Tony Hawk on his skateboarding legacy
There&#x27;s a lot more to Tony Hawk than skateboarding: he single single handedly turned skateboarding into a multi-billion industry. Skateboarding was a big part of my life in the second half of my teenage years and that was in the mid 2000&#x27;s. What&#x27;s astonishing about Tony Hawk is that he made a huge impact during a time when vert ramps and half-pipes were extremely unpopular to put it mildly. Late 90&#x27;s it was all about street skating. The video series that still largely captures that period to me is Eastern Exposure. But also skateboarding as a whole was dropping in popularity relative to the early 90&#x27;s. What the Tony Hawk series did was they captured the imagination of the next generation which took the 90&#x27;s skateboarding to a scale which I don&#x27;t think anyone even remotely considered possible. I remember in the earlier 2000&#x27;s when seeing someone jump down 10 stairs seemed like something out of this world. By 2005-6 that was looked at largely as &quot;k, cool&quot;. That+the fact that skateboarding was at the top of the game once again. I&#x27;m not sure what the situation is today but I feel like it&#x27;s dying again when I walk around the city. There&#x27;s no denying that skateboarding is difficult: it will take you months to get a hang of the basics whereas kids can pick up a scooter and start doing tricks as soon as they set foot on them. Kind of sad now that I think of it. Every now and then a gif will pop up on the internet and I&#x27;ll instinctively want to start clapping. Shame.