17-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Watch: Legendary skateboarder Tony Hawk filmed skating in Mallow
He may have officially retired two decades ago, but that didn't stop the world's most recognisable skateboarder from hitting up a skatepark in Co Cork earlier this week.
On Monday, 57-year-old Tony Hawk, widely regarded as one of — if not the most — influential skateboarder of all time, shared a video of himself and his family skating in Mallow Skatepark.
In videos posted to his official Instagram and Reddit accounts, Hawk revealed they had the run of the park for more than two hours.
"While on vacation in Ireland, our kids wanted to skate at least once. Who am I to deny them?" he wrote.
"In these situations, my role is strictly facilitative: finding a decent park, providing transportation and on-demand follow-cam."
After his family, who are all excellent skateboarders in their own right, had filmed their clips, Hawk asked his son Miles to film him putting a run of tricks together.
"We had the whole place to ourselves for nearly two hours btw. 10/10 would skate again," Hawk added.
In his discipline of vert skating, that is skating and performing tricks on a vert ramp, he is a trailblazer and pioneer.
In a professional career spanning 25 years, the Californian competed in and won events the world over, inventing more than 100 tricks along the way.
His most legendary feat is, perhaps, the "900" — a trick involving the completion of two-and-a-half mid-air revolutions on the board above a vert ramp.
Until Hawk completed the trick in 1999, after more than a decade worth of attempts, it was thought the trick was so technically demanding it would be practically impossible.
If the 900 made Hawk an extreme sports star in the US, it was the video game that bears his name that turned him into a household name, and his sport into a global phenomenon.
The Tony Hawk's video game series has sold more than 1.4 billion units, pulling in over $2bn in sales since the release of the first instalment, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater for PlayStation 1 in 1999.
The most recent instalment, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 + 2, a remake of the first two titles in the series, sold more than a million copies within the first two weeks of its release. The next instalment in the series, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4, a remake of the third and fourth games of the series, is set for release next month.
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