I highly recommend watching the Papas brothers doc, All This Mayhem. It goes in depth to show how much of a worm Tony Hawk is, and how awesome the Papas brothers were. Also the Christian Hosoi documentary is really great too, as is the Powell video.
My wife knew Tony Hawk when he was a kid. He would always try to worm into their surf line up. Got himself an ass whoopin for being a worm and this, from about the most accepting group ever.
That's interesting because he was always portrayed as this golden boy, but he was really a manipulative snake. Cool story man.
Truth be told, it was my wife that said with balls like that, that kid is gonna be a millionaire. You never cross a line up unless the spot is given too you. Dude was stealing waves and that shit gets real tense, kid or not. Understand though, this was Hawk when all he was, was a name in the local pools. Some of those same pools today are like temples. My kid has a couple of really nice, rare artist blanks. Hawk was signing autographs at Legoland and of course, my kid wanted his boards signed. Mom took him and Hawk looks at them like he didn't want to sign like, he hesitated. So mom gets in his ear and he signs away. She is pretty good at that.
There was a story on that documentary about how Hawk was winning all these competitions and never flipped his board, all his tricks were safe and easy, and he ran the same routine time and again, but would win because he is Tony Hawk, and his Dad was really good friends with the committees and even Christian Hosoi used to complain about this in the pool days around Venice. So Tas Papas finally beats Hawk, and does it with a broken rib, and Hawk instead of congratulating Papas tells him that he should won not Papas, and then Ben Papas just went off on Hawk, and so did Tas, and that caused Papas to be blackballed. That famous 900 that Hawk landed at the X games, Papas was supposed to be in that competition and he was going to do a 900, Hawk found out about and got Papas dropped and he basically stole his move in front of thousands and it's still one of those big moments in Skating history and it was all a sham.
Don't know much about Tony Hawk but seems like I first heard about him 30 years ago and was always the only name people talked about.
kinda like edison and the light bulb. theres always someone who got stepped on along the way. in this case, just some stoner.
