Josh White's First Tailwhip Jump

Here's GT pro rider Josh White working the first four quarterpipe set-up at an AFA Master's contest in the fall of 1987.  Blasting out of obscurity (pun intended) in Oregon, to instant fame in the BMX freestyle world, Josh raised the bar considerably as he broke onto the scene in a big way.  He was known for going incredibly high for the time period, hitting honest 10 to12 foot plus airs when that's where the ceiling of the best riders was, and doing variations a 7 or 8 feet up.  Keep in mind the ramps then were 8 foot high by 8 foot wide, wobbly, wooden quarterpipes, that usually came just up to vert.

Josh also set himself apart with his super stretched variations.  This was said to come from years  of training in kickboxing (MMA didn't exist then, BTW), and daily stretching through all those years.  But the thing that I never could figure out about Josh was that he would approach the ramps at what seemed like half the speed of any other vert rider, amateur or pro, and then blast 9 or 10 feet out.  He could just pump more air out of his speed than anyone, and even he didn't seem to know quite how that happened, because I actually asked him about it once.

As fate would have it, I met Josh in the Dallas/Fort Worth airport, on a layover to the Tulsa, Oklahoma, AFA Masters contest in April of 1986.  I traveling on my own, but had been tapped to write the article about that contest for FREESTYLIN' magazine.  So I knew it was going to be a pretty cool weekend for me.  That amazing weekend started when I saw GT pro freestylers Eddie Fiola, Martin Aparijo, and some blond kid in the DFW airport.  I'd met Eddie in Whistler, British Columbia the year before, where he and Chris Lashua hung out for a week on a tour break.  I knew he didn't remember me, but it gave me, a pretty shy guy by nature, a reason to go say "Hi."  Eddie was really cool, remembering the week in Whistler, and introduced me to top flatlander Martin Aparijo, and the new guy, Josh White.  Eddie added, "Josh just did his first photo shoot for FREESTYLIN' the other day."  I said, "Oh, cool."  We talked for about fifteen minutes, until the last possible minute to board our plane, and then took our separate seats.

The next day, I saw just how good of a vert rider Josh was, holding his own (and then some) with all the heavy pros like Fiola, Brian Blyther, Mike Dominguez, and the rest.  I wound up hanging out with the Haro team all weekend (since I was traveling on my Pizza Hut salary and had no room or rent-a-car), and spoke with Josh, Eddie, and the others here and there over the course of the weekend.  Almost all the pros, and many top ams, were staying at the same Holiday Inn motel, playing pool, and doing flatland in the parking lot all weekend, and everyone was talking about the new GT vert guy, Josh White.

In another bit of coincidence, that photo shoot Josh did with FREESTYLIN' led to a small, and completely amazing, photo on the cover of the August 1986 issue of FREESTYLIN'.  In that same issue happened to be an article about zines, where my zine, San Jose Stylin', was listed at the top BMX freestyle zine in the country.  And, my article about the Tulsa contest also was published in that same issue.  Now I'm definitely biased, but I also think the cover design was the coolest cover FREESTYLIN' ever did, which says a lot.  They had many amazing covers.  This is it:

In those days, magazines took three months to come out, from writing and photos to finished copies, so this epic issue hit newsstands in late June.  A one hand no-footed can-can was simply unheard of  then.  A seven foot high, super stretched one hand no-footed can-can, on the famous T.O.L. ramp, was simply un-fucking-believable.  This cover, all by itself, raised the bar of BMX vert riding, and the article inside raised it even higher.  The icing on the cake was Josh's quote, blown up in big letters, "I consider myself a ground rider."  With this issue of FREESTYLIN' magazine, Josh White exploded onto the national BMX scene.  Meanwhile, deep inside the magazine, I kind of oozed quietly into the background periphery of the national freestyle zine, as a writer/zine guy.

Within days of this magazine hitting the stands, I interviewed for, and was hired at, Wizard Publications.  So this issue changed the course of Josh's life, and my own, and shed light on some other up-and-comers in the freestyle world, little Mathew Hoffman got his first editorial photo, Joe Johnson got his first magazine mention, and NorCal bros. Chris and Karl Rothe got a photo.  For an obscure part of the country to have a freestyle contest at the time, the 1986 Tulsa AFA contest shined a light on a lot of new blood in the BMX freestyle world.

By the time the magazine hit, Josh was already touring the country for GT Bikes.  I moved to Redondo Beach, California, and began a new life of my own, first as a magazine guy for a few months, and then as the guy you yelled at when the ramps moved at AFA contests, and as their newsletter editor.  While I never knew Josh well, we knew each other, talked from time to time, mostly at mostly at contests. Josh became legendary as part of the mid-1980's quarterpipe riders, pushing the older skatepark riders in the rapidly progressing vert scene.  Josh went on to join the high air posse of Todd Anderson, Dino Deluca, and the other Camarillo riders.

In my life, I spent the last half of 1986 working at Wizard Publications, then nearly all of 1987 working for Bob Morales at the American Freestyle Association down in Huntington Beach.  Bob got me into video work, which all happened at Unreel Productions in nearby Costa Mesa.  Unreel was the video unit of Vision Skateboards/Vision Street Wear, which were soaring in popularity at the time.

My life turned to one of either taking the bus or riding my freestyle bike the length of Huntington Beach every morning, then cleaning up at work.  On the days I rode, my 11 mile ride home was a wandering cruise to a whole series of H.B. street and flatland spots.  I spent most of my weekends sessioning under the H.B. Pier with inlander-but-local freestyler Mike Sarrail, and freestyle skaters Pierre Andre', Don Brown, Jeremy Ramey, and the random locals who came by, like Mark Gonzales and Ed Templeton.

On one of those many weekends at the Huntington Beach Pier, in later 1988, I think, Josh White rolled up.  We got to talking, and busted some flatland for the beach crowd.  Then Josh told me a friend of his said there were some walls right by the beach that would be good to ride on.  Wall rides were a brand new thing then, and everyone was looking for good walls to ride.  Josh told me where these walls were supposed to be, right on the beach, from Goldenwest south.  I rode the bike trail day after day for over a year, right by there, and was always looking for new places to ride. I told Josh would have seen them if they were there.  But it sounded like something worth looking for, so he and I headed off to find these mysterious walls.

We rode north from the pier, and where the bike path headed up the hill, kind of across PCH from Taco Bell, (about 11th street), he asked about the lower, dirt path.  For some reason, I'd never ridden it.  It was dirt, and when I was heading to the pier to flatland all day, I didn't want to get my brakes all dirty, I guess.

So Josh White and me ride up this wide dirt area, below the bike path and above the beach itself.  It's actually where the railroad into H.B. was built in the early 1900's, just before the big oil boom of 1920, as I found out later.  Much to my surprise, there were all these old, crumbling, slightly under vert, concrete retaining walls, about 11 feet high, with murals on them.  Most of them had thick sand in front of them, preventing a ride up to hit them for wall rides.  We finally found one that didn't have much loose sand, the wall with the Blues Brother mural, and the Three Stooges painted on it.  On the very left corner of the wall, there was a built up mound of dirt, maybe 18 inches high, a lip to get your bike up on the wall.  Obviously, someone had ridden it before.

Best of all, the wall was just a bit under vert, maybe 80-85 degrees steep, which made it easy to get much higher up than any normal wall ride.  Josh was doing 4 or 5 foot high wall rides right off the bat, and nearly 7 feet up before we left.  I wall ride the other way, and found a tiny lip, a few inches high, farther down the wall, and got maybe three feet up the wall.  I was stoked. Being able to actually grip on the wall, rather than the wall slides we had been doing, made us feel like a hero on the Blues Brothers Wall.

Then we got into a fakie wall ride session.  While I'd done fakies on small walls with launch ramps before, I could never get the back wheel bounce to do a true fakie wall ride and land it.  But I could roll up the Blues Brothers Wall, like a ramp fakie, and I was having a blast.  Josh was getting a couple feet higher up the wall.  Hey, he was Josh White, vert superhero.  No surprise there.  Right before we gave up on that session, he was doing fakies, pulling off the wall, and tweaking a nearly clicked turndown on the way down, and landing them.  I'd never seen anything like that before.  While Josh rarely came by the H.B. Pier after that, I started riding those walls on a regular basis.  I did have a couple of more sessions with Josh, and others, over the next year or so.  So that day, I got to know Josh a bit better, just as a rider.  The Blues Brothers Wall, and several others, are in my 1990 video, The Ultimate Weekend (below), from 10:57 to 12:20, and around 13:26.

At that time, I had moved jobs from the AFA to work at Unreel Productions, which was on edge of  the Costa Mesa mesa, looking north over the oil fields near what is now Sheep Hills.  The Sheep Hills trails we know now didn't exist then, but there were some jumps above Sheep's current location, where the condos above Sheep Hills are now, by the bottom end of 19th street.  There was a good sized hip jump, and a roll-in then flyout ditch jump, and also a four foot deep, concrete ditch, with banked walls, at the bottom of the hill.  As a freestyler who was never good at jumping doubles, I was all about the ditch jump.

This jump was 5 minute ride from the Unreel office, and I realized I could hit it on my lunch break.  This was probably the spring of 1989, I think.  I started riding over there and getting a quick, half-hour jumping session in at lunch, then hitting the deli near our office on the way back for a sandwich, and eating in my dub room as I got back to work.  Life was good.

One day, I was hitting the ditch jump on my lunch break, and Josh White rolled up.  I was trying to learn tailwhip jumps, something I'd been struggling with for two years at that time.  Joe Johnson did tailwhips on vert then, and even doubles, and I think Mat Hoffman was doing single tailwhips at that time and learning doubles.  But no one had done a tailwhip off a jump yet, even off a flyout jump.  I had worked out the basic move, leveling the bike off and getting the back end around, but I couldn't land them.  I was always beside the bike, not up over it so I could land it.  I'd also been trying bunnyhop tailwhips for a year and a half at that point, which everyone knew was impossible.  That was just my stupid idea that would never, EVER happen.  That's how different the thinking was at the time.  Saying you wanted to land a bunnyhop tailwhip in 1989 would be like telling people you want to land a bunnyhop double backflip today.  Never gonna happen.  (Watch, someone will do a bunnyhop double back off a drop in or something now, give it a year).

At the ditch jump, Josh said he'd thought about learning tailwhips off jumps, but just never tried it.  So we took turns hitting the flyout jump, getting maybe 18 inches off the ground, and trying to land a tailwhip.  I got close, but couldn't land it.  Josh worked out the basic movement pretty quick, and then was getting about to the same point.  Neither of us could land it.  I headed back to work, leaving Josh riding alone, and that was the last time I saw him at that ditch jump.

A couple of days later, back out at that jump, I snapped my chain heading into the ditch, went over the bars while just rolling in, and dove, Superman-style, into the sandy dirt.  The whole side of my face and body was covered in dirt, those painful, stinging scrapes, and then some blood.  I scootered my bike painfully back to Unreel, washed up in the bathroom, and went back to work.  All afternoon, one person after another walked into my room and asked, "What the hell happened to you?"  I only went for a couple more lunchtime jump sessions after that, and started hitting the jump, and other local spots, after work, on my long, sessioning, ride home.


This is my 1990 self-produced video, The Ultimate Weekend.  The footage was shot over the spring, summer, and early fall of 1990.  If you go to 23:16, you'll see me do three quick double peg grinds on a ledge with screw-on, knurled pegs, and then it leads into a section at a flyout jump.  That jump was called Oceanview, and was an epic spot for a few years, in Huntington Beach.  It was located at Oceanview High school, on the corner of Warner and Gothard in H.B., and was a big skate spot, as well, in the 1990's.  A big addition was built onto the school years later, and this spot is under roof now.

This video section is from a collection of about 6 or 7 different sessions over a few months.  Keith Treanor is the standout rider, in the black T-shirt obviously, and John Povah, Woody Itson, Josh White, and Andy Mulcahy are also in it.  Josh has the white T-shirt, gray shorts, and light hair.  All the footage with Josh was shot in half an hour, one evening when I ran into him there.  It was just us, and one local kid, who wandered off  pretty quickly.  After shooting him doing a bunch of his standard vert variations, some of which he'd never tried on dirt.  Josh and I got talking about that time we were both trying tailwhips the year before, at the ditch jump in Costa Mesa.  He told me he'd never tried them again.  But Oceanview was the perfect jump to land one.

So... with my two-hour camera battery fading, and dusk approaching, Josh White started trying to land his first tailwhip off a jump.  He got the feel back pretty quick, and was coming real close.  Remember, NO ONE... EVER, had landed a tailwhip off a jump then, as far as I know.  If you go to 25:19 in this video, you see Josh come close to landing one, and then, off balance, come running towards the camera.  That was the second to last try Josh took that night.  I know this because, on the next try, Josh White landed the first tailwhip off a jump I had ever seen, or heard about.  Even today, 29 years later, I believe that was the first tailwhip jump ever landed.  And my battery died as his bike left the jump.  My camera shut off when bike was mid-air.  I missed the shot.  I missed the shot of the first tailwhip jump ever landed.

I screamed.  That wasn't out of place, because Josh White screamed, too.  He was super stoked.  He didn't realize we were screaming for different reasons.  Josh was about ready to strangle me when he asked to see the footage, and I told him my battery had died while he was mid-air.  We watched it back, and I think it clicked off just as his bike was leaving the jump.  Darkness set it, both in the Huntington Beach evening, and in our souls, knowing what I'd just missed documenting.  Ultimately, we just shook our heads and rode off in our separate directions.  Sorry about that one, Josh.

If you go to 35:48 in the video, you'll see Mike "Crazy Red" Carlson do what I believe is the first dirt jumping tailwhip to ever appear in a BMX video.  This one happened at Edison Jumps, behind Edison High School, on the other end of Huntington Beach.  That's located at 21400 Magnolia in H.B.  It's a toe dragger, but it's a tailwhip, and it happened on double jumps, not a flyout jump, about three months after the one I saw Josh do.  Josh White is also all over this section, but that was shot on a different day than the session with Crazy Red, Chris Moeller, Dave Clymer and the rest.  I never met Crazy Red until that day.  By the way, this section is the first time the S&M Bikes/P.O.W. House crew appeared in a video as well.

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