Hawk was achieving a similar effect on ramps, flying high above the ramp’s lip, where he learned to spin 360 degrees, then 540 degrees, and then, in 1985, in Stockholm, 720 degrees-two aerial rotations, a feat virtually unimaginable at the time. It was Rodney Mullen, Hawk’s teammate on the famed Bones Brigade, who invented the flat-ground ollie, a jumping maneuver, in which riders kick the tail down to bring the board off the ground and into the air-where anything is possible. Hawk went pro at 14 and would prove a magnetic, inventive figurehead for skateboarding throughout the 1980s, when wooden ramps replaced parks and fish-shaped boards of layered hardwood heralded an era of high-flying and tech-savvy skateboarding. The blue Bahne evokes an era when public outcry had driven skaters off sidewalks and into the first skateparks, where they rode plastic boards with polyurethane wheels higher and higher up the walls of in-ground pools that were capped at the top or extended with plywood. Yet the sport enjoyed a major resurgence in the 1970s, thanks in part to new technology. cities by August 1965-had ended by the time Hawk stepped on the board. The first wave of skateboarding-when decks were wood, wheels were steel and “sidewalk surfing” was banned in 20 U.S. Today, the 1975 Bahne skateboard on which he learned to ride tells the story of a single man’s extraordinary career but also the vexed, tumultuous 60-year history of a much-misunderstood sport.

Over in the skate bowls, he recalls, kids were “flying.” Inspired, Hawk stepped on the board, rolled up a wall, took to the air and basically never came down.

There, Tony Hawk saw kids as small as he was rolling and carving through a sea of concrete waves in the shadow of Interstate 805. Eleven years old, towheaded and built like a starving stork, the most famous skateboarder in the world began skating in earnest in 1979 during a trip to Oasis Skatepark, near his hometown of San Diego.

Tony hawk skateboarding