![]() He was so desperate to be accepted by young skating legends like Steve Caballero, Mike McGill, and Christian Hosoi that he ate gum from between Steve's toes. ![]() He was so skinny he had to wear elbow pads on his knees, and so light he had to ollie just to catch air off a ramp. Fellow skaters mocked his skating style and dubbed him a circus skater. But it wasn't an easy ride to the top of the skating game. When his brother, Steve, gave him a blue plastic hand-me-down skateboard and his father built a skate ramp in the driveway, Tony finally found his outlet-while skating, he could be as hard on himself as he was on everyone around him. He threw tantrums, terrorized the nanny until she quit, exploded with rage whenever he lost a game this was a kid who was expelled from preschool. Growing up in Sierra Mesa, California, Tony was a hyperactive demon child with an I44 IQ. And after thirteen years of failed attempts, he nailed it. It wasn't enough to knock himself unconscious more than ten times, fracture several ribs, break his elbow, knock out his teeth twice, compress the vertebrae in his back, pop his bursa sack, get more than fifty stitches laced into his shins, rip apart the cartilage in his knee, bruise his tailbone, sprain his ankles, and tear his ligaments too many times to count. For Tony Hawk, it wasn't enough to skate for two decades, to invent more than eighty tricks, and to win more than twice as many professional contests as any other skater. ![]()
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