How Did I Get Here (18 page)

Here I am at the Nathan Lazarus Skatepark grand opening in Nederland, Colorado, named after the 5th grader who helped me win big money on
Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?

In late 2001, I wrote a check for $50,000 to kick-start the foundation. I also promised to donate future appearance fees. Some of my major sponsors at the time (Activision, Heinz Foods for Bagel Bites, ESPN, and Quiksilver) contributed as well.

Shortly after we became an official nonprofit, I got invited to be on a celebrity edition of ABC’s hit game show,
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
With an assist from Steve as my “phone a friend” lifeline (he’s not that smart, just good at googling), I won $125,000 for the foundation. Thanks, Regis. (A few years later, Fox TV asked me to be a contestant on its series
Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?
, also for charity. That time I got invaluable help from one of the show’s “classmates,” an 11-year-old named Nathan, and won $175,000. I was so impressed by Nathan that, in front of the cameras, I promised him we’d help finance a skatepark in his hometown. The park cost about $500,000 total, and we kicked in $75,000. Two years later, I attended the grand opening of the Nathan Lazarus Skatepark in Nederland, Colorado. I stood beside him as he cut the ribbon, then skated for a while in front of a few thousand people. That was a good day. (And it’s a good skatepark.)

To get the word out about the foundation, we issued some press releases, and I began to talk about it in interviews and on talk shows. Jaimie Muehlhausen, my company’s in-house graphic guru, teamed up with my old friend Ray Underhill to build a website (
tonyhawkfoundation.org
) so communities could fill out our grant application and read tips on how to develop a community skatepark.

As the first wave of applications poured in, some patterns emerged. A big percentage came from small, impoverished rural communities in the Midwest (particularly Wisconsin, for some mysterious reason). We also got a lot of applications from the West Coast: California, Oregon, and Washington, which all have strong skate scenes.

The West Coast applicants tended to want to build big concrete parks with deep bowls designed primarily for older, experienced skaters. The Midwesterners had cheaper, more modest ambitions. Most were small farming towns seeking to buy prefab obstacles (quarterpipes, fun boxes, pyramids) that they could install on existing flat surfaces. A lot of their proposed parks were the exact same size: 14,400 square feet. It took us a while to figure out that they were converting old, unused tennis courts into skateparks.

The first year we donated to parks, we gave away over $350,000 to 105 projects, with grants ranging from $1,000 to $25,000. The applicants had to be legitimate nonprofits, and they had to be working toward creating a public skatepark in an underprivileged community.

This Ain’t No Soccer Field

After the foundation had been up and running for a couple of years, two of our board members took over to run the show. Miki came on as executive director, and Kim stepped up to oversee development and fundraising efforts. Today, the Tony Hawk Foundation has four full-time employees.

In addition to poring over grant applications to determine which projects should receive our money, Miki and his staff have worked to turn the foundation into an invaluable educational resource for anyone grappling with the painful logistics of getting a public skatepark built.

When a skater or parent calls, we tell them how to get their project started and how to push it through the system. When a municipality or local parks-and-recreation administrator calls, we stress the importance of bringing local skateboarders into the process very early, to ensure that they build a park their constituents will actually use.

We remind them that the design decisions that go into building a skatepark are far different from those of such cookie-cutter facilities as basketball courts or soccer fields. No two skateparks are alike. They can be made of concrete, asphalt, wood, steel, or plastic—or some combination thereof. They can range from 1,000 square feet to 100,000 square feet. Too often, bureaucrats heed the advice of reps from a particular line of modular skate obstacles (often made by large playground equipment manufacturers), who sometimes present themselves as unbiased experts but invariably push their own brands.

In 2007, we collaborated with a nonprofit called Skaters for Public Skateparks and the International Association of Skateboard Companies to draft, print, and distribute a 128-page
Public Skatepark Development Guide
(
publicskateparkguide.org
). It quickly became
the
go-to guide for anyone looking to create a public skatepark. We also field a flood of phone calls and e-mails from skaters and officials who have specific questions, and we’ve compiled a public database of municipal officials who’ve succeeded at building skateparks and who are willing to give advice to their peers in the parks-and-recreation world.

At the time this book was written (summer 2010), the foundation has provided technical assistance to some 1,700 communities, and awarded more than $3 million in grants to more than 450 low-income communities in 49 states. (Time to step up, Connecticut.) About 350 of the parks that have received our money are now open, serving around three million skaters annually. Based on those numbers, we figure the foundation has helped to create more than 10 percent of the estimated 3,000 skateparks in the country.

Celebrity Backscratching

One of the keys to the foundation’s growth has been our annual “Stand Up for Skateparks” benefit. It’s one of those high-end fundraising events in which well-heeled people pay a few hundred dollars each to eat good food, watch famous performers, and bid on donated auction items. Only ours is far from black tie. It’s aimed at kids, and the food is mostly tacos, burgers, hot dogs, and macaroni and cheese. And the entertainment comes in the form of skateboarders and BMXers doing a demo on my vert ramp.

The first one was held in 2004 at a Pinz bowling alley in Los Angeles. The band Blink-182 played, and a bunch of celebrities whom I’d met over the years (Tom Green, David Spade, and Jon Favreau, among others) showed up. We grossed more than $700,000 that year. More important, we planted seeds for future events.

Turns out that one of the richest guys in Southern California, grocery chain magnate Ron Burkle, has a son who loves skateboarding, and after the first event Ron graciously invited us to use his 14-acre estate in Beverly Hills for the next fundraiser. Word got out that our first one had been very kid-friendly, with lots of giveaways (free skate shoes, free backpacks, video games, and toys), and we drew the attention of several celebrities with kids who skate. People like Sean Penn, Jamie Lee Curtis, Lisa Kudrow, Kathy Ireland, and Chuck Liddell (
shredordie.com/video/tony-hawk-ride-presents-stand
) lent their names to the event and donated generously. We realized we had a fundraising hit on our hands.

In 2008, we decided to hold a secondary event in the Hamptons, in New York, introducing a whole new crowd to California-style fundraising. That one didn’t raise as much money as we had hoped, so in 2009 we moved the secondary event to Las Vegas, where it did very well and where we’ll keep it for the foreseeable future.

But the primary event will remain in Beverly Hills. We’ve drawn some cool celebrities over the years, including Lance Armstrong, Andre Agassi, Benicio del Toro, Pamela Anderson, Johnny Knoxville, Travis Barker, Mia Hamm, Howie Mandel, Leeza Gibbons, Sean “Diddy” Combs, Fred Durst, Jakob Dylan, Flea (of the Red Hot Chili Peppers), John Fogerty, Kenny G, Arsenio Hall, Ed Helms, Anthony Kiedis, Dylan Bruno, Stefan Lessard, B. J. Novak, Trent Reznor, Russell Simmons, and Victoria Beckham. In addition to Blink-182, we’ve had musical performances by Perry Farrell, Social Distortion, and Rancid.

The annual Stand Up for Skateparks fundraiser has turned out to be the foundation’s greatest single source of revenue. In recent years, we’ve added a live “pledge drive” format, in which guests are asked to donate money to a specific skatepark project in an especially needy area. At the 2007 event, over the course of about 15 minutes we raised $80,000 for a park in Compton, the notoriously gang-infested city near Los Angeles. Since then, we’ve also held live pledge drives for parks in New York City, San Diego, Las Vegas, and Watts.

Meanwhile, over the past decade or so, I’ve been invited to several fundraisers organized by other sports celebrities, including Muhammad Ali and Andre Agassi. The Agassi event is
the
big sports-celebrity charity gala of the year. It’s held in an arena in Vegas, where Agassi grew up, and the performing musicians have included such huge names as Celine Dion and Reba McEntire. Andre is an amazing philanthropist who has single-handedly financed a school for troubled kids in his hometown. At his event, I agreed to donate a free private skate performance and a tour of my office (and lunch) for 10 people. I was stunned when two separate people bid $50,000 for that package, for a total of $100,000…just to see me skate!

In return, Andre donated a private tennis lesson at one of my events, which brought in $10,000 for the Tony Hawk Foundation. You might notice that my donation earned more for his foundation than his did for mine. But don’t get any ideas. It’s not that people are willing to pay more to see Tony Hawk skate than they are to learn how to hit a tennis ball as hard as Andre Agassi does. It’s just that his event attracts a richer crowd.

Clearly, I need to poach his guest list.

Flipping Flapjacks and Mowing Lawns

We select our grant recipients based not only on financial need, but also on how much evidence they provide that the local community is coming together to support the skatepark project. That’s actually become a key factor: Have residents, especially local skaters, rallied around the project? It’s also become one of my favorite things about the foundation, and about skateparks in general.