![]() I knew it was a risk and that I wasn’t going to make as much money, but I had to do something that I was passionate about. I didn’t want to just be a sad, old, washed up vert skater struggling to make a living and that’s why I started Birdhouse. It wasn’t ‘dead’ yet, but I could sense the sky falling and I wanted to do something new. Around 19 there were some $20,000 months.īut by 1991 it started going from $4,000 a month to $2,000 a month. Powell paid royalties based on a certain percentage and I think it worked out to around $1.50 per board. I had salary from Airwalk shoes and Tracker Trucks and royalties from Powell Peralta. My checks were getting cut in half pretty much every month starting in 1991. When did you realize it was all going south?īy 1991 I sensed that skating’s popularity was waning and definitely the interest in vert skating was falling even faster. That door slammed pretty quick considering that just a few years prior in 1987 you were cashing $20,000 monthly royalty checks. There was a time in the early 1990s when your value as a pro was considered worthless. I haven’t seen him eat at Taco Bell for a while, though.” ![]() ![]() He’s a skate rat who currently skates a custom ramp that cost a cool million with the same mixture of fun and determination that he employed while avoiding holes in his crumbling backyard ramp in 1993. He looked for any way to meet his goals, with no ego attached to a past status. Obviously, Tony Hawk found a way to stay in the skate scene and prosper, and it’s partly his loose-change scrounging attitude that allowed him to persevere. The 1990 crash repeated the cycle of death and rebirth, so veterans assumed that skateboarding would rotate through this hardship every decade as older generations of pros aged out. Skateboarding had also turned dystopian in the early 1980s when magazines and major brands died skaters horded trucks and some feared they’d have to pour their own wheels. Rodney Mullen was living in a simple apartment using yogurt containers as dishes while other lucky pros begged themselves onto demos as second-tier talent behind more popular rollerbladers.īut this was nothing new. Most established brands died or declared bankruptcy, contest checks bounced and once-thriving pros now lived below the poverty line. In 1991, skateboarding had suffered such a rapid loss in popularity that the scene now had a distinct post-apocalyptic vibe to it. ![]() Taco Bell had a cheap menu and we were trying to scrounge up lunch money. “One day in 1993, when things were particularly tight, I remember helping Tony Hawk look for change underneath the floor mats of his Honda. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |