Birthdate: May 12, 1968
Birth place: San Diego, California.
By twelve, Tony was sponsored by Dogtown skateboards, by fourteen he was pro, and by age sixteen Tony Hawk was the best skateboarder in the world. In the ensuing 17 years, Hawk has entered an estimated 103 pro contests. He won 73 of them, and placed second in 19. By far the best record in skateboarding's history. Tony started Birdhouse skateboards in 1992 started off kind of slow but as you know grew tremendously. 1999 Activision and Tony created Tony Hawk's Pro Skater video game for PlayStation. They expected decent sales, but the copies blew off the shelves and it quickly became a bestseller. The next year, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 was released and jumped to the number one position for over a month. Since then, the THPS series has become one of the best-selling video-game franchises of all time. Tony Hawk's Proving Ground just launched October 16, 2007 to excellent reviews and with no signs of slowing down. He may not feel as old as other parents, but he's old enough to have retired at age 31. It should be made clear, though, that in skateboarding the word "retire" doesn't mean you stop skating. It simply means he's stopped competitive skating. He still skates almost every day, still learns new tricks, and still does several public demos a year. He was recently voted the best vert skater by readers of Transworld Skateboarding magazine. One of the reasons Tony decided to stop competing at the end of 1999 was that he landed the first-ever 900 (two and a half mid-air spins) at the X Games. The 900 was the last on a wish list of tricks he'd written a decade earlier. The list included ollie 540, kickflip 540, varial 720 and the 900. With the creation of the Tony Hawk Foundation, Hawk also has made an effort to give something back to the sport that has given him so much. Designed to promote and help finance public skateparks in low-income areas, the foundation has distributed more than $2,300,000 to non-profit groups building skateparks throughout the U.S.: from Homer, Alaska, to Needles, California, to Greencastle, Indiana, to Glenwood, Arkansas, to Livermore Falls, Maine. The Foundation has now been a part of 390 new skateparks around the country. Info provided by TonyHawks Official website
