Blog post: Why did BMX freestyle happen?
In the original version of this blog post, I embedded a video clip of a young man and woman, riding bikes on a domed roof of an old building. In that clip, we saw a man and a woman, probably in their early 20's, around college age, riding bikes on the edge of this dome, on a windy day, at some point in the 1920's, the Roaring 20's, as they've come to be known. Not insane by today's standards, but they had a 20 to 30 mph wind they were dealing with, it was definitely dodgy.
I'm 54 now, as the crazy year 2020 draws to an end, and my grandparents were born between 1900 and 1909, I think, which would put these riders right around the same age. So if you're middle aged like me, imagine your grandparents riding 1920's bikes on a domed roof in the wind, as young people. Pretty radical for those days.
Then we see a guy on a 1920's mega ramp, below, basically, clearing a gap of 25 to 30 feet. Sure, there are a lot of riders who could make that jump today, on their BMX or mountain bikes. But that guy did it when the grandparents of us Old Schoolers were young, on a mild steel frame. What we call 4130 chromoly (or chrome-moly) steel today, was aircraft technology from the 1920's, to the best of my knowledge. It wasn't a material used to make bikes then, it was way too expensive. All these old bike trick videos and photos were people riding what we call mild steel frames. You know, the kind of frames you could snap in ten minutes at your local trails. These are the bikes Mike and Frank from American Pickers find in a barn of they're having a really good day. There were actually people riding bikes with wooden rims in that era.
I don't care how good of a rider you are, would you try that gap below on a skinny tire, $200, mild steel, beach cruiser-style bike from Walmart? Hell no, you wouldn't. My point is, people were getting crazy on bicycles from about the time modern bicycles were invented, which was around 1875. The Fred Flintstone-style, "hobby horse," foot push bikes, adult sized versions of today's toddler balance bikes, popped up around 1830. But pedal bikes came along around 1875.
As I've thought about those early bike riders while blogging, and as I've dug into these old clips and vintage photos, it's become apparent that there were some crazy ass motherfuckers on bicycles from the earliest days. And I mean crazy... by Morgan Wade Dakota Roche standards. They were doing Evel Knievel caliber shit 120 years ago. This photo below dates to 1905. My oldest grandma was kindergarten age when this photo was taken. Most people rode horses into town in those days.
You get the idea. There were people doing tricks on bikes from the get go. My personal belief is that bicycle trick riding was invented about ten minutes after the first guy learned to ride the first bike, when a cute girl walked by. That's just an educated guess.
We didn't know about this history when freestyle began spreading in the early 1980's, as Bob Haro, Bob Morales, Eddie Fiola, R.L. Osborn, Mike Buff, and other freestyle pioneers started doing demos and shows and letting other riders see what they had learned. After 1980, trick riding on BMX bikes began to spread slowly around Southern California, and the BMX racing world. Then a few hundred weird kids, myself included, caught the fever, and it blew up in small scenes dotted around the U.S., the U.K., and Europe, into the first wave of popularity in the late 1980's. Martin Aparijo and Woody Itson, who could both jump and ride pools, focused on flatland, and opened all our eyes to the what was possible with a BMX bike and a parking lot. We didn't all have skateparks, but we all had local parking lots for flatland.
So why did BMX freestyle, which started with Bob Haro and his friend John riding pools, just about on the 100 year anniversary of bikes being invented, take off and blow up world wide? Why did all the other action sports seem to pop up, grow, and explode, just as us Generation X kids were coming of age? This is one of the themes I went into in my online book/blog Welcome to Dystopia: The Future is Now, Book 1 (You can google it).
I think I've found the answer to this question, based on a little known social theory from India. The concept comes from a thinker, and pretty weird guy, P.R. Sarkar, and it's called The Law of Social Cycle. Basically, Sarkar came to the conclusion that there were four main mentalities of people in any society, The Intellectuals (smart people), The Acquisitors (smart people who focus on building wealth), The Laborers (average people who work normal jobs), and The Warriors (people focused on physical skills and courage). At any given time, in every society, one of these mentalities dominates society. That mentality is most looked up to, and shapes every aspect of their world. These mentalities can dominate society for decades or hundreds of years. But the mentalities dominate society in a particular order. The Warriors, The Intellectuals, The Acquisitors, The Laborers, and back to the The Warriors again.
An American economist, of Indian background (India Indians, not Native American Indians), named Ravi Batra, applied this concept to the U.S. in the 1980's, and came to the conclusion that we've been in the Acquisitor Age since our colonial days. The U.S. has been about business people, businessMEN primarily, as any woman who knows history can tell you. In the 1980's, when Batra figured this out, he wrote that we're nearing the end of the Acquisitor Age, a time when things turn to massive business and government corruption, the common working people get the shaft, and their standard of living goes down and stays down. Eventually, the working people become fed up, and they rise up in a huge populist movement.
Guess where we are now? Yep, the Occupy Wall Street movement, in 2011, was the beginning of the American populist movement rising to national awareness. It had been brewing under the surface for decades. Then the unexpected rise of both Donald Trump (on the political Right) and Bernie Sanders (on the political Left) were more examples of the rising populist movement. While they are on opposite ends of the political spectrum, they both tapped into millions of average working people who were pissed off at how much of a struggle everyday life, and making ends meet financially, had become. The new crop of both Progressive Left, and some of the Right Wing political extremes, tapped into millions of The Laborers rising up in protest.
In Sarkar's theory, The Laborers rise up, shit gets completely crazy and chaotic for a while, then one of two things happen. Either the society collapses and/or gets taken over by a rival (the bad option), or The Warriors rise up and take control and lead a new version of society. While the vast majority of people are Laborers, they aren't leaders, by nature. So The Laborers' populist movement rises up, shakes up and collapses the business people's corrupt system, then it kind of dies out. That vacuum is filled by Warriors, physically strong and truly courageous people. The average working people are sick of smooth talking con men at that point, they want actual, courageous, leaders.
So what does this have to do with BMX freestyle and actions sports? Simply, we as BMXers and Action Sports people, are one part of The Warrior mentality. Watching Sarkar's theory play out over 30 years now, since I read the book about it, I realized that the Warrior mentality people don't just pop up when The Laborers revolt, they slowly build, and the Warrior mentality spreads across the society little by little.
The entire action sports world, we are all part of the Warrior mentality that's been rising up in society, from the few weirdos on the fringe, decades ago. When all those crazy and fun-filled riders in the photos above got crazy on their bikes, they were freaks. Society wasn't ready for them, they didn't get thousands of other people to go out and do crazy things on bicycles. Bicycle trick riding was a novelty, but it didn't take off as a mass movement. But bicycling itself, then newer than BMX is today, did grow in a practical way. These shredders in the photos above, they were the handful of people pushing the limits in a highly conformist, Industrial Age, businessman's world.
But when Bob Haro and friends started doing tricks in the 1970's, they appeared on the heels of us Generation X kids seeing a couple of amazing and crazy people. Those two people, who influenced so many of us as little kids, were Evel Knievel and Bruce Lee. Their skills, daring, and general badassness really appealed to us kids, whose dad's (and a few moms then) worked either blue collar factory jobs, or suit-and-tie, 9 to 5 office jobs.
We were born into a world of massive, "company man" conformity, and Evel and Bruce showed us it was possible to be a bad ass. Those two came along right after surfing got popular in the 1960's, and as martial arts was gaining steam in the U.S.. Motocross, the other root action sport, besides surfing, had been slowly growing in the U.S., as well. These were all modern people with a Warrior mentality, but unlike the soldiers, police, and firefighters, professional athletes in mainstream team sports, the Warrior mentality people of earlier eras, these action sports pioneers turned that mentality towards a new group, a whole new kind, of "sports."
Another aspect of The Warriors that P.R. Sarkar described, was that people with the Warrior mentality are big on individualism. They like to do their own thing. So as the Warrior mentality was slowly spreading throughout American society in the soldiers, police, firefighters, and professional athletes in traditional sports, a whole new world of very individual-oriented sports, Action Sports, from BMX to rock climbing to surfing, and all the rest, evolved.
I published a zine in 1998 called "The Warrior Sports" explaining this idea. I passed about 50 of those zines out at the X-Games in San Diego that year. Much to my surprise, a year later, I was on the deck of the X-Games vert ramp, shooting video with a scammed press pass. Dennis McCoy rolled out next to me. Out of nowhere, he said, "Hey, that warrior zine you wrote last year was pretty cool." I didn't even see Dennis the year before, he nabbed a zine I gave to Mark Losey. But when Dennis McCoy remembers a zine a year after you publish it, you know you hit on a pretty cool idea.
So, in the Big Picture of things. BMX and BMX freestyle happened when they did, and took off and grew worldwide in the way they did, because society was finally ready for some radness. The Warrior Mentality was creeping through society, slowly becoming more acceptable to more and more people. By the time Bob Haro got his bike into a skatepark about 1975, a whole bunch of kids in Generation X was ready and looking for something wilder and crazier than the things our parents did as hobbies. You know, exciting things like bowling and miniature golf. Us Generation X kids were looking for a new type of excitement, and BMX freestyle was it for us, skateboarding for others, surfing for others, and the same with all the other Action Sports. Without realizing it, we all played a small part in creating a new version of the Warrior mentality. We found ways to do scary stuff, push our physical and mental limits, and get crazy, without actually going to war and killing other people. The early human tribal people, and later warriors and soldiers, were the root of warriorship, and the warrior mentality in ancient times.
As we move forward in the world today, we'll see more and more people who are actually physically good at something, from many different Warrior-type backgrounds, rise up to positions of importance in society. People are sick of silver-tongued, douchebag politicians. OK, a lot of people are, not everyone, there are still plenty of those politicians in office. As we navigate these chaotic times, we will see more courageous people emerge, actual leaders, and maybe some will be people we sessioned with in days past. Hopefully we'll take this into a type of society that's better for the vast majority of people and less of a 1% versus the 99% world.
One last thing, if you spend a chunk of your time in a bike shop, take heart, you never know what a small group of people from a bike shop will accomplish. Check the meme below.
