October 26, 2006 | Read Time: 6 minutes
On a crisp, sunny morning here, a dozen or so teenagers in baggy jeans do their best to defy gravity. At a newly built skateboard park, they zip through the gray-white hills and valleys with abandon, the soft rolling sound of their rubber wheels punctuated by the occasional crash of a failed ollie or other aerial trick.
Despite the sunshine and good times, a shaggy blond-haired skater kicks up his board and makes an ugly face. “Are you here to fix the park?” he asks a visitor. “That transition sucks.” He nods to where a concrete floor slopes skyward.
The visitor, Miki Vuckovich, replies that, No, he isn’t here to improve the public facility, but he agrees with the angry teenager’s assessment.
“It’s pretty cramped,” Mr. Vuckovich says after his visit. “You end up with kids coming down this way, coming down that way, and there’s crisscross runs. The builder had no previous experience building skate parks. It’s more than just pouring concrete.”
Mr. Vuckovich knows of what he speaks. He is the executive director of a small charity established by the professional skateboarder Tony Hawk to help build public skate parks that are safe and well designed.
With about 2,200 public skate parks in the country and an estimated 11.5 million skateboarders, the parks are in great demand. More cities and towns are constructing such facilities as the sport becomes more popular — and as police grow tired of chasing skaters out of drained backyard pools and other places where their daredevil antics are unwanted.
But many public parks, which cost upwards of $500,000 to construct, end up like Carlsbad’s, with bad curves and bad vibes.
To Mr. Hawk, that is unacceptable. Since 2002, the Tony Hawk Foundation has given $1.3-million to help build 291 skate parks. He has raised the money by donating his public-appearance fees — he doesn’t recall the total amount of his contributions — and other gifts primarily from corporations in the skateboarding world. Aside from money, the Hawk Foundation provides information on its Web site and in a soon-to-be published 150-page book about how to design and build a skate park.
While not necessarily a household name, Mr. Hawk, 38, is easily the world’s most famous skateboarder. He is credited — and occasionally maligned — for shepherding his sport into mainstream America. He has won numerous competitions, is featured in best-selling video games, and has earned the nickname “Birdman” for his high-flying acrobatics.
A laid-back, lanky Southern Californian with scars on his elbows and knuckles from wiping out, Mr. Hawk houses his nonprofit organization at the offices of Tony Hawk Inc., his Vista, Calif., company that produces his DVD’s and tours. The fund’s three staff members work just steps away from a massive room that contains Mr. Hawk’s 13-foot half-pipe, a wooden U-shaped ramp on which he can reach such heights that he was forced to make the building’s ceiling eight feet taller.
“We had to quote-unquote raise the roof,” quips Mr. Vuckovich, a former photographer for skateboarding magazines who met Mr. Hawk 14 years ago.
While skeptics may question the quixotic mission of the Tony Hawk Foundation, perhaps dismissing it as a marketing ploy, Mr. Hawk insists there is a social value to it.
“The skate park growing up was my sanctuary. It was where I spent almost all the time when I wasn’t in school,” says Mr. Hawk, who serves as the fund’s president. “A lot of these [skater] kids feel like they’re shunned or they’re outcasts because they don’t play traditional sports, and they don’t have a place to hone their skills.”
Adds Mr. Vuckovich: “If we can help build skate parks in some of these communities, we can offer a place and an outlet that basically keeps good kids out of harm’s way.”
While both men may sound like apologists for the United Church of Skateboarding, they take a serious approach to their charitable efforts.
The Tony Hawk Foundation only supports parks in low-income neighborhoods, vetting grant applicants against the U.S. Census Bureau’s data on poverty and geography.
The fund also requires skaters to work hand in hand with local officials in planning a park.
Getting skaters involved in the civic process, which often includes appealing to city councils to make their case for building a park, reduces negative stereotypes of skaters as punk-rock- loving, pot-smoking hooligans, says Mr. Hawk.
“We’ve heard so many stories of city officials initially saying, No way, we’re not having a park here, it’s a bad influence, these kids are degenerates,” he says. “Then they see these kids are motivated kids, artistic and creative. They actually do an about-face.”
This détente between rebellious skaters and uptight officials usually leads to a joint fund-raising effort, in which the Hawk Foundation and the local government allocate some money, but the kids raise the rest through car washes, bake sales, and benefit concerts.
Skaters in Missoula, Mont., for instance, set up their own charity, the Missoula Skatepark Association, that garnered $700,000, including $15,000 from Mr. Hawk’s group last year. The Hawk grant, while small, provided much-needed publicity, says Chris Bacon, the association’s founder and the manager of a local skate shop.
“At that point in our fund-raising stage, it was a great momentum booster,” he says.
The Missoula park opened last month. Aside from the occasional $25 fine to people who aren’t wearing helmets, the Missoula Parks and Recreation Department says the skaters are not troublemakers.
Next month the Tony Hawk Foundation will hold its biggest fund-raising event, Stand Up for Skateparks. A black-tie gala this is not.
The gathering will include such celebrities as Sean Penn and be held at a posh Beverly Hills mansion that was featured in the 1985 Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Commando — “where he chases the drug lord through this huge estate and blows away all the henchmen,” Mr. Vuckovich says.
Mr. Hawk will perform a “vert ramp demo” (that’s vertical-ramp demonstration, to nonskaters), all fueled by music from the Anarchy Orchestra.
The charity expects to raise more than $900,000, a $400,000 increase from two years ago when the annual event began.
But despite the fund-raising success, occasionally Mr. Hawk questions his charity’s goal.
“I know the value of it, but on the surface, you think, You guys are raising money to pour cement? C’mon,” he says.
A recent meeting in Los Angeles with another charitable sports icon, the cyclist Lance Armstrong, exacerbated this concern.
“We went to visit some kids in a children’s hospital in L.A., and I was trying to purge myself and tell him, Well, we have a foundation, we build skate parks, but when I see what you’re doing with cancer research and the impact you have, it feels trite to me.”
The seven-time Tour de France winner, however, put Mr. Hawk’s mind at ease. By getting kids physically active, the Hawk Foundation is fighting obesity and helping them be healthy, Mr. Armstrong said, according to the skateboarder. If they do get sick with cancer, they’ll be much more likely to beat the disease if they’re in shape, Mr. Armstrong added.
“He really tied it together,” says Mr. Hawk, smiling. “I felt really good about that.”
