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.
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.
Blog post: Venice Beach 1985 AFA Masters competition
Getting one of the first ACS Rotors and meeting Scot Breithaupt and Perry Kramer in 1985... when I had no idea who they were
The original core of SE Racing, founder Scot Breithaupt (left), and Perry Kramer (right), who the PK Ripper is named after. Public domain photo.
In June of 1985, Jay Bickel and his parents offered to take me along to the 1985 AFA Masters contest in Venice Beach, California. Jay and I got along real well, and I paid them a fraction of what the trip cost, and owe them a lot for taking me to my first big freestyle contest. We stayed in Marina Del Rey Hotel, Jay's dad was a lawyer, and they always traveled in style. I had no idea how good I had it then.
After competing in the first two freestyle contests in Idaho (and winning 17 & Over flatland in spring of 1985), the Venice Beach '85 AFA Masters was my first major contest. Flatland and ramp contests were only one year old at the time. American Freestyle Association founder Bob Morales had moved his efforts from putting on BMX skatepark contests, to promoting BMX flatland and quarterpipe contests in 1984. Bob, then a 20-year-old rider/entrepreneur/promoter turned BMX freestyle into a sport, and opened it up to hundreds, later thousands, of hungry riders nationwide.
But the day before the actual flatland contest, we hopped in the Bickels' Mercedes station wagon, and headed out into Southern California traffic to see a couple of Jay's sponsors. Stop one was at ACS, the component company that made the plastic, spoked Z-Rims that I rode then. They also had a brand new thing that just came out, the ACS Rotor, back brake cable detangler device. The "Potts Mod," invented a couple years before, got us freestylers running our front brake cable through our stem bolt, which kept it from getting bound up on barspin and flatland tailwhip tricks. But the back brake cables were still an issue in those early days of freestyle. A series of inventors came up with three different "detangler" devices to solve that problem, in 1985 and 1986. The ACS Rotor was the first of those devices to come out, followed later by the Robert Peterson designed Skyway Spinmaster, and a bit later, but much more trick, the Gyro designed by Brian Scura. As luck would have it, Jay Bickel was co-sponsored by SE Bikes, and by ACS then.
So Mr. Bickel drove us through the craziest traffic I'd ever seen in my life, and we wound up at a pretty average looking industrial building, where ACS was housed. I don't remember much, but the guy we talked to there was real cool, and gave us a tour of the business. What I remember is he didn't really talk to Jay and I as kids, but actually listened to us, as riders, and seemed interested in my thoughts on riding Z-Rims, and how different BMX components worked. Then he showed us the ACS Rotors. We'd heard of them in the magazines, but they weren't out yet, and we hadn't seen one in person. He showed us the new Rotor, and I think it was set up on a bike, and asked us what we thought. As basic at the Rotor seems now, it seemed pretty freakin' amazing back then.
Much to both of our surprise, he handed Jay and I ACS Rotors, and we assured him we'd get them on our bikes, and ride them in the Venice Beach contest the next day. As crazy as it sounds, Jay Bickel and me, two pretty good, but not great riders, but kids from fucking IDAHO, were two of the first freestylers to actually compete with the ACS Rotors on our bikes. Rotors became standard on freestyle bikes in the next few months, but we just happened to get them before most of the factory guys. That was just luck and good timing. I think one other rider had a Rotor the next day at the Venice Beach contest. So Jay and I wound up having pro riders and top ams stopping to check out our bikes, and ask us about the Rotors. I'd never even seen any top riders in person at that point, let alone met and talked to them. Suddenly guys I saw photos of in the magazines were asking me about how the the Rotor worked. Crazy.
After repeatedly thanking the guy at ACS (I totally don't remember his name, sorry), we piled back into the station wagon and headed off to Long Beach. Another 45 minutes or an hour in traffic, on what seemed like gigantic freeways, and we rolled up to another industrial building. We headed inside, and were met by the guy the Bickels dealt with primarily, SE Bikes business manager, Mike Devitt. He was professional and friendly, and led us into the office.
I need to preface this by saying that I'd been riding BMX pretty seriously (for an Idaho kid) for 2 1/2 years then, since 1982. I'd been reading BMX magazines since late 1982, early 1983. I didn't know shit about the history of BMX. I was 18, nearly 19, and Jay was 16, I think. There were no BMX documentaries then, and even Jay's "old" magazines, only went back a year or two before mine did. I knew who the current racing pros were then, like Stu Thomsen, Greg Hill, Harry Leary, Brent and Brian Patterson, Eric and Robbie Rupe, and a few others. As a freestyler, I knew who the top freestylers were, R.L. Osborn, Eddie Fiola, Martin Aparijo, Woody Itson, Mike Dominguez, Brian Blyther, Ron Wilkerson, and so forth. But I didn't know anything about how long they had been riding. I didn't know anything about who ran the different BMX companies, or how they started, or any of that. I was fucking clueless on what BMX had been before 1982. I was a young kid dreaming of becoming a pro in a brand new sport, the history of BMX racing and freestyle didn't matter to me then.
With that in mind, Mike Devitt pointed to two guys sitting on a nearby desk. Both had dark hair. One had real curly, longish hair, and the other guy had a thick beard, and thick wavy hair, 70's style. Mike said, "This is Scot Breithaupt and Perry Kramer." Jay and his parents had met Scot before, and knew who Perry was. But to me, they were told older guys (mid to late 20's), goofing around. I said, "Hi." They talked to us a bit. I had no idea who I was talking to.
Then Mike led us out for a tour of the factory. I got another shock. As a kid who grew up in Ohio and Idaho, I'd been to several of the factories my dad worked at, and took tours of a few factories as a school kid. My dad was a draftsman/engineer, who worked in an office. But over the years, he took me to some of the factories where the things he designed, like custom locomotives and mining machines, were built. To me then, a factory was a huge building, it was loud, there were high ceilings, forklifts rolling around, and dozens or hundreds of people busy working on big machines everywhere.
So when we walked into the SE Bikes factory, I expected to see dozens, maybe even hundreds, of people, big machines, welders, machinists, forklifts driving around, and all of that. The SE bikes "factory" was fucking empty. And it was quiet. Nothing was happening. First we saw the shipping area. No one was there. There were five or six rows of big, industrial shelving racks, piled with boxes which had the familiar SE Bikes logo. The coolest thing was a shopping cart with a pair of handlebars welded on it. It had a number plate that said, "Shipper Ripper."
Then Mike led us through a big doorway to the factory side. There were pieces of frames and forks in places, and one guy busy welding. One welder, that was the SE "factory" workforce in the summer of 1985. The Bickels later told me that Scot, the founder, had gotten heavy into drugs a couple years earlier, and the company had nearly collapsed as he went deep into the dark side of life. With Mike running the business end of things now (in 1985), they were getting it going again, and that's why it seemed like this huge brand in my head, but only had 4 people working there. And Scot and Perry, at least at the time, weren't really working.
I honestly had no idea what they were even doing there. They acted more like kids hanging out at a bike shop, joking and goofing around, than business guys, when I first saw them. I had no idea those were two of the best racers in the history of BMX, and that Scot helped create BMX racing itself. I just saw two 20-something guys joking around.
But that didn't matter much, they had two"huge" 8 foot high quarterpipes in the back, facing each other, halfpipe style, with 20 or 30 feet of floor between. They were built so SE factory vert rider, Todd Anderson, could practice when he came by. Mike said, "You guys want to ride the ramps?" "Uh... YEAH!". I may have always sucked at riding ramps, but I still loved trying to ride them. We grabbed our bikes from the station wagon, Jay's SE Quadangle with a coaster brake, and my freewheel Skyway T/A, rockin' red Z-Rims, and we did our best to air out of those huge ramps. Jay had a slightly undervert, 6 foot tall quarterpipe, in their driveway, which is what we were used to riding. I think Jay got a foot or two out of the 8 foot ramps, and I aired a little under coping. But we had a great time anyhow.
We were taking a breather when we heard something that sounded like a chainsaw start up in the front of the warehouse. We also heard some laughing. Jay and I looked at each other, confused. Suddenly the noise got louder, and Scot came racing around a shelving unit on an 80cc dirtbike, foot out, carving the the turn on the slippery warehouse floor. He whooped as he blew past us, and disappeared around the corner, down the far aisle. He made 4 or 5 laps around the warehouse, and then we heard the motorcycle idle a minute, rev up again, then Perry came ripping around past us. Jay and I just shook our heads, and went back to riding the quarterpipes.
After we were pretty worn out, we wound up by the wooden shipping bench, and Scot pointed out photos taped to the wall behind it, telling stories about each one. I seriously had no idea how ingrained Scot Breithaupt was, or that he went back to the very beginning of BMX racing itself, in 1970 (Chill out Dutch guys, I know your grandpas rode cruisers on dirt 20 years earlier, but BMX began in 1970).
Scot ended up giving Jay and I each an old poster, he had a stack of about 100 of them. It had about 12 or 15 top racers, including Scot, Perry, Stu Thomsen, and the late Kyle Flemming, on it. It was an Oakley grips poster, and the caption was "Our R&D department works weekends." The poster came out in 1980, I think, so it was already old in 1985. I think Scot and Perry signed them for us, I honestly don't remember. I wasn't into autographs then. But the poster was on my wall for the next 2-3 years. Scot also found a photo of the old Team Terrible Bus, from its epic days, and then took us out back and showed us the the remains of the bus, rusting on the side of the building. He told us they once had a turret on it with a tennis ball cannon. When one of their riders would win, they'd shoot tennis balls out across the pits at races. I'm not sure if that was true or not, but it sounded cool. But someone drove under a low overhang at a hotel, and knocked off the turret, and about 20 bikes.
After a good hour of stories from Scot Breithaupt and Perry Kramer, we headed back to the Marina Del Rey Hotel, where we stayed in style all weekend. It was only after we left the SE factory that the Bickels told me that Perry Kramer was the guy the legendary PK Ripper bike was named after. "Whoa, really?" was my reply. There's an old saying that goes, "When a pickpocket meets a saint, he sees only his pockets." I had no idea while talking to Scot and Perry that I was meeting two of the major forces in the history of BMX racing. Those two goofballs (as they seemed at first glance) did a lot for BMX in the 1970's and 1980's.
Jay and I spent a hour or so getting the ACS Rotors on our bikes, and dialing them in, which forced us to raise our stems and handlebars about an inch or inch and a half. It was the night before my first major contest, and with the Rotor on my bike, everything suddenly felt weird with the higher bars. So we adjusted our seats to match the higher handlebars, and then went out to the parking lot to practice our routines over and over and over, to get them down with our new ACS rotors. That was our first full day in Southern California that trip, for Jay Bickel and me, leading up to the Venice Beach AFA contest, the next day.
The Ultimate Weekend was released in the middle of October, 1990. This week is the 30th anniversary of its release. I wanted to do a 20 year anniversary video in 2010, and a 30th anniversary video this year, to come out right now. My life's been real weird over the last 20 years, and I couldn't make those happen. But a 30th anniversary video, The Ultimate Weekend II (#tuw2bmx) is in the early stages, and I'm gonna make it happen. I'm planning on a video release this time next year, and a whole lot of The Ultimate Weekend content for this whole next year, as it gets made.
BMX "died" in 1989, when the entire bike industry said, "BMX is dead, mountain bikes are the cool thing now." Money drained out of the 20 inch world. In 1990, while still working at Vision Skateboards/Vision Street Wear they had just dissolved Unreel Productions), I decided I wanted to self-produce a bike video. I produced the first six videos for the AFA in 1987, but Dave Alvarez at Unreel did the editing. I produced and edited the first 2-Hip video (2-Hip BHIP on YouTube now), in early 1989. But I wasn't sure I could actually produce, and sell, my own video.
I shot video on the weekends for 7-8 months. I spent $5,000 of my own money (because I was an idiot, and used to spending too much ,like Unreel did), and wound up selling 500+ copies through a shady surf video distributor. I'm pretty sure he sold A LOT more overseas. I made back $2,500, and after living off my credit cards at the same time, put myself $7,000 in debt, and then got a $7 an hour job.
But for 6-7 months (until Eddie Roman came out with Headfirst, the most influential BMX freestyle video EVER, hands down), I had the coolest rider-made video out there. The first mini-ramps in a video, the first spine ramp in a BMX video, the first handrail slide down stairs, the first ice pick grind on a street rail, and a few other BMX video firsts happened to be in this video. The first footage of the P.O. W. House, of Chris Moeller, of Dave Clymer, and the first S&M Bikes Shield Logo (spray painte on th eteam VW bus) were all in this video. Then unknown Jersey powerhouse, Keith Treanor, became the breakout star of the video, because he just raged every time we rode somewhere, always pushing the limits. Glad I made this thing, despite the financial flop part.
Now... finally... The Ultimate Weekend II is in the works... stay tuned.
If you're from Generation X, this theme and intro are still embedded in your brain.
I was a year out of high school, and manager of a tiny little amusement park in Boise, Idaho. The park was called The Fun Spot, and even in Boise, people made fun of it. But then, we made fun of Boise State in those days, too. "Are you going to college?" we'd ask our friends, "No, I'm going to Boise State," they'd reply. Or "Boise State University, where BS comes before U." Anyhow, I didn't have money for college, I almost joined the Marine Reserves that winter of '84-'85, but got booted from the delayed entry program. So in May of 1985, I left my line cook job at Chi-Chi's Mexican restaurant, and became manager of The Fun Spot for the summer. 18-years-old, running a small business, managing 12 or 13 high school kids, all making $2.10 an hour. I, however was raking in the cash, making a whopping, $3.10 an hour. Minimum wage was $3.35 then. We got paid under the immigrant farm worker law. But hey, it wasn't that bad, I got free Pepsi's all day, free popcorn, and cotton candy. If you ever work around cotton candy, you get sick of it about three hours. Pepsi and popcorn were nice perks, for the time. Here's what I looked like then, balancing on my Skyway T/A. Photo by Fun Spot co-worker, Vaughn Kidwell ( he did make it into the Marine Corps, later on).
There was one trick team in Boise then, I'm pretty sure it was the only one in Idaho at the time. Justin "Jay" Bickel and I made up the Critical Condition Stunt Team. That was the second incarnation of the team, the first was Jay and the other Boise freestyler, Wayne Moore. I met them at one of their shows, and rode in one or two shows with them, as I recall. Then Wayne decided to retire from freestyle, at the ripe old age of 17. Jay and I thought up the new name, and decided "stunt team" sounded way cooler than trick team. We rode in every parade in the Boise area, area, and Jay's mom lined up a few free trick shows now and then. I'd given up BMX racing in the spring of 1984, where I never made it out of the 17 novice class. Mostly, I hardly ever raced novices, I was always racing intermediates, and often experts, like local speed demon Clint Davies. I did do 360 tailtaps in motos a few times, on a roller jump, on a track I designed. That was the highlight of my racing career. There were some good racers in Boise, current USA BMX guy, Shannon Gillette, was a 12 or 13 X when I was racing.
But freestyle, and managing The Fun Spot, were my life that summer of 1985. Like freestylers everywhere, I'd wait for the new issue of FREESTYLIN' magazine to show up, and read everything, even the ads, twice, the first day it came in the mail. Then I'd head over to Jay's house, after work the next day, and we'd discuss all the new tricks, and try whatever looked possible. Jay's parents were totally supportive of freestyle, and basically became my "freestyle family," while I lived in Boise. At a time when everyone gave us shit for "doin' tricks on little kid's bikes," Jay's parents, Dwight and Cindy, were full bore behind the sport. They actually bought the first AFA "franchise" from Bob Morales, even before Randy Loop, in Ohio, and Ron Stebbene, on the East Coast, got contests going. After sucking at every sport throughout my childhood except dodgeball, chubby kids are good a dodging), I finally found a sport I could be mediocre at, or even good. That was mostly because no one else did it, but I didn't mind. That was awesome to me.
That summer, the Bickels asked if I wanted to go with them to the AFA Masters contest in Venice Beach, California. The very first flatland and ramps BMX freestyle contests, ever, were the year before. I think Venice Beach 1984, was the first AFA contest. Freestyle was brand new as a sport, and going to California would be my first chance to see the top pros and amateurs ride. My answer was something like, "Hell yeah!" They asked me to pay $100 towards the trip, and they'd handle the rest. I really didn't have any idea how much that trip actually cost, but my share was a lot more that $100, I know that now. But Jay and I got along well, and rode together 2-3 times a week, on his wedge ramp and six foot high quarterpipe. So we packed into their Mercedes station wagon, and Mr. Bickel drove us to Southern California, my first time going there.
I didn't realize it , but, because Jay's dad was a lawyer and made real good money, they liked to travel first class. So we stayed at the luxurious Marina Del Rey hotel, right on the harbor, a short bike ride from Venice Beach. When we pulled up to the hotel, there was a really cool looking sports car, one I couldn't identify, parked to the side of the entrance. While Jay's parents went to check in, Jay and I walked around and scoped out the car. It turned out to be a Maserati Merak, like this one, the first Maserati Jay and I had ever seen. We immediately wondered if it could do 185, like in the Joe Walsh song. That was a cool start to our first night in Southern California.
Jay and I walked our freestyle bikes through the upscale hotel lobby, feeling like movie stars or something, because no one seemed to care. After getting everything taken to our room, we went for a bike ride on the beach bike path, heading north, away from Venice Beach, out of Marina Del Rey. That's when I saw something that amazed me, California girls... in tiny swimsuits. I literally did the Jack Tripper move, staring a a woman and riding right off the bike path... TWICE... in like 100 yards. I totally went over the bars, into the sand, both times. Jay was laughing his ass off. He said it was funnier than the Three's Company into (above). I think we ate in the hotel restaurant that night, since it was already dusk when we got back to the hotel. We had a lot of driving around the L.A. area to do the next day. I'll get into those stories in the next post.
But for our second night in L.A., The Bickels said they always took Jay out for a crab dinner, his favorite food, the night before a contest. For me, epic seafood was the Skipper's all-you-can-eat buffet in Boise. Fried fish of some kind, slathered in tartar sauce, tons of big French fries, and mounds of coleslaw. I'm not much of a gourmand. I was way out of my element when we walked into the Chart House the next night. The waiter got us drinks, as we check out the menus. I'd only eaten crab when the youth group at our church had crab dinner fundraisers. It was good, but I wanted to try something else. Our waiter said the special that night was teriyaki thresher shark, and, like an idiot, I said, "OK, I'll have that." I'd never eaten shark before, so it sounded cool. Jay's parents gave each other a funny look, but didn't say anything, and they ordered their meals, and Jay got his crab legs. The shark tasted amazing, and I found out I really do like seafood, or at least well cooked shark.
Later that night, back in the hotel room, Jay asked me why I got the shark, and I told him I didn't really know what to get. He said, "It's cool, but the specials they offer are crazy expensive, that was a $27 dinner." I FREAKED, and went to Jay's parents' room right away to thoroughly apologize. They laughed it off, and said, they didn't mind paying a bit extra. They were glad I came on the trip to keep Jay company, and were happy to help me get to the contest. They also said that if I wasn't sure what to order at another upscale restaurant, I could ask them for suggestions. Lesson learned.
While Southern California's best BMX freestylers were eating at Carl's Jr. or In-N-Out, or eating bologna sandwiches in the back of a smelly van that night, I was living it up, joyfully dining on teriyaki thresher shark in luxurious Marina Del Rey. OK, that's it for today's freestyle BMX tale. I need to go panhandle money for a cheap burger or something. Heh, heh. Times change...
A thresher shark hunting, using tail slaps to stun fish.
One time Sheep Hills Local, Cory Nastazio, jumping at Sheep in a late 1990's JNCO commercial. This is the later part of the classic Sheep Hills era, when most of the best dirt jumpers in the world rode at Sheep Hills, and the X-Games was just beginning to show BMX dirt jumping to the rest of the world on mainstream TV, making these trails famous around the world.
I first wandered into the area now known as Sheep Hills in early 1988. I was looking for a mini-ramp some skateboarders at Vision told me about. Starting in December 1987, I worked at Unreel Productions, the video company owned by Vision Skateboards/Vision Street Wear. Skateboarding, BMX, and BMX freestyle were peaking at that time, and the money was rolling into the Vision empire by the bucketful. Unreel was located on a little office park street called Brioso, right on the edge of the mesa, the bluff in Costa Mesa, above present day Sheep Hills, and a few hundred yards towards the ocean. My main job at Unreel consisted of sitting in a tiny room with a whole bunch of different video machines, and making copies of tapes for people throughout the Vision world. Unreel had a $500,000, component Betacam edit bay, two $50,000 pro caliber Sony Betacam video cameras, and 11 employees, then. It was started, and run by Don Hoffman, longtime surfer and skateboarder, and the son of the owners of Pipeline Skatepark. The Vision empire then included Vision, Sims, and Schmitt Stix skateboards, Sims Snowboards, and Vision Street Wear clothing. The company was growing like crazy, and had something like 800 total employees then, and made about $50 million in 1988, I believe. Those were the gravy days.
Unreel Productions made full length videos to sell through Vision's 3,000 skate shop network, we made commercials to put in the Vision videos, and we made videos for trade shows and other events to promote Vision's companies. We even produced the first nationally syndicated action sports TV show series, called "Sports On the Edge." Between all of those, different people would call me up, or walk in my room, and say, "I need 10 copies of this by tomorrow," or "I need a copy of that segment to send to a TV show," stuff like that. So I sat there day after day, making small numbers of videos for people throughout the Vision businesses. I also ran errands, did odd jobs around the office, and basically was an assistant to everyone. I didn't produce or direct anything, there were a bunch of older surfer guys who did that. The pay was better than I got at the AFA the year before, and I got to know all the Vision skaters and Sims snowboarders, from Mark Gonzales and Gator, to guys like Shaun Palmer and Tom Sims himself.
I also made a window dub of every tape shot by Pat Wallace, our staff cameraman, and he traveled to all the AFA contests, the 2-hip contests, and the NSA skate contests. So I saw all the raw footage, and hand labeled all those tapes. In one of those tapes, Pat went out to some mini-ramp, hidden in trees somewhere, with some Vision skaters, and I later asked some of them where that ramp was. They told me it was hidden in the bushes, in the sketchy oil fields area, at the bottom of 19th Street, in Costa Mesa. That was only a few blocks away from our office. Since I rode my bike to work 3 or 4 days a week, I rode down there not long after, to the area where Sheep Hills was later built, looking for that mini-ramp. I never did find it.
What I did find was this dry ditch, which later showed up in the 1988 Psycho Skate video (in the intro, at 1:12), and the 1989 Barge At Will video(2:02, where Marty "Jinx" Jimenez tells the police helicopter, "Fuck You" at 2:02).
It wasn't a great place to ride on a bike, but it was fun to carve along. I soon began to head down 19th street after work, rather than heading towards Pacific Coast Highway, when I rode my bike home. I'd ride the ditch a bit, and then take about 3 hours or so to hit a series of little street spots all the way across Huntington Beach, to my apartment on the north side of H.B.. So, a couple years before the first jumps were built in what is now Sheep Hills, I rode through the trails that you take to get to Sheep, 2 to 4 times a week.
At that time, the big condo complex, on the hill above Sheep Hills, didn't exist yet, that was more open land then, with some hiking, dog walking, and riding trails through it. There were some jumps up in that area, and no one seemed to know who built them. There was a ditch jump, the kind you ride down into, and flyout on the other side. Freestylers like me, who couldn't jump doubles worth a damn, loved flyout jumps back then. There was also a big (for that time) hip jump on one trail, maybe 4 feet high, and 7 or 8 feet long. I learned about those jumps from none other than "Hollywood" Mike
Miranda. Yeah, this guy.
Mike was a top pro racer in the early 1980's, and a really good jumper for that era. He was also show off, and shameless self-promoter, and so he wound up test riding bikes for the BMX magazines, and getting a lot of coverage outside of racing itself. That's the "Hollywood" aspect of Mike Miranda. By 1988, he was working as the Vision BMX team manager, taking care of the BMX racers and freestylers sponsored by Vision Street Wear clothes. Mike called me up one day at Unreel, to organize a video shoot for Vision clothes, with racer/jumper Rich Bartlett. Being the only BMX guy on the Unreel staff, I somehow got to tag along on the shoot, I think to carry the tripod or something. I'm pretty sure that was in early spring of 1988. We went to the hip jump, and Mike had his bike, and Rich had his bike, so they started hitting the jump. Pat the cameraman, got the video camera ready, and someone was there shooting still photos as well. I was stoked to find out that there were a couple of cool jumps just blocks away from work. Mike hit the hip jump a few times, just for fun, and then Rich hit it a bunch of times for the actual photo/video shoot. I think the stills wound up in a Vision Street Wear ad in the BMX magazines, and the video, like most of the video that we shot at Unreel, never got used for anything. There's a HUGE amount of high quality BMX/freestyle video form the late 1980's, that no one but me has ever seen, sitting in boxes somewhere, in a Vision warehouse. It'd be cool to dig into the footage now.
After that, my ride home from work would start with the ditch jump and the hip jump, on the hill above the oil fields, and then I'd head down, and maybe session the ditch a little, then ride out to Victoria/Hamilton to Brookhurst street, over the Santa Ana river ditch, and on through Huntington Beach. I know Mike Miranda hit that hip jump now and then, but I never ran into him on my rides home. I did run into freestyler Josh White one day, in 1989, while riding the flyout jump. I'd been trying bunnyop tailwhips then, and could never land them, and also trying tailwhips off little jumps, but couldn't land those either. At the time, no one had done a tailwhip off a jump. Joe Johnson did them on vert, and learned double tailwhips that year, landing his first at the same contest where Mat Hoffman landed his first 900. Josh White, the day I ran into him, said he'd been thinking about trying tailwhips on dirt, so we both started trying them on the flyout jump. It was the perfect place to learn weird new tricks. It was a 6 or 7 foot roll down into the ditch, then a 6 or 7 foot flyout, and you'd hover for a second, but only about 2 feet above the ground, when flying out. Neither Josh nor me could land one that day, though we were both beginning to get the back end of the bike all the way around. Josh landed his first tailwhip off a jump a year later, which I wrote a big blog post about a while back.
That was the only other BMX rider I ever ran into while riding those jumps. As I rode through the wide area by the creek, night after night, I kept noticing this little trail, barely more than a rabbit trail, on the other side of the creek. There was also a trail along the opposite side of the creek, with a little tiny tabletop jump on it, and I'd hit that once in a while. Finally, one night, I decided to follow that little rabbit trail, to see where it went. So I walked my bike along it, hoping there were no rattlesnakes hiding in the weeds by the trail. I went through maybe 100 yards of brush and little trees, and then it opened up into a meadow, an big open area. I thought, "Oh my God, this would be a great place to build some jumps." That place was where Sheep Hills is now, and the little rabbit trail was where the main wide trail into Sheep is now. But it was just an area of weeds then. Back then, in 1988-1989, BMX jumps got plowed most every where we built them, unless it was a real out of the way place. Land in Southern California was expensive, and is way more expensive now, and no one wanted kids getting hurt on their land, and then having parents sue them. So the key to building jumps was to find a hidden little place no one cared about.
I actually bought a shovel at the swap meet that weekend, and planned to go back to that open area and start building jumps. But I lived over on the other side of Huntington Beach, off of Warner, and I ended up building a flyout jump, and building up some tiny doubles that were already there, in the Bolsa Chica wetlands area, maybe 150 yards from where The Wetlands trails are today. So I forgot about the Sheep Hills area. In early 1990, Unreel got shut down, as the Vision empire imploded due to growing too fast, and the collapse of the skateboard and BMX industries. I got moved to the main office in Santa Ana, and never went back to that area in Costa Mesa for along time.
I made The Ultimate Weekend video in 1990, the 8th BMX video I produced, and the first one I totally self-produced. I shot video at the Oceanview jump, and Edison (High School) jumps, and the P.O.W. House backyard in 1990. But no riders ever mentioned a place called Sheep Hills. If you ask the original Sheep Hills jump builders, then known as Hippy Jay and Hippy Sean, they say they started work on Sheep Hills in 1990. But I never heard of it while making my video, which came out in October of that year. So they must have started building in the late Fall.
Back then, the Sheep hills area would flood during Southern California's winter rainy season, and just be totally muddy, from December into March. Sometime in 1991, late spring or early summer, I think, I went with some riders, probably Keith Treanor and John Povah, to this new place called Sheep Hills. There were three berms in the main line, and I think the first version of the bowl jump was built, and it wasn't very big, because I could jump it. Since it was out of sight of almost everyone, and since no one could park right by the jumps to draw attention to them, and we all had to ride in, the place went unnoticed.
Sheep Hills got built up in 1991-1992-1993, into about the size it is now, but with smaller jumps and lines. It wasn't until the Sheep locals actually drained the entire nearby pond to water the jumps, that police and official type people took notice. Somehow, being so out of the way, Sheep Hills has survived for 30 years, and became known around the world. It's not part of an official park, and it shows up on Google Maps. The legendary status of Sheep came since so many of the 1990's top dirt came out of the Sheep Hills scene. In the early days, the best known riders were the P.O.W. House/S&M Bikes crew guys, like Chris Moeller, Dave Clymer, John Paul Rogers, Alan Foster, Todd Lyons, Lawan Cunningham, and later Brian Foster, and several others. The next generation that came up, to which Sheep was their first main trails spot, were Shaun Butler, "Barspinner" Ryan Brennan, Josh Stricker, Freddie Chulo, Marvin Lotterle, Jason "Timmy" Ball, Neal Wood, Adam & Jason Pope, and that crew. European racer Christophe Leveque was a longtime local as well. Later on, in the late 90's, came Cory "Nasty" Nastazio, Chris Duncan, and Stephen Murray, as the top names local at Sheep. There was always a whole crew of good local riders as well, most of whom never became top pros.
One last little story about Sheep Hills. One day at Unreel, sometime in 1988,we got talking about that area. Pat Wallace, the Unreel cameraman said, "You know they found a 4 foot long alligator down in that creek a few years ago, right?" I didn't. Pat was known for telling tall tales... sometimes. But he also had a lot of random, weird facts in his head. I tried to find proof of the alligator story, but in those pre-internet days, I couldn't find an old news article anywhere. So maybe that's true, and maybe it's not.
That leaves only one mystery, where the hell did the name Sheep Hills come from, anyhow? I actually asked original builder, Hippy Jay, a few months ago. He said that when they first started building the trails, he called them "Hollywood," after Mike Miranda, who used to jump the hip jump I mentioned earlier, and other jumps nearby. Then one day, some local kids showed up to ride, and they were calling the place Sheep Hills. Jay had no idea where the name came from. There are no sheep. Hell, there are no hills right where the jumps are. But the name "Sheep Hills" somehow popped up among the local, Costa Mesa, kids, and the name stuck. A hundred years earlier, there were shepherds who raised sheep and goats on the mesa, and the area is known as Sheep Hill or Goat Hill to some really old locals. That's there the name Goat Hill Tavern, a Costa Mesa bar (140+ beers on tap) came from. So that's my personal story on what I know about Sheep Hills, before it became known as Sheep Hills. Here's one last video, rapped by pro skater, Pro Riders founder, and old friend of mine from a Vision skateboard tour we went on, Chris Gentry.
I'm not sure what the "ten years" in this video was. This video's from the Boozer Jam in 2014, 24 years into the life of Sheep Hills. What every, it's a cool video.
Having worked a short time at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines back in 1986, I've seen a lot of great BMX photos, published and not published. None of these are that caliber. But using an old iPhone 5 that Steve Crandall gave me a couple years ago, I captured these images at Sheep Hills in 2019. This photo above, unknown rider to me, X-Up over the Boozer line, Boozer Mike Memorial Jam, 2019.
S&M and Rock Star sponsored female ripper, Jesse Gregory (@lilbmxwolf), throwing out what us old guys call either a one-legged Hannah, or a Griz Air. Hell yeah!
X-Games Real MX 2019 winner, Colby Raha takes it back to his BMX roots with a flip at the Boozer Mike Memorial Jam, 2019.
Rider unknown to me, but he needed no snow to snap this toboggan.
Rider unknown, but a great Leary (lookback to freestylers), over the hip. Boozer Mike Memorial Jam, 2019. #steveemigadventuring, #steveemigphoto
