This one happened in the early fall of 1986, when the Haro team got back from their summer tour. Actually, there were two Haro touring teams then, this one was Ron Wilkerson, Brian Blyther, and Dave Nourie, the other with the remaining Haro riders. I was working at Wizard Publications, home of FREESTYLIN', magazine, and editor Andy Jenkins came over my intercom, and asked me to come down to his office. That was 50 feet away, across the little warehouse area in the Wizard building. Andy said there was a photo shoot later that day. Ron Wilkerson had some new trick called," and Andy made a funny face as he said it, "the abubaca." I looked perplexed, "A -boob-a-what?" I asked. Andy said, "I don't know, that's Ron's name for some new trick. We're going to a shoot a how-to of it."
Andy gave me the info, I had to drive Windy Osborn, the Wizard photographer, and Ron, in the Wizard Astro van, to the alley behind a well known bike shop in Redondo Beach, where they had a quarterpipe.
I headed back to my office, and looked up the address in the Thomas Guide, a big, phone book sized map book of Southern California, so I could find the place. I made sure there was some gas in the van, and headed back into my office to work on other stuff until it was time for the shoot.
Ron showed up later that afternoon, and I saw him talking to Andy and Windy. Windy swung by my office, and said she was taking Ron out to the T.O.L. Ramp in the parking lot, to shoot some pics there, and they'd be ready to head to the bike shop in 15 minutes or so. I headed down to Andy's office, and he and Lew told gave me a microcassette recorder, and told me to wedge it by my leg, out of sight, and try to get Ron talking about tour and saying some crazy stuff. I was baffled. "Ron's crazy, we all know that, I'm pretty sure he'll say some crazy stuff anyhow." The whole sneaky recording bit bothered me, and seemed kind of pointless. But I just nodded, and took the recorder.
Meanwhile, Ron Wilkerson was outside, completely wrecking himself for Windy's camera. He was doing a no footed backwards drop-in on the T.O.L. ramp. Stand the bike on the edge of the deck, backwards, step up into an endo, sit on the seat, take both feet off and stretch the legs wide, then bring the feet back to the pedals, as he dropped backwards into the 8 foot ramp, landing fakie. He could do the trick, but not consistently, and he got the seat jammed into his ass on 3 out of 4 tries. But it made for a great photo, I remember it ran at some point. Despite the painful bails on the backwards drop-ins, Ron was ready to head to the bike shop, and show us this new trick, the a-boob-a-something...
Windy hopped in the white Astro van, sitting shotgun, and Ron sat right behind us, on the floor. I pulled out the micro recorder, in full view, and said something like, "Let's hear some crazy tour stories..." I set the recorder on the floor in front of Ron. I can't remember what he talked about, but it was funny shit. Windy, of course, knew Ron well, so they pretty much talked the whole way to the shop, maybe 15 minutes away. I rolled up this alley, and saw the quarterpipe in the back, and parked nearby.
One thing a lot of people don't know, or forget, from those early days of freestyle, is that there was no standard quarterpipe size until about 1987. The original Bob Haro designs, printed in the magazine, for riders around the country to see, was for a six foot high, eight foot wide ramp, that came just under vert. That's what my Boise teammate Justin Bickel had, and what a lot of us kids then rode in our local shows or in our driveways. Those ramps would be considered a mini-ramp today.
When the factory teams built ramps on trailers to go on tour, the sizes ranged widely. The Skyway team had a 9 foot high, 8 foot wide quarterpipe, with 2 or 3 inches of vert, I believe. The Haro ramp was 8 foot high, and 8 foot wide, just up to vert. The GT ramp was 9 feet high, 9 foot transition, and 5 feet wide ramp (seriously, ask Eddie Fiola about drifting a little to the side on that toothpick). Everybody had slightly different ramps then, and it took some getting used to when you rode some new one somewhere, or at a contest.
The bike shop quarterpipe, best I can recall, was seven feet high, with an elliptical transition, and about a foot of vert. It was one seriously fucked up transition. By elliptical, I mean that it hit vert six feet up, but it wasn't a six foot radius, it got steep real quick. Take an egg out of the fridge, and hold it vertical on a table, with the small end down. Now imagine a quarterpipe with the transition like one side of that egg. It was rideable, but really weird and steep.
Ron Wilkerson, already known as a master of lip tricks, wasn't phased. He did a couple of small airs to get the feel of the ramp, and let Windy get set up for the shot. Then he went for the new trick, the abubaca. He went fairly slow, like he was going to do a fakie air. But then he landed the back wheel on the edge of the deck, the bike leaned forward, and then Ron hopped backwards, trying to land back on the transition. But the ramp was so steep, he landed at the very bottom of the ramp... hard... and shot backwards, landing on his back on the ground. It had to hurt.
But the trick dumbfounded me. It just seemed too gnarly to land right on the edge of the ramp, 7 feet up, and then hop backwards into the ramp, blind. I'd seen Eddie Fiola, earlier that summer, do a trick he called the Expo, that also dropped in backwards. Eddie would flyout, doing a 90 degree turn, landing sideways on the deck of the ramp, balance a second, then hop back in fakie. Both tricks were insane at the time. But the abubaca depended on landing right on the edge of the ramp, any mistake, and a painful would result.
At the time, the abubaca seemed completely insane. Ron got up, dusted himself off, sore after that crash, and the other bails at Wizard. Then he tried again, as Windy's Nikon's motordrive clicked and whirred. Same thing, Ron caught a tiny bit of the bottom of the ramp, but ate shit hard again. He ended up doing the trick about 7 times, I think, and ate shit hard on 3 or 4 of them. But he landed the first abubaca Windy Osborn and I had ever seen, and then a couple more. That sequence that got printed, and changed vert riding, and later street riding, forever. While Ron played it off as no big deal, I know he was hurtin' when we headed back to the shop. With Windy confident she had the sequence on film, we thanked the bike shop owner, who walked out to watch, and loaded up for the short trip back to 3162 Kashiwa Street in Torrance, the Wizard warehouse.
I turned the recorder on again, and Ron told us some more funny stories about tour. I gave the micro-recorder back to Andy, and him and Lew were both stoked on Ron Wilkerson's stories. Windy got the sequence, but I don't know what issue it came out in. I checked Old School Mags.com, but they're missing issues around this time. It was probably in the January 1987 issue of FREESTYLIN'. So that's the story of how Ron Wilkerson's foundational vert and street trick, the abubaca, got into FREESTYLIN' magazine, for the first time.
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