“I didn’t have any peers,” Hawk said, looking back at that time. He’s also played a crucial role in mainstreaming the sport, via video games and creating skateparks across the country. The revelation may come as a surprise to cursory fans of Hawk, considering the skating legend-now 53, still shredding-has gone on to become the greatest skateboarder of all time. It’s a period of his life that’s rarely discussed, in which the then teenager, only a few years into his career, almost walked away from professional skateboarding for good. “I felt like I was losing myself,” Hawk says in the newly released HBO documentary Until the Wheels Fall Off, directed by Sam Jones. There was just one slight problem: Hawk was miserable. It got to the point where other skaters could only dream of placing second, because Hawk’s win was a foregone conclusion. After years of obsessive training, he had become the one to beat on the continental circuit-taking the top spot at skateboarding competitions across California, in Chicago, in Vancouver, setting records and winning thousands of dollars along the way. It was the mid-1980s, and Tony Hawk, the gangly runt of skateboarding team the Bones Brigade, had finally come into his own as a professional skater.
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