Looking back on my early years of freestyle... and on Eddie Fiola's influence

I saw it was Eddie Fiola's birthday today (OK, yesterday now, I didn't finish this post yesterday), he's hitting the big 55 today.  Happy Birthday Eddie.  That seemed a good reason to blog about Eddie and the early days of freestyle, for us guys who jumped on that first wave of it in the mid 1980's..  When I got into BMX freestyle, Eddie was the best known pro, and one of the veteran"old guys,"being 21 or 22 then.  Now, so many years later, he's only two years older than me, we're practically the same age, and he still is a blast to watch on a bike.  

 I went looking for clips to use, and decided to watch this whole, half hour video.  I've only watched this video maybe two times, while I was working in video stores in Huntington Beach around 1994-1995.  This video was produced by East Coast BMX freestyle promoter Ron Stebbene in 1988, and features two of my old bosses, Bob Morales and Don Hoffman, and industry legend McGoo, so there's a lot for me to write about here.

As I've mentioned many times before, I got into BMX jjumping, and then BMX racing while living in a trailer park outside of Boise, Idaho in 1982.  I was 16 that summer, in between my sophomore and junior years at Boise High School.  Us Blue Valley Mobile Home Park kids hit the last local race of the season in October '82, got totally stoked on BMX racing, and then had to suffer through an Idaho winter until we could race again.  Before our dirt jumps dried up enough from spring mud to ride, we were making ramp to ramp jumps out of cinder blocks and plywood sheets on the street.  We got racing again about March or April, but most of the guys faded in a couple of months.  We were broke ass motherfuckers back then, and the "crazy" $2-$3 fee to race (minimum wage was about $3.35/hour then) was a lot to us.  But I managed one race every couple of weeks or so, keeping the BMX stoke going.

What I haven't written much about was that my family moved back into town in the early summer of 1983.  Suddenly I was out of the trailer park, back in a cool, middle class subdivision, but I didn't have any jumps or people to ride with.  I kept racing pretty steadily all through 1983.  But I also started to work some odd jobs, make a little bit more money, and I started buying BMX magazines.

At that time, "trick riding" was just starting to get more popular, and transitioning into the sport of "BMX freestyle."  At the time, that meant you rode flatland, a wedge ramp, and quarterpipes.  So there were trick how-to's in almost every magazine at the time.  BMX freestyle was just on the verge of its first wave of popularity and breaking into mainstream consciousness.  BMX Plus was the only magazine on the newsstands in Boise, either at 7-11's and Circle K's, or at the grocery stores.  I stumbled across BMX Action later that year, in Bob's Bike Shop (and Lawn Mower Repair), my local shop in Boise. 

In the January 1983 issue of BMX Plus magazine ("Skatepark Shoot out in the Badlands", scan pg. 27), I saw my first article about this crazy place in California called Pipeline Skatepark.  There was this big picture of this HUGE concrete bowl, with all these kids sitting on the coping up on top, and all their bikes piled up in the bottom of the pool.  The place looked enormous, and I couldn't imagine riding walls so vertical and steep.  "Those skatepark guys are crazy." I thought.  My only tricks at the time were a one handed wheelie, and I couldn't even ride it, just pop it up, do one crank while standing up, take a hand off, and then put the hand back on and drop down all sketchy.  My other trick, a trailer park trick, was doing tire endos.  We'd roll up to a car tire on the ground (plenty of those around a trailer park), pop our front wheel into it, then to an endo, curb endo style, but it was more stable. The only jumps I hit were two foot high jumps to flat, or the rolling tabletop at the Fort Boise track.  So seeing the photos of the kids riding Pipeline blew my freakin' mind.  In those pre-internet days when information barely traveled at all, I had no idea that kind of riding was even possible.  It was that article that opened me up to this whole new kind of riding, carving huge vertical walls on pools, and airing out of vertical walls.

It was in that article that I first heard of the rider named Eddie Fiola, he had the top photo on the second page of the article.  As time went on, and I saw more photos and articles about trick riding and freestyle, I realized this Eddie Fiola guy was the biggest name in freestyle, as he became the King of the Skateparks that year. 

Even so, no one else I knew outside the Fort Boise BMX track had any idea who he was.  My high school friends were outdoorsy fishermen and hunter types, we liked to fish, shoot guns, and smoke weed.  Even in my high school, there were three grades, with 400+ students each, and I was about THE ONLY BMXer.  The other riders I knew were mostly younger kids in junior high, or they went to the other high schools, Borah, Crapitol... I mean Capitol, or Meridian, the little town next to Boise.  I was literally into a weird little sport that, for all intents and purposes, didn't even exist to the 1,200 people in my high school.  And I was weird to start with, so it wasn't like anyone else wanted to jump on that bandwagon and follow me.  16-year-olds simply didn't ride "little kids' bikes" back then.  Everyone just wanted me to grow up and give up my stupid BMX "hobby."

As I got more into BMX, read magazines, and went out for solo rides every day around the neighborhood, Eddie Fiola became the Michael Jordan of freestyle to me.  On the edge of our subdivision was this 50 foot tall embankment, and at the top of it was the New York Canal.  Much of the year it was 18 or 20 foot deep with fast moving water.  But part of the year it emptied out and was dry, a big ditch with 45 degree banked sides.  As I got more stoked on the riding of those crazy skatepark riders, I would ride up on the banked walls, do a tiny bunnyhop, and tilt the bike sideways a little, mimicking the tabletop aerials I saw skatepark riders doing.  Yeah, we called them "aerials," still, in 1983.

I won a contest at the Fort Boise track, to re-design the track for 1984.  That landed me something like 22 free races for the 1984 season.  But coming out of the winter indoor races, I was losing interest in racing, and getting more and more into the emerging freestyle thing.  I looked up to a lot of riders then, particularly the rider/entrepreneur guys like R.L. Osborn, Ron Wilkerson, and Dave Vanderspek.  I was deathly shy, dreamed big, and never acted on my dreams, and it seemed amazing that those guys were putting on so many shows, actually get paid for shows, and in R.L.'s case, booking whole tours.  A big part of BMX freestyle then was promoting the sport itself, letting other people know about this cool thing we had found, and how much fun it was to try and invent tricks on these little bikes.

But as a rider, Eddie was getting a bunch of coverage then, and doing most of the biggest aerials I saw in photos.  He was the biggest name in the sport, as far as I knew.  But I was a kid in Idaho, and it really didn't even occur to me that I could meet him someday, let alone would meet him.  That spring of 1984, I heard about a local trick team having a show, went to it, and met Justin "Jay" Bickel, Wayne Moore, and Jay's parents.  I wound up part of the trick team, and later Jay and I reformed it, when Wayne "retired" from freestyle at the ripe old age of 17.  Jay's parents, Dwight and Cindy, were totally supportive of BMX freestyle, and became my "freestyle parents."  Suddenly I could go to Jay's house and ride a six foot quarterpipe, and try to actually learn to do aerials.  Every time I hit that ramp and aired coping high, I was pretending to be Fiola or Dominguez or R.L. or Wilkerson.  Jay and I did a dozen or so shows around the Boise area that year, and rode in about 5 or 6 parades, and became the freestyle guys in Idaho at that time.

Then, in early summer of 1985, my family moved to San Jose, California.  I stayed and worked my summer job in Boise, managing a little amusement park called The Fun Spot.  I went to my first AFA Masters contest with the Bickels, the Venice Beach comp in June of 1985.  It was the first time I actually saw pros and sponsored amateur freestylers ride, including Eddie Fiola.  We had to leave before pro ramps on Sunday, but I got to see them practice on Saturday, and it blew my fucking mind.  To see 7-8-9 foot airs, and canyon airs, for the first time, amazed me.  I had a totally new frame of reference of what was possible on a BMX bike.  Freestyle was blowing up, Eddie, R.L., and Wilkerson were in the Mountain Dew commercial that summer, and the sport and riding seemed to be progressing so fast.  Still, Eddie Fiola was the biggest name in the sport to me.  If outsiders knew anything about BMX, they knew one name, Eddie Fiola.

In August of 1985, the Fun Spot, the little Boise amusement park I worked at, closed for the season.  I packed up my 1971 Pontiac Bonneville, which was just a tad bit smaller than a battleship, and drove solo to San Jose to live with my family again.  Once there I got a job at Pizza Hut, started a zine, and found the NorCal freestylers like pros Vander, Maurice Meyer, Robert Peterson, and that whole crew, over the next few weeks.  Somehow college was out the window (I was broke, and my parents didn't have money set aside to help me go), and BMX freestyle became the focus of my life.  I made it to the fall 1985, and spring 1986 Velodrome contests, and moved on the edge of the national freestyle scene.

Then, in April of 1986, thanks to my zine, Andy Jenkins of FREESTYLIN' magazine tapped me to cover the AFA Masters contest in Tulsa, Oklahoma.  On my flight layover in Dallas/Fort Worth, I ran into Eddie Fiola, Martin Aparjo, and some new guy named Josh White.  Suddenly I was standing there talking to a couple of the guys I'd been reading about in the magazines for three years.  The next morning, Eddie walked up and just started chatting, and I was stoked beyond  belief.  That weird wall between "those guys in the magazines" and "the rest of us out in anywhere USA," was collapsing.  Things like that, talking to the pros you looked up to and hanging out with them, didn't happen in pro football or basketball.  But in our weird little sport of freestyle, it did.

By that point, the skatepark era had faded, and quarterpipes had taken over.  But I think the skatepark days, Pipeline Skatepark's Pipe Bowl, in particular, played a key role in vert riding.  As all of us Old School BMX freestylers know, there's a documentary called The Birth of Big Air, about Mat Hoffman's mega quarterpipe, and his motorcycle tow-in mega huge airs in 1992-93.  But I think the name's a misnomer.  Looking back, I think "The Birth of Big Air" was really the Pipe Bowl era at Pipeline, led by Eddie Fiola.  What Mat did a decade later was the birth of ridiculously humungous air.  I wasn't there in the skatepark era, but from the photos, there were these shots of guys doing one-two-three foot aerials out of skatepark bowls at Lakewood or Whittier or Pipeline's Combi pool.  And then, all of the sudden, there's Eddie, Mike Dominguez, Brian Blyther, Brian Deam, Tony Murray... and they're going 6-7-8-9 feet out of this one bowl.  The Pipe Bowl at Pipeline.  And that bowl had 8 feet of transition, and four feet of vert, but no coping.  That stands out as the real birth of Big Air when you look back at magazine photos. 

Then vert riding moved to quarterpipes, and we saw Eddie, Mike, and Brian getting those big airs on quarterpipes.  Coming up on their heals, and soon passing them, were riders like Todd Anderson, Josh White, Joe Johnson, Dino Deluca, and Mat Hoffman.  That was the generation bred on quarterpipes, but who were inspired by those 1983-1985 photos of Eddie, Mike, and Brian blasting huge at Pipeline. 

As BMX freestyle grew and exploded in its first big wave of popularity, from 1984 to 1988, Eddie Fiola was on GT, and was touring, doing shows at bike shops and other events, letting kids see freestyle firsthand.  I got picked up to work at FREESTYLIN' (and BMX Action) in August of 1986, as things surged upward.  During my short stint at Wizard Publications, I got interested in how all the other riders got into freestyle in the first place.  For me it was jumping in the trailer park, like I wrote above, then racing and into freestyle from the magazines.  But seeing that first local show with Jay and Wayne in Boise, that was a key point in getting stoked on freestyle.  So I started asking all the other riders, pros and amateurs, how they got into freestyle.  It was an informal poll I did just because I was curious.

Almost every single rider I talked to said they got into BMX freestyle because they saw a live freestyle show, usually one of the factory teams.  It was the live shows the really grew our sport back then, and then new riders started buying magazines, to get their monthly fix.  This was especially true for the riders outside of Southern California.  Throughout that whole time, Eddie Fiola and Martin Aparijo, along with Josh White and Dave Voelker, were out there, in the smelly vans (shoes and vehicles), showing kids everywhere this new thing called BMX freestyle.  They were the GT guys, and then Haro was the other rock star team, with Ron Wilkerson, Brian Blyther, and Dave Nourie hitting the road as one team, and the other Haro riders as another.

During that time of five or six AFA national contests a year, six magazines covering BMX and freestyle, and 8 or 10 factory touring teams, Eddie Fiola continued as one of the biggest names, showing kids his smooth showman style on both flat and vert, show after show.  When not on the road, I got to know Eddie well, since he was dating Wizard photographer Windy Osborn at the time.  So he was in the Wizard offices most every day while I worked there, and no one tore up the T.O.L. ramp in the parking lot like Eddie did.

The funny thing was, during those years, 1986-1988, word in the industry was that Eddie was burning out, thanks largely to the long months of touring to promote GT bikes.  We all knew he had a three year contract with GT, and everyone thought he was just biding his time, getting ready to move on, maybe into TV acting or something, and then he'd let the young guns, like Josh White, Joe Johnson, and wunderkid Mat Hoffman, take over the world of vert.

Meanwhile, I got the boot from Wizard, and went on to work for Bob Morales, who not only ran the AFA, but was doing magazine ads for several companies, and we designing products and part owner of Mor Distributing, as well.  My official job was as editor and photographer of the AFA newsletter.  But working for Bob Morales, I did a little bit of everything, from putting heat transfers on AFA T-shirts, to driving the van and 30 foot trailer to local contests and trade shows.

During that year, 1987, I did a feature interview with Eddie Fiola for the AFA newsletter.  That was during the time Eddie was supposedly burned out and ready to give it all up and move on.  I shot the photos with Eddie at Pipeline's Pipe Bowl,  mostly as an excuse to see him ride there.  I didn't have a car, and I couldn't get to Pipeline to ride it.  But doing the interview there, I had an excuse to take the AFA van there for an afternoon, and then get a little riding in at the park I first saw in that crazy BMX Plus article in January of 1983.

Eddie showed up in his standard riding "uniform," Levi's, a T-shirt, and an open face helmet.  Although I had been part of the BMX industry for a year at that point, it amazed me that suddenly I was shooting photos of Eddie Fiola at Pipeline, something I never even dreamed could happen back in Idaho, a couple of years earlier.  The Eddie that showed up, was anything but a burned out has been.  He fucking tore up the Pipe Bowl, and was just having fun riding.  That was his home park at that point, his local spot, and he shredded it with his amazing style.  More than anything else, Eddie Fiola made riding freestyle seem really damn fun.  I wanted to be able to ride the Pipe Bowl like that, or at least try to.

As fate would have it, I started producing videos for the AFA that year, and that landed me a job at Unreel Productions, the Vision Skateboards/Vision Street Wear video company.  Don Hoffman, who was the first guy to really make a bunch of BMX freestyle videos, including those skatepark videos used in the video above, was the head of Unreel.  While little known to the riders outside Southern California, Don played a huge role in mid 80's freestyle, by making those skatepark videos, and later producing the big 2-Hip King of Vert finals (where Mat went pro) in 1989, producing the first syndicated Action Sports TV show series, and putting out Freestylin' Fanatics, and Mondo Vision.

Because Eddie Fiola, Bob Morales, Don Hoffman, McGoo, and Ron Stebbene, all played big roles in my years in the BMX freestyle industry, it was cool to watch the Eddie Fiola video above again.  That video was produced right at the end of freestyle's first wave of popularity, right before we dropped into the "ramen days" of 1989, and the early 1990's.

Again, Happy Birthday Eddie, hope it was a cool one.  Back in the late 80's, I don't think any of us dreamed BMX freestyle would be as big as it is now, that many of us would still be riding (I'll get back at it when I can afford a bike), or that rider's would be wearing skinny jeans in 2019.  The weird little activity that turned into a sport and into a lifestyle, BMX freestyle, continues to grow in different ways, and evolve into new things.  Eddie Fiola was a huge part of that in its earliest days, and is still part of it today.  If you're around SoCal, hit the Huntington Beach Pier area on Tuesday evenings, for HB Tuesdays with Eddie, Martin Aparijo, and a bunchmore old schoolers hanging out ans sessioning.  It's as much fun as it ever was.