Followed: Tony Hawk | DAY IN THE LIFE

What's up, Pocket Skate Mag? Welcome to my house. As you can see, Ronan was just here. Riley just picked him up. This whole area and that room is his domain, and he insists that I bring out all the skateboards. And he used to just push them around, but now he sits on them and waits for me to push him, or he tries to stand up on his own, and he's not ready for that yet, so it's a little terrifying. It reminds me of having Riley. We have a Gons blanket covering the couch. But it's funny, because Mark came here and was sitting there before he realized that he was sitting on himself. And then this is my office. Yeah, I just have a random collection of stuff. Most of the more sentimental items are at the office on my ramp. This is one of the coolest things I got to do last year with the release of THPS 3 and 4. This is my dad's helmet from World War II. He was a pilot in the Navy on aircraft carriers. This was his actual helmet, FH Hawk. This is my dad during his Navy days, and he looks just like me, Riley, Spencer, Keegan. I don't know, we're all just carbon copies of each other. This was a gift from Riley. It's a smoker for whiskey. So you put a glass of whiskey in there, burn some wood chips, and then it's like a whole theatrical thing. And if you turn around, you'll see why he bought me that, because I have a collection of whiskey. Top shelf ones, they are very, very rare. Honestly, I don't drink that much, but every once in a while, I have a glass, and I know exactly which ones are the best. And so, self-studied whiskey and bourbon connoisseur. This was actually from Prohibition Days. It's got the stickers on it, and from 1917, it was when it was bottled. And then it's for medicinal purposes only. That's how you could get away with alcohol in Prohibition Days, if it was medicine. This is my piece de resistance, over 100 years old. This was my first X Games trophy, 1995. It came with a glass piece right here, and I don't know, I don't know. I just found this, actually. That costume, that, like, I actually had a Hollywood makeup artist do the costume, and I had the most insane headache by the end of the night, because all that stuff was just pulling on my face. But we got the shot. I got to ride a motorcycle and get towed by Evel Knievel. This is from Jackass 4. I got pushed through the street by the Pontiosaurus. I actually started bleeding. So, thanks, Spike, thanks, Jeff. This is actually from Animal Chint, from the video. This is one of the posters that was in the Blue Tile Lounge. I stole it, sorry, Stace. That's from the MTV Music Festival, 99. The first actual mega-ramp event they ever did. My mom, right there, Ray Underhill, two of my biggest inspirations. Tupac, where I met Tupac at the American Music Awards in 1990 or 91. It's a complicated story, but basically, we met him backstage, got a photo of him with Riley's mom. For some reason, I didn't get the photo of me, or I think I ran out of film at the time. One or the other. V-Mix, who's a famous artist on Instagram, combined us two from the same night. Like, I still feel this, like, oh yes, I got to meet Tupac, so cool. So, Tupac. That's kinda it. You wanna see my new curb? So, this pool was here when I bought the house. And it is skatable, kinda, but it's pebble-tech, so if you fall on it, you just get chewed up. We drained it once, and it was not as fun as we'd hoped. This is the skate park. It's changed, different sections of it have changed through the years. That used to be just more of a mini-ramp section, and they changed into, like, the shallow end of a pool, and copied Del Mar Skate Ranch tile on it. This used to be just a bank with a curb, so then we made it a step-up and an extension. It's not easy changing concrete parks, which I've learned through the years. That's why they say it's set in concrete. It's not meant to be changed. Where there's a will, there's a way. And here's the latest addition, because I'm in my late 50s, a slappy curb. Yes, I'm joining the crew, but I'm not that good at it. I mean, I can slappy, but I can't do all the little dances and switch-arounds and stuff like that. The coolest thing about having a slappy curb is trying to teach my kids in their 20s slappies. It's fun. They can all do them backside, but they can't do them frontside. I don't know what that is. I only, I learned them frontside. Let's go! Let's do some slappies! I'll get my skateboard. I like doing, like, straight ends. It's hard for me to keep my front truck on. That's my challenge. That's the thing, though, if you really approach it like a slash grind, then your front truck comes off as quick. So you gotta give it, like, a half-slash to keep it on. I'm not good at backside. Roll out. I'm pretty bad at it. Yeah, that's how the kids do it. I try to force them to put their foot, like, over the back bolts, especially frontside. I mean, even experienced skaters, pro skaters, do the same thing where they're, like, trying to kick turn onto it. I tell them to do it like the hardest speed check they've ever done. I'm too excited. Cutting it tight. I want to learn how to do the, like, where you're really in it and you're, like, stuck in 5.0 and go to tail slide and stuff like that. Yeah, I'm not trying to do that, though. I'm leaning into my age. I'm going with noping tail blocks, slappies. Park is 2004, but I'm mostly skating my ramp these days. Kids have a blast out here. I like skating where I can knee slide. There's no knee sliding in here. I grew up in the days of not auling on street, right? And so when we would manual stuff, or, like, nose manual, I learned it like this, and I can't get out of it. Time to go to work, my office. Normal day, if I'm home, starts pretty early, probably a workout for about an hour. I have a little gym in the garage. If I'm feeling not too sore, I'll go to the ramp. It's kind of day by day now. Workouts usually help get loose, and I'll go to the ramp and then just, like, skate, usually with no directive, just for fun. Sometimes we'll come up with something where it's like, I'll be skating with Andy, Jimmy, or Reece. We'll just have little challenges for ourselves, you know, like, hey, let's try to relearn backside hurricanes. And then that becomes a thing to do. It's way less pressure than it used to be. It used to be just like, oh, gotta put something out, gotta get a new trick, destroy yourself or something that a few people will like, maybe, you know? It's weird being a vert skater, because it's so niche. And I just picked up violin again. That's been fun, but super humbling, because I played violin when I was really young and actually gave it up for skating, and now I'm trying to get back into it, and it's not like riding a bike or anything, but I'm just learning kind of some riffs. It's been fun, though. At some point, you realize, oh, I'm making that sound, and it's actually in tune, and I don't know, it's exciting. I mean, musicians, I understand what I'm talking about, but it is like, I get that same feeling that I get from doing new stuff skating. That's probably what I should be looking for, because I'm ******* old. But happy to go to the ramp if you want to check it out. Cool. My role at Birdhouse, well, officially, I'm the president or CEO. I'm kind of more the ambassador to the brand. I don't want to say the ringleader, but the one that's really making the decisions in terms of what we do with the team, kind of what direction we go, but Derek is the guy doing all the heavy lifting, and it's pretty much me and Derek, and then Steve does the team. That's Birdhouse. It's the three of us. It's been fun. I mean, Birdhouse has been going for over 30 years now. It's still my biggest pride of a company. It's impossibly hard to be successful as a skate company these days. We figure out ways to find other licensing opportunities and things like that, and it's a hustle, though. I mean, it is definitely the thing that I work on the hardest. I don't know how to explain it. With little return, but I don't care. I mean, that's how it is. I love it. I don't think my love for skating has ever fluctuated. If anything, it ever fluctuated in terms of my desire was when I was doing really well in the late 80s, winning a lot of events, and that pressure began to outweigh the fun of skating, and it sucked because I still loved it, but when I would go to a contest, and back then, everything was contests. I know it's not like that now, but if you were alive in those days, you weren't gonna make a living as a video skater. You had to compete. At some point, I was just expected to win, and I just wanted to be part of the crew. Like, I wanted to be one of the skaters on the ramp having fun, everyone was, you know, we were in town, we were together, and there was this really intense pressure on me coming from myself, but also my sponsors, the organizers, and so I just felt robotic. I was actually gonna just quit skating, but I stepped away from competition, dove into just being as creative as possible on a skateboard, and that brought me out of it. That made it way more fun, and then when I went back to competition, I didn't have that attitude of having to have a perfect ranking. I just went with more cavalier attitude that was like, if I bail, I bail, and I'm just gonna try the hardest stuff, and it just made it so much more fun because it was more spontaneous. That was probably my best era of learning tricks back-to-back, but then since then, I mean, it's just been fun. Like, even now, it's almost more fun than ever because I'm still officially a pro skater. I'm, of course, super old, and I'm more niche because I skate vert. It means so much more now because it's fleeting. I'm not trying to, like, hang on to my youth for dear life, but it's more like I know that I won't be able to do these tricks sooner than later or skate like this, and so I enjoy it so much more because I feel like I get to really experience the twilight of it, if that makes sense, but there are a lot of people that they skate and they don't realize when it's coming to an end, either professionally or their skill set. I feel like I get to sort of control that narrative. This is my happy place. This is my office slash ramp. We're here to shoot some video for an upcoming Birdhouse promo. You know, I'm part of the team, so trying to get some clips. Hello. This is Galena. Hi, hi. What's up? No, Lance Mountain's here. This is Jared. Jared runs 900 Films, all the video content. Her official title is Director of Fun. Have fun. I feel like no one here actually has a title because we all just, like, everyone jumps in when we have a big project, like Vert Alert or, like, a commercial or something. It's all hands on deck here, so, and I don't even know what my title is either. This is actually the board I used in Madness. That Sean Mortimer had. And then this right here is the very first Birdhouse board ever made. Jeremy Klein model. And this is a replica of my first skateboard because it's now in Smithsonian. And then this one is, this was one of the first pro models I ever rode of my own. This is my office, and this is more like sentimental photos and stuff like that. That's from the movie Wild at Heart. I'm a big fan of the movie, and I saw that some props came up in an auction, so I bought that. If you've seen the movie, you know what it is. This is exciting. We're bringing back Hawk Shoes. Right here. These are actually ones from the store. Six years in the making to try to bring these back. I'm super excited. I'm glad that I was able to keep the license of it. So it's been, well, about 15 years or so trying to revive it, and then we finally got a good partner, and we're back in the market. Yeah, I don't have much else here. Like, this is more like art stuff. This is Seth, Sandy, Sean. They do all the heavy lifting here. Like I've said before, I get to shake hands and kiss babies and wave. Sandy. Sandy is my business partner. Seth knows my schedule and my details before I do, and Sean makes sure that we are not losing money all the time. Yeah, here's the ramp. This ramp is 24 years old. The only thing we've changed about it is the surface several times. It's still, by most accounts, the best ramp around, and it goes up like a Lego set in a matter of hours. We bought it for the Huck Jam Tour and then ended up putting it up here when we weren't on the road, and it's still my favorite thing. Favorite thing I've ever bought. This is actually my locker room, I guess, but it's also an arcade. These are all the arcade games that feature skating that have ever existed. Skateball from 78. Radical from 1989. Top Skater, 1998. Air Tricks was 2001, I think, and then 720s, 1986. But Air Tricks is a deep cut. All right, let's select where you're gonna skate. Welcome to Air Tricks. It's all vert. Combo. Bounce or combo. That guy doesn't do them. There's another guy that doesn't do those fun slides. So, let me get ready to skate. I never used to stretch. Then I got old, it broke my leg, and I learned the value of stretching. I realized that I was just kind of taking it for granted that I could jump on the ramp and do whatever and fucked around and found out. And then it has allowed me to do it into these later years, so. The tricky part for me is my neck because I've gotten so many whiplashes through the years that when I do stuff like this, I'm trying to create space between my vertebrae because there was a time when my neck was so bad that I couldn't really go fakie because I couldn't see where I was going. I couldn't turn my head. It's weird when you skate for most of your life and the discipline that is required to be a skater or to be a pro skater, you forget to sort of implement that into other parts of your life. It's there, you know what I mean? Like, I'm obsessive about tricks and I'll try them forever even though I'm so exhausted or so hurt. And I kind of learned how to use that attitude in so many other parts of my life, including this, like including a discipline to work out, stay healthy, get enough sleep. Like, I just have to learn to sort of transfer that approach. I feel like skaters are capable of anything and I feel like so many people are successful outside of skating, those who actually grew up skating because of their determination and because of their inability to give up and the creativity and everything else. So I like to think I've finally figured it out in other parts of my life. It's Cameron. Cameron's the other half of 900 Films and he's in charge of our current video. This might be the last day we're shooting, actually. If it's up to him, this is the last day we're shooting. I'm gonna do that weird tail scrape thing across this because I shot it once, but it was portrait mode. Backside, yeah. Sliding tail block. Sliding tail block, yeah. Gons told me I had to call it the moon landing. So that's what I call it. Is today the day? I'm the best moon lander. Is it a problem I play music? We have a Sonos system in here and then people would come and skate and for whatever reason, they would delete my stations and so I finally named my station something that they would take notice of. And it hasn't been deleted. I mean, this has been going like five years. So it worked. Can you guys skate instead of clap? I'll just try it without taking my foot off. Missed the aim. I got caught up there. Hot rod. 260s in the back, 58s in the front. It looks like you're overshooting it. I couldn't really feel it. I didn't know what happened. It felt like I came in on my truck, which was not the plan. Oh, that's amazing. That's pretty sick. It's fine. I wanna try that body very old cab thing. 80s nose pick. That was for Jeremy Klein. Oh, forgot how to do it. It's been a while. Lance, here we go. Thank you. You're pressing your foot down like you're trying to do a tail slide. No way, dude. I am Kevin Staub. That was not the intended outcome there. Foot plants. That was the worst sweeper that's ever happened. It's so hard. People first come here, especially kids that are excited to skate here for the first time, they hit the wall and just don't even think about what's coming over here. I saw one kid actually didn't know which way to go, so he caught the gap like this, caught his arm here, and his arm went back, and he ripped a hole in his armpit, which I'd never seen before because it stretched the skin so much. It just opened a portal into his body. And then we almost saw Steve do it. No. You're heading right here, Steve. It's like you're drawn to this. If you'd made that, it would've been way worse than what just happened. But don't be overconfident. All right. That was good. Good dodging. Good ducking and weaving. Well, the soundtrack to THPS was a group effort between myself and Activision music department. We didn't have any grand plans. It was more just, what's the music I grew up skating to, which was early punk rock. So I grew up listening to Buzzcocks, Sex Pistols, Black Flag, Gang of Four, Axe, just Dead Kennedys, all that stuff. So Activision went out looking for newer kind of punk bands of the same genre, but of that era. Goldfinger, Mil and Colin. Sort of a skate sound, and I guess we were trying to represent it well, including hip hop. I just never thought that would be such a highlight for people. For me, it was just obvious. The last 900 I did was 2016. I knew it would be my last. I didn't go into it knowing it'd be my last, but once I started trying it and I started taking some of those slams, I realized that I'm not gonna put myself through this again. I did it because I had been skating a lot at that time and doing a lot of spin stuff, doing a lot of 540 variations, doing some 720s. And so I just thought, oh, I could probably still spin two and a half and set the day. It took way longer than I thought it would. I got pretty rocked. When I landed it and I was going across the flat, instinctually I knew, yeah, that's never happening again. But it was cool. It was cathartic. I was stoked to be able to put an end to it. You don't usually get those kind of chances. I firmly believe that the fact that I skate vert or skate ramps, and I'm able to knee slide to bail out of stuff is the reason I'm able to do this at my age. I would not have survived jumping downstairs, trying to dance on handrails at this age. I don't really wax nostalgic for times of skating or eras of skating. So my favorite era is here and now. Skating is bigger than ever. There's skate parks in every city. You know, the diversity in skateboarding is as big as it's ever been. And I love it. You know, the fact that I still get to participate, but also bear witness to it and be an ambassador for it, like now, here and now. It's awesome. Right now, we are heading to Chicken Hawk, which is a restaurant I invested in here in San Diego with my favorite chef here, Andrew Bachelera. Roman Pabic is the new Birdhouse skater. We are working on a promo video. He's going to be one of the highlighted parts in it. Today seemed like a good time to present him with this pro model because they just came in. And so instead of waiting for this video to be done, we're going to kind of jump the gun and give this model now and start offering it to shops right away. I think he thinks we're coming to be part of this, which is cool. The plan is to serve him a skateboard instead of a chicken sandwich. We'll see how that goes. These things never go as planned. I like to invest in startup stuff, especially restaurants, because I'm obsessed with food. Just asked my wife. I would say if I have one extravagance, besides the rare whiskeys that I showed you, it would be high cuisine, aka expensive food. I got to know Andrew because he was a chef here. They actually got a Michelin star. He and I started talking about how much we love Nashville hot chicken, like spicy chicken, and how we were so disappointed that there wasn't one in San Diego. This is five years ago. And then he and I got together and decided we want to do a hot chicken sandwich place. And he made a recipe that I think is the best by far. And we just went for it, found a place, finally got it open about six months ago, and we've just been going full steam ahead ever since. What's up, buddy? How are you? Good, how about you? This is Aiden. Hey, how are you? Tony, nice to meet you. You know, almost like a taco. Great. Here we go. I'll start it off. Yeah, crack it off. How do we do it? There you go. It's gonna be a mess, though. And then like a taco, like an overstuffed taco. You can get this as a burger. That's the hack. Secret menu. Special order, secret menu item. The Roman Pabbage special. Thanks, buddy. Amazing. You know it. It's an honor. It's a pleasure. We're so excited. Oh, he has no words. Yeah, Roman! I love that graphic. It's so cool. Yeah, I'm so pumped. Roman has the feature part in this promo video coming up. But we wanted to get him his model before he came out. So here we are. This is the only 900 I do anymore. Riley, you wanna try it? Thank you, guys. Thanks, buddy. Hell yeah. Stoked. Here's to a bright future. We appreciate you. I'm riding this next. I'm going back home to be a grandparent and a husband and a father.