Somehow I witnessed two first 900's ten years apart

Tony Hawk, during the best trick jam at the 1999 X-Games in San Francisco.  I think it was on the 11th attempt he landed the first 900 on a skateboard ever on a skateboard.  He'd been trying the trick for nearly ten years.  

Ride a bike, it will take you places.  SE Bikes brand manager Todd Lyons says that a lot these days, and he's right.  There were about 5,000 stories of Tony Hawk landing this 900, the first ever on a skateboard, that night on a pier in San Francisco, a different story for each person in that crowd.  This is my version.  I was standing behind the pro skaters, less than 20 feet from the side of the ramp, talking to San Francisco BMX freestyle legend Maurice Meyer.  My Sony Digital8 video camera was in my hand... with a dead battery.  I'm glad actually, that was a moment I was happy to just stand there and witness, without trying to capture it on video, and keep him well framed during each try.  More than a decade later, in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Sean Penn's character sums up that feeling better than I've ever heard it described.  

I had finagled a press pass to the X-Games that year, planning to write an article or two for Dig Magazine in the U.K. about the contest.  Maurice had nabbed a VIP pass, too.  I rode with him and the other Golden Gate Park locals, most weekends, during the one year I lived there, in 1985-86.  We ran into each other near the end of the BMX vert practice, and started talking about "the old days" and how much BMX and action sports had changed over 12 or 13 years' time.  

While we were talking at the bike halfpipe, a red helicopter with a World Industries logo on the side of it, hovered near the ramps, and started dropping stickers.  The handful of kids around the area ran around picking them up.  Then we realized that something else was getting thrown out of the chopper, little wadded up pieces of paper.  Because of the breeze, most were falling on the empty BMX ramp area, where we were, not on the skateboard crowd.  Someone grabbed one of the pieces of paper, and unraveled it.  "It's money" they said.  Suddenly all of us jaded Old School guys were picking them up, too.  Mike Dominguez Jr., amped up after an afternoon of free Mountain Dew, sprinted around and grabbed 30 or 40 of the wadded up dollar bills, I think.  I wound up with four of them, each with a World Industries skateboard character, like Flame Boy or Wet Willie, rubber stamped on them.  We laughed at yet another example of Steve Rocco's crazy promotion methods.  When in doubt, just throw money on the crowd.  I literally had real helicopter money in my pocket when Maurice and I decided to walk over and watch the skate best trick jam, which had just started.  

Dusk was descending on the huge pier that housed the 1999 X-Games, next to San Francisco Bay.  With our passes, we just walked over and stood behind the rows of chairs there for pro skaters and their girlfriends, wives, and a few kids.  In some of the wide shots in the clip above, you can see two really bright lights, that look lke stars on the video.  We were right below, and maybe 20 feet in front of those lights, they were shining over our heads, lighting up the skate halfpipe for the TV cameras.  

Maurice and I kept talking, as the world's best skaters tried their newest and best tricks.  As I recall, Pierre Luc Gagnon was trying to land a heeflip Caballerial, as Steve Caballero himself sat 10 feet in front of me.  Bob Burnquist was trying a one footed Smith Grind to revert, I believe.  Other skaters were trying their "Merry Christmas" tricks, the things they could land once in a while.  For Tony Hawk, that was the varial 720.  About 12 or 15 minutes into the half hour jam, he landed one.  Then he went back up, and just stood on deck a few minutes.  

Skaters dropped in, sometimes snaking each other, to try to pull that one big trick.  It was the closest thing I'd seen to "real," everyday skateboarding in a contest environment.  The best trick jam was a concession to the vert skaters, who still weren't really happy with ESPN's take on skateboarding, in their 4th year of the putting on the X-Games.  The big TV contest idea for action sports was evolving, as skaters got more involved and vocal about how they were portrayed to millions of viewers.  

It was obvious the bigwigs at ESPN didn't give a shit about the best trick jam, but they had a big crowd, around 5,000 people in the stands on the other side of the ramp, so they kept the cameras rolling.  It would make for soem good highlight clips, I think that's how they saw it.  Old School skater and announcer, Dave Duncan, called the action out live from the deck.  Maurice and I watched and talked.  

Then Tony Hawk dropped in again, and no one paid that much attention.  Until he opened up out of what looked like a over-rotated 540.  We stopped talking, "Did he just try a 900?" one of us asked the other.  I can't remember who said it.  Tony walked back up to the top of the ramp, and did the same thing a couple of more times.  The second rotation got tighter and tighter.  After the 3rd or 4th try, he walked off the side of the ramp, facing us, He was 15 or 20 feet away, and we could totally see his eyes, he had the stare, the "thousand yard stare," as I've heard some call it.  He was looking right towards us, but saw nothing.  Pure focus.  I asked Maurice, "Did you see his eyes?  He's serious.  He's either going to land it or go to the hospital trying."  Maurice agreed.  

The whole aura of the place shifted.  Other skaters stopped dropping in.  The skaters on the deck knew Tony really wanted the 900, and stepped back in respect.  It wasn't planned.  No color commentary guy had to spew stats and percentages to hype people up.  The energy in the whole area changed.  This was real skateboarding at it's best.  

A top skater just got a taste that tonight was the night to land the unlandable trick, and Tony just laser focused on it.  Everyone stopped skating after a couple more attempts.  It wasn't about trophies or prize money anymore.  We all wanted to see Tony Hawk progress vert skating to the next level.  Tony kept trying, getting more and more determined, and closer to landing it.  Dave Duncan kept talking into the mike like only a hardcore skateboarder could.  This was a moment, one way or the other.  

I think it was on the 7th attempt that Tony landed on the board, made it a few feet, then washed out on the flatbottom.  I jumped up in the air screaming, I gave that one to him.  But he didn't ride away, it wasn't clean, he wanted it 100%.  He kept trying.  On the 11th attempt, I believe, is when Tony Hawk landed the first skateboard 900 air, totally solid.  Everyone went nuts.  

If you freeze that video above at about 6;03, you'll see Maurice right behind Tony, in a white hoodie, with sunglasses.  He ran up there with all the skaters to congratulate Tony.  I, for some reason, stayed right where I was, 30 feet away, watching the pandemonium.  The place went nuts.  But I had seen that happen before, 10 years earlier, up in Canada.  

Mat Hoffman's first 900, at 14:43 in this clip, in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, in the spring of 1989.  After the intro with Eddie Roman's girlfriend, this is the footage that I shot from that contest, with Eddie and friends doing their funny color commentary over it.  This is from the 1990-2-Hip video, Ride Like a Man, edited by Eddie Roman.  

Riding a bike did take me places.  I was a dorky, unathletic kid who grew up in Ohio, spent 9th grade living in New Mexico, and then lived in Boise, Idaho through high school.  The summer after my sophomore year, I got into BMX riding, then BMX racing, and then new sport of BMX freestyle, in 1983.  A year after I graduated high school, my family moved to San Jose, California.  I worked at Pizza Hut, started publishing a freestyle zine, and met the Bay areas freestylers, like Maurice, Dave Vanderspek, Robert Peterson, Hugo Gonzalez, and a couple dozen more.  My zine led me to a magazine job in Southern California.  I wasn't punk rock enough for that place, and I got laid off.  I got a job editing a newsletter, which led to working at Unreel Productions, the Vision Skateboards video company, in late 1987.  I was out riding three hours a night like everyone else, but didn't have the balls to make it to pro caliber as a BMX freestyler.  By 1989, I was Unreel's camerman, traveling to all the 2-Hip vert and street contests to shoot video, because Vision Street Wear sponsored the contests.  

While I was bouncing around the BMX and industries, the early skatepark riders inspired a bunch of great quarterpipe riders around the U.S. and Europe.  In 1987, Haro pro Ron Wilkerson started putting on halfpipe contests.  Riders like Todd Anderson, Josh White, Joe Johnson, and this kid from Oklahoma, named Mat Hoffman, moved up the amateur ranks and into pro.  They pushed the older guys like Eddie Fiola, Brian Blyther, Mike Dominguez, as vert riding progressed.  

The first 2-Hip King of Vert of 1989 was in Kitchener, Ontario Canada.  The less than epic 2-Hip halfpipe was set up in a college gymnasium for the weekend, and the riders, amateur and pro, gave it their best.  The talk of the weekend was that this crazy, unknown guy from Canada, called The Terminator, was going to do a backflip abubaca or fakie or something.  No one except lake jumper Jose Yanez had done flips on a BMX bike then.  No one had even tried them on vert.  The Terminator was an amateur, and when his final run came up, he did a high fakie, leaned back a little, and crashed hard.  The weekend up hype fizzled.  

The rest of the amateurs rode their runs, blasting high and pulling their best tricks.  Joe Johnson landed the first double tailwhip air, which was amazing.  I was on the deck, with a $50,000, 35 pound, rented Ikegami Betacam, shoulder checking photographer John Ker for a good angle to shoot from.  I was doing my best to get good footage of the days events.  

Then came Mat Hoffman, in what I believe was his second pro contest.  He won his first pro contest.  At the end of his final run, with about 300 people watching, mostly Canadians, he nearly landed a 900.  Mat got up, and went for it again, landing the first BMX 900 in a contest, and the first recorded 900 in any action sport.  Even snowboarders hadn't pulled a 900 air at that point.  I caught it on video from the deck, and Eddie Roman and another guy caught it from two angles below.  Mat Hoffman, new pro vert rider and wonderkid, broke the 900 barrier in action sports, with video and photos to prove it.  Word was the Mike Dominguez had landed a 900 or two on his own ramp.  But there were no photos or video.  Mat made it official, the 900 was possible.

By some weird quirk of fate, me, the goofy kid from Ohio and Idaho, was there to get video.  And by an even crazier quirk of fate, I was in San Francisco a decade later to watch Tony Hawk do it, live, on a skateboard.  The only other two people that I know were in both places were Mat and his buddy Steve Swope.  But they were running the bike contest in 1999, and I don't think they were watching the skate best trick jam.  I'm not sure.  There may have been a couple of people who saw both happen live.

We live in a weird Universe, and really crazy coincidences happen now and then.  It still trips me out that I somehow saw both of these happen live, right in front of me.  Riding a bike did take me places, for the first 20 years of my adult life.  I met alot of cool people, traveled around the U.S., and into Canada a couple of times.  

Then I got injured, became a taxi driver, and things went into a downhill spiral.  I think life wanted to kick my ass for a couple of decades to teach me some other lessons.  One of the things I've learned is that there are a lot of ways to spend your time in life, and goofing around on bikes is one of the best ways.  You never know where it will lead you.  Ride on!

My thoughts on financial markets:

White Bear Investment Ideas

Video stills from "Animals"- my 2001 BMX video nobody saw

Emmett Crooms, nothing at Sheep Hills, 1999, I think.

In 2000, after 5 years of riding on my own nearly every day, but being away from the BMX business, I bought a Hi-8 editiing system, and made a super low budget, fast paced, bike video.  I had been going to contests, and shooting random "lurktographer" footage, as well as going down to Sheep Hills once in a while.  The idea was to make a practice video out of  footage I had shot over the past few years, plus a bit from 1991.  Then get a bunch of the hot young riders of the day to want to go out and shoot some new footage for a much better video, to get back into the game.  

Chris Duncan, one handed tailwhip at a Core Tour event in Huntington Beach, 2000, I think.

That idea didn't work.  Just before Christmas, 2000, my driver's license got suspended, which turned out to be a clerical error at the DMV.  But since I was a taxi driver who had just gone Christmas shopping, that left me broke and unable to earn money.  No driver's license, notaxi driving, no income.  Plans screeched to a halt, and I wound up working a sketchy telemarketing job for a while.  I edited this video, Animals,  in 2001, and it sold about 10 VHS copies.  Most of those I sold to to A-1 Bike Shop in Westminster, the old POW House local shop.  I handed a few copies out.  The follow-up video never got made, and I wound up homeless for a while, and finally got my license, permit, and got back into taxi driving on Labor Day weekend 2003.  The taxi industry was going down the tubes, and so was my life.  So my return to making BMX videos failed.  

Alex Leech, wallride off the stage at Huntington Beach High, 1991.  

In 2008, fate forced me out of Southern California, and to North Carolina, where my family wound up living after I moved out.  I grew up in Ohio and Idaho, so I had no connection to NC, except my parents and sister's family.  What little I owned then was in a tiny, 5 foot by 5 foot storage unit.  I lost everything, including all my BMX master tapes, 18 years worth of raw footage, my bike (Dyno race bike), my whole BMX magazine collection going back to 1982, (including complete collection of FREESTYLIN' magazines), and all my videos and DVD's.  I went into a deep depression as soon as I landed in NC, which was November 2008, as the economy was collapsing.  Bad time to find a job anywhere.  

The Animals video was totally lost, until Alex Leech posted a couple of stills from it a year or so ago.  Somehow, one of the few copies wound up on BMX Movie Database, where you can watch today- link above (if you're really bored).  

Dave Mirra, one handed toothpick over the spine at speed.  X-Games qualifying comp in Anaheim, 2000.  

While things didn't go as planned 22 years ago, they never really do.  I was really stoked that this, my "lost" video, resurfaced.  A bunch of my lost footage was in this video, though there was about 35 more hours, shot from 1990 to 2008, that was never seen by anyone.  Through the rough years of the 2000's, I planned to someday make a BMX documentary from that footage.  

Two or three weeks after landing in North Carolina, after losing everything from my BMX days (except my Haro brake lever keychain), I started blogging about BMX.  All I had left was memories, so I started writing them down online, not sure if anyone would ever read them.  That's how my BMX memoir blogging career began.  At the time, there wasn't really any media in the Old School BMX community, just a lot of chatting on that new thing called social media.  Luckily for all of us who rode in the 1980's and 1990's, sonce then the OSBMXR, books, and podcasts sprang up, allowing a lot more people to tell their stories from those days, which I think is awesome.  

Bill Nitschke, one of the first Whoppers (bunnyhop tailwhip) to be captured on video.  The Spot in Redondo Beach, 1991.  

I captured all these stills, and a bunch more, several months ago, to do something with them on Pinterest, I think.  They've been sitting on my hard drive.  While they don't have the photo quality, or the age, of Bill Batchelor's great photos in his new book (Concrete and Smog), they are a few snippets of the BMX that happened in front of my video lense over the years.    

Big Island Mike, drawing on Mat Hoffman's arm with a Sharpie, with Steve Swope checking it out.  A hint at things to come, perhaps.  The X-Games in San Francisco, 1999.  Mat's bike and uniform got lost by the airlines, so he borrowed Rick Thorne's bike and gear.  With no sleeves, Mat decided he need some ink to do Rick's jersey justice. So Mike grabbed a Sharpie and gave him some right before riding.   

Dave Clymer, AA pro racer, dirt jumping pioneer, P.O.W. House O.G., and street rider with white boy dreads.  Huntington High in 1991.  

 

My thoughts on financial markets:

White Bear Investment Ideas

Bill Batchelor's book: Concrete and Smog- Everybody looks so young...

Curb Dogs leader and all around innovative guy, Dave Vanderspek, showing the roots of street riding, a flatland trick in a really precarious spot.  1985, I believe, this photo was in Bill Batchelor's print zine Shreddin', and has been one of my faovrite photos of his for 35 years.  Photo by Bill Batchelor

Order Bill Batchelor's epic book of early BMX photos: Concrete and Smog*

The man who invented BMX freestyle, Bob Haro.  Close-up mug shot at Pipleline Skatepark.  Photo by Bill Batchelor.  

A year and a half ago, a middle aged guy walked out into the garage and pulled out a box that had been buried behind other stuff for decades.  He says his life was far from stellar at the time, and he's not sure why he decided to pull the box out that day.  In the intro to Concrete and Smog, Bill Batchelor says opening that box "transported him to the before times, 1984..." when he was 13 and carried a camera everywhere.  Lots of kids, even in the 1980's, shot a lot of photos.  But Bill Batchelor was an really skilled photographer at 13, and he grew up near the legendary Pipeline Skatepark.  His box of photos was a time capsule, to the early days of BMX skatepark and freestyle competitions, the first wave of BMX freestyle.  Bill's BMX history was all of our BMX history.  That box was a treasure trove of great photos of the guys who formed BMX freestyle into a sport in the mid 1980's, the guys created this thing that drew the rest of us in.  

English invader who came across the pond to give the California riders a run for their money, Craig Campbell.  Footplant on the face wall of the Pipe Bowl.  Just a reminder, there's 8 feet of hard concrete transition below him, and four feet of vert.  This was no small task in 1985.  Photo by Bill Batchelor

As a diehard blogger, BMX and otherwise, now, who's online a lot, I commented on the first few photos Bill tentatively dropped on Facebook over a year ago.  We messaged a bit, and I shared the good and bad side of sharing your own photos online.  I also told him, as did pretty much everyone else, how epic these photos of his were.  I remember saying something like, "Yeah, people will steal and share your photos, but if you ever do anything like an art show or maybe a book, that sharing is also promotion."  Bill wasn't sure what to do with all these photos then, and I was one of many people who just kept seeing his photos and commenting, "These are fucking AWESOME!" or something close to that.  

Obviously, Bill decided to compile the photographic treasure from that old box into a book.  But not just any book.  This is the guy who self-published an amazing print zine, Shreddin', when he was only 13.  He spent the last year and a half making one hell of an amazing coffee table book, with this amazing collection of photos,as well as writing his own personal story of getting into BMX, and becoming that kid with the camera hanging around Pipeline, and other contests, snapping magazine quality shots, but ones we DIDN'T have on our walls 35 years ago.   

Two very influential people in the early days of BMX freestyle, seen here at the AFA Masters comp in Huntington Beach, in 1984, I believe.  In the front, BMX freestyler/entrepreneur Bob Morales, the guy who turned BMX freestyle into a sport, with the ASPA and then the AFA.  He also founded Dyno, Auburn, and created many more projects.  In the back, Don Hoffman, skateboarder turned video guy.  Don's parents, Stan and Jean, owned Pipeline Skatepark, and Don was the first guy to produce multiple BMX videos, Wayne's World-style, by "borrowing" PBS TV equipment.  Before Eddie Roman, Mark Eaton, and myself even thought about making a BMX video, Don had produced 7 or 8, all of which aired on local cable TV, and some became home videos, and then he headed Unreel Productions at Vision.  I wound up working for both of these guys later on, and I'm proud to say that I did.  Photo by Bill Batchelor.

Over the last few days, I've had a copy of Concrete and Smog to check out, thanks to Bill.  I've been reading part of the text every day.  Then flipping through the seemingly endless pages of new old photos.  Everyone looks so young, that's what strikes me the most.  I was also a zine publisher, a few years older than Bill, back in the mid-80's.  But his zine blew mine away, and I honestly thought maybe I could work for him someday, back in 1985.  I never dreamed I'd work at the magazines, but contributing to future issues of Shreddin' seemed possible.  Maybe.  Much to my, and everyone else's surpirse, I landed a job at Wizard Publications.  Somehow, I never met Bill back in the day, though I had several issues of Shreddin', and I think we traded letters and zines.  So I wound up hanging out, riding with, and shooting a few photos of the pros, as well.  But my memories are strongest from a few years later, 1987-90.  

In Conrete and Smog, Bill catches all the big names, Bob Haro, Bob Morales, Eddie Fiola, Brian Blyther, Mike Dominguez, Jeff Carroll, Woody and Martin, and many more, in 1984 and 1985.  the whole sport was a bunch of teenagers and a few kids in their early 20's then.  Kids having fun on bikes, not one of them thinking middle aged guys would be drooling over these photos more than 35 years later.  Concrete and Smog is one of, maybe THE coolest Old School BMX freestyle product I've seen in the last few years.  If you rode in the 1980's, at any serious level, you NEED this book.  It's as simple as that.  They're not sold out yet, but it's getting there.  If you don't have your own copy enroute, hit that link above and order one.  

This is just a hunch, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's a call for another run of these books, once the first copies hit Europe, the U.K., Scandinavia, Australia, and other foreign lands.  I know there's a HUGE Old School BMX freestyle community across the ponds, from my own blogging and art, and once a couple guys get this book in hand, A LOT more Old School riders will want one.  So order yours now, if you haven't yet.  

Waaaaaay up in the Pipeline's 20 foot diameter full pipe, Pipeline local Jeff Carroll clocking in at about 10:30, pushing 11:00.  Although inspired by nearby Balldy Pipe, that was 16 feet diameter.  Pipeline's full pipe was four feet larger in diameter, and scary as can be to ride.  Photo by Bill Batchelor.

With Bill's permission, I pulled four photos from the book that haven't made the rounds on social media, for this blog post, and in these captions, I tell you why I picked these few (plus the Dave Vanderspek shot from Shreddin' at the top).  These aren't the absolute best, close-up photos, of which there are plenty in the book.  These photos show the scene back then, in 1984-85, the small group of people making BMX freestyle happen as the first wave of popularity was just taking off.  

Just to be clear, I mentioned above messaging Bill, and talking about ideas of what to do with all these photos when he first started sharing them.  I didn't give him the idea for the book, he'd already thought of that.  We were just talking about how photos get shared, "stolen" as some people see it, and the issues of creative work spreading around the web, whether you want it to or not.  I just shared what I'd learned over years of BMX blogging, mostly that there was a big and really hardcore Old School BMX/freestyle community out there, online and off.  I knew his photos would be a hit, whatever he decided to do with them.  Having lived away from social media, he didn't realize then just how big the Old School community was, and that's what I told him about, just how stoked people would be seeing this incredible collection of photos none of us had seen before.  Bill looked at his options, and did the publishing equivalent of blasting a ten foot air in the Pipe Bowl.  Great job on Concrete and Smog, all the way around.  

I can't write about Bill Batchelor's photos of the early days of Pipeline without a photo of the original King of the Skateparks, Eddie Fiola.  The Pipe Bowl's face wall had 8 feet of transition, four feet of vert, and Eddie's about three feet above a five foot high fence above the lip.  8' 2" officially, this is from the high air contest.  Bill Batchelor's photo captures the scene at Pipeline in the era that inspired so many of us other kids around the country to get into BMX freestyle.  If you rode in the 1980's, just buy the book.  You need it.  

 

*Not a paid link

Dakota Roche- Native Land BMX street riding edit

This is my favorite of the Dakota Roche edits out there.  If you're into BMX street riding, you know Dakota has been killing it for a really long time.  Watch this video.  Then go ride.  

Way back in about 2002 (or so), I caught a ride with Barspinner Ryan, Freddy Chulo, Athene, and little Armando to a BMX event called the Nasty Jam.  Cory "Nasty" Nastazio had a BMX dirt jumping jam in conjunction with a mototcycle race, way the fuck up in Gorman.  If you aren't from Southern California, Gorman is a little town with big hills up near Magic Mountain amusement park.  If you are from Southern California, you probably still haven't heard of Gorman, it's up on the Grapevine, north of L.A. and the San Fernando Valley.  As California goes, it's the middle of freakin' nowhere.  The only other time I had been up there is to go target shooting with a friend in the early 90's, other than driving through on my way to NorCal.

It was a fun day watching some top dirt jumpers huck it over a single big jump, watching some motorcycle races, and a cool band that played at the end.  Then we all headed back in town to a really good burger place afterwards.  The woman who helped Cory put on the jam (sorry, forget her name) had a son.  He was 14 or 15, and was talking to the pro riders at the dinner as we all ate.  In the room were Cory Nastazio, Stephen Murray, Barpsinner Ryan Brennan, Freddy Chulo, Reuel Erickson, and several other top BMX jumpers.  The kid told all the riders he was going to be a big time pro, like them, someday.  All the riders were cool, and told him to go for it.  As you figured out by now, that kid was Dakota Roche.  

Obviously he kept riding, and got pretty buff along the way.  I saw him 3 or 4 times after the Nasty Jam, riding in Orange County, still a young up and comer, but definitely getting better every time I saw him.  He's been riding hard, pushing the limits, and innovating every since.  As an old Has Been BMX industry guy, and Never Was  rider, his video parts are some of my favorites to check out these days.  All his edit are worth checking out, but the combination of tricks, obstacles, editing, and music make this one my personal favorite.  So give it a watch, and then go ride.  

Summer Lovin' - Olivia Newton John and the P.O.W. BMX House

The iconic opening scene of the 1978 movie Grease, a musical play, first performed in Chicago in 1971, and which later scored 3,388 performances on Broadway, starting in 1972.  Though it's officially called, Summer Nights," a lot of us think of this song as "Summer Lovin'" because of the repeating lyrics.  John Travolta and Olivia Newton John starred in the movie.  She just died a couple of days ago, at age 73.  

In the beginning (1988 or 1989), there was the HBP apartment.  S&M Bicycles owner Chris Moeller, and about three other guys, rented an apartment on Huntington Street, near Adams, in Huntington Beach, California.  I think it was Chris, Dave Clymer, John Paul Rogers, and either Alan Foster or Bill Grad living there to start.  Four riders and two bedrooms equals no privacy, cheap rent, and a ten minute ride to the beach.  Not a bad set-up for young pro racers always needing money to get to the next weekend's race.  

The HBP crew stepped things up in 1989 or 1990, and rented a four bedroom house, on Iroquois Street in Westminster, the city just inland of Huntington Beach.  They soon dubbed themselves the Pros Of Westminster, or P.O.W's, for short.  No disrespect was meant to actual military P.O.W.'s.  The name came up, and it stuck.  It was the first hardcore BMX house, and it became legendary in BMX worldwide in the 1990's.  You can see the house in this clip of Dave Clymer in 1990 and 1991, first the backyard with the jumps, and later the front yard, with a glimpse of the front of the house at 1:15.  

The P.O.W.'s were mostly pro racers, and the number of actual residents of the House ranged from 8 to 12 guys, sharing the four bedrooms, which kept rent down to about $90 to $120 a month, plus a share of utilities.  Renting a normal room in a house then cost $350-$400, so living there saved residents a lot of money.  

The best known residents of the POW House were Dave Clymer, Chris Moeller, Alan Foster, John Paul Rogers, Todd Lyons, John Salamne, Lawan Cunningham, Jason Lonergan, and Brian Foster.  All together, I think there were 22 "official" house members, including myself, over the 4-5 year span of The House.  Pretty much every traveling BMXer that came through SoCal in that era spent a night or two on the floor or couches. Any rider who spent a night there, and had a full page photo in a BMX magazine, could put it up on the living room wall.  There were 147 full page photos of different BMX riders in the living room, not counting house residents, the last time I counted them.  

There were so many good riders living at the POW House in those days, that BMX magazine editors and photographers would just show up at times, with three or four different articles to shoot pics for. Whichever guys were least hungover that morning got photos taken for the magazines.  

It was the long recession of the early 1990's, BMX, as an industry "died" in 1989.  There was hardly any money in the sport for even the best riders.  We could all make at least 8 different meals out of a packet of ramen.  Street riding and dirt jumping were evolving into their own genre's, and the whole idea of BMX riders making their own videos was just getting going.  The POW House was dirty, crazy, stupid, awesome, and hated by "Miss Iroquois," the neighbor across the street.  We were a bunch of young, single, BMX guys with drinking problems, or a bunch of drinkers with a BMX problem.  It sort of depended on what day you showed up.  Suave, sophisticated, clean cut, and respectable, we were not.  

Into this house of mayhem, the current residents and former residents would gather each night, in the living room, in the early evening.  We were looking for really cheap places to go party, drink, and try to meet women.  On one of those nights, I was sitting on one of the four couches when "Summer Nights" from Grease came on the TV, and the volume was set pretty loud.  For Genreration X kids like us, the movie Grease was etched in our brains, though none of us would ever admit it.  

Within the first few bars of "Summer Nights," two or three guys started humming along.  Now I'm talking guys in BMX T-shirts, thrashed shorts, with billy goat 90's goatees, and holding Mickey's bigmouth beers.  We were the polar opposite of Broadway musical fans.  But within 30 seconds, every single one of us was singing along with this song.  Guys sang the Greasers parts, other guys sang the girls parts, in bad falsetto.  We were all dancing around, acting it out, like it was the most normal thing in the world.  This song was such an ingrained part of growing up as a 70's 80's kid, that we just all rolled with it, singing like a bunch of idiots, and loving every minute of it.  It was seriously one of the craziest, funniest moments I remember of the POW House.  

Then the song ended, and we were back to being 10 or 12 dirtbag BMX guys, deciding whether to go to see T.S.O.L., Clawhammer, All, or whatever the punk show of the night was, or to a bar with cheap pitchers of beer.  As soon as the song ended, I just sat there looking at everyone, thinking, "did that just happen?  Yeah.  it happened.  That's how big Grease, and Olivia Newton John and John Travolta were to our generation.  Even punkers sang along to "Summer Nights," if no one was watching.  Another random night at the P.O.W. House.  "Lawan, hurry up!  We gotta get there before 10 or pay full price!"

Rest in Peace Olivia Newton John.  

For those looking for a little BMX nostalgia, or who have never heard of the P.O.W. House, here's the P.O.W. video that never got made, in the form of a blog post.  "You are (Fo)R(G)otten."

Van's Waffle Cup Best Trick Highlights 2022

This is an insane jam.  Highlights from the Van's Waffle Cup Best Trick Jam, a couple of days ago in Huntington Beach, CA, held in conjunction with the U.S. Open of Surfing contest, right on the beach.  This jam is a cool combo of street and park riding.  Man, I should have gone down to H.B. to watch.  My loss.  

I'll go with the rail nosewheelie as my pic for best trick.  It's all nuts.  I'm an Old School BMX freestylers who was doing nollies and half-Cabs and similar tricks when those were just dumb, not even considered tricks,  So all the on off stuff on the "lifeguard tower" roof here is my favorite stuff.  But it's all nuts.  Just watch.  

Steven Hamilton's section in the Animal Bikes video "Can I eat?"

This is one of my all time favorite BMX street sections.  There had been years of street videos which seemed to be 47 rail grinds per section in each video.  Sliding rails is nuts, but Steven Hamilton's section was this whole different take on street riding when this came out, about 2003 or 2004, I believe.  

When I made my first self-produced BMX video in 1990, I spent a lot of time thinking about what the point of a BMX video was.  At that time, videos were mostly to promote bike companies.  We hadn't morphed into the time when good video parts are what put riders on the map, or made their career.  When I got down to the point of it, I came to the conclusion that the point of a BMX video is to make you want to go out and ride.  This was one of those video parts for me.  

I just went to BMX movie database to see what year this video came out, and I got a "This site can't be reached" page.  Anybody know why?  

#SEstreetlife photos- Creatures on the streets

As if rats, coyotes, skunks, opossums, raccoons, mountain lions, gangstas, and street zombies (tweekers and crackheads) aren't enough, apparently now we have to worry about gremlins on the streets.  Gremlin on a shopping cart, panhandling for change with his tin cup.  The Valley, 2022.  #SEstreetlife, #steveemigphotos.

Repeat, but I love this photo.  Passed out street penguin.  The Valley, 2022.  #SEstreetlife, #steveemigphotos.

California gull, looking for another snack after finishing his Diet Coke.  The Valley, 2022.  #SEstreetlife, #steveemigphotos.

Homeless woman and homeless dog, chillin' on the bus one night.  2022.  #SEstreetlife, #steveemigphotos.

Teddy bear rim.  I wouldn't want them on my car, if I had a car.  But hey, it's creative, and I'm all for creativity. The Valley, 2022.   #SEstreetlife, #steveemigphotos.

One of my favorite street riders in the early years.  BMX freestyle, street, and video producing pioneer, Eddie Roman, with sprocket grind on a ledge in San Diego, 1990.  Still from my 1990 BMX video, The Ultimate Weekend.  #SEstreetlife, #steveemigvideos.

 

The Streets and me over the years- Part 1

Big man rolling.  Me, Steve Emig, riding backwards, with a bit of style, on my Schwinn BMX cruiser, in 2009.  Remember when BMX cruisers weren't cool?  Some readers of my Freestyle BMX Tales blog, from the Midwest, hooked me up with this cruiser, and some T-shirts, when I landed back east.  After years lost riding, and many pounds gained driving a taxi, this was about the only trick left in my trick bag at the time.

Warning: Shameless namedropping ahead 

(like usual in my blogs)

When you say "The Streets" these days, a whole lot of things may pop into people's minds.  But a lot of it will probably revolve around rap, hip hop, jewelry made for maximum bling factor, and people in expensive clothes posing, wearing Supreme gear, or something like that. The other thing many people picture are rows of smelly tents with lots of sketchy looking homeless people milling around.  "The Streets" is a pretty vague term, but it sounds fucking cool.  Tough, urban, gritty, scary, wild.  

That stereotype is why I'm kind of surprised myself that I wound up doing this blog.  I grew up as a kid in rural and small town Ohio.  I was listening to John Denver records and wandering the woods half the time.  Some of my early memories on streets or roads involve herding cows off Route 603, outside of Shiloh, when they got out of the pasture of the farm we lived on.  I was 9, and we rented a farmhouse, but the owner actually did the farming.  But when the cows got out, I helped herd them back into the pasture, a little bit.  

My sister Cheri, My dad, Tom Emig, and me, ready to head to church.  This is about 1972, in Massillon, Ohio, I think.

A year later, shortly after we moved to nearby Willard, a new friend showed me a skateboard for the first time.  His dad, a fabricator, made it out of aluminum plate.  The aluminum was rolled over on the edges, with steel roller skate wheels.  Months later, I had my own board, a green plastic Scamp that I bought at Western Auto for $11.92.  I was learning back wheel 360's and we were tandem sit skating , our feet on each others boards, down the little hill, in front of that house on Laurel Street, where I saw that first skateboard the year before.  

We moved almost every year, around Ohio, sometimes just to a new house, sometimes to a new city.  My first thing to do was explore the new area on my red, white, and blue, three speed, stick shift, banana seat bike.  Soon I would meet a new friend or two.  Usually we were wandering around the woods nearby within hours.  I was pudgy, I sucked at sports, super shy, smart, dorky, and about as far away from living a "street life" as you can imagine,  

Then I got into BMX, in a trailer park outside Boise, Idaho in 1982, the summer before my sophomore year in high school.  A year later we moved back into town, and I was riding the big New York canal banks, and wandering Boise, looking for little jumps and stuff to ride.  BMX trick riding was just beginning to turn into this thing called BMX freestyle.  There were only three of us freestylers in all of Boise.  Nobody in my school new who Eddie Fiola or Martin Aparijo or R.L. Osborn was.  I was the only freestyler in my high school of 1,200 kids.  Pushead, the artist and skater, lived in Boise around that time, but I never met him, or even heard of him, although I saw the halfpipe he and friends used to skate.  It was a no BMX scene. 

BMX is what led me to really explore "the streets," although there was not much urban in Boise, except the fairly small, downtown area.  But there was a cool tabletop built into the lawn of the office building next to the state capitol building.  We'd hit that in 1984 and 1985, on occasion.  

I graduated high school, worked at a Mexican restaurant, and hung out with my outdoorsy friends, often going fishing, doing some shooting, and trying to meet girls, like any 18-19 year old guys.  I was also beginning to practice freestyle tricks on my bike nearly every day.  Boise freesytler Jay Bickel, and me, did a few shows, and rode in parades in the Boise area for about a year.  

Here I am, on my Skyway T/A, doing a Robert Peterson inspired balance trick.  Uh... yeah, the shorts.  We thought all the guys in California wore OP cord shorts.  We were wrong.  This is at the Boise Fun Spot, a little amusement park, where I was manager, in the summer of 1985.  Photo by Vaughn Kidwell

Then my dad got a job in San Jose, California, and I followed my family down there, right after turning 19.  By publishing a zine, I got to know the riders in the San Francisco Golden Gate Park scene, and the Beach Park ramp jams, held by Skyway pro freestyler, Robert Peterson.  Before long, I was riding up to The City and sessioning with Dave Vanderspek, Bert, Maurice Meyer, Rick Allison, and the other locals, which included John Ficarra, Chris and Karl Rothe and Mark McKee, among other,s at the time.  

On those afternoons, I'd wander down the road in Golden Gate Park and watch the skaters for a while.  Tommy and Tony Guerrero and friends hit the launch ramp, blasting several feet up, and blowing my mind.  I also watched Maurice's brother, Ray Meyer, freestyle skating.  Within a couple of months of landing in San Jose, I was riding with those am riders to the Embarcadero after Golden Gate Park sessions, bombing down the occasional San Francisco hill, and hearing about bike and skate spots like The Dish, China Banks, and Calabassas jumps.  Those guys were my introduction to "the streets" in a real, big, crazy, urban environment.

Being the uptight, complete fucking dork that I was, riding around downtown San Francisco scared the living shit out of me.  But it was a blast as well.  I learned that an ollie over a homeless person was called a vollie, for "vagrant ollie."  I did a poll in my zine, and we settled on the term "bummyhop" for a BMX bunnyhop over a bum.  And yes, I did a handful of bummyhops in the wild, following all those other riders through The City.  

That was on Sundays.  On most other days, I was wandering around San Jose alone, exploring on my bike, like I had done since I was about 7-years-old, in every other new town or area.  But in San Jose I was looking for natural urban jumps and stuff to ride.  I started to run into shady characters now and then, the occasional homeless person, and getting a little more used to the urban world of a large city. 

My zine, much to everyone's surprise, especially mine, landed me a job at Wizard Publications, in Southern California, home of BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines.  That happened in August of 1986.  Though the job was short lived, I was thrust into the BMX industry, and riding nightly with magazine guys Gork and Lew, and locals Craig Grasso, Chris Day, and sometimes R.L. Osborn.  We sessioned at The Spot, by the Redondo Beach Pier nightly, and wandered off street riding fairly often.  

The South Bay, as the Torrance/Redondo Beach area is known, was a new, huge, urban area to explore.  I met skater Rodney Mullen on my second night in Redondo Beach, and got to know him a bit.  I saw Mark Gonzales for the first time, when he skated up one night to hang with Rodney.  Rodney practiced his freestyle tricks with knee pads and socks pulled up to his knees, and taped fingers, in those days.  He was 19, the same age as me, but already 8 time world champion in freestyle skating.  Mark "Lew" Lewman was my roommate, and he got me checking out skateboard magazines for the first time.  Vert was where the money was then , Pipeline and Del Mar Skateparks were still open then.  Rodney and the other freestyle skaters were the low paid, kind of dorky guys of skateboarding, if you asked vert skaters.  Those guys admired the technical abilities of freestyle skaters, but vert was way cooler to most.  So as I was beginning to hang around the pros and top amateurs that I had been reading about in the BMX magazines, I was also seeing some of the early street skating pioneers.    

What is now called street skating was just beginning to turn into a thing in 1986, led by Gonz, Natas Kaupas, and Tommy Guerrero primarily.  As a dorky BMX freestyler, working at a magazine that also covered some skateboarding, I began to learn about the hardcore skating world, checking out Lew's skate mags, and some we had at work.   Rodney stayed at Steve Rocco's house while in California, and Rocco hated BMX.  One night Lew gave Rodney a stack of "I (heart) BMX" stickers, and Rodney plastered them all over Rocco's place, driving him nuts.  It was months before he found the last couple stickers.  We all got a good laugh out of that one.  Rocco was pretty much a washed up freestyle skater at the time, but within months, he would start World Industries, and dominate the skateboard industry, years later.

We were just young guys riding and skating, at a time when, even in California, you were weird if you spent a lot of time riding or skating as a teen or 20-something.  None of us realized just how big street skating or BMX freestyle would become.  Andy Jenkins, as FREESTYLIN's editor, and a skater, was heavily influenced by skating, punk rock, and the D.I.Y. culture that was a key part of those worlds.  That influenced Gork, Lew, and me, as we started covering early BMX street riding.      

I got laid off at Wizard after a few months, I just didn't click well with those guys.  We got along as friends, but I wasn't the right guy for Wizard.  I landed in Huntington Beach, writing and shooting photos for the American Freestyle Association's newsletter in early 1987.  Some BMXer/skater kid named Spike Jonze filled my spot at the magazine.  He was a good fit for the magazines, and started shooting photos a lot.  That wound up working out really well for him.  

Meanwhile, I found myself in a hub of surfing, skateboarding, punk rock, and BMX culture.  I soon began to spend my weekends sessioning at the Huntington Beach Pier, hanging with Mike Sarrail and a couple other local freestylers.  That was in early 1987.  Also hanging at the pier were some more freestyle skateboarders that I became really good friends with, Pierre Andre' (Senizergues), Don Brown, and Hans Lingren.  Bob Schmelzer was around at times.  There was also this whole crew of young street skaters, Ed Templeton being one of the most notable at the time.  Mark Gonzales lived in the area, and would come by now and then.  The scene was just all day sessions every weekend.  The skaters would get a crowd watching them, then the police would break it up.  Then us BMXers would get a crowd, and the police would break it up.  That happened every Saturday and Sunday if there, if we didn't have a contest to go to somewhere.  I figured out once that I rode in front of over 140,000 people, 100 or 200 at a time, in all those years of weekend sessions at the Huntington Beach pier.  We didn't put out a hat for money, it was just practice, and trying to impress girls, for us.  So I got a bunch of experience as a street performer, of sorts. 

This is me, doing a Shingle shuffle, under the Huntington Beach Pier, in 1987.  I don't know what was going on with my hair.  I was cheap, and let it grow for  about 3 months, before getting a haircut.  

 

I wound up spending more time riding with skaters than other BMXers, from 1987 into the early 90's.  I would play SKATE with the skaters at the pier, but on my BMX bike.  SKATE is like playing HORSE in basketball, except doing tricks.  I could do backside bonelesses, no comply's (footplant to 180), wall rides, and I became the first BMXer to really get into doing nollies (nosewheelie at speed into a speed bump or small curb, bouncing up off the ground), in addition to my own, weird brand of BMX freestyle. 

Like skaters, when I traveled to contests back then, groups of us would go street riding late into the night, in some other city, with the locals.  At the same time, I was exploring Huntington Beach and Orange County, looking for cool riding spots.  How many of you reading this know that there are 4 full pipes in Huntington Beach?  Yeah, I didn't think so.   They're small, 8' - 9' diameter, but they do exist.  I found those, and rode them a couple of times.

While living there, Pierre Andre' gave me one of his old freestyle boards, so I started skating some, mostly when my bike was broken.  Mike Sarrail not only became a great riding friend in those days, but he slowly led me into the world of punk rock. That opened me up to a whole new world of music, and he took me to clubs to see bands live.  We even saw Joey Ramone at the lunch truck in front of Scream , in a sketchy-ass part of L.A. one night.  

My job at the AFA led me into producing videos, which led me to a job at Unreel Productions, Vision Skateboards' video company.  My boss was Don Hoffman, whose parents owned Pipeline Skatepark.  I met a ton of top skateboarders working for Vison, like Gator, Gonz, Ken Park, Joe Johnson, Johnee Kop, Paul Schmitt, Marty "Jinx" Jiminez, as well as Chuck Hults, Chicken, and the other wood shop guys.  I didn't know any of them well, but I did find out where a lot of backyard pools were, and went to ride my bike in a couple.  When the Huntington Pier bank chain got cut and "disappeared" in 1989, I sessioned there all summer, nearly every night, with dozens of different skaters, and a few BMXers.  

Vision closed down Unreel Productions in 1990, but kept me on.  I started shooting a video of my own.  Along the way, I met Keith Treanor and John Povah, and we all went street riding a lot, sometimes with me shooting video, and sometimes just riding.  That became my first self-produced video, The Ultimate Weekend, which came out in October of 1990.  Rider-made videos were still a really new thing back then, and mine was one of the first, along with those by Eddie Roman, Mark Eaton, and the Alder brothers Back East.  BMX as an industry was dying, but street riding was evolving faster than ever.  Every video that came out had some brand new tricks in it.  

While I drifted away from the BMX industry, I wound up roommates with S&M Bikes owner, and pro racer/jumper Chris Moeller, through much of the early 90's.  I also lived in the P.O.W. (BMX) House a couple of times, where guys like Dave Clymer, John Paul Rogers, Alan and Brian Foster, Todd Lyons, Jay Lonergan, Lawan Cunningham, and several others, were living cheap and riding a ton.  Those guys were mostly racer/jumpers, but they were crazy, and groups of us would hit street spots pretty often.  I sucked compared to the jumping skills of those guys.  We had a lot of fun riding dirt and also street spots, and made trips to random ditches, and schools with banks, like Kenter and San Pedro.  As BMX street riding was evolving, I was around some really great riders, watching it happen, and doing a little bit myself.

 
 

This is me, doing a double peg grind on a ledge in Huntington Beach in 1990.  It's a video still from The Ultimate Weekend.  What's really crazy about this shot is that this is either the 2nd or 3rd double peg street grind, in any BMX video.  I wasn't a great rider, but managed to be ahead of the curve on this trick.

In 1995, I headed off on my own, away from the BMX industry and most other riders.  But I rode solo, nearly every day, until I became a taxi driver in 1999.  I still rode a lot until 2003, when I started working 7 days a week as a taxi driver, and began to gain a ton of weight.  I also first became homeless, living in my taxi, in 1999.  That led to a whole different side of getting to know "the streets."  Riding around jumping curbs and doing wall rides is one thing.  Sleeping alone in a taxi, in different parking lots, is a whole different thing.  

My driver's license got suspended in 2000, due to a clerical error at the DMV, it seemed.  And I became fully homeless, on the streets, for the first time in 2001.  I finally got back into a taxi in late summer of 2003, and spent 2  1/2 more years, working 7 days a week, drivng drunk people home every night, and living in my cab.  My long run of going in and out of homelessness had begun.    

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1980's urban BMX exploring...

Tommy Guererro's classic part in Bones Brigade II: Future Primitive.  This part, that seems so basic now, inspired me to spend dozens of long Saturdays and Sundays wandering the South Bay area of Southern California in 1986, and thousands of hours of BMX wandering after that.

"200 years of American technology has unwittingly created a massive cement playground.  It took the minds of 12-years-olds to realize its potential."  -C.R. Stecyk, the quote seen right at the beginning of Tommy's section (above).

For me, it really started with the New York canal in Boise, Idaho, when I was starting high school.  My family moved to 909 East Saratoga drive, in Boise, in June of 1981.  That subdivision was known as Centenial at the time.  If you pull that up on Google maps, the street view photo shows a hill rising behind the house.  The New York canal, a big, concrete canal, with about 45 degree walls, runs along the top of that slope, allowing water to flow from just below Lucky Peak reservoir to farmland near Lake Lowell, nearly 30 miles away.  

The next summer, as I've mentioned many times in previous blogs, my family moved to a trailer park we called Blue Valley, out past the Boise airport.  My parents' plan was to save money for a year or two, then buy a house and finally settle down, permanently, in Boise.  In that trailer park, in 1982-1983, I got totally into BMX, and started racing.  

The first part of my parents' house plan actually worked.  A year later, in June of 1983, we moved back into town, back to the Centenial area, to 4029 Morningwind.  Again, the big New York canal was close by.  In the winter months, the canal was usually dry.  I could ride a few blocks, push my bike up the steep canal bank hill, and ride in the canal.  I would roll in one wall, carve up the opposite wall, and bunnyhop near the top,  and pretend I was Eddie Fiola, Brian Blyther, or Mike Dominguez, riding Pipeline Skatepark, like the photos I'd seen in BMX magazines.  That was the first "street riding" I really did.  

Later I would ride into downtown Boise, and wander around looking for stuff to ride.  There was a perfect tabletop jump built into the lawn of an office building right next to the state capitol building.  A couple of us would come racing around the corner, hit the table, and do a little kickout or turnbar tableltop attempt, and then ride off.  We'd come back a minute later to hit it again, and usually the security guy was running out the door to chase us off at that point.  There was also a little skate ditch near the BMX track, where we would do kickturns.  "Street riding" wasn't a thing yet in BMX, it was just part of the random riding around I did, often with one or two of the local racers.  

Over the next year, I got more into trick riding, which was starting to be called "BMX freestyle."  The Haro Freestyler, a bike made just for freestyle, came out.  In 1984, I met Jay Bickel and Wayne Moore, who had the only trick team in Idaho.  Wayne retired, at the ripe old age of 17, and I joined the team.  I started doing shows and riding in parades with Jay, and sometimes with a few of the racer guys, who could do a few tricks.  BMX freestyle became my thing.  I graduated from Boise High School in 1984, and bought a Skyway T/A, with red Z-rims, my first "real" BMX bike, with my graduation money.  I continued to ride around the streets, finding little jumps or banks here and there, to do tricks on, like pretty much every other BMXer everywhere at the time. 

In the summer of 1985, my dad got a job in San Jose, California, and my family moved there.  I rented a room in my best friend's house, and worked my summer job, managing a tiny amusement park called the Boise Fun Spot.  In August, when it closed for the season, I packed up my ugly, brown, gigantic, 1971 Pontiac Bonneville, and drove solo to San Jose.  

While I had an old handmade skateboard that I bought in Ohio for $2, and actually did skate now and then, I had no idea what was going on in the  real skateboard world at the same time.  In the 25th anniversary Thrasher magazine coffee table book, there's a photo of Mark Gonazales, with a caption that says something along the lines of, "In 1984, Mark Gonzales jumped off the side of a ramp (1:55), and things got gnarbuckle."  Street skateboarding was starting to morph into its own thing, apart from vert/pool and freestyle skating.  Leading the charge were Mark Gonzales from Southern California, skating for Vision, Tommy Guerrero from San Francisco, skating for Powell-Peralta (and the Curb Dogs), and Natas Kaupas from SoCal, skating for Santa Cruz.  

Issue #1 of FREESTYLIN' magazine, featuring a cover photo of Ron Wilkerson, riding in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, shot by Bob Osborn.  

Also in 1984, the first issue of FREESTYLIN' magazine came out, edited by one Andy Jenkins, BMX racer, art student, and skater.  Andy was a fan of Thrasher, and a talented, emerging graphic artist, and helped bring the punk rock and street inspired vibe to BMX freestyle.  That was something Dave Vanderspek and the Curb Dogs were already doing.  A few issues into the magazine, in the April 1986 issue, came the first "street" riding article.  The tricks were pretty simple, though Rick Allison's 5 foot backwards drop-in was insane at the time.  All of us freestylers around the world, who devoured every issue of FREESTYLIN' (you can read it here), started looking at the urban landscape in a different way.  

I started my zine, San Jose' Stylin', mainly to meet the other BMX freesytlers in the area, since I was new to the area.  Within a month I met the incredible John Vasquez and his friends in San Jose.  They told me about the Beach Park ramp jams, held at the bike shop where Skyway team member, and Master of Balance tricks, Robert Peterson, worked.  At my first jam, I met Bert, Dave Vanderspek, Maurice Meyer, and several other great riders.  I got to know Menlo Park local, John Ficarra.  Not long after, I started catching rides with him and several others to the Sunday afternoon jams in Golden Gate Park, up in San Francisco.  

In Boise, I was one of the only fish in a really small pond that was BMX freestyle.  Suddenly I started riding with these amazing riders, pros and amateurs alike, from the Bay Area.  We often went to the Embarcadero after the flatland sessions at the park.  Embarcadero was this place with big, blocky ledges and steps, you can see Maruice Meyer and others riding it at 3:27 in the video below.

Ride Like a Man, the 1990 2-Hip video, produced and edited by Eddie Roman.  The first few minutes are a good look at street riding when BMX freestyle was "dying," as the first wave of popularity of the late 1980's ended.  

Not only did I see Tommy Guerrero and other skaters blasting off launch ramps in Golden Gate Park in 1985, but I was riding with the Curb Dogs, Dave Vanderspek, Maurice Meyer, and others, who were leading the charge in BMX street riding at the time.  They got me looking for more urban riding spots.  A few hours of riding at the park, and downtown San Francisco with those guys, and I would drive back down to San Jose tired, but totally psyched to ride as much as I could all week.  

I worked the evening shift at Pizza Hut about 5 nights a week, usually getting home around midnight or 1:00 am.  I often worked on my zine and did balance tricks in my room until 3:00 or 4:00 am.  Then I'd crash out, wake up around 10:30-11:00, have breakfast, argue with my mom about something, and do whatever household chores needed done.  In the afternoons, I would go ride for two or three hours.  Sometimes I would practice flatland in a nearby parking lot.  But I began to start wandering on my bike more and more, looking for urban places to session.  I wandered all over the San Jose area looking for banks, little jumps, ledges and benches to footplants on, and anything else that looked fun to ride.  Riding on the weekends with the Curb Dogs/Bay area riders inspired me to spend more time just riding around, exploring.  On my days off from work, I would sometimes ride around for 7-8 hours, into different areas.  

I found the Calabassas jumps (the dirt jumps in this clip),  I bombed down the hills above Mountain View, chasing road bike guys at 40 mph.  I wandered over to Cuppertino, and explored the edges of downtown San Jose at times.  With the influence of the Curb Dogs, my riding expanded from just spending hours learning flatland tricks, to riding around and just having fun on my bike.  There were very few other freestylers in 1985-86, but I ran into a few now and then.  Mostly though, I spent a ton of time solo riding, both practicing flatland, and wandering and riding street obstacles.  

It's impossible now to describe just how weird BMX freestyle (and street skating) were in the mid-1980's.  All of us older Gen X kids grew up in a world where there were four "real" sports.  Those were football, baseball, basketball, and hockey, and all were on the three channels of TV when we were kids in the 1970's.  To "play sports" back then meant having an overweight coach, with polyester shorts and a whistle, yelling at you for two hours a day, at practice, and making us do windsprints.  Then a handful of the good guys would play in the game, while the rest of us sat on the bench.  At the end of the game, whther we played or not, one team was "winners" and one team was "losers."  If you made the best play of your life, but th team lost, you were still a loser for the week.  If you played like shit, but your team won, you were a winner that week.  Forsome of us who were not natural athletes, that shit never made sense.

In BMX, we just went out on a "little kid's bike" and did whatever the fuck we felt like doing, just having fun.  We pushed each other naturally, nobody had to push us to improve, we pushed ourselves and each other.  The funny thing is, action sports, like BMX freestyle, andskateboarding, just keep evolving, where traditional team sports get a kind of rigor mortis, solidifying into set rules and ideas.  They were fun to play at times, but BMX and skating were much more fun for us weirdos of that era.  

After close to a year living in San Jose, my zine, much to mine and everyone's surprise, wound up landing me a job at Wizard Publications, home of BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines, in August of 1986.  I hopped on a plane down to L.A. with my bike, a suitcase, and $80, and started a new life.  I had just turned 20 years old, and a week later I was proofreading two magazines that were published worldwide.  I moved in with Gork and Lew, two of my co-workers, sleeping on their couch for a couple of months, in Redondo Beach, until we found a three bedroom apartment.  Once again, I found myself in a huge metro area that was new to me.  I soon began wandering around on my bike on the weekends, exploring the South Bay area of Los Angeles county.  

Nearly every weeknight we sessioned at The Spot, on the north side of the Redondo Pier.  Usually it was Lew (:56), Chris Day, Craig Grasso, and Gork most nights.  A couple of times a week, R.L. Osborn, would come down and session, and industry guy McGoo came by occasionally, sometimes with CW riders Ceppie Maes and Dizz Hicks.  There were solid flatland session every night.  Lew introduced me to freestyle skater Rodney Mullen there, who skated by The Spot when in town, and I even first saw Mark Gonzales there once, skating with Rodney.  Once in a while we'd go ride the Fatburger Banks, or another street spot, bu tmost nights it was lots of flatland practicing, with some goofing around. 

On the weekends though, that's when I really started going on some all day exploration rides on a regular basis.  If there wasn't a contest somewhere, it was a solo day for me.  I would wake up around 7 or 8 am, and make a huge plate of pancakes.  Then I'd put on the Bones II video above, Future Primitive, and watch the whole thing.  After that, I'd grab my bike, and take off in one direction or another.  It was a 4 mile ride to our offices in Torrance, and there were some street spots along that route I started along that route, wandering off to new areas.  Some days I would head up or down PCH (Pacific Coast Highway), which is a big surface street in that area.  There was a 5 sidewalk section curb jump on PCH, right by Redondo Beach Boulevard, it was about a 20 feet jump, that we'd hit on our way to work.  Twenty feet is a long jump off a curb cut, and we usually landed back wheel on the 4th of 5th section, with our front wheel near the landing curb cut.  One Sunday morning, hauling ass on the sidewalk along PCH, I got the light, and hit the jump with more speed than usual, and cleared the long gap.  I only did that twice.  Bombing down 190th street hill at speed, on the border of Redondo and Hermosa Beaches, blocks from our 2nd apartment, was another thing we often did.  

My best street spot find in Redondo Beach, though, was rediscovering what came to be known as the Jinx Bank.  One day I was driving the Wizard van to a photo shoot with Windy Osborn, our photographer, and Haro pro Ron Wilkerson.  We went to a sketchy, ellpitical transition quarterpipe behind a bike shop, where Ron debuted the abubaca.  Windy shot the sequence, and Ron changed vert and street riding forever, with one photo sequence.  On the drive over, I got a glimpse of a cool looking bank behind a nearby building, and then rode back a couple of weeks later, wandered around a bit, and found it.  

Hidden behind a business was a little parking lot that sloped steeply down.  There was an asphalt bank up against the back of the building, which went from flat to about three feet high, to over six feet tall on the end of the bulding.  Wall rides had not been invented yet.  But I found that it was a blast to hit the big end of the bank, then fly up, footplant on the wall 3-4 feet above the bank, then drop back into it.  The first three times I went there, I broke bike parts twice, and Lew rolled his ankle the time I took him.  He said, "That banks a jinx, I'm not going back."  It became known as the Jinx Bank, and I rode it nearly every weekend while I lived there.  But the Jinx Bank gained its own fame a year later when Windy shot this photo below of Eddie Roman there.

The first wall ride photo in a BMX magazine.  Eddie Roman, once again leading the way on street, at the Jinx Bank, putting walls into play for the first time.  This photo changed BMX freestyle forever.  Eddie was one of my favorite riders, especially on street.  He just kept coming up with new tricks, somtimes dorky, sometimes super hard tricks, always pushing the limits and progression of BMX.  Windy Osborn photo, 1987.

I was really an uptight dork in 1986, and I didn't really click with the crew at Wizard.  So I got laid off after 5 months there.  I paid my rent for a month, and stayed home, calling around looking for other BMX jobs.  Then I'd go riding all day with Craig Grasso.  We rode all over the South Bay, hitting the few local ramps, street spots, and just having a blast in general.  After three weeks, I lined up a job working for Bob Morales at the American Freestyle Association (AFA), and moved to Huntington Beach a week later to be editor/photographer for the AFA newsletter.    

Another new area, a new job, and more weekends of wandering on my bike.  I quickly started hanging out at the H.B. pier, with the local freestylers and freestyle skaters.  But I also went exploring on my bike, finding the known local spots, and some new ones of my own.  I found Hidden Valley (28:12), which has always had a few BMX jumps, the banks that used to be along Goldenwest Street, Huntington Beach High, Mesa View elementary (big skate spot), and when Josh White came down once, we found the Blues Brothers Wall.  Over the many years since then, I rode the whole length of the Santa Ana River ditch, which has lots of hips and huge banks the whole way.  Mike Miranda showed me the jumps above where Sheep Hills is now, and I found the ditch below.  I even stumbled across the moon.  Really, there's a park in Costa Mesa, right off the river trail, where there's a huge concrete moon surface.  A couple of the craters on it are big enough to skate on, a little bit.  Not much fun on a bike, but a weird find, nonetheless.

Moon Park, in Costa Mesa, California.  Photo stolen off the web.  

Over the 20 years I was riding my BMX bike almost every day, a lot of the best times were just the long, rambling, solo, exploration rides.  I jumped 25 feet off a hip in the Santa Ana River ditch (I shot video to check the distance).   Yeah, I am definitely not known for jumping, but it was a spot where someone like Chris Moeller, Dave Clymer, or Brian Foster could probably jump 35-40 feet, landing on the huge banked wall.  I also did 100 foot long framestands on the banked walls of the river ditch, and even did short ones on a 60 degree banked wall I found in H.B. (destroyed in the 90's).  I rode with Ed Templeton at Huntington High, and sessioned the H.B. Pier bank for months when the chain was cut, opening it up to bike and skate sessions again in 1989.  

Looking back, I wish I would have shot some video of some of those sessions.  But I lost all my video footage (and master tapes) in a move in 2008, so it may not have made much difference.  But all those sessions, usually solo, wandering around and looking for places to ride, led to some great riding spots, and just a lot of fun days of riding.  This is an aspect of riding nearly everyone has done at some point.  But we never really think about it.  Yet a lot of the great street spots were found by riders, often not the top riders, who just wandered around and found cool places that were not designed to ride or skate, but lent themselves to great sessions anyway.  

During all those years of solo exploration, I also ran into a lot of graffiti and street art, homeless and other people in urban settings, and met other riders and skaters.  Once in a while, like when I rediscovered the forgotten Jinx Bank, you find a spot destined to become legendary in our world.  These are some of the best times of my life on "the streets."  

The last trick I learned, in 2003,  was doing nollie 180's (curved nosewheelie into a gnarly speed bump, to a 180), in a parking lot in Garden Grove where no one else ever rode.  It's actually less than half a mile from the Van's skatepark in Orange.  I'd nollie the speed bump every time I rode by, and stopped to learn nollie 180's one day.  Soon after I went back to taxi driving, and was soon working long hours, seven days a week.  I started gaining a ton of weight, and haven't ridden seriously since.  I'm working now towards getting back on track financially, which will allow me to start losing weight, get a decent bike, and get back to riding daily, at some point.  

So that's a look at the usually ignored part of street riding, actually riding around aimlessly, and just exploring behind, around, under, over, and through urban places, to find new riding spots.  Maybe I got you psyched to go do a little exploring yourself.  

I ran into a rider named Lucas Borzio at Sheep Hills in about 2000, and he wanted to check out some street spots.  So  took him to Huntington Beach High.  I shot some video of him for a while.  Then I pulled the crash pads off the high jump pit, and started doing front flips off my bike into them.  That was something I'd learned while working on the crew of American Gladiators, in 1993.  I'd pedal as fast as I could, jump over the bars, and fly, doing a long flip.  The pads are ten feet long, and I was landing at the beginning of the second one.  In this photo, I'm about 8 feet past the bike, upside down.  The kid in the back is some local kid who was wandering around, and watching Lucas and me ride.  This is a still from my 2001 video, Animals.