No skateboarder, in terms of popularity, has come close to Tony Hawk. Just about every video game bared his name, and for most, he is the only skateboarder people can name.

Street League Skateboarding, founded by Rob Dyrdek in 2010, hands out the most prize money in the history of skateboarding.

However, the sport will be featured in the Olympics this year for the second time, and one skateboarder says the Games in Paris could be a huge step in getting skateboarding back to its glory days.

Paul Rodriguez did not have the opportunity to compete for an Olympic gold (he won four in his X Games career, and won two events in Street League Skateboarding). However, he is going to live vicariously through his friends who will.

“To see it in the Olympics is pretty incredible. To see my friends going, like, you’re an Olympian bro,” Rodriguez said in a recent interview with Fox News Digital. “We didn’t know that was something we could dream about when we first started skating. We just wanted to skate, make a little video, maybe get into X Games, but the Olympics wasn’t even on our radar. Now, I have a handful of friends. I know Olympians now. It’s a crazy thing to say.

Paul Rodriguez skating at the Nike Street League Skateboarding Competition at USC Galen Center on Oct. 2, 2016 in Los Angeles. (Brian Gove/Getty Images)

AUSTRALIA SWIM COACH CALLS CONCERN OVER CHINESE DOPING SCANDAL AHEAD OF OLYMPICS A ‘WASTE OF ENERGY’

“For me watching them, I’m extremely proud of them. I’m seeing how hard they’ve had to work to get there, to earn their way into the Olympics, the rigors of all the qualifications they have to go through to get it, it’s impressive, it’s tough…It’s really incredible, I’m really happy, and I look forward to watching.”

In fact, Rodriguez actually feels that the sport is reaching its highest point in popularity right now – and in his own case, City of Los Angeles councilwoman Traci Park recognized Friday as “Paul Rodriguez Day” in honor of Go Skate(boarding) Day.

“It’s definitely consistently growing bigger than ever since I came in the game…” Rodriguez added. “I think it’s continuously grown. I think sometimes, people grow out of it and don’t stay in touch with it, so it seems not as popular as it was when they were in it for themselves.”

However, he predicts that fewer people will outgrow it.

Paul Rodriguez competes in the Men’s preliminaries during the SLS Championship Tour: Lake Havasu at Rotary Park on Oct. 29, 2021 in Lake Havasu City, Arizona. (Jamie Squire/Getty Images)

“Right now, we need a few more generations of kids who skated, then they grow up, have a family, and they introduce their kids to skateboarding, and those kids introduce their kids. … Once the general public has the basis education of what they’re watching, skateboarding is gonna go crazy. [The Olympics are] just one more step on the educational process. Give it a few more generations… skateboarding is going to be heavily in that rotation.”

The Olympic roster is headlined by six-time world championship gold medalist and 12-time X Games winner Nyjah Houston.

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It’s one of the most powerful images in women’s sports history.

Brandi Chastain, after converting the penalty kick that gave the U.S. its second women’s World Cup title, dropped to her knees and ripped off her jersey in celebration, exposing her black sports bra to a live crowd of 90,000 and a national television audience that peaked at 40 million.

Twenty-five years later it’s still celebrated as a moment of unbridled joy, but also one of liberation. Never before — or since — has a team of women athletes played before a crowd that large in the U.S. And rarely had a woman athlete felt so unburdened by societal constraints that she started taking her clothes off in public.

“That was an iconic moment but it transcended sport. People saw the raw emotion in that photograph and it made people feel differently about women,” said Chrissy Franklin, an executive vice president with the sports and entertainment marketing firm Octagon. “She opened the door for women to be unapologetic about their success.”

If Title IX, Billie Jean King and Florence Griffith Joyner changed the way we thought about women athletes, Chastain and her teammates began to change the way we watched, consumed and supported women’s sports. It has been a long, slow and painful evolution, one that is still far from finished even as Caitlin Clark draws record crowds to WNBA arenas and the NWSL nearly outdraws the Cubs at Wrigley Field.

But Chastain’s journey from the floor of the Rose Bowl to the owners’ suite at PayPal Park, where the NWSL franchise she founded plays, is proof that progress has been made.

“Obviously the trajectory of women’s sports has skyrocketed in the last couple years and that has been a game-changer,” said Chastain, one of a growing number of women who have moved from the playing field into the executive offices of women’s soccer and basketball teams. “I think men in business, who have been decision-makers, now look at women’s sports as not just a charitable organization. We’ve been saying for 25 or more years that women’s sports has a place in the landscape and it’s viable.”

Cheryl Cooky, a professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Purdue, agrees. This moment, she said, finally feels different.

“Part of why we’re seeing what we’re seeing is because women athletes are taking the reins,” said Cooky, who has been studying the intersection of gender, sports, media and culture for more than three decades. “Women athletes today are creating their own media platforms, becoming owners and investing in women’s sports.

“I really do think it’s women athletes who are starting to really push the conversation, invest in women’s sports, speak out against injustices.”

Few U.S. professional sports franchises were owned by women in 2013, when the NWSL played its first season with eight teams. Since then the league has nearly doubled, to 14 teams, eight of which have women as owners, founders or significant investors. Chastain is all three for Bay FC, an NWSL expansion franchise she started with three other national team players.

On Saturday, Bay will play host to Angel City, a third-year club whose sprawling group of more than 100 owners and investors includes 14 former USWNT stars, two Wimbledon women’s champions and Olympic gold medalists in skiing and gymnastics.

Other NWSL minority owners include former World Cup champions Carli Lloyd and Briana Scurry, basketball’s Sue Bird, tennis champion Naomi Osaka and gymnast Dominique Dawes. Partly as a result of their investments, the league is stronger than ever, with a record four-year, $240-million domestic broadcast deal, record average attendance and two more expansion teams scheduled to begin play in 2026.

Angel City alone has been valued at $180 million by the sports business website Sportico, making it the most valuable franchise in U.S. women’s sports history. And it’s run by the largest majority-women ownership group in global sports. No longer do women athletes have to rely solely on men in business to make decisions about their livelihoods, a problem that repeatedly sunk women’s sports just two decades earlier.

“We do ourselves a disservice,” Cooky said, “if we don’t recognize all the work and all the effort that women athletes have put in, both on and off the field, to make this moment happen.”

A fan holds up an Angel City scarf during a match between Angel City and Bay FC in March.

(Doug Benc / Associated Press)

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There was a lot of patience involved, too. A year after Chastain’s penalty gave the U.S. a World Cup title, she joined 19 other national team players in forming the Women’s United Soccer Assn., the first in a series of short-lived women’s soccer leagues in the U.S. The WUSA folded three seasons later, but the problem wasn’t with the players, it was with the investors.

“Business executives and decision-makers were not ready for women’s sports at the time,” Chastain said. “This is not a short-term investment. Women’s sports has not been given the breathing space that men’s sports has, and so it’s hard to grow. And it hasn’t been given the nourishment to grow into what it can fully be.

“Now it’s breathing on its own, it’s healthy. The sponsorship space, the business space, we’re seeing what impact we can have.”

And it’s not just the NWSL. The WNBA has long struggled to draw fans and sponsors, but with Clark joining after a record-setting college career at Iowa, the league recently released figures showing attendance was up 156% in the first month of the season and more than half of all league games had been sellouts. Televised games on ABC and ESPN averaged 1.32 million viewers in May across ESPN, ESPN 2, ABC and CBS, three times as many as they did last year.

So can you draw line from Chastain kneeling on the floor of the Rose Bowl to Clark draining shots from the midcourt logo today? No, says Joy Fawcett, a teammate of Chastain’s on three World Cup teams. Agreeing with Cooky, she says seeing Chastain’s success reflected in Clark’s doesn’t do justice to the difficulty of the journey, nor the contributions so many others made along the way.

“It wasn’t a straight line,” said Fawcett, now an Angel City investor. “It was a lot of ups and downs to get to this point.

“This is something that takes a village. You have none of this without the fans and their support. You have nothing without the investors. It’s all layered over time and none of us could do it alone.”

But Fawcett, the first coach of UCLA’s women’s team and now an assistant with the national deaf soccer team, said she and her teammates never doubted this day would come.

“We always believed that it’s like ‘you just need to see it,’” she said. “You just need to watch the women’s game. It’s a beautiful game. You will love it. You just need to come.

“And that’s what happened. They did, and it took off.”

Twenty-five years later Chastain keeps a framed copy of that iconic photo in her San Jose home, though humility prevents her from displaying it in a prominent place.

“It’s in the bathroom,” she said.

Brandi Chastain speaks during Zeta Live 2023 in New York. Chastain tries to stay humble about her iconic moment in the 1999 Women’s World Cup.

(Charles Sykes / Invision / Associated Press)

But then Chastain doesn’t need a picture to be inspired, which is how the photo came to be in the first place. Her mother Lark raised her daughter to be the kind of woman who wasn’t afraid to take her shirt off in public if the moment called for it or to start a professional soccer team from scratch. However she did that not with words, but deeds.

Lark Chastain dreamed of becoming a flight attendant but was told she couldn’t keep the job if she married or had children — rules that didn’t apply to male flight attendants. So she quit, married and raised a family before returning to the work force, eventually becoming the vice president of a Silicon Valley employment agency.

While Brandi Chastain was winning World Cups, her mother was filling the board rooms at Hewlett Packard and IBM, arguably influencing the direction of the tech revolution.

“There was no reason for her to think she could do that. She was told she could be a nurse, a secretary or a teacher,” Brandi said of her mother, who died in 2002. “I saw that example every day in front of me. Her fearlessness gave me the power to stand up and say: ‘I love sports. I belong in this space.’ I will take pride in knowing that I was gifted something really powerful from my mom.”

So maybe there is a straight line from Chastain to Clark after all, only it’s Lark Chastain who blazed that trail by questioning whether the way things have always been done is necessarily the way they should continue to be done.

“What Caitlin Clark has been gifted,” Brandi said, “is women who have been showcasing powerful strength and confidence. So she too believes she belongs in that space.”

Trevor Bauer has dominated the Mexican League this season.

In 10 starts for Diablos Rojos del Mexico, Bauer has a 1.63 ERA with 83 strikeouts. And yet, he’s still searching for a Major League team to sign with.

Bauer was suspended by MLB for 194 games for violating the league’s domestic violence, sexual assault and child abuse policy over accusations of sexual assault. Bauer was not charged with a crime and denied each allegation. He and his accuser settled a legal dispute last year.

With Bauer cleared of criminality, former New York Yankees star David Wells told Fox News Digital he thinks the 2020 National League Cy Young Award winner should get a second chance.

“I hope so.… I guess people are afraid,” Wells said. “He was a hell of a pitcher. He should go in. I mean look at all these guys in the past who crap all over themselves and get in trouble. And they got second, third, fourth chances. 

“Why would you not take a chance on a guy? I mean, if I was an owner and I saw the ability in this guy, and he’s not gonna be a distraction to the team, and he’s going to go out and pitch, why wouldn’t you give him a second chance? I believe in second chances as long as they’re solidified and his was solidified.”

EX-YANKEES STAR DAVID WELLS RECALLS CHARLES BARKLEY PRANK AS HE READIES FOR AMERICAN CENTURY CHAMPIONSHIP

David Wells on the mound vs. Toronto Blue Jays. (Tony Bock/Toronto Star via Getty Images)

Wells, who is getting ready to play in the American Century Championship celebrity golf tournament next month, said athletes have to be careful in certain situations because they have a target on their backs.

“In sports, you get targeted so much by so many bad people out there. You just got to be able to cover your tracks and try to make the right decisions. And because we’re targets. Athletes are targets. I don’t care – men or women, you’re targets. And people are going to go out there and try to get the best of you, get a reaction and either sue you or whatever.”

Bauer reflected on his legal challenges earlier this year with Fox News Digital. He said while he never did anything “criminally,” he still had to look in the mirror and work on himself after the allegations.

And that is something he says all 30 MLB teams should look at and consider in their dialogue with the 32-year-old during free agency.

Trevor Bauer of Diablos Rojos during the match against Dorados de Chihuahua and Diablos Rojos del México. (Carlos Santiago/Eyepix Group/LightRocket via Getty Images)

“Anyone that’s willing to sit down with me and listen: I’d like to play the second half of my career in a better way than I played the first half,” Bauer told Fox News Digital. “I’d like to be an example that you can make mistakes, recognize them, adjust and then be better in the future. I think that’s something us as humans have to do and should be doing constantly.”

Fox News’ Ryan Morik contributed to this report.

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