Classic Eddie Fiola, tearing up the Pipe Bowl at Pipeline Skatepark, Upland, California, 1985.
If you're a BMX freestyler from the 1980's, you know BMX racing, and then freestyle, were born in Southern California. The early stars were guys that grew up in the SoCal BMX scene, and took to trick riding. Bob Haro got the ball rolling, then came R.L. Osborn, Bob Morales, Eddie Fiola, Brian Blyther, Martin Aparijo, Woody Itson, Mike Dominguez, and several others. These were guys that were there in Southern California in the early 1980's, and then freestyle began to grow into a sport and a lifestyle.
As these guys started getting photos in the magazines "trick riding," and riding in skateparks, the idea spread. Weird kids across the U.S., the U.K., and around the world got stoked on this new thing called BMX freestyle. I was one of those kids. I got into BMX in a trailer park outside Boise, Idaho, in 1982. Blue Valley trailer park had about a dozen teenage guys, and 4 teenage girls. One girl was older than all of us, and dated older guys. Of the remaining three girls, one had a long term boyfriend, one was a prude, and the last one was ugly, but liked to mess around. Since all of us were taking turns with the one ugly girl, we had a lot of time on our hands, out in the desert, far from town. So we started riding our crappy BMX bikes every evening, and trying to outdo each other. BMX became our thing that summer, and we all started racing at the end of the 1982 season.
We also started buying BMX magazines in late 1982. In the January 1983 issue of BMX Plus!, I saw an article that blew my mind. You can find that article, on scan page 27, if you look up the issue here. My mind was blown by this photo of a HUGE, DEEP skatepark bowl, with a pile of bikes in the bottom, and all these riders sitting on the lip of the pool. I had no idea that skatepark pools like that, the Combi-Pool at Pipeline Skatepark, even existed. I had no idea BMXers rode in skateparks then. It was all new to me. I'd never lived in a city that had a skatepark. I'd never seen one. I lived in Ohio as a kid, then New Mexico and then Idaho. Lots of woods, some desert, no skateparks. The article in BMX Plus! opened up a whole new world to me, showing me the gnarliest form of BMX... skatepark riding.
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That was way before the internet, before rider-made videos, a time when regional things could remain unknown to the larger world. This was back when there were 15 channels on TV, only BMX Plus! was on the news stand at Albertson's grocery store in Boise, and most of BMX was unknown to us kids across the U.S. and the world. All we had were the magazines, BMX Plus! at first, and then we discovered BMX Action when we started buying bikes parts, at Bob's Bikes (and Lawn Mower Repair), in Boise. For all of us kids riding out in the non-California part of the world, the BMX magazines were our only look at the BMX pros and riding then.
As 1983 progressed, and I got more into racing, and then into freestyle, I saw more and more photos and articles with Eddie Fiola, the original King of the Skateparks. Like riders all over, I saw him as the best known rider in the sport at the time, though R.L. Osborn was close. I went to Boise High School, had 400 kids in my class, and maybe 3 of them, all skaters, had heard of Eddie Fiola then. I was the only BMX freestyler in my school. He was Michael Jordan in my world of freestyle, but freestyle was still unknown to mainstream Boise culture.
While I began to dream of someday becoming a pro freestyler, and going on tour across the country, I also lived in an everyday world where dreams didn't come true. It was high school in small town America, we all drank beer on the weekends, and talked big about things we wanted to do someday, but nobody every actually made those dreams happen. People in magazines and on TV were "those other people," in that weird world of famous people. And normal people knew we'd never be a part of that world. We'd grow up, flunk out of college, and work at some factory job that we hated our whole lives. That was the "real world," in 1983, while I was in high school. But I wasn't "normal," I was weird, and I just kept dreaming of some kind of life other than working in a factory or office at a job I hated.
Racing turned into freestyle for me, and I joined Idaho's first, and only, trick team, with Justin Bickel and Wayne Moore. Then Wayne retired, at the ripe old age of 17, and Justin and I reformed the team, naming it the Critical Condition Stunt Team. We did a few free shows, and rode in a bunch of parades around Boise. BMX freestyle became my thing.
One thing led to another, and in 1985, my dad got a job in San Jose, California. My family moved there. I finished my summer job in Boise, then drove to San Jose. If you've read my blogs for a while, you know I started a zine, met the Curb Dogs, Skyway team, and the Golden Gate Park crew, and rode with those guys for a year. Then Andy Jenkins, FREESTYLIN' magazine editor, called up one day, and offered me a potential job at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN', based on 11 issues of my zine.
Less than a year after leaving Boise, Idaho, I was suddenly working at Wizard Publications, was roommates with Gork and Lew, and Eddie Fiola came in the offices regularly, because he was dating Windy Osborn then, and to ride the T.O.L. Ramp out in the parking lot. Somehow, and it still baffles me, a big part of my ridiculous dream to make it in BMX freestyle, came true. OK, I never became a pro rider, I was along way from that. But I wound up knowing all the pros, going on photos shoots, sessioning with them at The Spot at night, or on weekends. I became a part of the BMX industry, but was still that kid from Idaho thinking "Holy shit! Is this really happening?" as I hung out with the people who'd been my heroes only months earlier.
This is the AFA freestyle newsletter in 1987, on the left is the first issue I worked on, but done mostly by Bob Morales. On the left is the renamed newsletter, with my photo of Eddie Fiola at Pipeline on the cover, a few months later.
The thing about California, Southern California, in particular, is that it has a culture where a lot of people not only dream big, but then work to achieve their dreams. The freestylers coming up in the late 1970's, and early 1980's, were in Southern California culture, they knew people who had built businesses, or made big money in real estate, or appeared in TV shows or movies, or tried weird and creative ideas. While most Californians are pretty normal, working people, there's always been a culture of trying new things out here.
In most of the U.S., and other countries, I imagine, people with new ideas were made fun of, and often stamped out by the local powers at be. California has been a place where weird ideas can germinate and take root, for at least 200 or 300 years, maybe longer. California itself was a weird idea, first as part of Mexico, then later part of the U.S. A small group in NorCal even pretended to be their own country for a while. So while BMX freestyle was a "cool new thing" to try for the early riders like Eddie Fiola, Martin Aparijo, R.L. Osborn, Mike Buff, Bob Morales, and others, it was something earth shattering and amazing to the rest of us across the country and the world. The places these riders rode, the buildings where the magazines were located, the ramps and pools and riding spots we saw in the magazines, became truly legendary places to those of us who got into riding in places outside of SoCal.
Few places were on the scale of Pipeline Skatepark, in Upland. Up-land, even the name of the city seemed to know big air would happen there. The Pipe Bowl, with its 8 foot transition and 4 feet of vert, but no coping, with Eddie and Brian and Mike blasting 7-8-9 feet out, and that huge full pipe in the background, that was hallowed ground to us young riders of the mid-80's. The most amazing air photos of 1983-1984-1985 all seemed to happen in that one pool.
Somehow, in late August or September of 1987, I wound up there one afternoon, shooting photos of Eddie Fiola. Armed with my Pentax ME Super, a couple rolls of film, and the stock, 50mm lens, I walked around the pool whose photos I'd drooled over for years. I got laid off at Wizard, in December 1986, mostly because I didn't like the band Skinny Puppy. I spent a month riding with Craig Grasso every day (which I highly recommend), and then Bob Morales hired me to be editor/photographer of the AFA newsletter. We decided to do the main interview and photos with Eddie one month, so I called him up and set-up a photo shoot.
Here's the weird thing. At that time, in 1987, there was this story going around the BMX industry that Eddie Fiola was burned out on riding. The skatepark era had come and gone. We were in the AFA contest, quarterpipe era. Yeah, Eddie ripped on quarterpipes, but there was a whole new group of riders coming up and challenging "the old pros." Todd Anderson, Dino Deluca, Dave Voelker, Dennis McCoy, Josh White, Joe Johnson, and that crazy young kid from Oklahoma, Mathew Hoffman. They were all nipping at the heels of Fiola, Blyther, and Dominguez on vert. Plus GT made their riders tour all the freakin' time. The word in the industry, in late 1987, was that Eddie Fiola had had enough. He was going to ride out his three year contract, and walk away from BMX freestyle. Maybe he'd go act in commercials in Hollywood or something, he'd done a bit of that. Nobody knew. Anyhow, that was the industry rumor when I drove the AFA van up to Pipeline skatepark one afternoon in 1987, to meet Eddie Fiola, shoot photos, and tape an interview.
I'd only been there once, with Justin Bickel and his family, in 1985. We didn't get to ride, we just looked through the fence. The Pipe Bowl seemed so much smaller, and the full pipe bigger, in real life. The place was still legendary, and mysterious, to me in 1987. Eddie Fiola showed up, wearing Levi's and a T-shirt, and we went in. In about 60 seconds, the whole myth of Eddie Fiola being a burned out pro blew apart. Eddie just started fucking SHREDDING the Pipe Bowl. And he was having FUN. He was on home turf, no contest, no crowd, no sponsor's banners on the fence, only a handful of skaters in the other pools. It was just me and Eddie at the Pipe Bowl. And he was going off. Huge airs, 7-8 feet+ out of the 12 foot deep bowl. His classic one hander-one footers, and other variations. He carved high over vert in the full pipe. He talked to me as he was riding. I saw a whole bunch of the lines we never saw in magazines, the smoothness, the flowing style.
I wanted to get a photo of Eddie doing the footplant at the back of the pipe. By this point, I'd seen a couple of videos of Eddie riding the Pipe Bowl, and he always did a footplant on the five foot fence, above a ten foot deep section of pool, behind the full pipe. We never saw that in the magazines, and it was basically a stall point for him. But it was so much gnarlier in person, and it was something there'd never been a photo of in the magazines. I wanted to catch something I hadn't seen before, so my sketchy photo of his footplant became the cover shot. There were a few more photos of Eddie in the article, but I lost my copy of this newsletter about 30 years ago. The photo above of the newsletter just popped up on Facebook.
Yes, is was the AFA newsletter, not near as cool as a magazine photo. Eddie was doing me, Bob Morales, and the AFA a favor by letting me do that shoot. He could have blown it off. The cool thing about the AFA newsletter was that every serious freestyle got a copy mailed to them. The might not have talked about it, but everybody flipped through the AFA newsletter back then.
I was stoked Eddie did that photo shoot. Because watching Eddie Fiola ride the Pipe Bowl was magic. And to walk the edge of the bowl shooting photos, where Oz, John Ker, Windy, Guy-B and others had shot the photos that made me want to stick with freestyle years before, was fucking amazing. Eddie rode quarterpipes well. And he tore up the T.O.L. ramp at Wizard. But only at a skatepark, with all kinds of lines and terrain, could I really see what made Eddie Fiola the original King of the Skateparks, the #1 guy for us kids in 1983-1984, as "freestyle" blew up in the magazines. His flow and style in the pool showed me why freestyle was such a cool thing.
Looking back from 33 years later, Eddie and Martin ride flatland for fun at HB Tuesdays every week (in Huntington Beach, either by the pier, or across from the Hyatt, in the parking lot). I've also seen shots of him riding pump tracks, which looks like a blast. So much for the "burnout" industry rumor, from way back then. Riding bikes is still fun, and always will be, and Eddie's got as much style now, as ever.
