Hawk and Sons

The family that Flows together, stays Bros together

However you want to slice it: Wave House San Diego is a very popular place with families from all over. Belmont Park has a roller coaster and bumper cars and endless traditional amusements for kids of all ages. But Wave House offers thrills and chills that most people didn't even know existed: Hundreds of thousands of gallons of water creating an easy, non-curling ride, or a 10-foot barrel every bit as challenging as the ocean.

Some of these families come from as far away as Europe and Asia, but a lot of them are local. Like the Hawk family: father Tony and sons Riley (17) and Spencer (10): “My oldest son has become obsessed with the FlowBarrel in San Diego and has been going there at least once a week over the summer,” Hawk said. “He likes the challenge of going in and out of the barrel, and is learning to gouge carves on the face. All of his hardcore surf buddies love it too. I try to join them as often as possible. My 10-year-old loves to bodyboard on it as well.”

Going as far back as the early 1990s, Tony Hawk had a lot to do with the evolution of the waves his sons are obsessed with, alongside other boarding luminaries like Kelly Slater, Terje Haakonsen, Chris Miller and a long list of the world's greatest board sport athletes.

The first prototype of a sheet wave went online at the Schlitterbahn, a waterpark in the Texas Hill Country. In 1994, Kelly Slater and Terje Haakonsen accompanied Tom Morey to experiment with bodyboards and other designs and materials, to figure out how to ride the thing. They were Flow testpilots.

In 1995, Tony Hawk was part of a crew of surfers, skateboarders and snowboarders that included Brock Little, Donovan Frankenreiter, Chris Miller and Jeff Brushie who flew to Bo, Norway to show their paces on this new kind of wave bringing the thrill of a barrel anywhere, from the Arctic forests of Norway, to the scorching desert of Dubai, to jolly old England.

At the turn of the century, Hawk was one of the competitors on the SWATCH and Siemens Wave Tours, which transported the FlowBarrel Bruticus Maximus to a dozen locations from Florence, Italy to Dubai to Long Beach, California. It was during these events that Tony Hawk helped evolve flowboarding: both the hardware and the things that could be done with it. An alchemy of design and performance from all the different board sports.

In 1996 Tony Hawk and Chris Miller rode the wave in Texas to double for Kurt Russell for a stunt in Escape From Los Angeles. That same year, Hawk and Miller also rode the FlowBarrel for a Midnight Oil video called Surf's Up Tonight.

Tony Hawk has a long history with Wave House and sheet waves, and now he is handing this tradition down to his sons: ”These days it's just for fun,” Hawk said. “There was a time when I wanted to test the limits of Flowriding (flips, 540's, kickflips, etc), but now I like the purist feeling of riding without straps, getting barrelled, and doing strapless ollies and cutbacks. It is a constant challenge, much like surfing or skating.”

Hawk is in it for fun right now, and he is leaving the high performance to others like Greg Lazarus, Matt Lammers, Eric Silverman and Sean Silveira. He might not be pushing the limits of flow riding himself, but there's always the possibility that his history with Wave House and his involvement with the Xgames may help push flowboarding into the limelight. It's not improbable to imagine snowboarders, skateboarders and wakeboarders lining up to test how well their skills cross over to the future of nature.