.Interview: Tony Hawk On Skating San Jose

San Jose is a legendary skating spot, even in the mind of Tony Hawk. When he first started skating in the ’80s, while growing up in San Diego, he wasn’t even supposed to respect it, thanks to the bitter divide between NorCal and SoCal boarders.
“The rivalry was bizarre,” he tells me now, while prepping for the latest tour with his Birdhouse Team, who will come to San Jose’s Lake Cunningham Regional Skate Park Sunday for a demo. “We had a very small population that couldn’t get along. It was very polarized.”
But Hawk couldn’t help himself, because one of his earliest skating heroes lived in San Jose: Steve Caballero. And he’ll never forget the day he got to go to Winchester Skate Park in Campbell and skate with “Cab” for the first time.
“To this day, that’s one of the most monumental events for me,” says Hawk.
Hawk has skated the Lake Cunningham park only once, before it was completed. He calls the design, which features the world’s largest full pipe and cradle, and tallest vert wall, “incredible,” but marvels even more that this is just one of a whole system of public parks that now line California—a far cry from what was around in his younger days.
Of course, Hawk himself is one of the skaters whose fame ushered in the massive popularity of skateboarding that made these bigger and better parks possible in the first place. His new “Left Coast” tour comes not long after director Stacy Peralta, the former pro skater who made Dogtown and Z-Boys, brought his newest documentary to Sundance—a film that is likely to take the legend of Hawk and his fellow skaters to yet another level, even as it breaks it down to very personal and fascinating stories.
Bones Brigade: An Autobiography takes a look at the’80s skateboarding team of the same name that featured both Hawk and Caballero, and changed the sport forever. It allows the various members to tell their own stories, and focuses on their growing fame and rivalries, especially the infamous one between Hawk and Christian Hosoi. In the end, the movie is as much about how they pushed each other as a team as it is about their individual legacies.
For Hawk, the documentary was revealing, but not in the way you might expect. “It was fun to reminisce, but it was more interesting to me to get everyone else’s perspective on what our era represented to people, and to each other.” There was hardly time for such insights back then, he says, because “we were all fighting our own little wars.”
For this tour, Hawk will be bringing along skaters such as Kevin Staab, Willy Santos, Aaron Homoki, Shawn Hale, Clint Walker and several others. He knows his own skating is the main draw for a lot of fans, but he’s also entered in to what he thinks of as a new phase, where part of his goal is to give some visibility to rising stars.
“There’s a new generation of guys pushing the limits,” he says. “If I’m the one who turns on that spotlight for them, I’m happy.”
Tony Hawk and the Birdhouse Skate Team will demo at Lake Cunningham Park in San Jose on Sunday, July 15 at 2pm; free. An in-store will follow at Circle-A Skateboards, 4pm to 5pm.