Produced by the Old Man of BMX himself, Scot Breithaupt, the Huntington Beach Street scene in early 1989 was the first made-for-TV BMX street contest ever. The intro starts with Scot and announcer Dave Stanfield, and then you see myself (blue shirt), and Randy Lawrence (white shirt), and the H.B. flatland crew.
Bike riders have been jumping curbs, riding embankments, and having fun on urban obstacles for 100 years or more. BMX street started with Bob Haro doing kickturns on the 6th & Commonwealth banks, and Bob and R.L. Osborn riding the Larry's Donuts bank in Redondo Beach around 1979-1980.
But BMX street riding really got going with the Curb Dogs and the other Bay Area freestylers in the early 1980's. The San Diego riders were right on their tail, exploring the potential of urban obstacles. When Mark Gonzales, Tommy Guererro, Natas Kaupas, and a few other skaters started pushing the idea of treating every city as a big skatepark in the mid 1980's, BMXers soon followed, and street riding started to get a little magazine coverage in about 1985. Curb Dogs founder held the first BMX street contest, but it was a mostly NorCal event, and didn't get any media coverage. Ron Wilkerson, a year after holding the first BMX halfpipe contests, decided to hold a street comp. He held the first 2-Hip Meet the Street contest in Santee, California, at one of Dave Voelker's favorite riding spots, in the spring of 1988. This contest did get media coverage, and I happened to be the guy who edited the first 2-Hip video, which included this section, from the Santee contest.
The next spring, in 1989, I was still working at Vision Skateboard's video company, Unreel Productions. The Old Man of BMX himself, Scot Breithaupt, re-emerged on the scene, that time as a TV producer. At a time when the young network ESPN wanted nothing to do with action sports, Scot managed to sell them a series of bicycle shows, the Action Sports Cycle Series. Scot was a seat-of-the-pants type entrepreneur. He would sell the idea, and then try to figure out how to make it happen.
Scot was also the single best hard sell salesman I've ever met. He could have talked a polar bear into buying a refrigerator, and a chest freezer to boot. So Scot sold the series to ESPN, found a video editor, and then came to Unreel to rent our edit bay at night to edit his TV shows. Back in 1989, editing broadcast quality video took a $500,000 edit bay full of VTR's and effects boxes, and more monitors than the bridge of the Enterprise on Star Trek. I got the job of hanging out at night with Scot and his editor, mostly to make sure Scot didn't "borrow" any of our video footage or equipment. Scot was a bit shady at times.
It was easy work for me, and I spent most of the time in our lobby watching the collection of surf videos the Unreel producers had donated. After a few weeks of this, Scot asked me if I had any ideas for a show. He was finishing up editing one show, it was a Sunday night. He needed to find or hold a bike event the next Saturday, edit the show the week after, and the show would air two days after that.
My answer was quick, "You have to do a street riding show." But Scot, a diehard BMX racer since the sport was invented in 1970, shot back, "Like jumping curbs and stuff?" It took me 20 minutes, and showing him the raw footage from the 2-hip contest in Santee, to talk him into the idea. He finally agreed it sounded cool, and he needed some kind of bike contest to make a show out of. The next day we went to work. Scot rented the old Surf Theater parking lot in downtown Huntington Beach, and borrowed the Stonehenge jump box ramp from GT Bikes and got a junked car. I got on the phone (no internet in those days) and told every freestyler I could think of that we were having a street contest that coming Saturday. It all came together in a week.
He called the event the Huntington Beach Street Scene. I just wanted to get street riding on TV, BMX almost never got on TV back then. Other than Chris Moeller taking a pretty good digger, and Randy Lawrence getting a really lame nickname from Scot in the show, things went off well. This show got the best ratings, by far, of any show in the series. That's how the first made-for-TV BMX street contest happened. Yeah, it looks pretty goofy now, but you have to start somewhere. BMX street has evolved ever since.
I've got a new blog about BMX, skateboard, and action sports spots, check it out:
