The Birdman Drops In (Cont.)

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The Birdman Drops In (Cont.)

LATE ONE AFTERNOON, Hawk exits the highway on the outskirts of Oceanside and noses into the drive of a modest ranch house shaded by eucalyptus trees. There's a cluster of cars wedged into the yard, and next to the house a high fence guards what appears to be a large vacant lot. "Only a few of us have the key to this place," Hawk says with a grin as he cuts the engine. "We've tried to keep the location a secret." Then he gives me a look that says, Whatever you do, don't disclose it.

Today he's wearing baggy skater's shorts that come down almost to his knees and a T-shirt touting a sponsor, Quiksilver. His shoes are white-white, with a red "H" on them. A pair of Hawks, fresh from the box.

We get out, and Hawk opens the trunk and grabs an assortment of skating paraphernalia, along with a brand-new board made by his own gear company, Birdhouse. On the board's underside there's a skeletal hawk, its skull and beak sharply etched, its long talons stretching hideously as if to pluck its prey. "Rad graphics, huh?" he says, semi-facetiously. Hawk has to change boards every few weeks, he says, because the old ones quickly grow spongy and lose their pop. He tightens the trucks with an Allen wrench and lays a fresh sheet of grip tape on top of the deck.

He unfastens the gate and we file down a sandy path to behold a neighbor's worst nightmare: a stark new edifice risen from the brambles, a mountain of plywood. Call it the Hawk's Nest, his own private skate ramp, the test laboratory where he invents and perfects his latest tricks.

Last year, Hawk's celebrity grew to such a degree that he could no longer skate at his local ramp at the Encinitas YMCA without being interrupted by strangers pestering him for autographs. So he designed this leviathan of lumber and had it built for about $100,000. Even bigger than his old ramp in Fallbrook—untold truckloads of two-by-fours, metal pipes and rails, and Skatelite, a smooth, bronze, polymerized plywood, went into the construction—it would have made his father's eyes water.

As I watch, Hawk's movements take on a crisp new deliberateness, a tight gathering of energy that I haven't seen before. It reminds me of something Bob Burnquist said: "One minute Tony can be all teenagerlike, and the next he's all business. He can flip the switch just like that."

He's all business now, and the clock is ticking. He's aware that everything—the companies, the sponsorships, his house and cars—is built around what he cooks up here. Like Houdini, like Knievel, Hawk acutely realizes that as far as the demanding public is concerned, he's only as good as his latest trick.

And so, in "retirement," he's had to concoct increasingly bold and sometimes cheesy stunts to catch the public's eye. Over the past few years, he has, among other things: vaulted between two six-story buildings in downtown Los Angeles; ollied over recumbent Today show host Ann Curry; and launched himself across the "Murrietta Fat Gap," a huge set of ramps separated by a hair-raising gap that grew from 12 to 18 to 24 feet wide as Tony ratcheted up the pucker factor. This he built just so the feat could be documented by the drooling photographers of Transworld Skateboarding. And now there's the Boom Boom HuckJam, which he's taking on a 24-city tour this fall.

Hawk has fun coming up with these projects, but he's under an enormous amount of pressure. Kids pepper his Web site (clubtonyhawk.com) with e-mails beseeching him to try the next obvious permutation of the 900: a 1,080, three full rotations in the air. "1,080 OR BUST!" they write. Hawk's usual response: "I'm gonna have to go with 'bust' at this point."

Walking beneath the halfpipe's ribbed underbelly, we hear the scratch and smack of urethane wheels on the upper lip. "Sounds like a good session," Hawk says. He hasn't had a chance to skate in days, and he's itchy and restless. A small group of his buddies are already on the ramp. Chris and Jesse are here, and there's Matt and Andy. A few hangers-on click pictures and hoot praise—ooooooooohyeah, sick—whenever someone lands a nice one. Hawk and his crew greet one another with a series of inscrutable salutations—various yodeling noises, Hawaiian-style bruddah handshakes, catcalls of sweeeeeeeit, dooood—the preverbal patois of the skating fraternity. To his friends, Hawk is known simply as T, as though more than one syllable would break the linguistic bank.

Hawk grew up with many of these guys, and partied with them when his ramp in Fallbrook was the place to skate and hang. Now he employs many of them. They travel with him, promote him, shield him. And, of course, they skate with him. Hawk would no more want to skate alone than an improv saxophonist would want to jam by himself in a phone booth. A good skate session is a social event, with each athlete bringing something to the party and feeding off the spontaneity of the group.

Hawk is visibly impatient to skate, but first things first—the tunes could stand some improvement. He patches his iPod into the boom box that's set up beside the massive floor of the halfpipe. A minute later the place is throbbing to "Terrible Lie," by Nine Inch Nails. Satisfied with the mood music, Hawk ascends the stairs to the ramp's 15-foot summit and, in a flurry of scritching Velcro, dons his exoskeleton of elbow guards and knee pads. I take a seat on the platform behind him and watch as he girds himself. It's then, for the first time, that I notice his shins. They look like they're covered in barnacles, 20 unforgiving years of scars and stitches and scabs layered in endless combinations: a palimpsest of injury, a wound that never heals.

"You're overrotating, dude," he says, dispensing advice to a younger skater who's having trouble landing an aerial. Then he stands back, surveying the scene below with a magisterial aloofness.

Hawk straps on his helmet and brings his board to the metal coping that defines the brink, nudging the nose over the precipice. He's looking across the halfpipe now, at a rail set high over the lip. For the past week he's been obsessing on a new trick that involves hitting this rail in a certain glancing way he's never done before.

"You could call it a Frontside Overturn Grind, or you could call it Frontside to Switch Crooks," he explains, opaquely.

This is the way he skates, even among friends. This is the "nagging for perfection" that Mullen speaks of, the delicious little problem that's turned like a worm in his imagination. Now he gets to solve it.

Hawk glances west, where the sun is lowering into the Pacific, whence all boards sprang. He composes his lanky frame, tenses his stringy arms. His bulging blue eyes intensify. He looks suddenly serious, sober-minded, fiercely adult.

The bronze swell is clear for takeoff. Someone yells out, "T!" And then, with all eyes watching in fresh admiration, the Birdman drops in.

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