900 Best Trick: Tony Hawks becomes Legend

On June twenty seventh, nineteen ninety nine, legendary skateboarder Tony Hawk does something no one had ever done on a skateboard before. He landed a nine hundred, which is two and a half spins in the air in competition, amazing the world and bringing skateboard to its highest peak it had ever seen. Here's the story behind this iconic moment in skateboarding history today on Daily Sports History. Welcome to Daily Sports History. I'm Ethan Rees, your guide to a rapid deep dive into sports history every day. The trivia question for today is how many attempts at the X Games did it take Tony Hawk before he finally landed the nine hundred. Now there's one skateboarder almost everyone in America can name. Whether you've skateboard before, whether you followed the sport, or whether you're just someone that's never even seen a skateboard, you know the name Tony Hawk. He's transcended the sport, not only being one of the greatest and most accomplished skateboarders there's ever been, but he started his own brand in Birdman, and he also has one of the most popular video game series that's ever been released in the Tony Hawk series, and despite being fifty six years old in two thousand and four, he still skates every single day. But this didn't all just happened at once. It was a collective moment that led to the nineteen ninety nine X Games and him landing the nine hundred that helped grow the sport more than it had ever been Now. Tony started skating at a very young age, and he actually fell down and ran into a wall the very first time he stepped on skateboard, but he stuck at it and he loved it so much. When we say skateboard it they looked very different. They looked like small surfboards opposed to the oval skateboards that we see today. And he turned pro at the age of fourteen. And I'm not going to go into all his accomplishments, as he deserves his own entire episode. I want to focus on the nine hundred for this one. But he was always pushing the envelope and he helped usher in new styles of skating, especially in the halfpipe and pool skating and getting off these ramps to get air, which helped propel the sport even more. Now, the sport of skating has had way ups and downs. It's gone through multiple changes, but the height of skateboarding will always be nineteen ninety nine due to two reasons. One, Tony Hawk was great and always pushed the boundaries. Two the was the X Games, which also deserves their whole entire episode as well. But the very first X Games started in nineteen ninety five as ESPN's attempt to garner all these other sports that weren't getting attention, mainly because ESPN was still a relatively small channel and to get major sports like the NBA, NFL, Major League Baseball on their network was difficult. But skateboarding, bmxing, motocross, snowboarding, all these other sports weren't getting their due, and so they created their own kind of Olympics for these X Games. Interestingly enough, now skateboarding, snowboarding BMX are now becoming part of the Olympics, but that doesn't mean the X Games isn't still going strong to this day, as it does as it's done every year opposed to every four years of the Olympics. In the first year the X Games happened, they featured skating, water skiing, street louge BMX, and mountain biking, and they've grown ever since. But X Games five is when everything really culminated as it was coming into its own. In the nineteen ninety nine X Games was the most attended X Games in history to this day, with almost two hundred and seventy thousand people in attendance in San Francisco, and the closest they have ever come again is to have two hundred and thirty five in two thousand and one. But that doesn't mean the next game popularity really waned. It's just that the TV popularity increased, and it was due partly to what happened at the ninety nine Games with Tony Hawk. So what was going on? What was this event? It was the best trick event for the vert pipe. Now vertical pipe, if you don't know, think of an actual pipe. It's a circle and you cut it in half so you have a U shape and that's basically what a vertical pipe is. So skaters stand at the top of the vert and it's over ten feet in the air and they drop into it on their skateboard is what they call. It was basically going down the hill with your skateboard, you and you jump to get air. On one side and come back down go to the other side. That's basically how this works. And as you get into the air, you do tricks, and that's what this best trick competition was, and it was called a jam session, which is when multiple skaters kind of take turns, going one at a time, and they each try to do the best trick they can with their time, and you either land it or you fall down, and then the next person goes and it lasts for about twenty minutes. But this day was a little bit unusual. So the event starts and Tony Hawk and a lot of other skaters are going and there's twenty minutes time limit and it's supposed to be when that time limit stops, the event stops. And Tony landed the trick he came in planning to land. He landed it and it was pretty good. But other skaters had done really well during this time too, And the rule for this one it's a little bit different for best Trick. It was the first time they did it. They didn't go gold, silver, bronze. It's just whoever landed the best trick got best trick. You were best in show, you were the best that day. And so because of that, this made it kind of a little bit of a controversy because Colin McKay had arguably done some of the best tricks, had passed what Tony ha T was doing for that time, and Tony landed his trick that he plan came into to land, and then after that he didn't really have a plan, so he tried this nine hundred that he had been working on for years that no one had ever ever landed in competition. So he started to do it during the jam session, and he kept failing and kept failing and kept failing, and then the jam session stopped the time it stops, and at that point consensus was Kalami Kay had one best trick. Everyone said he had the best trick, and then they don't stop Tony. He keeps going and going. He tries to land the nine hundred, not one, not two, not three, not four, tries for eleven straight times and fails. It keeps getting a little closer, keeps having something go off just a little bit, and many experts kind of at the time thought it was just kind of hard to do. People have landed at nine hundred on skates and on bicycles, but those ones are a little bit easier. Skates, your skates are always on you, so the spinning is quicker and easier. You can spin a lot faster bike your hands are naturally on the handlebars, so the bike can't get away from you. But on a skateboard there's a lot of challenges because you have to bend down and grab it, which makes spinning harder. Because in skates you can stand straight up and spin faster, but when you get down, the spin becomes harder. So many thought it was just a hard trick to land and may not ever be done, or would have to be done by a person with a unique body type. But he kept going. He kept going in the twelfth time, and nobody else is going. It's just Tony. He falls, gets up, goes, climbs back up onto the divert pipe and goes again. No one else is challenging him, no one else is trying it, and you know, the announcers still announcing, all the fans are still excited, excited every time, and even you know, some of his other fellow skateboarders that are like you know, rooting them on too, because even Colin McKay's rooting them on He was like, you know, if you could do this, that's awesome, go do it, because he already thought he won the contest. And then on his twelfth run, he goes up, does two and a half revelations, lands low on the vert ramp, but stays on his board. Even though his hand slightly grazes the floor, it's still a successful landing, and he lands the very first nine hundred in technical competition, even though it was outside the framework the timing of this competition, and even though it was a sloppy landing by all accounts, it was still a landing, and everyone cheered, everyone is excited, everyone goes crazy, and X Games does something unusual. They're young, they're going for the highest popularity and everything. They give the medal for the best trick to Tony Hawk. Even though it was done outside of the time work, outside of the rules, they gave it to Tony Hawk. At this point, there's a little bit of kind of friction in the community, in the skateboarding community on should he really have won? It? Should have been Colin. It doesn't really matter if we look back who won the best trick. Everyone would just remember the nine hundred and I guess that's what X Games was going for. They landed the nine hundred, no one stopped him, so let letim go. And there's also some controversy too that another skater, Danny Way, who was known as the first person to land in seven twenty, had actually landed the nine hundred back in nineteen eighty nine on a Santa Cruz film. And you look at the video, it looks like he almost lands, but it cuts away before he looks like he's falling down, so it looks like he lands it, but it's kind of on a video editing, so you can't really say did he land it or not say? And it wasn't in competition, so really they give the nod to Tony Hawk. And what made this even more successful blow up even more was that same year, in September, the release of Tony Hawk Pro Skater, which had already been in development by Tony Hawk for PlayStation, was released. Now, PlayStation in nineteen ninety nine was king in video games. There was still Nintendo Dreamcast and some other type of games, but PlayStation was going above and beyond, and this was the first skater type of game, and it took off, allowing players to be different skaters and do tricks all over the place, and whether on avert or in the street, and go all over and it grew the sport of skating on top of the fact that he had just landed the nine hundred, which gave it even more publicity, and it got great ratings by all the publications, and it went on to sell over three hundred and fifty thousand units just in the US alone, and went platinum for video game sales and has come out with multiple sequels, and it has become one of the best selling video games of all time. And some can argue that if Tony Hawk never landed the nine hundred, maybe the game in the whole series would have never been the same. And I want to thank you for listening to today's Daily Sports History. If you like this, please share it with a friend, let them know about all the sports history you're learning today, and come back tomorrow for more Daily sports History. And did you catch the answer to today's trivia question, how many attempts did it take for Tony Hawk to land the nine hundred. It was a total of twelve attempts,