There's a lot more to Tony Hawk than skateboarding: he single single handedly turned skateboarding into a multi-billion industry. Skateboarding was a big part of my life in the second half of my teenage years and that was in the mid 2000's. What's astonishing about Tony Hawk is that he made a huge impact during a time when vert ramps and half-pipes were extremely unpopular to put it mildly. Late 90's it was all about street skating. The video series that still largely captures that period to me is Eastern Exposure. But also skateboarding as a whole was dropping in popularity relative to the early 90's. What the Tony Hawk series did was they captured the imagination of the next generation which took the 90's skateboarding to a scale which I don't think anyone even remotely considered possible. I remember in the earlier 2000's when seeing someone jump down 10 stairs seemed like something out of this world. By 2005-6 that was looked at largely as "k, cool". That+the fact that skateboarding was at the top of the game once again. I'm not sure what the situation is today but I feel like it's dying again when I walk around the city. There's no denying that skateboarding is difficult: it will take you months to get a hang of the basics whereas kids can pick up a scooter and start doing tricks as soon as they set foot on them. Kind of sad now that I think of it. Every now and then a gif will pop up on the internet and I'll instinctively want to start clapping. Shame.