‘Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off’ Captures the Gravity of Chasing Air “It Takes More Than Just Joy”
The HBO Max documentary on the skating legend, directed by Sam Jones, focuses on what it’s like to be a pioneer in a forward-thinking endeavor—and how it feels when the grandeur of weightlessness gives way to the terror of the emptiness.
Recently,
Tony Hawk, the action sports legend, recently performed a significant physical achievement. “I put my socks on just before I got on this interview with you,” he says over Zoom in late March, sitting in front of a colourful wall of skateboards. He appears slightly exhausted after the exertion, but also relieved. He seemed to be pleased with himself. He explains, “I couldn’t do it a week ago.” The 53-year-old Hawk broke his femur, the human body’s strongest bone, on March 7 during a routine (for him) Monday skateboarding session, an incident that would have been bad enough without the fact that he was days away from leaving for the SXSW conference to promote a new HBO documentary about his life and times called Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off. His wheels had gotten a little squeaky.
“I got a text saying, ‘Hey, I shattered my femur,'” says Sam Jones, the film’s director, over Zoom. “‘And don’t tell anyone just yet.'” Hawk kept texting: updates on his surgery, his doctor, and his hospital bed; requests not to tell HBO anything right immediately; and assurances that he’d still make it to the film festival in Austin, Texas. Hawk told Jones, who was doubtful, that he was going to seek a doctor’s authorization to fly: Another skateboarder friend of theirs, Steve Caballero, had experienced a similar accident a few years ago and spent a week in the hospital and out of commission. Hawk and his newly inserted nuts and bolts managed to make it work, though. Jones says, “We were just amazed when he came.” “He forced himself to get on a plane and fly to our film festival, and then he forced himself into the car.”
Hawk’s appearance in Austin provided a powerful conclusion to the two-hour programme. Hawk’s various mentors, pals, rivals, and peers marvel and worry about the toll that his continued pursuit of his chosen craft—one that has made him a park rat, an innovator, an X Games O.G., a video game magnate, and a global household name—takes on his lanky body throughout Until the Wheels Fall Off, especially in the last half-hour or so. “I’ve been there before,” skateboarder Sean Mortimer laments in Until the Wheels Fall Off, referring to his old buddy Hawk’s famed obsession with doing things faster, higher, gnarlier, and into oblivion, “when he only stopped because he broke a rib.”
Hawk returned to the ramp where he was hurt two weeks after his operation, getting back on his skateboard and riding away from the site where he fell as his wife, Catherine, waited alongside holding his crutch, as if to soothe away the unchill feelings of the place. Hawk, surfer Kelly Slater, and snowboarder Shaun White joined onstage at the Oscars a few days later to honour the links between James Bond films and extreme sports. Meeting Bill Murray, who was a vociferous supporter of Catherine’s Gucci gown, and having the honour of explaining one of the internet’s finest memes to Wesley Snipes were highlights of Hawk’s night.
Hawk, as usual, used the evening as an opportunity to push himself to a new personal limit. He strolled the red carpet with a cane studded with a miniature metal avian skull, a nod to his skateboard brand Birdhouse, but when it came time to give his speech, he left it backstage, accomplishing a small goal he’d set for himself throughout his rehabilitation. He explains, “I had been ready for that night.” It’s easy to image what that preparation looked like in Until the Wheels Fall Off, which premiered on HBO Max on Tuesday: tenacious, unrelenting, and laser-focused, adamant on trying again and again until accomplishing a goal or breaking a bone, a ratio that these days just ain’t what it used to be.
When
Hawk is initially seen in Until the Wheels Fall Off in an indoor training facility, where he is eating shit over and over again. He still has an unbroken femur, but he’s a middle-aged man who climbs a ladder again and over, sometimes gracefully, but always painfully, in order to try (and fail) to land his famous 900. Hawk was the first person to hit a 900, doing so in the X Games in 1999, and he is also the oldest to have done it, rotating his then-48-year-old frame two and a half times in a video he uploaded in 2016.
Jones’s Until the Wheels Fall Off is about what it’s like to be a pioneer in a progressive endeavour, and how it feels when the glory of weightlessness gives way to the dread of the void. It’s told with an appreciative apprehension reminiscent of other extreme-athlete documentaries like 2010’s The Birth of Big Air and 2013’s McConkey. “You make it all the way to the top of the mountain,” Nietzsche-paraphrasing skater Rodney Mullen, one of Hawk’s longstanding peers and one of the film’s many interviewees, observes in the film, “and there’s nothing left but to get hit by lightning.” The relentlessness of Hawk’s ascent, the loneliness at the summit, and the way life seems from the other side of the hill are all depicted in Jones’ film.
