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

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