in, Unfortunately, and who do we have here?

  • Oh, here's my daughter.

  • Hey, she also likes to spin so best skatepark in the United States.

  • What is it?

  • I really like the Linda Vista Skate Park here in San Diego.

  • It's brand new and has a little bit of everything.

  • And it's got a lot of variety and terrain, right?

  • And you're a trainee skater.

  • Is that correct?

  • I am a transition skater, Yes, What does that mean?

  • It means my expertise is in ramps with the Radius.

  • Because I grew up skating backyard pools.

  • That's what pools were.

  • You know, there's emulate waves, and I just learned how to skate half pipes much better than anything else.

  • Escaped feels like its own language.

  • Obviously, you got laser flips, eggplants, bod, burials, jealous husband sounds so cool sending all these words.

  • But where do all these names come from?

  • The general rule was, if you created a trick, you get to name it and anything goes, and there's no rules in skateboarding, so we have some ridiculous names right now.

  • Can you tell me something in skate language and see if I could decipher it.

  • Okay.

  • Uh, the other day I tried to do switch, kick, flip toe frontside hurricane down a six stare and ended up lending dark side and credit card ing on the bottom.

  • Right.

  • Okay.

  • So that means that you were rolling.

  • You broke a bone, and then you found out you have bad credit score.

  • Yeah.

  • Not really broke a bond.

  • Let's just say that my skateboard landed in the most uncomfortable place.

  • Okay.

  • What?

  • What is the craziest thing you've ever done on a skateboard?

  • I jump between 27 storey buildings in downtown Los Angeles for an MTV show.

  • Tony, I'm still here.

  • What's the hardest part of any trick?

  • The hardest part of any trick is committing to the landing.

  • It's There are all kinds of elements to a trick, and you can have all those pieces.

  • But when the time comes, the moment of truth is, if you're really gonna make it, what tricks have you invented?

  • Ah, Phew.

  • I'd say the most popular ones are stale fish.

  • Madonna.

  • 7 20 All the 5 40 kick.

  • Flip mctwist.

  • The ingenuity in this name design blowed away.

  • So how long did it take you to train to land?

  • The 900?

  • I tried nine hundreds on and off for about 10 years before I finally made one.

  • Incredible.

  • And have you seen anyone?

  • Land 10 80?

  • I have.

  • I've seen two people land 10 eighties.

  • They're much younger than me, and they did it on a much bigger ramp.

  • But it's very impressive.

  • What's a trick that you're trying to master today?

  • The most recent trick I've been trying is an alley front side lip slide into a backside Smith grind.

  • I still have no idea.

  • I don't expect you to.

  • Do you have any pre competition superstitions?

  • I don't really have superstitions.

  • I have more of an O.

  • C.

  • D.

  • The way that I put my gear on.

  • It's always left first, but I've just been doing that since I was a kid.

  • Why stop now?

  • What's most memorable injury.

  • I broke my pelvis, uh, fracture my skull and broke my thumb all in one fell swoop.

  • How do you talk yourself back onto the board after going through something like that?

  • That was the hardest thing to come back from a lot of things I took for granted I would come back to.

  • We're actually very daunting and scary to me.

  • My balance changed.

  • It took me about a year to really to really get back to where I was comfortable with all my tricks.

  • And just little by little, we could say, is the biggest life lesson learned in skateboarding.

  • Biggest life lesson is the value Perseverance.

  • Just trying something over and over and keeping at it, Not giving up wise words from Tony Hawk, huh?

  • Sounds like we got some skating in the distance going.

  • Are those air my kids skating in the backyard?

  • Natural?

  • They would be.

  • And that is a hawk on your gate.

  • It's a recurring theme to have talks about it.

  • No, I don't have an abundance of them, but this is actually a silhouette of my first skateboard graphic.

  • Like that white board that you saw in there.

  • This is the only gate exclusive to it.

  • It's really cool.

  • Very upper Bo.

  • What is also proposes Birdhouse.

  • So what a birdhouse come from birdhouses?

  • A skateboard company?

  • I started because I thought that my career is a skate as a pro skater was coming to an end, and I wanted to stay in the industry.

  • I wanted to create my own brand and have my own team.

  • And little did I know.

  • That was sort of the beginning of my second wave of a career and skating right now.

  • When did you start the Tony Hawk Foundation?

  • In 2002 on Was it always just about skate parks?

  • Mostly about skate parks, but also about empowering communities and used to do something for themselves and to give them the resource is and the funding to actually get parks built, right?

  • And, uh, it's It's the proudest work that I've done.

  • So cool.

  • How many skate parks have you opened?

  • We've helped to fund over 900 facilities, very inspiring.

  • Now when it comes to designing them, how much of a say do you get, uh, helping the design on some of them?

  • I get all the designs across my desk, but I'd say in the last 10 years they really improved.

  • I just try to mark him up and make sure that it caters to all skill levels and all styles, and you also recently designed a fashion line and launched it Paris.

  • Yes, I helped to design the tone.

  • Toxins Your line So cool.

  • What's your favorite place to skate in Paris?

  • The new Van Skate Park that was built for the Vans Park.

  • Siri's most recently.

  • How would you describe your personal style?

  • Tony, I would say it's subdued.

  • Clean, Um, relatively cool for 51 year old and you have a favorite shoe for skating.

  • I do my new look I pro does in the new color way that with all the achievements in the endorsements received over the years, what's been the attitude toward you in the skate community.

  • At first there was a pretty heavy backlash for having sponsors that were non endemic, more corporate.

  • But nowadays I think that people know I have the best interest of skating at heart and that I keeps gains integrity at the priority.

  • Andi, even with the young generation, having sponsors that aren't skate companies is very commonplace.

  • Now.

  • You could redo any moment in your career.

  • What would it be?

  • Um wow.

  • I could redo any moment.

  • It would be not doing a loop in a full gorilla suit.

  • Remember that one?

  • No.

  • Well, you know now what's something that you would go back and tell 14 year old Tony I would say you're not gonna believe what you're in for.

  • And if anyone asks you to do a loop in a gorilla suit, please decline.

  • Now you're early signature hairstyles were copied by so many skaters.

  • How did you land on those hairstyles?

  • Really, my friend Kevin, Stop.

  • And I'm just trying to grow your bangs out.

  • And I just kept sort of trimming up the rest of my hair until I had a pretty big flop.

  • And then that became known as the flop.

  • In fact, some barbers were offering Tony Hawk haircuts and their signs outside.

  • Yeah, I'm pretty familiar with the flop.

  • Um, this is it right here, right?

  • Yeah.

  • This is prime flop days right there.

  • In fact, it was so I guess iconic the Thrasher magazine dubbed it the Mix Squeak.

  • You gonna go back to that?

  • I don't think I have the fullness to go back to that.

  • But I would love to Tony as a father.

  • What do you hope your kids learn from you?

  • I hope I have taught them the value of perseverance, of believing in yourself and creating your own path of life.

  • And they're really good skaters.

  • They all skate.

  • Yeah, And by the way, I love that video of you teaching.

  • Your daughter had a drop in on the vertical ramp.

  • Thank you.

  • Yeah.

  • I didn't think that we'd gone so viral.

  • It went so bottles everywhere.

  • But do you get nervous about them getting hurt?

  • I do.

  • But I feel like they all have a pretty good sense of their limitations somewhere more daring than others.

  • But at this point, they're all almost full grown adults, and they have a better sense of their limitations.

  • And I do know what does Riley hawk down that Tony Hawk?

  • And never do you name it.

  • I think, firstly, to make a career as a pro skater without having to compete, just doing video coverage and photos being a male model, uh, having a being a rock star, having his own signature shoe in his twenties.

  • I mean, the list goes on, Joe, is that right?

  • Uh, no, I'm just really proud of him.

  • Cool.

  • Do your kids that offer any input on what you post online or put on social media?

  • Only if it includes a picture of them, then I will.

  • I will run it by them and get their approval.

  • So, Tony San Diego, how long have you been living in this beautiful, beautiful city for my whole life.

  • And besides San Diego, where else would you call home?

  • I would say my personal vert ramp.

  • Yeah.

  • Yeah.

  • My, uh that's sort of my home away from home.

  • That's my happy place.

  • Very, very cool.

  • Now, growing up here, did you serve two?

  • Yeah, She started serving before I started skating.

  • Now I would imagine that you, as a skater, makes for a good surfer, right?

  • I not great at surfing.

  • I I'm actually scared of big waves, because if I fall on a big ramp, it doesn't come crashing after me and try to drown me.

  • Andi also, I just don't get time to chase the swells.

  • He says, All right, let's check out some skating.

  • So, Tony, what do you think has brought the biggest change in your sport?

  • I would say the advent of social media, it's really leveled the playing field in terms of how to get recognized on and, uh, you know, kids can make their own scene in their own region and really become a pro skater without having to chase the magazines and the coverage in the video.

  • It's amazing what's most exciting change.

  • You've seen skating over the past decade?

  • Uh, the rise of female skaters.

  • There c rippers out there.

  • Right now, it's one in 2020.

  • It's being introduced as an Olympic sport, which is incredible.

  • Were you involved in making that a reality?

  • Yeah, I was in some of the early meanings of organization, actually went to the IOC and lasagne on.

  • I campaigned for forbid, and then once I realized it was actually going to be a reality, I step back from all the political process, and I'm just there to watch is a fan that's so cool is a harder to skate in front of a camera or an audience.

  • I would say it's hard to gain from audience.

  • Camera does not make funny if you fall and it gives you a second chance.

  • Oh, well, that's great.

  • Now, which excited doom or visiting the White House or being featured on The Simpsons being placed on The Simpsons was by far one of the coolest thing that's ever happened to me.

  • Thank you, sir all.

  • I really the idea that they created episode around me.

  • It was just unbelievable.

  • Is it safe to say that you may be the only person in history to have skated the White House?

  • Well, Andy MacDonald was there introducing Bill Clinton, and he claims that he stepped on a skateboard, but any pictures or it didn't happen.

  • True.

  • Now, skating is a solitary sport, but it creates such a community.

  • How do you explain that?

  • I think it's more that there's a camaraderie, especially if you go to the skate parts people really love to see put each other pushing their limits and overcoming their fears.

  • And as much as it is an individual pursuit, there's so much teamwork and it's really more like a party.

  • And what is their relationship with the bones brigade?

  • Like, right now, I still keep in touch with the bones for gave Tommy Mike Lance, uh, Rodney and cab.

  • You know, we're all, like, still hang out.

  • We still skate together right now.

  • You gonna show me some moves?

  • Uh, yeah, sure.

  • Let's do it.

  • Traffic alert.

  • I don't want to take my kids, though.

  • No, you definitely don't want to do that.

  • And there is Tony Hawk making it look easy for question number 73.

  • Did you ever find Animal Chin?

  • No.

  • Why do you think I built this?

  • Why do you think I'm still out here doing it?

  • Do you wanna come join me in the search like meets?

  • Get with you?

  • Yeah.

  • Comes giving me.

  • I don't even that was this.

  • Here you go.

  • I have no idea what I'm doing, but Okay.

  • You ready?

  • You just gotta get a lean forward.

  • Drop it and believe in yourself.

  • All right?

  • 123 I club Tony.

  • I think I just did a 900.

  • Yeah, us.

don't kick my board.

Subtitles and vocabulary

Click the word to look it up Click the word to find further inforamtion about it