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He’s been called the Michael Jordan of the skater world, and no matter what your opinion is of skateboarding,
Tony Hawk’s talent and influence can’t be denied.
When listing the sports that are the most lucrative for the top athletes, skateboarding usually isn’t even in the conversation,
but Tony Hawk has changed the game by earning tens of millions of dollars off the strength of his talent and his passion.
We’re going to tell the story today of how Tony Hawk defied the odds and became the richest skater in the world, but first a little background.
Anthony Hawk is primarily known for being one of the top skateboarders in the world.
He has won more than 70 skateboarding contests, including gold medals at the X Games in 1995 and 1997.
Even though he technically retired in 1999, he is still heavily involved in the skating world by giving demonstrations, devising new tricks,
and mentoring younger skateboarders like Olympian Shaun White.
Also, through the Tony Hawk Foundation, which he established in 2001,
he has worked to build more than 600 public skateboard parks across America to help with the emergence of the sport.
Tony has accomplished just about everything he has set out to do in the sport of skateboarding, but it hasn’t exactly been a smooth ride.
Let’s go back to the start of this story now and see where it all began.
Hawk began skating at the age of nine as an outlet for his excessive energy and creative spirit.
His parents encouraged him in what they thought would just be a hobby, but at 11 years old he began entering competitions
and started developing a reputation for being creative and daring.
At the age of 14, he signed his first contract with the Powell Peralta professional team.
Just two years later, he was considered by many in the skater community to be the best competitive skateboarder in the world.
But skateboarding was far from the mainstream,
and Hawk’s name wasn’t well-known outside of that circle for several years after he was already at the top of his game.
But Hawk had bigger dreams than just winning a few skateboarding competitions.
From a young age, Tony’s vision has been to bring skateboarding into the mainstream so that more people would become engaged in the sport
and it would be seen as just as legitimate as any other sports children, in particular, choose to get involved in.
Tony felt that skateboarding as a whole didn’t get the respect that it deserved and that skateboarders were never truly considered athletes.
He set about to change this widespread perception.
For Tony, it was never about the money but about following his passion and supporting the sport that he believed in.
Tony had become a star among his skateboarding peers, and he was known in those circles all around the world.
As a young teenager, he was making about $100,000 per year,
and in his later teens, he was bringing in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year due to his competition wins
and his primary sponsorship deal with Powell Peralta skateboards.
He was making much more money than his teachers and everyone else at school, and he even bought his first home when he was 17 years old
and a second home a couple years later.
In the late ‘80s, he traveled around the world giving skating demos and taking part in competitions.
Life was good, and Tony could not believe his good fortunes, but they wouldn’t last.
By the early ‘90s, skateboarding was widely regarded as the hobby of slackers and troublemakers.
Skate parks were closing down in large numbers because they couldn’t afford the insurance, and opportunities for Hawk dried up quickly.
He found himself with little income, two mortgages, and a son on the way.
He sold one of his houses, and at times he had to get by on just $5 a day.
Others he had competed with moved on to sensible careers, but Tony never abandoned his passion.
Even though every sign pointed to the popularity of skateboarding declining,
Hawk refinanced his home and launched his own skateboard company called Birdhouse Projects in 1992.
For the first several years, it seemed like his critics were right—his shop wasn’t making money, and his entire future hung in the balance.
But his unexpected rise to fame was actually just around the corner.
In 1995, ESPN launched an extreme sports competition called the X-Games.
Hawk was 27, and he felt like this would be a good opportunity to push skating toward the mainstream.
He won gold at the 1995 and 1997 games.
Due to this exposure, he began getting calls for endorsement deals again.
After having struggled financially for years, he was signing on to everything.
In the process, he made some bad deals and signed his rights away to several companies.
It was only later that he realized that this actually diminished his brand
as his name was attached to low-quality products that he didn’t want to be associated with.
There was even Tony Hawk toilet paper with his name on it.
When he confronted these companies, he found that he had no say in how his name would be used.
He would later say he had to nearly destroy his brand in order to learn its value.
This was a hard lesson for him to learn, but it served him well as he achieved even greater fame.
With a resurgence in the popularity of skateboarding and Hawk’s increased name recognition,
Birdhouse became one of the biggest and most successful skate companies in the world.
On top of this, 1999 became a pivotal year for Hawk.
First, he was approached by Activision with a pitch to create the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater video game.
This would end up being the most financially profitable deal of his life.
He had learned from his earlier mistakes with contracts.
He was offered $500,000 upfront for rights to his name and image,
but he turned this down and insisted instead on a royalty deal and final approval of all elements of the game.
Sales of the game soared when that same year he became the first skateboarder to ever land a 900
a move that involved rotating 900 degrees, or two and a half turns, in mid-air.
This played out live on national TV as part of the 1999 X Games.
The combination of this incredible feat and the success of his video game pushed him into the mainstream spotlight,
and he soon became a household name at the age of 31.
By 2015, a total of 19 video games had been released as part of the Tony Hawk video game series.
It’s one of the most popular game franchises in history with sales surpassing $1.4 billion.
Largely thanks to him insisting on a royalty deal, Hawk has accumulated an estimated net worth of $140 million.
His increased wealth also enabled him to buy out some of his former contracts so that his name would no longer appear on inferior products.
He officially retired after the 1999 X Games, but he continues to put on demos and exhibitions all around the world.
Birdhouse was established nearly 30 years ago and is more successful than ever.
His branded products continue to sell in the hundreds of millions.
He also owns a skate clothing company called Hawk Clothing.
He has become the most recognizable action sports figure in the world, and thanks to all of these revenue streams, he is now the richest skater in the world.
Hawk’s story teaches us to persevere and follow our passions through the highest highs and lowest lows.
It may not always be pretty, and others might not understand, but if you are driven, focused, ambitious, and strategic, you could experience incredible success.
Hawk persisted in starting his own business even when many people around him told him he was crazy to do so, and it paid off big time.
You might want to check out the book How to Start and Succeed in Your Own Business.
It’s written by entrepreneur and self-development author Brian Tracy.
Tracy not only built a multi-million-dollar company in less than four years but also has worked with over 100 companies as a consultant to increase their success.
This book sells for over $40 but save your money.
Just go to alux.com/freebook and sign up so that you can get the audiobook version for free thanks to our partnership with Audible!
While researching his story, we’ve come across this inspiring quote from Tony Hawk we’d like to share with you and it goes like this:
Now that we’re wrapping up this story, we’d like to know:
Let us know what you think in the comments.
And, of course, for sticking with us until the end, here's that bonus you're waiting for:
The first skateboard Tony ever used was a fiberglass skateboard called a banana board.
His brother gave it to him when he was nine years old, and he began using it all the time.
His brother said, “It wasn’t like he stepped on it and suddenly angels were singing.
He just kind of slowly got good at it.”
Today that skateboard is on display at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.
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