Tony Hawk.

P&R Profile: The Godfather of Skate

He might have been a computer programmer, a filmmaker, a fireman, or a pizza-delivery dude. Who knows?

But Tony Hawk didn't pursue any of these vocations. Instead, he became arguably the best skateboarder in history. He's skated in front of millions of television viewers and traveled the world a few times over -- all thanks to skateboarding. But none of this would have been possible without skateparks.

I didn't realize the diversity in skating when I started," Hawk confesses. "I thought it was just a mode of transportation until I went to my first skatepark."

Tony Hawk was 9 years old when his brother changed his life by giving him a blue fiberglass banana board.

Before skateboarding, Hawk was a self-described nightmare. "instead of the terrible twos, I was the terrible youth," he says. "I was a hyper, rail-thin geek on a sugar buzz. I think my mom summed it up best when she said I was `challenging.'"

He was also pathologically determined. When Tony was 6, his mom took him to an Olympic-size pool. "He decided that he had to swim the length of it without a breath," his mother, Nancy, remembers. "And then he was so frustrated when he didn't do it. He was so hard on himself, and expected himself to do so many things."

His frustration with himself was so harsh that his parents had him psychologically evaluated at school. The results showed that Tony was "gifted," and placement in advanced classes was recommended. The root of his frustrations was discovered as well.

"The psychologist said he had a 12-year-old mind in an 8-year-old body," Nancy Hawk says. "And his mind tells him he can do things his body can't do."

When Hawk received the blue skateboard from his brother, his body finally caught up with his brain. One day, a friend's mother took the boys to Oasis, a local skatepark. Soon after, Hawk became a regular at the park, visiting every day after school

"When he started getting good at skating, it changed his personality," says his brother, Steve. "Finally he was doing something that he was satisfied with. He became a different guy. He was calm; he started thinking about other people and became more generous. He wasn't so worried about losing at other things."

His mother agrees with a laugh. "I was just glad he was taking all his energy out on skateboarding, and not on me."

But Tony was still beating himself up. If he didn't skate his best in a competition -- even if he won -- he would still be silent, returning home and retiring to his bedroom to be by himself.

By 12 he was sponsored; at 14 he turned professional and skated every spare minute that he could find. But skateboarding hadn't caught on, and a lot of skateparks were closing down. Fortunately, Oasis stayed open longer than most.

"If it weren't for Oasis, I probably would have quit skateboarding at 13," Hawk says.

His family moved to Cardiff, Calif., when Tony was 14. Del Mar Surf and Turf, the only other skatepark open in the area, was minutes from their new house. By 16, Tony Hawk was the best skateboarder in the world.

Over the next 14 years, he would enter 85 contests, 62 of which he would win (he placed second in 16 others). In 1992, he started a skateboard company, Birdhouse Projects, with fellow pro skater Per Welinder.

Today, as much dad as skaterat, Hawk's days adhere to an outlandish dichotomy, tending to his two young sons' needs -- changing diapers, chaperoning field trips -- before grabbing his board and throwing down any one of the dozens of tricks he's invented.

With skateboarding recently making the hazardous-sports list (which means, theoretically, that participants can't sue park owners if they are injured skating), more skateparks are sure to open up around the country.

"Now that there are so many skateparks around the country," Hawk says, "It gives kids the opportunity that I didn't have growing up."

"I think the skateparks were invaluable," Nancy Hawk says. "Even when I didn't go [to the skatepark], I knew where he was and that he was safe. It gave him the opportunity to do what he loved all day long. We would never have let him go out on the streets all day."

Look, up in the sky. It's a bird. It's a plane. Nope, it's just skateboard acrobat-contortionist extraordinaire Tony Hawk. For the better part of 20 years, Hawk, 31, has been impressing the pants off of grounded mortals with his aerial arsenal of skateboarding antics ... and making a sweet living from it. Skateboarder magazine editor Sean Mortimer, a long-time pal of the legend they call The Birdman, takes a little trip into the vertically obsessed mind of the world's greatest skater (p. 94).