Tony Hawk's 900 in 1999: The Trick That Changed Everything

There are moments in sports where something impossible becomes real, live, right in front of you. Tony Hawk's 900 at the 1999 X Games is one of them.

June 27, 1999. San Francisco. The X Games are live on ESPN. The vert contest is over — time's up, the judges have turned in their scores. But Tony Hawk asks to keep going. He wants a shot at his 900.

What a 900 actually is

A 900 is two and a half rotations in the air above a halfpipe. The number is the degrees of rotation: 360 × 2.5 = 900. To pull it off, you need enough speed to get high enough out of the ramp, spin 900 degrees (two and a half times around) in the air, and find the board back under your feet as you drop back in.

Hawk had been trying the 900 for years. He'd come close, but never really had it. Nobody had ever landed one in a contest.

The attempt, live on TV

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What makes that footage so wild is the string of attempts you get to watch. Hawk goes for it. He slams. He gets up, climbs back to the deck, goes again. Slams again. Climbs back up. The other skaters, done with their runs, stay on the deck to hype him up — something you basically never see in a contest.

Around the twelfth try, he finally rides away. He lands it. The ramp goes off. The other skaters swarm him. The commentator screams something nobody can make out because he's that shook.

It's 44 seconds of footage that have been watched tens of millions of times. If you've never seen it, search "Tony Hawk 900 original" on YouTube.

Why it changed everything

The trick lands at the exact moment Tony Hawk's Pro Skater is about to drop on PlayStation, Nintendo 64 and PC. The 900 is in the game. Millions of kids who've never stood on a board are about to try that trick virtually, knowing the real thing had just happened for the first time ever.

That timing is what changes everything. The 900 would've been just another record inside the skate world if THPS didn't exist. But with the game landing right behind it, it becomes the symbol of a whole generation that discovered skating through pop culture before they ever discovered it on an actual board.

Tony Hawk is 56 now and he still rides. His 1999 900 is still the most famous trick in skateboarding history. And it earned that.

After the 900: the race for more rotations

A bar drops, and right away somebody wants to push it further. The 900 was no different. What Hawk did once in 1999, a handful of riders spent the next decade trying to top, spin after spin.

In March 2012, on the mega ramp at Woodward West in California, Tom Schaar landed the first 1080 — three full rotations. He was twelve years old. Seven years later, in August 2019, Mitchie Brusco stomped the first 1260 in Big Air competition: three and a half spins. Same mechanics every time as San Francisco in 1999 — a limit everybody swore was unreachable, cleared live in front of a crowd losing its mind. Those giant contests all went down at the X Games.

Hawk, for his part, was thirty-one. He was about to walk away from contests, and that 900 turned out to be his last big statement as a competitor — the perfect exit, right at the top.

Why the 900 still hits for skaters over here

In France, back in 1999, you could count the real vert ramps on one hand. Most of us landed our first 900 with a controller in our hands, in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, on the living-room PlayStation. The real trick and the virtual one showed up at almost the same time. That's our madeleine moment.

That's why those 44 seconds still hold up. Not because the rotation is pretty. Because they plug a whole generation straight back into being fourteen: the tape you passed around, the part you rewound over and over, the first ollie you blew in a parking lot. Hawk didn't just spin 900 degrees. He gave thousands of kids a reason to step on a board.

Twenty-five years later, ask any skater who lived through that era where they were on June 27, 1999. They probably won't be able to tell you. But put the clip back in front of them and watch their eyes change. Some records get broken; this one we keep.