When I started publishing my first BMX freestyle zine in September of 1985, I had just moved from Boise, Idaho to San Jose, California. My reason for starting the zine was to find and meet the other Bay Area riders, like Dave Vanderspek, Maurice Meyer, and the Curb Dogs, and Robert Peterson and the Skyway team. It worked, I became a part of the Golden Gate Park/Bay area freestyle scene. I became the zine guy of that scene, and 11 issues of my San Jose Stylin' zine landed me a job at FREESTYLIN' magazine. In less than a year, I went from some freestyle kid in Idaho to part of the BMX/freestyle industry. Honestly, it still blows my mind that happened. From 1985 until now, I've shot photos of freestylers. Not thousands of photos, and not many really good ones, but I shot a bunch. The photos in this post are three of my better early photos that got published one place or another. These were all shot with my Pentax ME Super 35 mm camera. I was never a great photographer, by any means, but I snapped a pretty good shot now and then.
Working at the AFA in 1987, AFA founder Bob Morales set me to work producing freestyle videos, which led to a job at Unreel Productions, the Vision Skateboards/Vision Street Wear video company, in DEcember 1987. In 1988, I shot a bit of footage with their S-VHS camera, and became the staff cameraman in 1989. At that time, we shot video on huge, broadcast quality, Sony Betacam cameras, that cost $50,000 each. But the surge in technology was making consumer cameras much better, and less expensive. In 1990, I got myself an RCA S-VHS camera, and started shooting footage on my own.
From 1990 to 2007, I was shooting video. I self produced a video called The Ultimate Weekend in 1990, and shot a lot of the footage used in the first two S&M Bikes videos, Feel my leg muscles... I'm a racer, and 44 Something. I shot sporadically after that, and had footage from the P.O.W. House, Sheep Hills, and a whole bunch of contest footage, from 1997 to 2007. I had dozens of top pro riders, and things like Todd Lyons doing a handplant over a sub box in La Jolla in 1992 (93?), Spike Jonze jumping, to footage of Cory Nastazio, Chris Duncan, and Stephen Murray at Sheep Hills in the late 90's. I had Dave Mirra doing under vert 540's as a kid, footage of Gary Laurent doing a barrel roll in 2000, to riders like Ryan Nyquist, and even Scotty Cranmer in Core Tour dirt jumping contests in 2006-07.
In other words, I had one of the best raw footage collections in the BMX world from the early 90's, and some good footage up to 2007. But I was a taxi driver in the 2000's, a business that went to hell because of computer technology. I wound up homeless, and ended up taking my family's offer to go stay in North Carolina for a while, where they lived. I'd never lived in North Carolina, but my parents and my sister's family landed there. I planned to go for a few weeks, maybe a few months, in late 2008, as the economy was crashing into the Great Recession. Before I flew to NC, my mom planned to loan me about $150 to pay my back storage unit payments, and to get my Mac Powerbook out of a pawn shop, and have them shipped to me by friends. With those, I could start working on a documentary about BMX freestyle.
Long story short, I wound up stuck in North Carolina, I couldn't find a job, and when I asked my mom to loan me that money, she said, "Oh, we don't have money for that." I lost one of the best collections of BMX freestyle raw footage because I couldn't scrape up $150. I wound up losing everything I had from my BMX life, and everything else I owned,in the move to North Carolina.
I had well over 200 BMX magazines, beginning in late 1982, and including a complete set of FREESTYLIN' magazines. I had a collection of 40 to 60 BMX zines, going back to 1985. I had all my master tapes of the videos I produced, and I had 50 to 60 hours of raw footage that had never been used in any video, from 1990 to 2007. I also had my freestyle video collection, on VHS and DVD, including the copy of Headfirst Eddie Roman gave me personally. In other words, I had a pretty cool collection, and enough raw footage to make one or more BMX freestyle documentaries. That's exactly what I planned to do, when I got back on my feet financially. The dream of making a really cool BMX documentary, or maybe 3 or 4 docs on different scenes, kept me going though some really tough times in the late 90's and early 2000's. Some day, I knew I would put together an epic doc with my footage. Suddenly, in early December 2008, it was all gone, along with my Dyno, race bike, the last bike I rode daily.
I went into a deep depression, a near suicidal depression. I was stuck in a tiny town in a state I never wanted to move to, and I couldn't even find a crappy job. I'd just lost the dream of making a freestyle documentary, the thing hat had helped me survive several tough years leading up to that point. The one thing I did have was my parents' computer in the room I stayed in. I barely ever got on computers before that, I was a total Luddite. I'd bought a Mac Powerbook, and was trying to teach myself to edit video with Final Cut, but I never got online with that laptop. That was gone, too. I had avoided learning much about computers. I had published about 25 posts on a crappy taxi driver blog, but that was it. I knew next to nothing about computers or the internet in late 2008.
All I had left from 21 years of riding my BMX bike nearly every day, and several years working in and around the bike/skate industries, was memories, and my Haro two finger, brake lever key chain. So I decided to write a blog about my time working at FREESTYLIN' magazine. The FREESTYLIN' book, published by Andy Jenkins, Mark "Lew" Lewman, and Spike Jonze, working wiht Nike,had come out a few months earlier. I wasn't even mentioned, not even as a dork or a zine guy. So I decided I'd write maybe 20 or 30 posts about my time there. It wasn't about revenge, it was more like, "Hey, I worked there too, for a little while." I didn't know if anyone would ever read them. Then I'd flip a coin. Heads, I 'd hitch hike back to California, tails, I'd commit suicide. Like I said, I was REALLY depressed after getting trapped in North Carolina, and I'd completely lost touch with anyone in the BMX world, while driving a taxi, except for a few of the Sheep Hills/S&M guys, who'd call me for rides now and then. To me, the "world wide web" or the internet, was a big black hole of cyberspace, and things just went there and disappeared.
So, with nothing left but memories, I began to write little stories of things I saw happen while working at Wizard Publications in 1986. They were my stories, but mostly tales of what I saw at some cool, behind-the-scenes moment, or big happenings in the world of freestyle. Much to my surprise, after about 20 posts, I got contacted by China Krys Darrington, who we know as Krys Dauchy in the 80's. I'd only met her once, but she started emailing me after reading posts. Then Maurice Meyer contacted me, then a few other people. Connecting with old freestyle friends, and people I didn't even know back then, saved me from completely losing hope while in North Carolina. Since I couldn't find a job for years, I had a lot of time to write weird little stories of my BMX freestyle days. I wound up writing over 200 posts on my FREESTYLIN' Mag Tales blog. Then, in 2009, I started Freestyle BMX Tales blog, so I could tell other stories, those that didn't happen at Wizard Publications. In a couple of years, I wrote over 500 posts on that blog. So that's how the original Freestyle BMX Tales blog came to be, 2009-2012.
My dad had a stroke in March of 2012, and died in August of that year. A month or two after his death, I got really depressed, not just because of his death, but at my life in general. One night, I deleted all my blogs, over 700 BMX posts, and many other ones. I immediately regretted deleting my blogs, and eventually started a new blog. Since 2013, I've written several hundred other BMX freestyle related blog posts, across about five different blogs. I did another version of Freestyle BMX Tales on Wordpress, and then switched back to Blogger, starting yet another Freestyle BMX Tales. I later wrote BMX posts on Steve Emig: The White Bear blog, and now on Steve Emig Adventuring. I didn't just write freestyle blog posts, people read my posts. My top few blogs have landed over 370,000 total page views, up to this point. People are still reading those older blog posts.
Since I was able to finally get off the streets, and escape homelessness, a month ago, I decided it's time to write the first Freestyle BMX Tales ebook. It's coming out in the next month or so. In it, I'll compile a bunch of the best blog posts, all in one place. I'm also writing a bunch of new sections, to tie the different stories together. So that's the main thing I'm working on right now, and I'm hoping to have it available, as a downloadable ebook, in early January 2021.
Since I've written so many posts, I quickly realized that it will have to be two or three ebooks, and each one will be 150 to 200 pages. For about the price of a cup of coffee, you'll be able to get my best stories, and carry them with you and read them whenever you like. This first ebook will go from my beginning in BMX in 1982, into the first big wave of BMX freestyle, to 1987.
So that's what I'm up to. Keep an eye here, or on my Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest posts and tweets, to find out when the ebook launches..
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