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When Tony Hawk finally stopped spinning, spinning, spinning, he landed back on Earth to find the skateboard world rotated around him.
And it had gotten a lot bigger.
At that surreal moment when he landed the famous 900-degree spin during the 1999 X-Games on national television, every skateboarder on the planet wanted to soar like the Hawk. And for the first time, some nonskaters did, too. He had shattered the ceiling of possibilities for all generations of riders.
"I had never done [the 900] before," he said in a telephone interview. "For me it was something I'd been working on, another trick, and it was weird that so much attention was drawn to it."
Nationwide, kids with scabby elbows and knees or casts on their forearms, still dreaming of their own 360 (one spin above the edge of the pipe, a 900 being 2 1/2), were awestruck. A hero is perfect in such moments, and immortalized, and that is why the name Tony Hawk is the only name nonskaters know.
Why that moment was so big still baffles Hawk, even as he heads to Salt Lake City on Monday with his Boom Boom Huck Jam Tour, spinning out a career that includes roping his first sponsor at age 12 and winning 73 of 103 pro contests.
He disputes that it was one trick so much as timing. A booming interest in all gravity sports and the '99 X-Games venue combined to make it perfect, he said.
"People were just starting to recognize skateboading again, and people who didn't actually skate could understand the rotation of [the 900]," he said Tuesday from his San Diego home. "You didn't have to be a veteran to understand it."
Or that it took a genuine, albeit rail-thin, athlete with gymnastic skill. Skating became socially acceptable almost overnight. Wheeled plywood boards no longer were seen as getaway vehicles for graffiti...