Why can no one recognize Tony Hawk?
The astrology of Tony Hawk and why, according to his Twitter account, he never gets recognized in public.
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In honor of his very recent Mars return, Twitter is once again talking about Tony Hawk. And not because of any recent events or significant moments in his career. Rather, Twitter is talking about all of the people who don’t recognize Tony Hawk and the fear that they may too become one of those people to look the famous skateboarder right in the face and say, “Has anyone ever told you that you look like Tony Hawk?”
Something about the way Hawk shares these anecdotes invites us to laugh along with him. Yes, we’re laughing at the expense of the unfortunate souls who have had these accidental run-ins with Tony Hawk, but Hawk doesn’t typically express offense or indignation the way some public figures might. There’s a certain joviality to the way he approaches these awkward moments. The way he tells it, he’s often in good spirits, not attempting to bait his uncertain fans but playing along with their assumptions and questions.
With this revival of interest in Tony Hawk and learning to recognize him, I got curious about whether his chart held any insights into how his name has been burned into our cultural memory while his face remains half-forgotten, an artifact of the 90s and 2000s.
Tony Hawk was born May 12, 1968 in San Diego, CA. He has an AA rated birth time of 3:12 AM (which we can likely safely assume is accurate, as it doesn’t end in 5 or 0). He was born just before a full moon in Scorpio with Pisces rising and a midheaven in Sagittarius. Jupiter in Leo functions as the ruler of both his ascendant and midheaven.
A quick look at this Jupiter, and we can see Hawk’s career written all over it. Leo lends an air of natural confidence to Jupiter, especially in a night chart, where Jupiter has triplicity rulership in fire signs. In these last degrees of Leo, Jupiter is in both the term and the face of Mars in Gemini. Jupiter gives us confidence, and Mars in Gemini points to a physical prowess, a person who could be quite successful in a sport involving balance and agility. Something like, I don’t know, skateboarding.
Read a little about Tony Hawk’s life and you’ll see this Jupiter come to life, especially its position in the sixth house. Planets in the 6th are hardworking. They’re in an environment where constant, steady work is often inevitable and expected. This kind of continuous laboring is a reality for many sixth housers, and it comes in many forms.1 In Hawk’s case, this shows up throughout his life putting in constant, intense effort toward his goals. As a child, he apparently spent about six hours a day skating and went pro at age 14.2 Apparently, he was relatively unpopular as a child, intelligent but restless, and skateboarding became his outlet. He also worked for close to a decade to achieve what is arguably the peak of his career—landing a 900 (a 900º rotation in the air on a skateboard). In June of 1999, after twelve attempts at the X Games, Hawk became the first person even to land a 900.3 Just a few years later, he retired from professional skateboarding entirely, having accomplished his ultimate goal.
Tony Hawk’s fixed determination and tireless pursuit of a goal are written all over his chart. His fixed Sun/Moon/Jupiter t-square lends him determination, and his Jupiter in the 6H focuses him, lending him the ability to work day in and day out through injury and disappointment to achieve a goal that remained until that point unattained. Uranus tied up with his lots of fortune and spirit lend even further testimony to his achievement, doing something that no one has ever done before.
This all explains Hawk’s success, but why doesn’t anyone recognize him anymore? Or rather, why do people seem to almost recognize him while looking right past the simple explanation for why the guy in front of them with the last name Hawk who’s holding a skateboard looks a lot like that guy from the X Games?
Notably, the same planet rules his ascendant and midheaven, so his public persona shouldn’t be that drastically different from the way he is in regular interactions. So this isn’t likely an issue of someone who puts on a show when in public who maintains a radically different private life. The answer lies, I suspect, with Neptune. His Sun/Moon/Jupiter connection is profoundly powerful, but it’s all tied up with his natal Neptune at 25º of Scorpio. Neptune confuses, confounds, and dissolves. Tony Hawk can stand right in front of you, skateboard in hand, and you still might not recognize him. Add to that a mutable ascendant ruled by a planet that can’t see the ascendant itself and you get a celebrity whose face remains inevitably obscured.
Further testimony to this is Jupiter’s position in aversion to the ascendant. Planets in the houses that cannot see the ascendant by a traditional aspect are in a sense invisibilized, hidden from view in a place that cannot be seen from one’s typical vantage. Just like hard work often goes unnoticed and unrecognized, planets in dark houses can sometimes find themselves unseen, whether by us or by those around us. Of course, Tony Hawk is a very successful white man, so his version of unrecognition is more amusing than anything else. But the tendency of sixth house planets to have their hard work go unnoticed has much more severe consequences for marginalized people who often do the most work for the least credit.
Some (like my girlfriend, for instance) might say that Tony Hawk is living the dream. A long and successful career, reached the top of his field, and he can still move about the world relatively unrecognized without the constant pressures and watchful eyes inherent in celebrity. Perhaps that’s why he tells these stories more with amusement than disappointment. After all, he lives a life of Moon in Scorpio conjunct Neptune. I want to mostly avoid making assumptions about his private, emotional world based on this chart, but I will say that I wouldn’t be surprised if his attitude of amusement and even enjoyment at his obscurity is entirely genuine.
We must also ask ourselves—why now? Why did the internet first become obsessed with Tony Hawk’s amusing anecdotes, and why did that obsession come back in the last week? For the first question, let’s look to the Buzzfeed article that compiled many of these tweets (Buzzfeed almost certainly did not discover this pattern, but they usually seem to pick up on Twitter trends fairly quickly, and we can use that speed to our advantage in timing).4 The initial Buzzfeed article about this phenomenon was published September 20, 2018.
Jupiter, that ascendant and midheaven ruler we’ve talked so much about, met Hawk’s Scorpio Moon exactly as these tweets initially went viral. These two planets are both heavily involved in this dynamic of fame and unrecognition, so this infrequent alignment of slow-moving Jupiter to Hawk’s moon is ripe for the increase of something. In this case, that was visibility. It is also worth noting that this was the day of a Mercury cazimi in Virgo, hitting relatively close to Hawk’s descendant/Uranus/fortune conjunction in the 7H. Uranus naturally speaks to virality and the unexpected ways that certain things blow up, and a fast Mercury at their superior conjunction carries information swiftly across the internet. September 2018 was a perfect storm to launch a long-since retired Tony Hawk back into the public eye.
Now, a Jupiter square later, approaching Hawk’s Jupiter opposition, Twitter has once again remembered how easy it is not to recognize Tony Hawk. Because of course, it’s still happening, and perhaps it always will. So remember kids, learn what Tony Hawk looks like, or else.
I owe a great debt of gratitude to Kirstin Yu and Alyssia Osorio for their brilliant and thoughtful reflections on the sixth house.
“Tony Hawk Takes Off.” David Kohn, 2002.
“It Took Tony Hawk 10 Years (Several Teeth, Some Broken Ribs and Multiple Concussions) to Accomplish His Dream.” Will Yacowicz, 2017.
“Tony Hawk Keeps Tweeting When People Don't Recognize Him And It's Freaking Hilarious.” Stephen LaConte, 2018.
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