What Dave Vanderspek brought to the BMX Freestyle Party

Blog post:  What Dave Vanderspek brought to the freestyle party

This is photo of Dave Vanderspek was taken by 13-year-old Bill Batchelor, for his really amazing Shreddin' zine, from July of 1985.  This was a couple years before wall rides, three years before the first street peg grind photo in a magazine, and five years before the first handrail grinds on street.  Doing a bar endo in a really gnarly urban place was one of Vander's early street moves, setting the stage for the future of street riding to come.

 I started hearing about Dave Vanderspek in BMX Plus in 1983, when I was getting serious about BMX racing in Idaho, and only BMX Plus was available in 7-11's and grocery stores in Boise.  I didn't run into BMX Action until I started buying parts at Bob's Bikes (and Lawnmower Repair), my local bike shop in Boise.  The first photo I can remember of Dave was at a skatepark contest at Pipeline Skatepark, when he was blasting huge 7 and 8 foot high jumps out of the back corner of the square side of the Combi Pool.  The pool was 13 feet deep with five feet of vert and huge coping, and Dave was BLASTING out of that pool.  It seemed insane.  Later, when I got to ride that pool a little, I couldn't even get my front tire up to the tile in that corner, though I could carve right up to the coping in the round bowl.  Dave's massive flyouts 3 or 4 years earlier seemed even more amazing.  And completely impossible.

While obviously an amazingly talented rider, Dave didn't spend his riding career on one factory team.  He rode a Schwinn in the first issue of FREESTYLIN' magazine.  He later rode for the Skyway factory team, and later for Kuwahara, and Boss.  But he spent most of his time promoting the Curb Dogs, the local, San Francisco bike/skate team he helped found.  With guys like Maurice Meyer, skater Tommy Guerrero, and several others, The Curb Dogs was the best known independent team in the world, and always landed in the top 5 teams when polls were taken, always beating some of the factory teams of the day.  Since I just did the drawing below as a tribute to Vander, I'm going to be writing some posts about my memories of riding, hanging out, and talking with him.  But in this post, I want to list five big things Dave Vanderspek brought to BMX freestyle in the 1980's.

Street riding- Dave was one of the earliest pioneers of BMX street riding.  Yes, I know, every early rider rode on "the streets."  Bob Haro and R.L. Osborn used to practice kickturns at the Larry's Donuts bank in Redondo Beach, and there's a classic photo of Bob Haro doing an edged kickturn on the 6th and Commonwealth banks, in downtown L.A..  Yes, everyone rode on the streets on their bikes, and hit little curb jumps.  But not everyone had an urban terrain like San Francisco.  Dave Vanderspek was one of the first riders to see the paved world as a big skatepark/bike park, ready to be explored and sessioned, just for the fun and thrill of riding it.  Dave and the Curb Dogs were one of the big early forces in pushing the use of urban terrain in all news ways and figuring out how it could be used to have fun on a bike. 

Punk Rock- As a BMXer, skater, and a punker, Dave brought the "fuck it" punk rock attitude into BMX in a way no one else did in the early 1980's.  With the Curb Dogs bike/skate demo team, he also took the "Do It Yourself/DIY" attitude of punk, and brought it into BMX freestyle, where we were listening to all kinds of music, and wearing motorcycle-style leathers and helmets to compete in flatland.  Vander's punk rock vibe, and attitude, led the way in BMX freestylers learning to be ourselves, wear more functional clothing, and working hard to build and promote our own teams, invent new tricks, and figuring out a way to make things we wanted to see happen in the world.

The Curb Dogs-  In the early days of BMX freestyle spreading across the U.S. and the world, there was no team like the Curb Dogs.  In the annual NORA cup awards, the Curb Dogs were always in the top 5 most popular freestyle teams, ranking among all the factory teams of the day.  They always beat 3 or 4 factory teams in the magazine reader polls.  That happened because Dave, while coming across as a Jeff Spiccoli-like goofball sometimes, worked his ass off to be weird, have fun, and promote the hell out of the Curb Dogs, and BMX freestyle itself.

The first BMX halfpipe contest- While Ron Wilkerson took vert to a new level by putting on the 2-Hip King of Vert contests from 1987 on, the very first BMX halfpipe contest was promoted by Dave Vanderspek at skater Joe Lopes' ramp, in San Francisco.

The first BMX street contest- If you ask an old school rider when the first BMX street contest was, they'll most likely say it was the 2-Hip Meet the Street contest in Santee, California, in the spring of 1988.  Heck for years, I thought that was the first street contest, because that was the first I heard of and went to.  But once again, Dave Vanderspek led the way, holding a small, NorCal street contest months before Santee happened.  It was a regional thing, none of the magazines showed up to cover it.  From what I heard, that wasn't the point, Dave just decided someone needed to throw a BMX street contest, so he put one on, before anyone else.

Dave Vanderspek, airing out of the Pipe Bowl at Pipeline Skatepark, 1983 or 1984.  Dave didn't have a skatepark to practice at in NorCal, and he rode a coaster brake in the pools.  That pool is 12 feet deep with four feet of vert.  Few, if any, skateparks today are as hard to air out of as the Pipe Bowl was.  

How good of a rider was Dave Vanderspek?  While Dave Vanderspek was known for doing easy tricks like track stands and and harder tricks like bar endos, he had a full bag of flatland tricks, many of them, like the bar endo, and the Vander Roll, were tricks he invented.  Some were not super hard, and more for show, like the Vander Roll, but some tricks were really hard.  I also saw Dave doing blunts on parking blocks on top of banks, a predecessor to the street abubaca, a year before the abubaca was invented.  

One day at a contest at the velodrome, I was talking to Dave, and he looked over at a hubba, an angled concrete wall on the side of a small set of stairs.  He asked, "You think I can pedal stall that?"  Since I'd never seen a pedal stall, I said, "Huh?"  Dave pedaled slowly towards it, did a huge bunnyhop, and landed on his pedal, on the angled wall, 4 1/2 feet off the ground.  First try.  He literally did a 3 1/2 foot high bunnyhop, turned 90 degrees, and landed on his pedal, at a time when street peg stalls didn't exist, and peg grinds on ledges were a year or two away from being invented.  Then he hopped down and kinda of laughed.  I'd never seen anything like that, and Vander blew my fucking mind.  Again.

On one or more occasions, Dave put a freewheel on his freestyle bike, and raced B Pro, and was in the mix with the other pro racers of the day.  He didn't have a skatepark to practice in, but competed in skatepark contests.  He was so far ahead of the game in early street riding, that we usually didn't understand how hard and gnarly his tricks really were.  Then there's that insanely high bunnyhop tabletop photo from 1983 (in a previous section).  That photo is now 37 years old, and I've never seen anyone equal it in height and style, to this day.  Dave Vanderspek wasn't just a funny and charismatic goofball, and a good promoter, he was seriously one of the best all around riders in BMX freestyle in the early and mid 1980's, and a pioneer in many different ways. 

While he died tragically in 1988, Dave Vanderspek was a huge influence on the world of BMX freestyle, and many of the top riders of the era.  That's why I chose to draw a picture of him with my Sharpies, the 4th drawing in my series of Old School BMX freestyle pros.  Here's the picture I drew.  It's 11" X 14", drawn in my signature Sharpie scribble style, and  some signed (by me) and  numbered copies are still available.  Contact me at: stevenemig13@gmail.com for info.