2-Hip King of Vert in Ontario, Canada 1989- First 900 and first double tailwhip in a contest

This was my first trip as a cameraman for Unreel Productions.  This is all my footage, the editing (or lack of it) and hilarious commentary is by Eddie Roman and friends.  This is in the last half of the 1990 2-Hip video, Ride Like a Man.  Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, spring, 1989.  I was the only guy in the gym with a professional level video camera, shooting with a rental Ikegami betacam that weekend. 

After about a year and a half working at Unreel Productions, the Vision Skateboards/Vision Street Wear video production company, they entrusted me to fly across the country and shoot video.  That doesn't sound like a big deal today, but the betacam pro video cameras we used cost about $50,000 each then.  In this case, I flew to into Canada, with the lovely Leslie, a new woman in the Vision promotions department.  She had worked for the NFL, and was completely dialed on smart business traveling.  I was not.  I got yelled at in customs in Canada, because I only had my driver's license, not a passport.  "You guys act like Canada's just your back yard, eh.  We're another country!"  I think that customs woman was a former lineman in the Canadian Football League, but she eventually let me in, as Leslie sailed through, passport in hand.

We got a rental car, and drove somewhere to rent my camera for the weekend, better than Unreel's Sony betacam's, I wound up with an Ikegami component Betacam, 35 pounds of 1989 high tech.  While betacam sounds like betamax, it was a different system.  The tapes looked the same, but betacam was broadcast quality, what TV stations used, and betamax was like VHS.  Then we drove to the hotel, where I hadn't bothered to get a reservation, I thought the Vision promotions people handled that.  Leslie, of course, had her room, and I asked to share, since they were out of rooms, or at least said they were.  I told her I'd sleep in the bath tub or something.  Used to dealing with sweet talking, but not very organized football players, Leslie said something along the lines of "Not a fucking chance, you can sleep in the car."  I think I had them call Ron Wilkerson or something, and once they found out I was working for the big sponsor of 2-Hip, Vision Street Wear, they released a blocked off room, so I was in business.

Somewhere in the hotel, lugging the heavy camera bag and my old-fashioned (no wheels) suitcase, I ran into Rob Dodds.  He was a good vert rider form western Canada, we'd met at a contest in Whistler three years before.  Rob's sponsors sent him to the contest, but saving money on rooms always helped.  Back then, half of us showed up at contests like that, and I told Rob he could crash on the couch in my room.  Whoever had rooms paid for in those days, often let a couple (or so) riders crash on the floor for the weekend.  A couple years later, I once rented a room on my credit card, and had 16 roommates for the weekend.  

 While we were unpacking, and Rob was building his bike, and I was trying to figure out how to work the Ikegami, Rob told me he'd been trying no-handed 540's back home.  Sure, those are done regularly now, but in 1989, he might as well have said he was trying a corked out 1440  with a quad tailwhip.  A no-handed 540 seemed completely insane at the time.  But then, Rob was a Canadian, AND a vert rider.  He got his bike dialed, I figured out the Ikegami, and we headed to the college gymnasium, where the practice sessions were taking place.  Leslie, by then, had figured out I was pretty much an idiot, and went her own way to promote Vision Street Wear.  I think she was putting up contest banners around the gym.  

Since I'd worked for FREESTYLIN', the AFA, and Vision/Unreel over the three previous years, I knew Ron Wilkerson, all the photographers, and the top riders already.  So that was cool.  I was just nervous about fucking up something on the camera, and either missing good footage, or breaking a $50,000 video camera.  Despite being a "video technician" back at Unreel (officially, anyhow), technology and I never had a good relationship, and really expensive pieces of tech, like the Ikegami, scared the shit out of me.  I was really uptight back then, and super anal retentive about pretty much everything.  But once I got a little footage shot, the camera and me got along fine. 

When I got up on the deck of the ramp, the main obstacle became John Ker, the BMX Plus photographer.  John's a good guy, but he'd jump in front of me, or anyone, for a good shot.  With the huge Betacam on my shoulder, my entire right side became a blind spot.  I soon realized that gave me a great advantage.  If I got on the left side of the deck, I couldn't see John, and the other photographers.  So if John got in my space, I'd swing the camera to the left, and clock him in the head with the big, heavy, back end of the camera, and say, "Oh damn, I'm sorry, you're in my blind spot."  I did that to John all weekend, and at every King of Vert after.  Heh, heh, heh.  There wasn't just competition among the riders, it got pretty competitive for the camera angles on the deck, as well. 

As Eddie Roman says in the funny commentary, the mobile 2-Hip contest ramp was known as the "boat hull."  Usually one side was a little under vert, and one side was a bit over vert, and riders felt like they were riding a huge letter "V", tilted to one side.  But they ripped it up anyway.  Joe Johnson seemed to be about the only rider who could consistently do good variations on both sides of the ramp.  If you watch that clip, you'll see that almost every rider, pros included, have a pump side of the ramp, and a variation side.  Back to back to back variations weren't the norm back then, and Joe was the one guy leading the pack in pulling off lots of variations on both sides.  

The talk of that weekend was some unknown guy from Canada called "The Terminator."  He was some crazy guy, like a Hugo Gonzalez-type mentality, the guy who would try something completely insane.  He was an amateur that none of us in the states had ever heard of.  But word was that he was going to try some kind of backlfip on the vert ramp.  At the time, only Jose Yanez, the weird, lake jumper guy from Arizona, had landed, or even tried, a backflip on a BMX bike.  He did it in 1984, and 5 years later, no freestyler or racer had tried it.  Nobody was sure what this Terminator guy had in mind, some said it was a abubaca to backflip, and some said he was going to try a backflip fakie.  Any kind of flip trick on a vert ramp seemed death defying then.  

So that's what all of us were looking forward to all weekend.  Finally, the amateur finals came around, and the Terminator went through some decent variations, then rolled in and went for the trick we'd all been waiting for.  He went up for a fakie air, back wheel near coping height, and he leaned back awkwardly... then ejected and dropped hard to the flat bottom.  And it was like all the air left the room.  "That was it?" we all thought.  He didn't even remotely commit to the flip, and it was a bad crash for that era.  But he limped away without serious injury.  After his run, all the hype of the weekend was gone.  The vibe in the room settled into a backyard ramp session vibe, just everyone riding an dpushing for fun.  Except, it was a jam with the best riders of the era, except Eddie Fiola, who was doing shows somewhere.

The 300 or 400 spectators, and all the riders, just thought, OK, now we just chill and watch everyone else do their stuff.  The Canadians were psyched to see the factory pros, and top ams ride in person.  Us industry people were just thinking, "OK, it's another 2-Hip King of Vert, let's get some good photos or video."  There was no big expectations of any big tricks after The Terminator's run.  It was just a big vert jam vibe.  

In this video above, we see ams like Jon Byers, Gary Pollak, Steve Swope, and Chris Potts, among others, ripping it up.  Then pro, Joe Johnson (white GT uniform), nails a huge tailwhip air, which he invented.  Then he hucks... and lands, the first double tailwhip air EVER (at 11:30 above).  What?  The jam vibe just keeps building and riders kept ripping. 

The 900 had been in people's minds since late 1987, when Mike Dominguez talked about trying them on his own ramp.  While there's no video or photos, Mike landed a couple 900's, without a crowd, in 1987 or 1988.  Honestly, some people weren't sure he had actually landed one, and even for the incredible Mike Dominguez, it was a "Merry Christmas" trick.  Then, at the 1987 2-Hip finals at Wilkerson's Enchanted Ramp, Dominguez came within a hair of landing a 900 in a contest (4:56 in this video).  Suddenly, the mythical 900 air seemed possible to the top riders, and it was a question of who would land the first one at a contest.  

The Kitchener contest was almost a year and a half later.  Several riders hucked 900 attempts at the end of their runs, but still no one had landed the elusive 900 at a contest, or even for photos or video.  In this video, we see Brian Blyther and Dave Voelker both huck 900 attempts, and both get near the 720 point in the rotation.  Then comes Mat Hoffman, who I think was still an amateur at this point.  Mat hucks a 900 attempt near the end of this video, and gets as close as Dominguez did in 1987.  So Mat gets up and tries again, and at 14:43 in this video, he lands the mythical 900, the first time it had ever been done in a contest, or on video.  History is made, in a big way, in BMX vert riding.

As luck would have it, that happened at the first contest I worked as a video cameraman, with a pro quality video camera on my shoulder.  Here are the other two main angles of Mat's first 900.  I'm not sure who was on the deck, but it's Eddie Roman, with his S-VHS camera, catching the 9 from the ground.  When Mat does the warm up airs in the first shot, you can see me on the opposite deck, with the Ikegami, I'm the second guy from the right on the deck, just to the right of Mat in the air.  I was was wearing the ever-non-fashionable Vision Street Wear spotted "cow" pants.  Hey, it was the 1980's.  After Mat's 900, and Joe's first double tailwhip air, I think we were all on a natural high, (and a few guys had herbal highs, as well), as we walked out of the gymnasium.  

Back in the hotel room, the Ikegami drove Rob Dodds and me crazy.  Pro video cameras, in those days, did not have playback.  The tapes were pro betacam, which couldn't be played, except in pro video decks.  So I couldn't go back and watch my footage.  As luck would have it, though, Mat Hoffman, Steve Swope, and Dennis McCoy were staying in the room next to us.  Rob and I headed out, to go eat dinner, just as Swope and Dennis walked out to go eat.  We asked, "Where's Mat?"  Steve Swope said, "look through the hole," pointing at their door.  For some reason, the peephole in their room door got knocked out, over the course of the weekend, so Rob and I took turns looking in it, from the outside.  Mat Hoffman was sitting there with someone's camera hooked up to the room's TV.  He'd play the video, then rewind, then play it again.  He was sitting in a chair right in front of the TV.  He was watching his 900, over and over again, analyzing it, in whatever way Mat analyzes his riding.  

Dennis McCoy shook his head, "He's been doing that for an hour, watching it over and over."  We talked with Steve and Dennis for a minute or two, they were heading to dinner, too.  Or trying to, except they couldn't get Mat away from the TV.  Finally they walked back in their room, "Mat, c'mon, we gotta go eat."  It took a couple more minutes, but they got Mat away from watching the footage, and the five of us headed to a Denny's-style diner, next to the hotel, for dinner.  A bunch of other riders were heading that way as well.  On the walk to the diner, Rob told Mat about his attempts at no-handed 540's.  That got Mat's attention, and they were soon talking shop, vert guy style, trying to figure out how to do a no-handed 540 without the bike drifting away, mid air.  That's the problem Rob had been having with that trick.  

The five of us, Mat, Steve Swope, Dennis, Rob Dodds, and me, wound up at a table, pigging out on some good diner food.  There were probably 30 or 40 other riders in the diner, it was a good size restaurant.  Since all of us had witnessed Mat Hoffman make major freestyle history by landing the 900, riders kept walking up an congratulating Mat on the 9.  When not talking to the riders walking up, Mat and Rob kept working out how to make a no-handed 540 actually happen.  Guess what trick Mat debuted at the next King of Vert, at Woodward camp.  You got it, Mat nailed a no-handed 540.

We stayed over Sunday night, and Leslie and I took the rented Ikegami camera back, then flew out of Canada, and back to California.  After a rough start at traveling for work, I was beginning to get the hang of things, and headed back to California, and back to normal life.  But I wasn't on the same flight as Leslie, so she asked me to fly stand-by, so we could be on the same flight, out of Chicago.  Luckily I got a seat, and Leslie and I got along much better on the way home.  

Finally back at Unreel, I got to make sure my footage came out.  Unreel was weird, as production companies go, and the footage from this contest never got used in a Vision video.  But 2-Hip also had the rights to use the footage, and Ron Wilkerson tapped Eddie Roman to make the 1990 2-Hip video, and we have this hilarious video above from Kitchener. 

Winter riding: Evel Knievel days in Boise, January 1983

For the kids of Generation X, kids from the 1970's, Evel Knievel was a huge influence.  In a world of white collar "company men" and blue collar factory workers, came this loud guy in white leathers.  He jumped a huge Harley-Davidson over cars and buses, and strutted around like a white pimp, with a cane and cape at times.  This documentary of Evel is a classic, from the late 1980's.  Ramp to ramp jumping was Evel's thing, and in 1983, that became my BMX crew's thing, on BMX bikes, for a while.

In the last post, I wrote about how I got into BMX riding, mostly hitting little jumps, as a high school kid, outside Boise, Idaho, in 1982.  Our posse from Blue Valley mobile home park got more and more into BMX, pushing each other daily, through the summer of 1982.  Act the end of October, we discovered the Fort Boise BMX track, and started racing.  We all won trophies, and were psyched on BMX.  Just in time for the Idaho winter to set in.  Our track, our little area of jumps, at the edge of the desert, turned first to super muddy, and then froze and got covered with snow.  It wasn't rideable all winter.  In the last post, I told of the snow jump I made, and our frozen pond sliding that winter.

Back then, Boise seemed to have this weird weather event in late January or early February, every year.  For some reason, we'd get about a week or ten days of warm, shirt sleeve temperature weather, like high 50's or low 60's, right at the end of January.  Snow started melting, and our little jumps turned to 6 inch deep mud, again.  They were totally not rideable.  But after jonesin' to ride all winter, and with a warm week, we were determined to find some way to jump our bikes.  It was Scott and Rocky, who both lived on the other side of the Blue Valley pond, who got an idea.  Going back to those days of watching Evel Knievel on the Wide World of Sports in the 70's, they scrounged up to sheets of 1/2" plywood, and a bunch of cinder blocks, and they built a ramp to ramp jump, in front of Scott's mom's trailer.   

The first version had a launch ramp that was two cinder blocks high at the high end (laying on their sides), with single blocks under the middle of the plywood sheet for stability. Tthe landing, about six feet away at first, was one cinder block high.  Word got around the park, and we all congregated to try the ramp to ramp jump.  We were all riding off brand, Kmart special frames then, with Z-rims or a few better quality parts.  Only Andy, the youngest kid, had a four year old Mongoose, with Motomags.  None of us could afford a decent quality bike.  James had a Huffy Pro Thunder, all of our bikes had mild steel frames, none were chromoly.  So we were not riding quality equipment.  But we just HAD to get outside and jump.  

We spent the afternoon jumping ramp to ramp, Evel Knievel style, stopping only to move the plywood back, when it started to slide off the cinder blocks.  By the second day of ramp to ramp jumping, after we all got used to the set-up, we went to a two cinder block high landing ramp, and maybe a 7 or 8 foot gap.  By the end of the week, our launch ramp was three cinder blocks high, and the landing was two cinder blocks high.  Though the plywood was just sitting on the blocks, they were pretty stable, and it was good to get a little air again.  None of us were very good jumpers yet, we could barely bunnyhop, and our bikes were all pieces of shit.  But we were having fun for that weird, warm week, in January in 1983.

When spring actually did hit Boise, six weeks later, or so, our dirt jumps were still all muddy for 2-3 weeks.  We went right back to jumping ramp to ramp for a while.  In a couple of weeks, the game was stepped up, and the front of Scott's mom's Ford Pinto was moved between the ramps.  I think 3 or 4 of the guys cleared the Pinto's hood with our ramp to ramp jump.  I chickened out, I couldn't do the bunnyhop necessary off the launch, to clear the Pinto, though I cleared the distance without the car there.  The car jump died when Brian ate shit, and wound up breaking his arm.  

By that time, the jumps were drying out, and we moved back out into the dirt to ride, rebuilding our little jumps.  Soon the BMX races began again, and we started racing whenever we could afford the $3 entry fee.  Hey, we were trailer park kids, money was tight.  Our Evel Knievel inspired period ended, and we started looking to guys like Stu Thompsen, Harry Leary, Billy Griggs, Andy Patterson, and a BMX Plus test jumper named Martin Aparijo, for jumping inspiration. 

Snow BMX riding in Boise in 1982-83

Since I don't have photos or video of our snow riding in Idaho BITD, why not go with the best snow riding video ever.  Fabio Wibmer just kills it in this funny video from a couple of winters ago.  This post goes out to Sven Soisdal in Norway, and Rick Coronado, both laid up with injuries right now.  I told them I'd try to write more BMX posts this month, while they're recuperating.

As I've mentioned, many times over 12 years of BMX blogging, I got into BMX riding in a trailer park outside Boise, Idaho, in the summer of 1982 (Latitude 43 degrees, BTW).  It was several miles outside of town, totally isolated, and surrounded by waist high sagebrush for miles.  Officially, the trailer park didn't have a name, but we all called it Blue Valley, because every street name started with "Blue."  You can look up "Blue Hill Lane, Boise Idaho" on Google Maps, and zoom out, to get an idea how isolated it was.  Now there's a lot of businesses in the larger area, particularly the Micron Technologies complex, across the freeway.  Micron was one small building then, just a computer chip start-up, all the other businesses within a couple miles didn't exist then.

So there was this little community, filled with, fine, upstanding Idaho White Trash, and not much to do.  Even though Boise is pretty far north, the summers are hot, around 90 degrees (F) often.  So the dozen or so teenage boys, and 4-5 girls, would stay inside all day, watching TV or whatever.  In the evening, as the air cooled down, we'd all come out, and congregate by the basketball court and grassy area at the end of the big pond.  Every night we'd try to find something interesting to do.  This usually turned into a game of football, whiffle ball, shooting baskets, or riding our BMX bikes.  There were no mobile homes on the outside edge of Blue Heaven Lane then, but there was a dirt area.  Some dirtbike rider a couple years before roosted small berms on the ends of the dirt area, and built four small jumps.  That was our "track."  As the summer rolled on, we spent more and more time riding our bikes, and less time playing other sports.

We started pushing each other, breaking parks on our crappy bikes, and buying better parts with what little money we could scrounge up.  Mowing lawns could make us a few bucks.  Babysitting in the trailer park paid $1 an hour and all the government cheese we could eat.  Seriously, that was the pay. I hate most cheeses, except on pizza.  Somehow I used these, and working a couple nights a week at the local trap and skeet club, to buy Z-Rims, Hutch forks, and a gold anodized, Diamond Back stem.  That made my Sentinal Exploder GX bike ridable.  Yeah, that's what it was called.  It wasn't even a Kmart Special bike, it came from a Kmart wannabe store, I think.  I bought the bike, complete, for $5, from a friend in New Mexico.

In late September, one of the guys got word that there was actually a BMX track in Boise.  Scott, Rocky, James, and I piled into Scott's mom's Ford Pinto (not a hatchback), with their three bikes, and we went to a race in mid-October.  I ,as the other three guys raced, smoked most of the locals, and brought home trophies.  The next weekend we piled the whole crew into my dad's big, silver, Ford van, and went to the race.  We'd been pushing each other so hard, in our isolated world, that we were all pretty fast riders by then, though we'd never actually raced.  We all wound up being highly competitive in our classes, and all 8 or 9 of us brought home trophies.  That really pissed off all the local point chaser kids, getting smoked by a bunch of yahoos in Levi's, T-shirts, and with paper plates for number plates.  Nobody could figure out where all these fast kids on POS bikes came from.  The desert, that's where.

We drove back to Blue Valley completely stoked!  We had a natural high going, BMX was now our thing, and we were going to continue to kick ass at it.  But there was one problem, that race was the last race of the year.  Within a couple weeks, snow started falling.  Rain came, the jumps first got muddy, and then froze, and were soon covered by drifting snow.  We were in Idaho, after all.  Winter hit Boise, and tried to dampen our stoke for BMX.  It's the bane of BMXers in northern states.  WINTER hates BMX.  

Scot and Rocky saw some TV show about ice racing motorcycles in Wisconsin or something.  Those racers took their tires off, and actually put screws in their tires, from the inside out, to get traction.  They told us all this idea, and then tried it themselves.  But it took 2-3 hours to get 8 or 10 screws in your tire.  So that idea faded.  

In mid winter, I actually made jumps our of snow, like building a snowman.  I made a big ball of snow, then packed and shaped it, over a couple of days.  I carried cups of water from home, and poured them on the jump, which froze into ice.  I rolled my knobby up and down the jump, and the knobby tracks froze, giving it some grip.  After about 3 days, I had a single good jump, where we could roll in off the little hill created by the earthen damn of the pond, and crash into two feet of fresh snow.  I actually had someone take a few photos of me doing kicked out cross-ups over the jump, in a snowstorm, when it was about 10 below zero outside.  Those photos got lost over the years.  

But the best day of winter riding, that winter of 1982-83 in Boise, was a bright sunny day.  Our pond froze over, and by mid-January it was 6" to 8" thick.  A couple of the guys took their bikes out on it, and were riding on the frozen pond, in 3" to 4" of snow.  One little area was kind of windswept, with bare ice.  So they would pedal on the snow, the put a foot out, kick the back end sideways, and do flat track style slides on the bare ice.  A couple other guys saw them riding, and walked around and got the rest of us out there.  

We grabbed some snow shovels, and cleared off another section, about 20 feet long, and 6-7 feet wide.  We would pedal across the snow-covered ice, hit the bare spot, and the throw it into one foot out slide, then which was totally fun.  Then we'd hit the lip of snow on the other side, which would kick the back wheel straight, and we'd ride away.  We just kept doing that over and over and over, for a couple of hours.  It was just a blast.  

We didn't do a lot of snow riding that winter, but we didn't let Ol' Man Winter totally kill our BMX spirit.  While it wasn't near as crazy as Fabio Wibmer's video above, us Idaho trailer park kids did find a way to have fun on our bikes over the cold, Idaho winter.