Tony Hawk landed the first 900 in skateboarding history on 27 June 1999, a trick no rider had ever completed. The two-and-a-half-turn spin came at X Games Five in San Francisco, after the Best Trick clock had run out and the officials let him keep trying.
Eleven drops, one landmark
Hawk had not planned to try the 900 that evening. The announcer, a loud crowd, and his fellow skaters urged him on, and he fell on ten straight tries. On his 11th attempt he spun cleanly, rode away, and was lifted into the air by the other skaters on the ramp.
He had chased the trick for more than ten years in practice, breaking ribs, losing teeth, and suffering a concussion along the way. “This is the best day of my life,” he told the crowd afterwards.
The ceiling breaks
The 900 had stood as a roof over vert skating. Hawk was its only member for five years, until Giorgio Zattoni landed one in 2004; the club now holds 11 known members. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater launched on PlayStation months later, and Hawk called the timing a “perfect storm” that pushed skateboarding into the mainstream.
He had already won twelve straight NSA vert titles and been ranked the world’s top vert skater for that whole span. The 900 sat apart from those wins — it was a trick that belonged to nobody until that night.
In 2003 he became the first to land a 900 inside competition time, taking vert best trick gold with seven seconds left. In 2016, at age 48 and exactly 17 years after the first, he landed one more and then said he would never try it again.
The Birdhouse Falcon 2 board he rode in 1999 later sold for roughly $1.152 million at auction. The trick remains a line between everything that came before and the night the clock stopped and Hawk kept dropping in.
