Hawk: Occupation Skateboarder Book

The book “Hawk: Occupation Skateboarder” was first published in 2001. It was a New York Times Bestseller and was available for $14.99.

From back in the day:

Think it’s fun being Tony Hawk? Sure, If your idea of fun is doing things like: Skating on Italian TV wearing see-through plastic shorts Eating gum from between Steve Caballero’s toes, having more than fifty stitches laced into your shins, fracturing several ribs, spraining both ankles, and ripping apart the cartilage in your knee. But there are some decent perks. You get to win more than twice as many professional contests as any other skater, invent a revolutionary skating style and know more than eighty tricks and also land the 900 after thirteen years of failed attempts.

Best of all, on official forms you get to list Skateboarding as your occupation. In Hawk, Tony takes you behind the scenes of competitions, demos, and movies and shares the less glamorous demands of being a professional skateboarder. With brutal honesty, he recalls the stories of love, loss, bad hairdos, embarrassing ’80s clothes, and determination that have shaped his life-from being ridiculed for his skating style to the loss of his biggest supporter, his dad.

He takes a look back at skateboarding’s evolution and tells all about his outrageous experiences with the skateboarding legends of the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, including Stacy Peralta, Eddie Elguera, Mark Gonzales, and Bob Burnquist.