“It was so crushing.” After a few years, all of it combined was enough to make him want to leave professional skating altogether. “Who’s this little robot kid doing circus tricks with a skateboard?” Hawk said in a 2021 interview with The New York Times, characterizing his reputation at the time. Hawk was mocked for his tricks as well, called a “clown” skater by traditionalists. You can see what type of position that put Tony in.” That, coupled with the fact that Frank was a tough, bullish presence, meant his son got accused of winning by default. “Frank represented authority to Tony’s friends,” fellow skater Christian Hosoi told Sports Illustrated back in 1986. After Hawk took interest in skating as a kid, his father, Frank, founded the National Skateboard Association, which presided over numerous competitions. The higher Hawk rose, the more taunts he also had to take from other skaters. The kid who was once thrilled and scared to zoom around empty pools with the older, wilder boys had become a joyless functionary. He’s talking about how happy he is to be there, but he’s expressionless. Stacy Peralta, who helped form the Bones Brigade and was the Yoda-like presence in Hawk’s life, describes the young skater as being practically “catatonic.” The film backs up this claim, rustling up archival footage of a young Hawk being interviewed at a competition. He was so successful that he was able to buy his first house at 17 a 1997 Los Angeles Times profile estimates he was making upward of $200,000 a year.

No one had managed to surpass him on a technical level. “I didn’t have any peers,” Hawk said, looking back at that time. He’s also played a crucial role in mainstreaming the sport, via video games and creating skateparks across the country. The revelation may come as a surprise to cursory fans of Hawk, considering the skating legend-now 53, still shredding-has gone on to become the greatest skateboarder of all time. It’s a period of his life that’s rarely discussed, in which the then teenager, only a few years into his career, almost walked away from professional skateboarding for good.

“I felt like I was losing myself,” Hawk says in the newly released HBO documentary Until the Wheels Fall Off, directed by Sam Jones. There was just one slight problem: Hawk was miserable. It got to the point where other skaters could only dream of placing second, because Hawk’s win was a foregone conclusion. After years of obsessive training, he had become the one to beat on the continental circuit-taking the top spot at skateboarding competitions across California, in Chicago, in Vancouver, setting records and winning thousands of dollars along the way. It was the mid-1980s, and Tony Hawk, the gangly runt of skateboarding team the Bones Brigade, had finally come into his own as a professional skater.

Rodney mullen tony hawk