Why Tony Hawk is excited about his 'fun and irreverent' collaboration with Hot Wheels

Hot Wheels Skate is a line of “fingerboards” – small skateboards used to simulate skateboarding tricks using the middle and index fingers. The games were first published by professional skater Lance Mountain in the 1980s.

Tony Hawk’s fingerboards and matching games, featuring ladders and other items in the skatepark, will be available exclusively at Walmart. For starters, the kits also include “skate shoes” attached to the boards, making them handy for kids of all ages.

Hawk, 54, told CNN he’s very excited about the fact that the font is suitable for finger surfers of all skill sets.

“I liked the direction they had because it is more suitable for all kinds of skills,” he said. “Their creative team is absolutely amazing too. So the game systems they have are really fun and irreverent. And so it seemed like a really cool angle and it handles the finger game as a whole.”

For Hook, the beginner-friendly spirit of finger combos stems from the dribbling that skating in general represents.

“I feel like skateboarding is the great equalizer,” he said. “Anyone is welcome to participate. You are only judged by your skating and not by your background. Uniqueness is key – excellence is welcome.”

As part of the partnership, Hot Wheels announced that it will donate to The Skate Park Project, a non-profit organization Hook began creating public skate parks throughout the United States.

He said the organization “is important to me because I grew up near one of the last skate parks in the United States. It was my home away from home, where I found my sense of community, where I found my friends, my sense of identity. And I never lost track of how lucky I was to have it.”

“And then when I had some success, I thought the best I could do with it was make more of these places that were so important to me as a kid.” “It’s more about developing a place for your community, not trying to grow professionals.”

Hawk retired from professional skateboarding in 2003, but has continued to support the sport, helping to transform it from a counterculture activity to a specific and tough sport with prestigious competitions. In 2021, even sports He was raised for the first time in the OlympicsA move that Hook said helped show how “disciplined and dangerous this can be”.

This year, Hawk plans to host the second edition of Vert Alert, a competition designed to highlight the “underappreciated” challenges of vertical skating — that is, skate down a slope or steep slope, rather than on the street or at a skate park.