My Superbowl of BMX Freestyle

This isn't the footage I shot on the big, ol' $50,000 Sony Betacam camera I had that day.  That's lost to time in a warehouse somewhere.  But this gives you an idea of how nuts the scene was at the street contest itself.  2-Hip Meet the Street, Brooklyn Banks, Manhattan, New York City, fall of 1989.   Dave Voelker's 360 drop was the big trick of the day.  And it was some day.

As football season approached last August, I was pissed at the NFL for how they handled the whole Kaepernick/kneeling in protest thing.  They just flat out caved to corporate interests.  So I decided I just wouldn't watch pro football this past season.  I've never been huge football fan, but, I became a Carolina Panthers fan while living in NC for a decade.  I hate a lot of things about that state, mostly the goofballs running everything (poorly).  But the Panthers were a perpetual underdog team that did crazy shit, like run the ball on 3rd and 17, and then convert the first down.  So I liked watching Panthers games with some good munchies, when possible.

Yes, I am homeless, and don't have an apartment with a TV to watch games at home, but there's always a sports bar, pizza joint, or upscale restaurant where a guy can watch the game.  But this past season, I didn't watch football at all.  OK, I had a motel room in January on a Sunday, and watched like two plays of a Rams playoff game.  But that was it.  It was wonderful not watching football this past season.  I had no idea who won the Superbowl yesterday morning, but assumed it was the Patriots, because... well, they were in it.  You have to assume heaven and hell will be moved to help them win, if necessary.  So, officially clueless, I watched an 8 minute video of the Superbowl 53 highlights, and saw just how much it sucked.  Thank God I was spared from watching Maroon 5, too.  I'm pretty much over football at this point.

But I needed to write another BMX post, I've lagged while working on other projects lately.  So I tried to think of what my own, personal "Superbowl of BMX freestyle" would be.  It was obvious.  The 2-Hip Meet the Street contest at the Brooklyn Banks in 1989.  That weekend was epic on every level.  I was sent there as the cameraman for Unreel Productions, the Vision Skateboards/Vision StreetWear video company.  But I was able to take my bike, ride the city, and ride the contest, as well.

Mike Miranda, former pro racer, was there as Vision team manager, with his girlfriend.  Rich Bartlett, Vision Street Wear rider and the biggest bodybuilder in BMX at the time, was sent to ride street and vert.  Rich and I shared the best hotel room I've ever had in my life, in midtown Manhattan.  As I recall, we got there Thursday afternoon, got to the hotel, and Rich and I rode about three miles through crazy-ass, pre-Guiliani clean-up, New York City.  I'll be honest, I was scared shitless riding through the city.  But it was insane fun at the same time.

At some point, I may go into more detail on that weekend.  But here are a few of my best memories from my own personal "Superbowl of BMX Freestyle."

Riding across Manhattan on a BMX bike seemed like the reason why I rode bikes for the previous 7 years.  High speed, dodging traffic, bunnyhopping up and down off sidewalks and dodging pedestrians, going the wrong way through traffic on one way streets, it was a rush.  It was like every bike skill I'd learned came into play that weekend.  

The closet in our hotel room was bigger than half the bedrooms I had growing up.  That came in handy, because the first night, Rich said, "I told some guys they could crash in our room, cool?"  I said, "Sure."  The BMX industry had taken a dive in January 1989, as every major bike company backed off their BMX programs in favor of the hot new thing, mountain bikes.  So most riders lost their sponsors that year.  At the contest site, Rich told me who'd be staying with us.  It was Dennis McCoy (top overall rider then), Mat Hoffman (top very rider then), Steve Swope, some up-and-comer named Rick Thorne, and a couple other Kansas City guys.  So our posse left the contest site to head back to the hotel around dusk.  Because every BMXer in NYC was a huge Dennis McCoy fan, we had about 45 other riders, in this block-long string, follow us the whole way.  We fuckin' wreaked havoc on traffic as we moved, en mass, across the city.

There were some people standing in the shadows, a couple and a young boy, in front of our hotel as we all sat talking outside.  For some reason, they just didn't move for the longest time, and we started to wonder what their deal was.  Finally someone went over to them... they were bronze statues.  In the evening shadows, we thought they were real for like 20 minutes.

Dennis McCoy brought a couple locals up to the room, as most of our posse stood our bikes upside down and called floor space.  I think five guys, and all the bikes, slept in the closet.  Rich and I had the two small beds, of course.  80's rules, it was our room.  Anyhow, Dennis asked the locals where the roughest place in the city was, and several hood names were thrown around.  Hell's Kitchen was finally agreed upon as the absolute, most dangerous place in New York City then.  Then Dennis spent about half an hour talking the locals into taking him there.  They did their best to talk him out of it, but finally gave in.  Dennis and 3 or 4 locals took off to explore, to street rogue, Hell's Kitchen.  Much to everyone's surprise, they all came back alive about 4 am and told us how crazy it was.

I had sprained my ankle pretty bad about three weeks earlier, and was just getting back close to normal.  But I wasn't quite totally healed.  I went out with the posse on the first evening session each night, ranging around and sessioning different spots.  Then we'd all get a classic New York slice of pizza, and head back to the room to chill a bit.  Then they all went out for the late night session, which always involved getting chased by security and police.  With the sketchy ankle, I was the most likely to lag and get caught, so I hung in the room and watched TV, or rode near the hotel solo.  The posse came back a few hours later with tales of slaloming through hookers on 42nd street, getting chased by local people and cops, and nearly getting caught.  Rich talked about using his "Pro elbow," honed in racing the best guys in the world, more than once to escape security that weekend.

On one trip back to the hotel, Rich and I stopped at a quintessential New York deli for lunch.  We stood our bikes upside down outside door, and sat on stools, facing out the window, and ate our sandwiches, and keeping an eye on our bikes.  A really tall guy walked up, and Rich said, "That's Rick Ocasek form The Cars."  It was.  He paused a second at the door, and looked down at our bikes for some reason while we watched.  Let the Good Times Roll.  

The little deli next to the motel had really good pieces of cornbread, cheap, for some reason.  I lived on New York slices of pepperoni, Coke (the drink), and cornbread, all weekend.

On the morning of the contest, our posse of Rich, me, Dennis, Rick, Mat, Swope, and the other two KC guys headed to the Brooklyn Banks, at the highest speed possible.  We hauled ass the whole three or so miles, dodging cars, hopping up on the sidewalk and dodging walkers and the occasional dog, and sprinting the wrong way down a one way street we turned up by accident.  At one point, I followed Rick between two semi trucks, with a narrow gap between.  The truck on our right was parked, but the one on the left, which we thought was parked, started to move forward.  And it got closer to the other truck.  Rick and I both let out screams as we hit the turbo boost, leaned back, and both turned our bars slightly and manualed between the front of the two truck cabs, then barely more than handlebar width apart.

A couple of blocks later, I was maybe 20 yards behind Rick again, and cars suddenly blocked the street lanes, so he swerved to the right, bunnhopped up the curb at full tilt, and swerved hard to the left to miss a woman walking.   She turned around into our path enexpectedly.  Rick missed the woman, but he got so close that his back tire hit the heel of her high pumps, breaking it off.  The woman fell sideways, like a tree cut down by a lumberjack, and I swerved hard left around her head as she hit the ground.  I'm pretty sure the guy behind me bunnyhopped over the woman, he had nowhere else to go.  The whole three days in Manhattan was like that.  Oh, and then there was the contest, which was completely off the chain as well.

Since I was weird, even among BMXers, I was always trying to dream up the next new trick to invent, one that would put me in the realm of the really good riders.  It never happened.  But I did invent a few little moves.  By the fall of 1989, I had been trying the bunnyhop tailwhip, which was said by everyone to be impossible then, for 2 1/2 years.  I never landed a clean one, and Bill Nitschke invented it the next year.  But I was doing tailwhip footplants on the street, bunnyhopping up, doing a footplant on a bench of something, and swinging the bike in a tailwhip, the landing with one foot on the top tube.  No one else was doing those then, it was considered kinda dumb.  I managed to find a spot at the Brooklyn Banks with a medium sized bank to the wall, and the wall had a tiny ledge, about half an inch wide, in it.  It gave me just enough grip that I landed some tailwhip footplants on the bank to wall, which I was stoked about.

I also was doing what I called No Comply Tailwhips then.  Since I couldn't do a true tailwhip bunnyhop, which was impossible (everyone thought), I would ride at a good clip, bunnyhop and pop my feet off the pedals.  I'd plant both feet, swing the bike around in a tailwhip, and hop back on and land on the top tube.  I could do that at speed in a pretty fluid way then.  But at the Brooklyn Banks contest, I started trying these on the bank.  They felt really cool, and a handful of other riders, started trying them, too.  So  I probably placed about last in my class that day, but I threw the tailwhips on street idea out there, and let it marinate in the BMX world.  I had no idea that ten or twelve years later tailwhips would turn into a foundational street trick.  Again, Nitschke's bunnyhop tailwhip, the Whopper, was the thing that showed everyone those were possible.

We all headed to Long Island after three crazy days in Manhattan, and the whole posse stayed in our room there, too.  The night before the vert contest, most of us came back from dinner, and Mat Hoffman was sleeping on the floor.  We all joked that he was probably dreaming about doing a 900, having landed the first one in a contest earlier that year.  Steve Swope said, "You guys don't know Mat, he's not dreaming about a 900.  He's probably dreaming about the world's biggest ice cream sundae."  We all laughed at that, but let Mat sleep so he'd be ready to rip the vert ramp the next day.

So those are my standout memories from the most epic weekend I ever had in 20 years of riding a BMX bike every day.  The footage I shot that day on the big, 35 pound, betacam camera, at the Brooklyn Banks, never got used.  Because Vision closed down Unreel in January of 1990, the footage I shot all through the 1989 2-Hip season never got used by them.  Eddie Roman used a bunch of the vert footage in 2-Hip's Ride Like a Man, linked below.

You can watch the vert footage I shot in Long Island here, starting at 1:10:36.  The first rider is Rich Bartlett, pro racer and dirt jumper, and my roommate that weekend, but he could do decent airs as well.  Epic weekend.

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