How Did I Get Here (3 page)

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BUILDING A BETTER BIRDHOUSE

The birth and near-death of our first business

I officially became a professional skateboarder in 1982. I was 14. The moment itself was no big deal. I was at a pro-am contest in Whittier, California, and my main amateur sponsor at the time, Stacy Peralta (co-owner of Powell Peralta), suggested it might be time for me to turn pro, since I’d reached the top of the amateur ranks. When I filled out the registration form at the skatepark that day, I simply marked the box that said “pro” instead of the one that said “am.” That’s it.

My first board.

I’d started skating five years earlier, when my brother Steve gave me one of his old boards. I took to it quickly, and lucked out in two big ways. First, there was a good skatepark (since demolished) just a few miles from my house in San Diego. Second, my parents were the kind that steadfastly supported their kids’ passions, no matter how far they veered from the mainstream. My sister Pat loved to sing; my dad managed her rock ’n’ roll band and drove her to gigs. Steve loved to surf; my parents would get up at dawn to drive him to the ocean, 10 miles away. They didn’t have much money, but they were there for us in every way.

My dad, Frank Hawk.

Once I started winning amateur skate contests, my dad, Frank, diverted his enormous energy into helping the sport become more organized. He and my mother, Nancy, founded and ran the California Amateur Skateboard League—which, amazingly, is still in existence, and now, even more amazingly, includes a parent-child division. Dad also created skating’s first truly successful professional circuit, the National Skateboard Association. (The NSA eventually morphed into World Cup Skateboarding, which remains the governing body for both the X Games and the Dew Tour.) He also built countless ramps for me over the years. He died of cancer in 1995, one month after watching me win gold during the inaugural X Games. My mom’s still going strong, and lives a couple of miles from me in northern San Diego County.

That day in 1982 when I officially turned pro, I harbored no fantasies about making a living as a skateboarder. I think the first-place prize money at that event was $150. Someone else won it. Even when Powell Peralta made me an official member of its team of pros, called the Bones Brigade, and started selling boards bearing my name (and an amateurish hawk graphic), I had zero visions of wealth. One of my first royalty checks, dated April 19, 1983, was for 85 cents. I still have it.

Things started to change after Stacy directed and released the
Bones Brigade Video Show
in 1984. It was the first direct-to-video skate movie ever made, and it helped trigger a boom for the skate industry. Suddenly, I was receiving royalty checks for $3,000 a month. The amount quickly grew. By the time I reached my senior year of high school, I was making around $70,000 a year. My dad believed it was likely to be a short ride, and he encouraged me to invest some of my income. My sister, Pat, who did my taxes (and is now my manager), told me I needed a write-off, so I bought a house in Carlsbad a few months before graduation. I was only 17, which meant that my dad had to co-sign the loan.

As with many pro athletes, my income was not only variable, but also destined to be short-lived. At the time, there were no pro skaters over age 25. Plus, the skateboard industry was notorious for its boom-and-bust cycles. But I was too young to care, and the money just kept getting better. As the 1990s neared, I was earning close to $150,000 a year—a ridiculous amount for a pubescent skate rat just out of high school. I socked some of it away, but I also fed my gadget obsession. The local Sharper Image salesmen got hard-ons when I strolled into their store.

A World of Hurt

Not long after my eighteenth birthday, the skate industry went into a tailspin. The major players like Powell Peralta, Vision, and Santa Cruz crashed hardest, taking hits from all flanks. First, skating simply fell out of fashion—a cultural shift that should have surprised no one since it had happened twice before, in the 1960s and 1970s. Also, the industry was suddenly swarming with small, agile upstarts who were ruthless (and often hilariously brutal) in their determination to take down the big boys. Because they were nimble, the new brands were also better positioned to survive a downturn. On top of all that, the old-guard companies started losing many of their best team riders. Some got recruited away, while others went off to start their own labels.

Powell took a particularly steep dive, partly because it and the Bones Brigade symbolized the clean, parent-approved side of the sport. The newcomers, most notably World Industries, were true anarchists who captured the skate world’s attention with their ballsy, uncensored approach. Powell tried to look cool by making videos mocking mainstream exploitation of skateboarding. World ran ads mocking Powell.

To outsiders, the distinction between the old brands and the upstarts was probably hard to discern, since even the biggest skate companies profited by painting themselves, and skateboarding, as counterculture. Powell’s graphics featured skeletons, rats, skulls, and snakes—sometimes skulls
with
snakes. My most popular insignia was a bird skull against an iron cross background, created by Powell’s gifted artist, Vernon Courtlandt Johnson. None of it was
Sesame Street
fare.

But companies like H-Street and World pulled out the stops. They openly ripped off logos from corporate America (Looney Tunes and Burger King, among others). One of World’s most infamous skateboard deck graphics had a naked woman in a spread-legged pose—an anatomy lesson. World’s founder, Steve Rocco, also got pissed when
TransWorld Skateboarding
magazine wouldn’t publish some of his attack ads, so he created his own skate mag. It was called
Big Brother
, and it did a good job of covering the hard-core corners of the sport, amid reviews of porn movies and articles like “How to Kill Yourself.” (The
Big Brother
crew would later create the massively successful
Jackass
TV series and movies.)

By 1991, the skate industry was reeling from uncertainty, civil war, and a declining market. My income from Powell had shrunk to $1,500 a month, and I was struggling to make my mortgage payments. It occurred to me that if I wasn’t going to make a living wage from royalties, I might as well take the big step of starting my own company. Also, I figured the industry had no place to go but up, right?

I started talking to a fellow Powell rider, Per Welinder, about teaming up to launch a new brand. Per had a business degree, I had the visibility, and we both had access to seed money. We met secretly for months to draw up a business plan. He would run the day-to-day operations, and I would head up promotions and recruit and manage a team. I refinanced my house, which gave me $40,000 to sink into the business. I also sold my Lexus and bought a Honda Civic. We named the company Birdhouse Projects, and we assembled an amazing team of skaters: Jeremy Klein, Willy Santos, Mike Frazier, Ocean Howell, and Steve Berra.

I was still pretty pessimistic about the future of the skate industry and my own career. I was 24—a geezer. It was time to think about putting away my skateboard and focusing on business.

Heelflips on the
Titanic

The early years of Birdhouse were predictably bleak. The skate industry was overloaded with inventory, and we were barely turning a profit. When I took the team on tour, we slept five and six to a room. Occasionally, shops that hired us for demos would tell us after we’d skated that they couldn’t afford to pay. One guy offered Chinese food instead of cash. Once, I flew to France for a $300 payday, but an unavoidable ticket change on the way home cost me $100 of that.

I wouldn’t have minded the financial stress—in fact, part of me embraced the way the skate recession had weeded out the wannabes—except I suddenly had a new incentive not to go broke: in 1992, my wife Cindy became pregnant with our first son. At home, we pared our budget to the bone. I was given a “Taco Bell allowance” of five bucks a day and I was eating Top Ramen almost daily.

I started seriously weighing options for my post-skateboarding career. My first choice was to become a film editor. I’d already edited some video segments for Powell and all of the early Birdhouse videos, and had enjoyed it, so I borrowed $8,000 from my parents (who couldn’t really afford it), and cobbled together an editing system. I actually got paid to edit a few videos, but soon realized I didn’t have the contacts, equipment, or resolve to make a living at it.