SR International: Professional Skateboarder Tony Hawk Chats About The Oscars, Fatherhood + More
Tony Hawk, who’s widely considered the greatest skateboarder of all time, is the subject of a new documentary, “Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off,” which premieres on HBO and HBO Max
on April 5. The documentary captures his childhood in San Diego, his rise in the skateboarding world, and his reflections on his family life and growing older. With a reported net worth of $140 million dollars (Celebrity Net Worth), Tony Hawk is decidedly the most decorated and highest-earning professional skateboarder in history.
Hawk was the youngest of four children, born 12 and a half years after his brother Steve, whom he’s closest to in age. Hawk was a high-energy kid and skateboarding became an outlet for him. By the time he was 14, he was a professional in the sport, as well as the youngest member of the Bones Brigade, a skateboarding team formed by Stacy Peralta.
During the 1999 X Games, he became the first person to execute a 900, two-and-a-half turn twist, after attempting it for 12 years. Altogether, he’s won over 100 titles and invented over 100 tricks. Hawk has four children—Riley, 29, Spencer, 23, Keegan, 20, and Kadence—as well as two step-children, and lives in San Diego with his wife, Catherine Goodman.
Here, he talks to WSJ. about meeting Wesley Snipes at the Oscars and how he gets his best ideas while dozing off.
Here are some things Tony Hawk revealed to WSJ. Magazine… net worth
On when he wakes up on Monday and the first thing he does:
Tony Hawk is usually up by 6:30 a.m. He has half an hour to himself before he wakes up his 13-year-old daughter, Kadence, to get ready for school. “I immediately go get some coffee and start checking messages, emails, checking the pulse out there on social media, what’s the buzz?” says the professional skateboarder, 53. He starts his workday after he gets back from school drop-off and usually tries to skate between 11 a.m. and noon. Right now, though, he’s recovering from a broken femur. “I’m three weeks out and I’m walking, usually with a cane, but I can walk without a cane,” he says. “That seems like something to celebrate.”
On if he takes vitamins:
I take a sort of bevy of supplements. I would have to go grab them to explain all of them but it’s like, pantethine, CoQ10, a multivitamin, Delta-Fraction [Tocotrienols], D3K2. A nutritionist recommended this dose to me and I’ve been taking it for years. And I honestly haven’t gotten sick in a long time.
On coffee:
All day.
Like four cups a day?
At least, yeah.
On whether he does any exercise beyond skating:
Surfing, sometimes. But I can’t say I go and exercise for the sake of exercising.
On what time of the week he’s most creative or productive:
As I’m dozing off is when I get some of my best ideas and sometimes, I actually have to wake up and write them down, whether it be tricks or projects or even just how to word something that I had to write. A lot of times I will literally just jolt myself up and be like, “Okay, write that down because you’re going to forget it.”
On whether doing his documentary taught him anything new about himself, or caused him to reflect differently on any part of his life:
I think it gave me a better perspective on how people see what I do as so risky. I’ve been living in this bubble and in this tribe—not that I haven’t been concerned with it, but I just haven’t really been mindful of how others might see it. But at the same time, my family’s very supportive, they trust what I do. You see all those crashes in the movie and that’s like a 15-year time span condensed into five minutes. When you watch it in that way, it looks like, Oh, that’s all he does, is get f—ed up, every single day. And that’s not how it is. And my wife and my kids know that. But they also know that the other day, I was skating, it was just a normal day of skating and suddenly they get the phone call: “Tony broke his leg, they’re taking him to La Jolla [hospital].”
On what he would like the audience to take away from the documentary:
It’s okay to take risks and it’s okay to obsess on doing something you love and following your passion. It’s worth it. I think that’s the takeaway, for me, is that “all this hard work, all this repetition, in the end, is worth it. It pays off.”
On his favorite part of presenting at this year’s Oscars:
My favorite part of the night was walking on stage because I never thought I’d be on that stage and I walked unaided without a cane, so that was exciting. In fact, I wasn’t even nervous about reading my lines. I was more nervous about looking like I had a bad limp and when I did watch the programming, all I cared about was seeing that walk for 20 feet.
And then I think the second most exciting was meeting Wesley Snipes because we have this kind of meme thing, and he didn’t know about it. I just saw him coming up the stairs and he was talking to a friend of mine and I was like, “Oh my god, Wesley Snipes, I have an opportunity to get a picture with him. I’m going in.”
On having to explain the meme and whether Wesley thought it was funny:
He did, but he was kind of confused by it. He doesn’t live there.
On what he learned about his family when taking a road trip together during the pandemic:
I can’t say I learned anything new, but we learned how to coexist in a small space for the first time because our house is enough for everyone. An RV is not really enough room for eight people, and so, there are arguments over who has priority on the Nintendo Switch, things like that. But what I learned was they’re all adults now, except for my daughter, they really are, and they have their own way of thinking. They have their own approach to life. And I got to see it firsthand.
On the one piece of advice he’s gotten that’s guided him:
Stacy told me a long time ago, and I’ve sort of changed the meaning of it, but he said, “Don’t price yourself out of the market,” which meant you can’t charge an arm and a leg just because things are huge, to do appearances or for your time. And he’s right. You want to be available and you want to be approachable and affordable in a sense. My version of that is I’m on Cameo, and I do these Cameos and they’re not hugely expensive. It’s not some great bread and butter for me, but I love the connection, and I love the reaction to it, and I love having that one-on-one with people who are fans or people who are giving it to people who are fans. And that stems from Stacy telling me, “You’re not above all this.”
On his most memorable Cameo:
Someone sent me a video of their husband watching it and he started crying. And the guy’s my age. It’s hard for me to believe that my presence or a video of me would impact someone like that.
Read the full article here.
Photo: Joshua Cutillo courtesy WSJ. Magazine
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