Here's a short New School how-to video on the BMX Half Cab. I didn't invent the Half Cab, but when I started down a new direction with my riding in 1987, Half Cabs soon became one of my favorite and strongest tricks. I was doing 7-10 foot Half Cabs in 1988-89, and nearly clicked lookback Half Cabs in 1989. For real. But Half Cabs weren't even considered a "real trick," back then. It was just some weird thing I did, since I rode with skaters all the time.
At the Oregon AFA Masters contest in the spring of 1987, a trick by NorCal rider Tim Tracy became the trick of the weekend. That trick was the Backyard, and it was the first scuffing trick that went viral in BMX flatland. Whiplashes were still new then, and the whole idea of rolling forward tricks was just beginning to change the course of the evolution of BMX freestyle.
People have always done tricks on bikes. But what we know as freestyle began around 1980, with Bob Haro's demos at BMX races. Flatland tricks then were things like rollback 360's, and front wheel 360's on flat ground. The idea of BMX trick riding began to grow, and Bob Morales, R.L. Osborn, Mike Buff and a handful more, showed us the early tricks. Front and back wheel hops. Hip whips. Rollback 540's and 720's. 360 bunnyhops or "floaters." Martin Aparijo, Woody Itson and others got into the mix. Along came boomerangs, flatland tailwhips, decades, Switzerland Squeakers, cherrypickers, sliders, backwards wheelies, lawnmowers, funky chickens, Pinky squeaks, balance tricks, among other tricks.
Across the U.S., and in a few other countries, early BMX freestyle converts started learning the basics from magazine photos, and then inventing their own variations and tricks. BMX freestyle began to grow, and with the AFA in 1984, Bob Morales turned it into a sport with flatland, wedge ramp, and quarterpipe contests. In those early contests, it wasn't unusual to see 50 different riders, from novices to pro, doing tricks we'd never seen before. Then some tricks, like boomerangs, decades, and cherrypickers became standards that nearly everyone did. For good or bad, I was always trying to invent new tricks, I didn't really want to do all the same tricks everyone else did. Some riders specialized in taking the most popular tricks, and really dialing them in to do a tight routine. Others, like Oleg Konings and Eddie Roman, for example, tried to do mostly completely original tricks and variations. Most riders did several standard tricks, with a couple original ones in 1984-85-86.
At the Austin, Texas AFA Masters in 1987, an amateur rider, Kevin Jones, from York Pennsylvania pulled up into a backyard in his run. He had completely dialed in the new scuff trick from a month before, and then he snapped up into a no handed version, we learned later he called it the locomotive. Kevin didn't only scuff no handed, he kicked off and began to glide. A big group of us in the crowd went fucking berserk, so much so, that all the judges turned around to see what we were yelling about. We pointed down to Kevin, on the floor. He had just changed the whole game of flatland freestyle, and somehow we all knew it.
Back home after the contest, I tried the backyard, and I could get about 4 or 5 scuffs after stepping into it. I knew that it would take me weeks to get that trick down to where I was average at it. The same was true of the whiplash, which I first saw done by Denny Howell in late 1986. The forward rolling tricks were about to take over flatland freestyle. And I just didn't want to learn them, to just be mediocre at them. The flatland world soon turned into a "Follow Kevin Jones and the York guys" sport. The stuff they were doing was really hard, and amazing. But I still wanted to break new ground, not just keep trying to learn their newest tricks.
Around that time, the GT team had a show in Huntington Beach, a couple blocks from my house. After watching a cool show, and getting super stoked to ride, Mike Sarrail and I showed some young kids a few basic tricks to work on. Eventually the GT guys packed up, the kids rode off, and Mike and I were just doing our flatland. I had been thinking to myself, "Flatland is turning into a forward rolling, scuff/glide sport. It's not "freestyle" so much anymore, it's becoming 'clone style.'" You have to learn a certain style of tricks to even be in the mix in competitions. I wanted to keep trying new stuff, even if it meant giving up on competitions. After winning one contest in Idaho in 1985, I'd been placing in the middle of the huge packs for 3 years or so. I decided to go a totally different direction with my riding. I'd start exploring what could be done with hop tricks. But not the stationary pogo hop tricks, those had been done. I decided to start working on what else could be done with hops on a bike. I did an endo, and went into a backwards wheelie (on the back peg), one of my favorite tricks at the time. In the middle of the wheelie, I tapped the brakes and did a small hop, and tried to land back into a backwards wheelie, and keep rolling. I'd never tried it before, and never seen anyone else try it either. After a couple of tries, I pulled it off. It wasn't very hard. It wasn't a big trick by any means. But that feeling of landing something completely new, that stoke, was there. I did a few more, and I started thinking about other types of hop tricks that might be possible. That was the summer of 1987.
One of my best tricks then was 180 bunnyhops... at speed. A couple days later I went to a basketball court in a park near my house. I started doing 180 bunnyhops, and then trying to bunnyhop while rolling backwards. My 180's were really low, and I took off of both wheels, rather than pulling the front end up up like a "real" bunnyhop. Doing them that way, I could do a bunnyhop 180 at nearly full sprint speed. I would land backwards, and sit down (high seat days), and backpedal to keep up with the freewheel. Usually I would do a 180 out, or "cool guy turnaround" as I called them, a Martin Aparijo trick where you turn the front wheel partly backwards and slide it around until you're going forwards. But that day at the basketball court, I started doing bunnyhops while rolling backwards. After and hour or so, I had them pretty dialed. I kept practicing backwards bunnyhops for a few days, and by then I was bunnyhopping 6-7 feet, maybe farther, backwards. That was pretty cool.
Every weekend in those days, if there wasn't a contest, I was riding at the Huntington Beach Pier. There were 3 or 4 of us regular bike freestylers, plus a few freestyle skaters. Pierre Andre', Don Brown, Hans Lingren, and H.B. local Jeremy Ramey, were the main ones. But since the HB Pier was a known spot, pretty much anyone could show up. Ed Templeton was a local street skater, and he came by often, as did Bob Schmelzer and Per Welinder. There was a whole crew of HB street skaters, and Mark Gonzales showed up now and then, too. On the bike side, guys like Martin Aparijo and Woody Itson rolled up once in a while to session, there was a crew from Lakewood that came by a lot, and anyone else, from Eddie Fiola to Josh White, might come by and ride flatland for the crowds for a while.
We had crowds every half an hour or so, usually with 100 to 200 people, gathered 'round. Sometimes up to 500 people would stop to watch. Normal people, even Californians, still stopped to watch BMX and skate freestylers back in those days, most people had never seen freestyle skating or BMX, since it was never on TV back then. Basically, we were street performers who never put a hat out. I once figured out that I rode in front of over 140,000 people during those weekends at the HB Pier, 100 to 200 people at a time. I spent as much time riding with skateboarders as I did riding with BMXers, in those years from 1987 to 1992 or so. My weekend riding was for crowds, so I added the high speed 180's and backwards bunnyhops into my trick bag. It wasn't long after that I started doing Half Cabs. For those not familiar, that's rolling backwards, and then doing a 180 bunnyhop back into riding forwards. The reason Half Cabs are upper case, is because "Cab" is a name, for the inventor, vert skater Steve Caballero. He invented a vert trick in the early 1980's called the Caballerial. He would roll backwards (aka fakie) up the transition, and pop off the wall and do a 360 Ollie (without using his hands). After spinning a full 360 on the vert wall, he would roll back down the wall forwards. This quickly became known as a Cab. When a skater did a fakie Ollie to 180, either on vert or on flat ground, then it was called a Half Cab. So after the straight backwards bunnyhops, I started hopping my 180's, which in skater lingo was a bike version of a Half Cab.
Since I rode a freewheel (I hated coaster brakes and freecoasters), my pedals would turn backwards when I was rolling backwards. I just had to backpedal a bit faster, which was not hard when I was sitting down. But freewheel gave me an edge doing flat ground Half Cabs. Because my pedals rolled backwards, I could put a lot of pressure on my outside pedal when I did Half Cabs, so I could really hop. And since I could do super fast 180 bunnyhops, I could roll backwards faster than pretty much anyone in freestyle back then. When I put those two together, I started getting a decent amount of distance on my Half Cab bunnyhops. I kept pushing those, and within a couple months, I was traveling 6-7-8 feet backwards, while turning around mid-air, in my Half Cabs. I've probably done 10 foot+ Half Cabs at times. Then, in 1989, the H.B. Pier bank opened up, when some skaters cut and "lost" the huge chain that had blocked it for years (it's supposedly buried in the sand, far out under the pier now). I started riding that bank almost every night. Before long I was jumping off the top of the bank (which was small and mellow) doing 180's. Then one night I did a little lookback attempt in a 180 flyout. I didn' get very high, so it wasn't very clicked, but it was fun. Since I landed those rolling backwards, I would Half Cab out of them. So I started trying a lookback in the 180 jump, then a lookback in the Half Cab turning back around. Those were really slow, and more of goofy "turnbars" than a lookback. But then I started trying lookbacks in my big, fast, long Half Cabs. And I could get them about 2/3 clicked. I was doing pretty decent lookback Half Cabs by the summer of 1989. To this day, I've still never seen anyone else do one.
As freestylers, we've all played games of FREESTYLE, like HORSE in basketball, where one rider does a trick, and then everyone has to pull it, or get a letter. When I was hanging out at the HB Pier, I would get into games of SKATE with skaters, usually street skaters. They'd do a skate trick, and I'd try to do the closest bike version of that trick. That was fun and got me thinking in totally different ways about what I could do on my bike. I had learned the original sidewalk crack nollies on a skateboard, and then took those to BMX, doing high speed nosewheelies into small curbs and speed bumps. launching low for a few feet off the front wheel. My BMX was getting more and more skate inspired, as I faded away from flatland.
One day at the pier I was playing a game of SKATE with some of the local street skaters, and one of them did a no comply. That was a real popular street trick at the time, and was a footplant ollie 180. So I did a footplant on my bike, and tried to boost into a 180, and land riding backwards. I don't think I got it first try, but I got pretty close. That turned into another skate inspired trick, and another hop trick as well. I got those dialed, and I think I was the first BMXer to do a flat ground footplant to 180, aka a skateboard no comply on a bike, back in 1989 or 1990. That's the one trick of mine that Eddie Roman put in the 1990 2-Hip video, Ride Like a Man. Eddie was doing footplants to 360's, and I had him trying one of those in my 1990 video, The Ultimate Weekend. When we sessioned for the shoot of him for my video, I showed him that I had been doing footplant 180's, and he had been doing them to 360, and neither of us thought of doing the other version.
The other big hop trick I was trying all through those years, is the bunnyhop tailwhip. I've written about that quite a bit in previous posts. I started trying those in the summer of 1987, and could come close in late 1989 and 1990. But I was never able to land a single one, and actually get both feet on the bike. You Old Schoolers know that Bill Nitschke, back in Indiana, invented bunnyhop tailwhips, aka the Whopper, in 1990. He was a much better rider than me, all around, and it took him a year to learn that trick.
My frustration with not being able to land bunnyhop tailwhips led to a couple of footplant versions of that trick. I did one that I called a no-comply tailwhip, where I would bunnyhop and begin to huck the back end of the bike around, and as I was doing that, I would jump off the back of the bike, plant both feet on the ground real quick, and then jump back on as the bike came around. Since that was just a dork trick, I could land those easy. They looked kind of cool, especially when I did them on banks. At the 1989 2-Hip Meet the Street at the Brooklyn Banks, I did a few of those on the small banks, and 3 or 4 other guys started trying them. I wasn't used to people trying tricks that I did, so that was pretty cool. I also learned to do a tailwhip footplant on the wall, at that contest. There was a section of wall a ways back, on the bigger banks, with a tiny, 1/2 inch wide ledge. It was just enough to help my foot get a little more grip on the wall, and help me stay on the wall a bit longer, and do a tailwhip footplant. I also used to do a straight footplant booster to tailwhip. That was probably the coolest trick to come out of my attempts at bunnyhop tailwhips. I'd ride along parallel to a ledge or bench, bunnyhop up and footplant with my right foot. Then I'd boost higher off that foot, throwing the bike around in a tailwhip at the same time. So the bike would be 3-4 feet off the ground. Then I 'd land on the top tube and pedal, like I would on the flat ground, no-comply taiwhips. Again, none of those things were considered "real tricks" back then. Nobody else, except Eddie Roman, was doing anything like a half Cab, or street tailwhip tricks.
Sometime in late 1989 or 1990, after doing big Half Cabs for a couple of years, I realized that I should try to keep going with the Cab idea. So I started trying full Cabs (rollback to 360 bunnyhop) one night, and then I tried doing them to 540 (rollback to 540 bunnyhop). I did land full Cabs on flat, in 1990, I think. I came close to the 540 Cabs, which I was going to call a King Cab, since I had a Datsun King Cab truck. I could kickstand them, sticking a leg out, but could never land a clean one. I also tried tailwhip Half Cabs, but could never even come close to those.
The last hop trick I tried back in 1989-90 was one I really wish I could had landed. As I wrote above, nollies on a bike became a favorite trick of mine. I loved hauling ass at a big speed bump, going into a nosewheelie a couple feet before it, and doing a nollie. In my opinion, it's not a nollie on a bike if you don't hit a bump with the front wheel. What most New School riders call "nollies" today are nose wheelies, in my opinion. They do amazing ones, nosewheelies to barspins off ledges, and nosewheelies to tailwhips, but they're not nollies, in my opinion. But that's the old salty guy in me.
So the other cool nollie trick that I actually tried for a while was a nollie tailwhip. I'd nosewheelie into a speed bump, pop off the front wheel, and huck the back end of the bike into a tailwhip. On flat ground, with just a speed bump, not off a ledge. The problem with learning that trick is that since I was only 2-4 inches off the ground, the back end of the bike would usually hit the ground about halfway around, then I'd land on my stomach, on top of the bike. That fucking hurt, every time. I did he bike more than halfway around at times, it was a brutal trick to try and learn, just landing on top of the bike, stomach down, getting poked by pedals, stem, pegs, and everything else, every time. So I just gave up on that one. But I know it is possible. After all, tailwhip Half Cabs, 360 tailwhip bunnyhops, and even a 720 bunnyhop have been done (really check YouTube). More is possible.
For those who knew me back then, you might be wondering why I didn't put any of these tricks in my 1990 video, The Ultimate Weekend. It's the same reason I didn't put any of our flatland riding at the pier in the video. I didn't think those tricks were really tricks. That stuff we did every weekend just seemed so "normal" to me, that I didn't even shoot video of it. I was trying to get the newer riding, which mostly street stuff. Plus, I thought I sucked at that point, so I didn't put much of my riding at all in the video. That's my biggest regret from The Ultimate Weekend, I didn't put any of our weekend sessions in, I never even shot video of that. Mike Sarrail was one of maybe the first) guy to do barspin and no handed Miami hop-hops, and undertakers, and Randy Lawrence could learn pretty much any trick in 10 minutes. But I didn't think that was worth shooting back then. I had a few unique flatland tricks as well, like no handed and barspin megaspins, and an opposite tailwhip-catch, to double tailwhip normal direction, and a few others. I never got any of those things on video, and that was stupid.
Obviously, I had no idea that 10-20 years later Half Cabs, bunnyhop tailwhips, and nollies would wind up being "cool" tricks. On one hand, those tricks I did 30 years ago that "weren't real tricks," that are now popular, is a cool bit of validation. I tried some weird stuff that wasn't cool BITD, but eventually, riding circled around and those tricks, like Half Cabs and nollies, found a home.
My other reason for writing this post is that at any point, there are one or two main styles of riding that are cool, but there are still different directions of riding waiting to be explored. In today's world of long frames, low seats, and freecoasters, a different bike set-up, with today's skill rider skill levels, would make all kinds of new types of new tricks and variations possible. Remember kids, it's called FREEstyle. you are free to completely ridiculous (and currently uncool) ideas, and see what happens. Just sayin'.
I have a new blog about BMX, skateboard, and action sports spots:
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