This post was sparked by a album of photos of old school rider Craig Grasso in the Facebook group "Freestylin'. It's a bummer, but there aren't many videos with Grasso riding on You Tube. So I picked this one, which is my edit of the first 2-Hip Meet the Street contest in Santee, California in 1988, from the 2-Hip BHIP video. Craig Grasso is wearing the black beret and yellow and black shirt. You can see him painting at :25, and riding at 1:54, 2:36, 4:11, 4:34, and 4:46. Craig was known as a weird, artsy, funny guy, and not a top placing contest rider. But he ripped it up. If you check the results for this comp, Grasso came in 4th in the "Great" (pro) class, behind Dave Voelker, Craig Campbell, and R.L. Osborn. That's some seriously heavy company. Just for the record, I'm the guy who ghost rides his bike into the big wall. I decided I'd only include myself in this clip with a goofy shot, since there were so many guys ripping it up that day, and I couldn't give everyone fair video time.
I actually met Craig Grasso on my first trip to Southern California, riding along with my Idaho trick team partner Jay Bickel. His family took me to the AFA contest in Venice Beach in 1985. Jay had a co-sponsorship deal with SE Racing, and they sponsored Todd Anderson and Grasso then. So on my first trip to see the "real" BMX freestyle world, Jay and I hung out with, Todd, Craig, Steve Broderson and that crew all weekend. It was epic for us.
My life took me to San Jose, California later that year, when my dad got a job there. I rode with the Golden Gate Park/Curb Dogs/Ground Control riders for a year, and published a zine about that scene. That little zine catapulted me to a job at Wizard Publications. That job changed the course of my life in a huge way, and landed me in Redondo Beach, CA, as a roommate with my co-workers Gork and Lew. Their local riding spot was The Spot, a brick area on the north end of the Redondo Beach Pier complex. I followed Lew down there night after night. Gork, although editor of racing magazine BMX Action then, came down to freestyle at least 4 nights a week. Locals Craig Grasso, and high school kid Chris Day were down there every night as well. R.L. Osborn came down to ride 2 or 3 times a week. Skater Rodney Mullen also would practice on the concrete next to The Spot when staying with Steve Rocco for a few weeks at a time. It was a great scene, but a much different vibe than the NorCal guys I'd been riding with. Not better or worse, just different. Industry guy and natural comedian McGoo came down regularly, often bringing Ceppie Maes and Dizz Hicks with him. They were the CW factory team then.
We all sessioned and practiced our flatland for a 2 or 3 hours every night. Chris didn't do anything but flatland, and he was busting his amazing "flail" boomerangs back then, swinging his legs wide like a flair in gymnastics. He was kicking his legs higher and higher, blowing all our minds, as the weeks went by. Grasso also had a trick he called the Flail. But it was totally different. Craig would start pedaling fast, heading towards a group of people either walking or riding up the bike path. He would pretend to slip a pedal, drop down onto his top tube, and purposely get all squirrely like he was out of control and going to run into the people. It was always hilarious as people bailed out of the way in panic. That, and random jokes, were ways that Craig kept us all laughing night after night.
Flatland riding then was filled with single tricks, like backwards wheelies (on the back pegs), sliders, boomerangs, decades, lawnmowers, and the like. R.L. Osborn was starting to link his tricks together, something that I, myself, had also begun doing. He was as much, much better rider, of course, but we had the desire to link tricks in common then. We also all played games of FREESTYLE, often, like HORSE in basketball, where one guy would do a trick, and everyone else had to pull it or get a letter. That helped us all progress and try new stuff.
Lew at the time had nerves of steel. I would get nervous riding with R.L. or other top riders that came by. Lew would pull his tricks solid, and with tons of style, no matter who was watching. So that was the main form or riding for our group, the group that Lew dubbed, "Club Homeboy" that fall, before opening that club up to riders everywhere.
At times, for whatever reason, a couple of us would wander off and do some street riding. At the time, street skating, led by Mark Gonzales (who came by The Spot a couple times) was just becoming a thing. And Andy Jenkins and Lew at FREESTYLIN' were starting to cover BMX street riding in the magazine. Those little roaming street sessions were usually Grasso, Lew, and me wandering around to hit some bank or curb jumps. Grasso, being the weird, artsy guy, even back then, showed his latent creativity in finding weird things to try and ride. At the time, wall rides and wall fakies hadn't been invented. So we'd do kickturns and footplants on banks a lot. Even then, Craig Grasso shredded the street obstacles.
On one of those street sessions, Craig and I realized we both liked to do a backside boneless on a bank. A backside boneless is a skateboard trick, basically like a BMX can-can footplant, BUT done as one swinging, pendulum motion. Brian Blyther had been doing can-can footplant flyouts on vert for a while. But on those, he would flyout, land on the can-can foot, stall a few seconds, then hop back in But Craig and I, independent of each other, had learned to do a more fluid version, more like a skater, on banks. What was really weird, was when we tried to figure out exactly when each of us learned that trick. We discovered we "invented" that trick, me in NorCal in him in SoCal, in the same week. Trippy. This is something I saw fairly often in the early days of freestyle. I called it, "spontaneous revelation." It's more like a form of the "100th monkey" concept. Riders in different areas, with no contact to each other, would come up with the same trick at almost the same time. It seems the idea was out there, and Grasso and I tapped into it simultaneously. That happened to other riders with other tricks as well back in the 80's.
Then I got laid off at Wizard in December of 1986. The inside joke was that I got fired because I didn't like the band Skinny Puppy, a big favorite of Andy J. and Lew. But I just didn't fit the Wizard scene, I was way to uptight and dorky. But I had enough money saved to pay my rent for January of 1987. So I was still roommates with Gork and Lew while searching for a new job. So everyday that month, I'd meet up with Grasso, who lived at home then, and we'd ride around and session different places all day. One day we'd bomb down 190th street hill and head inland to session a some skaters' ramp. The next day we'd head up PCH (Pacific Coast Highway) and session the Jinx Bank and the Fat Burger banks. The next day, we'd wander around an find other stuff to ride. Many days we'd start out at the Wall Ramp in Hermosa Beach. It was two foundations for a building that never got built. There was a big concrete slab, a five foot high wall, and then another slab above it.
On the top slab, local skaters had built a tiny mini ramp, eight feet wide and 2 or 3 feet high. On the bottom slab, there was a launch ramp up against the wall, with a parking block on top of it. I started doing fakies on it. I'd been trying to do a fakie on a wall, which wasn't invented yet, for months. Gork had dubbed the trick the "Spud Stall" since I was from Idaho. I could get close, but never get my back tire on the wall. Grasso said my fakies on the launch ramp and parking block were super close to a true wall fakie, with my back tire coming within a couple inches of touching the wall. But the wall wasn't high enough. If I tried to go higher, my front wheel would go over the top of the upper slab, and I hang up and fall backwards. So I never got the wall ride fakie until a couple years later on a wall in Huntington Beach.
Some of you may remember that the person who did get the first wall ride fakie photo was... you guessed it, Craig Grasso. He did it on the Jinx Bank wall, a bank I found and showed to both Lew and Craig. That was also the location where the first wall ride photo of Eddie Roman was shot by Windy Osborn. It's funny how things work out.
While Craig Grasso, in those days, was known mostly as a weird, artsy rider who listened to The Cure and Gene Loves Jezebel, he was also a truly amazing rider, and just a fun guy to hang out and session with. He could bust four foot airs and several variations, launch a curb jump, bust original tricks on a bank, and lay out serious flatland. And he was funny as hell all the time. Just a great person to hang out and session with.
I know Craig has had some serious struggles since, including in recent years. I hope things are going better Grasso, and you're out there making people laugh somewhere.
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