Welcome to 'Hot Crosses', where we talk to killer collaborators, slashies, and other people who manage to be many things at once, brought to you by Huyndai. See our first interview, with Rankin, here,  and our second, with Ruby Rose, here.

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Perhaps like no other athlete before him, Tony Hawk’s fortunes seem hopelessly intertwined with his own sport. He and his Bones Brigade comrades were at the forefront of skateboarding in the late 80s, when the plucky subculture seemed tipped to take over the world.

But as skateboarding’s popularity tanked in the early 90s, so did Hawk’s career. His wife at the time, Cindy Dunbar – a manicurist – became the family breadwinner. The skateboarding scene cleared out, many riders selling their gear and moving on to more traditional pursuits. Hawk, however, rolled the dice and decided to go the other way: he refinanced the family home and, along with Per Welinder, began a skate company, Birdhouse Projects. It seemed a crazy move, and for the first few years Birdhouse struggled to stay afloat, but it also illustrated Hawk’s compulsion to diversify his interests.

When skateboarding carved back into the limelight as an extreme sport in the mid-90s, Hawk was well placed to capitalise. Throughout the late 90s he dominated vert competitions, whilst Birdhouse began to flourish. Hawk went on to launch an all-conquering series of video games, pen a brace of books, and in the new millennium establish his charity, the wildly successful Tony Hawk Foundation.

In 2011, Tony Hawk remains a major force in skateboarding and a celebrity in his own right, particularly at home in the United States. But he also works hard to reconcile skateboarding’s traditional status as an iconoclastic subculture with his desire to see it properly recognised in the sporting world.

Hawk and his Vert Jam Team will be down in Australia next month as part of the Big Day Out. TheVine caught up with the man himself to talk about his early years, his thoughts on skateboarding not being included in next year’s Olympic Games, and how it feels to still be vert skating at 43.
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Whereabouts are you calling from, Tony?
I'm currently in San Diego. I just visited a bunch of vets from the war.

What was the story behind that?
They asked if I would come. They have an annual luncheon around the holidays. They asked if I could come and say hi to the vets, the wounded warriors. The guys who lost their limbs and stuff like that.

You're from San Diego originally. Is that where you’re living at the moment?
I live in north San Diego.
    
Talking about San Diego and your growing up there: your father was a big supporter of yours but he was a military man. Back then, skateboarding was such an iconoclastic sport. In that respect was there ever any tension with your dad?
No, actually I was the youngest of four kids that he had, so he'd kind of been through everything with the previous three [laughs]. I think he was just tired by the time I came around. He let me do what I wanted to do but he saw what it [skateboarding] gave me, and that it gave me a sense of self confidence, and that I was empowered by it. He really wanted to support it. When the last of the competition series died as I was an up-and-coming amateur, he formed a new series.

You once described yourself as a ‘demon child’. The military is a classic option for troubled kids. Did your family ever suggest that route for you?
Not really. My dad was in the navy in World War II, but I think that he saw it more as a necessity of his way out of where he was. He worked so hard to provide for us so that maybe we could go on to do other things. I don't think he would've discouraged it but he didn't encourage us to go that way.

You’ve got three siblings. You've always seemed close – Steve as part of the Tony Hawk Foundation, Pat helped you write How Did I Get Here? – do you really count your siblings as being important to your success?    
Yeah, in the later years, for sure. But when I was really up-and-coming skating, they had all moved out.

Were you guys close when you were young?
We were but they'd already moved on to college. My brother is thirteen years older than me, and my sisters are older than him again. I remember distinctly he would come down from college once a week and drive me to the skate park. Wednesday was my day with Steve to go to the skate park. Then he got out of skating and I was on my own.

Skateboarding crumbled in popularity in the early 90s before coming back into fashion. That second wave of skateboarding, from the mid '90s onwards: there's never been a second dip in the sport's popularity. Why do you think that is?
I think it's all about the positive media coverage and the success of televised events like the X-Games and the success of video games, and kids wanting to do something different; kids not wanting to get into the mainstream sports anymore and just wanting to take their own direction. The MTV generation: they want instant gratification and skateboarding definitely provides that. Once you step on a skateboard it's on. You're not waiting your turn at bat or you're not waiting for the pitch.

Like skateboarding's profile has risen, yours has as well in that last fifteen years. It's fair to say you're a sporting celebrity in your own right. Is that something you've grown comfortable with? Have you gotten used to it?
I don't know if I'll ever get used to it. It's still strange for me to be recognised for something that I was chastised for as a kid. To me that still rings true and I'm still surprised at all the opportunities and all the crazy situations I get to be in. But at the same time I appreciate it, and I don't take it for granted. I love that I get to do really cool things with my kids sometimes because of it. I would never take advantage of it. I enjoy it. I appreciate that I still get to do it for a living.

Skateboarding has a history of spurning any sort of self-promotion – you're supposed to let your riding do the talking. Was it hard then, to hit that balance, to improve your profile and make your achievements without losing the support at the grassroots level?
Yes and no. I never was one to covet skateboarding. I didn't want to keep it underground. It provided so much to me as a youth and other youth deserved that opportunity, and to spread the good word of it, to promote it as much as possible, so I was never there hoping that people would go away and not recognise us. To be honest, I wanted to see more skate parks in the world. I always made that my goal and when I had a chance to do that through endorsements and other peoples' advertising money, I jumped at the chance.

There always seems to be that tension within skateboarding, though. Is it a sport or a sub-cultural movement? There’s always that discussion there.
There is, but I feel it is all of that. By definition it's a sport because it's active and there's competition. But there are plenty of people that don't ever want to compete that make a living at it. There are plenty of people that push it more as an art form, and I love that it's so diverse like that. I don't ever want to pigeonhole it.

Talking about not wanting to keep it underground, the debate surrounding skateboarding and the Olympics: what are your thoughts on that and what was your reaction a few years ago when it was announced it wouldn't make it into the 2012 London games?
My reaction was the IOC is crazy if they think their viewership is getting any younger [laughs]. They need that youthful energy at the summer games the way that snowboarding has provided it to the winter games. There are so many sports that are really obscure that are included in the games that relatively few people participate in. Skateboarding is huge in so many countries and would bring a lot of young viewers into the Olympics. My attitude is more they need us more than we need them, but it would be cool to have it in there and see it recognised on a more global scale. That's the biggest advantage of it, that it would be seen in countries that may have never, ever seen it.

There were concerns at the time that its introduction into the Olympics was being rushed. Was that a fair comment, or was it stonewalling?
Why not, though? There's so much red tape and bureaucracy that goes with getting a sport into the Olympics, if they're going to have to fast track it, sure go for it.

The Tony Hawk Foundation’s approaching its tenth birthday. How have the foundation's achievements stacked up against your original expectations?
It's been really great. What I love about it more is not that we're helping to build skate parks, which is awesome, but the fact that we empower the people who have already taken it upon themselves to try to get a skate park. They feel like they're validated in their efforts. We don't go to a city and say, “You need a skate park because you're a low income area.” We wait for the communities to come to us and say, “We want to get a skate park, Tony. How do we go about it or how can we use your help?” That way the community feels like they are part of the process.

We were talking about the X-Games earlier helping raise the profile of skating. What about the Tony Hawk video games? How important have they been in raising the profile of skateboarding, particularly with armchair fans?
I think that was the first time I noticed armchair skate fans appearing. I think we definitely helped to create a fan base of spectators, and not participants, and that's really what has broken through the wave of popularity. I think the fact that people were finally appreciating skating but not necessarily doing it has set a foundation so that it's here to stay. I'd like to think that our video games helped in that, for sure. They definitely changed my life and changed my level of recognition and the opportunities I had. To be honest, on Saturday I'm announcing our next game [Tony Hawk's Pro Skater HD].

Fantastic.
It's the best of our first two games, but released for the new consoles.

I know plenty of people who will be looking forward to it. You're performing at the Big Day Out here in Australia. Are you looking forward to making it back down to the country?
Yeah, I love it there. Every time I have a blast. My memories of Big Day Out in 1996 are some of the best because at the time it was some of the biggest crowds I've ever skated in front of.

It's a natural match. It may not be obvious to some people but I think it's a natural match.
I think it always has been, but the fact that I'm being invited back for a headlining act, so to speak, is really an honour for me.

When did you first do skateboarding at a music festival, do you remember?
There were a couple of random festivals that happened before the [1995] Warped Tour – I think one was in Denver and one was in Virginia, but it was all very scattered. No one knew what to make of it. The bands weren't necessarily headlining acts. The first time I really got a taste of that was during the Warped Tour.

When you were on the Warped Tour: that's when you really thought you were onto something?
No, not really because I still felt like skating was still a sideshow. I would say the first time I felt we could make it as a show of our own instead of just a sideshow was at Big Day Out in 1996, because there was such appreciation for the skating. That was one of the inspirations for me to do my own tour, Boom Boom Huckjam, where we were the headlining acts and the bands were sort of secondary.

Do you have any specific plans for the festival?
We're going to work on some really complicated choreography, like doubles and triples and stuff like that, because we don't want it to just be a standard exhibit. We want it to be something special.

Are you doing any other skating while you're here?
We've been talking about that and I don't think we'll be allowed to.

That makes sense.
You might see us at a skate park here and there, but nothing will be announced.

And the rest of 2012 – what are the plans?
The video game. I'm doing a big project with YouTube right now that we'll have out in January, while I'm in Oz. That'll be up on YouTube. We have our own channel that is funded by YouTube itself. And more skating, as long as I'm capable.

You're 43 now. You don't skate competitively but looking back about thirteen or fourteen years ago, did you ever see yourself still skateboarding at 43?
No, I had no idea. When I was young the guys that got to be in their twenties had to quit because they had to find a job [laughs]. Skating was not an option as a career back then. I thought I had to quit when I got older because I wouldn't be making a living, and here I am still doing it, so I guess I'm the guy that's testing the waters as to how far you can go and at what age.

In a sense, I guess you're still breaking boundaries.
Yeah, I just learned a new trick the other day so I can't complain!

Matt Shea

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BIG DAY OUT - 2012

FRIDAY, 20 JANUARY, 2012 - AUCKLAND MT SMART STADIUM - (Tickets $160 (incl GST) + bf*.)

SUNDAY, 22 JANUARY, 2012 - GOLD COAST PARKLANDS
Smith Street, Southport. Gates open 11am

THURSDAY, 26 JANUARY, 2012 - SYDNEY SHOWGROUND
Showground Road, Sydney Olympic Park. Gates open 11am.

SUNDAY, 29 JANUARY, 2012 - MELBOURNE FLEMINGTON RACECOURSE
Epsom Rd, Flemington, Melbourne. Gates Open 11am

FRIDAY, 3 FEBRUARY, 2012 - ADELAIDE SHOWGROUND
Rose Terrace, Wayville, Adelaide. Gates Open 11am

SUNDAY, 5 FEBRUARY, 2012 - BROWNES STADIUM, PERTH

Tickets are $165 (incl GST) + bf*, and on sale now.

More at bigdayout.com