This day in the spring of 1988 completely changed BMX riding forever. The first 2-Hip Meet the Street contest. Ron Wilkerson and posse put on this comp in a spot behind a shopping center in Santee, California, a spot where Dave Voelker had built some giant wall rides.
At 4:00 in this clip of Mondo Vision, you get the official Vision Street Wear edit of the Santee Meet the Street contest. The edit above is my edit for the 1988 2-Hip contest video, it's edited from the same footage, but is my rider-made edit, and much lower budget. The Mondo Vision edit was directed by one of the Unreel Producers, I can't remember which one.
None of us knew what to expect. Wall rides on BMX bikes were just invented the year before, and the biggest wallride ot appear in a magazine photo before the contest was about two feet high. BMX freestyle then was closely following skateboarding, and street skating was just beginning to become its own thing, led by skaters Mark Gonzales, Tommy Guerrero, and Nata Kaupas. What exactly did "street" riding mean, anyway? None of us who showed up at Santee really knew. We all had been doing it as long as we'd been riding, just like all the BMX racers a decade before us. We'd been hitting driveway curb jumps, doing kick turms on banks, doing footplants on benches, carving and doing bunnyhop "airs" in ditches, jumping down steps, and launching off loading docks on occasion. But there had never been a contest of street riding before, as far as we knew. Actually, later I heard Dave Vanderspek had held a small DIY comp in NorCal a year or so earlier. But I didn't know that on this sunny day in Santee.
A group of maybe 200 people total, mostly riders, showed up in a weird little area, behind a pretty average shopping center, in the Spring of 1988. Ron Wilkerson, Haro pro rider, vert and lip trick legend, and the guy who started putting on a halfpipe contest series the year before, put the event together. I rode down to the contest with the Unreel Productions cameraman, Pat Wallace. He was a lifelong California surfer guy, VW van and all, and Unreel's official camerman then. Vision Street Wear sponsored all AFA and 2-Hip contests that year, and Unreel, where I worked, was Vision's video company. So Pat got sent to every event to shoot footage, and both Vision and 2-Hip could use that footage however they wanted later on. And just for the record, as the Unreel tap libraian, MOST of the AFA and 2-Hip video shot from 1987-1990 has NEVER BEEN SEEN by anybody, except me. Really. There are dozens of hours of high quality, early, BMX freestyle footage form the 1980's that never got used in ANY video. It's all sitting in a warehouse now... somewhere.
All that aside, I was there as a rider, not a video guy. As we neared the contest sight, I joked, "It's going to be crazy, I wouldn't be surprised if somebody does a can-can wall ride or something today." That seemed like an completely crazy trick at that point. We rolled back behind the shopping center, and the first thing I saw, out the window of the VW van, was SoCal local rider George Smoot doing a can-can wall ride, on this HUGE dirt bank to wall. We hadn't even parked, and my mind was alreayd blown.
Soon after, I was on my bike, as Pat got the camera, and started shooting. Another guy, I think a friend of Pat's came along as well. The riding area was completely unseen from the road in front of the shopping center, and while one police car rolled up to see what was happening (and somehow got a 12 inch square Vision Street Wear sticker added to the trunk), the world had no idea out little contest was happening. It was just a bunch of BMXers, and a few obstacles. But there was a car. Most of us dreamed of riding on a car at some point, in our day to day riding, but never got the opportunity. and Ron Wilkerson had a huge, old, land yacht towed in to thrash. Right after we got there, cans of spray paint were pulled out, orange and green. A whole bunch of guys laid down bikes and started spray painting the car, and duct taping the windshield.
The guys best known for street riding at the time were the NorCal pioneer of everything, Dave Vanderspek, and San Diego thrashers Eddie Roman and Pete Agustin. So those were the guys most expected to blow minds going in. But we'd never all got together before to thrash urban obstacles, so everyone else was an unknown commodity.
Vander, Eddie, and Pete were there, of course. Santee area local, Dave Voelker was the guy who rode that spot on his own, and built the dirt jumps to giant wall rides. He was an immediate standout. Straight outta Torrance, The Spot locals, R.L. Osborn and Craig Grasso stood out immediately as well. R.L., one of the pioneers of BMX freestyle, going back nearly a decade then, was thought to be pretty much "retired" from riding at the time. Yet, he was there blasting huge wall rides in both directions and back peg fakie wall rides, among other moves. Grasso, the artsy looking omnivorous rider who could ride anything well, was doing big fakie wall rides, wall ride variations, and throwing his unique style at obstacles.
But the contest also drew hardcore BMX racers, most notably pros Rich Barlett and Chris Moeller. The launch ramp up to the five foot box, then to a four foot high box, was up their alley. Moeller, well known magazine test jumper, as well as pro racer, made fun of freestylers by putting a trick list on the back of his number plate, with tricks like "bunnyhop" and "long skid" listed on it. Vert legend Todd Anderson, running his coaster brake General, was there as well, and tossed out amazing fakie wall footplants into the growing trick lexicon of the day. Scott Towne, magazine photographer, was throwing out tons of style as well on his bike. NorCal young buck vert rider, Mike Golden, jumped the car sideways, to flat, off a tiny launch ramp. Dave Vanderspek launched off the tiny ramp to footplant on the roof over the car. Vander still had it.
The whole day was a "Fuck yeah! This is cool!" vibe among all of us. You can't put it into a context for modern riders, who have grown up with ramps, skateparks, and decades of videos to watch. It was like you took 100 hardcore BMX riders, and dropped them at the first skatepark ever built. It was all new. Yeah, we'd jumped off skater's launch ramps, and homemade plywood ramps before. But the obstacles were largely new. Many of the tricks were pretty knew, wall rides and fakie wall rides had been invented less than a year before. And then we had the boxes, and a car to figure out what we could do on it. Something like Steve Crandall's DIY comps, or Trey Jones Swampfest would be the closest comparison to the Santee vibe, in today's world. It was just a fun, crazy, experimental day of riding new stuff, real, hardcore, BMXin'.
The only crowd really was a few dozen friends, girlfriends, and some family members. It was mostly just a bunch of riders. And we all just went nuts. There were only two classes, Good (amateur), and Great (pro). There were no pro street riders then, this was the contest that turned street riding into a "sport," so riders just decided if they felt "pro" or not. In addition to the big car, launch ramps, and big boxes, and ramp/dirt wall rides, the obstacles included two parking blocks and a shopping cart. The one complaint some of us had was there wasn't much in the way of actual "street" obstacles. No one had done peg grinds on rails or ledges yet, that hadn't been invented. But there were no bench sized ledges, concrete or asphalt banks, or other types of often ridden obstacles. It didn't really matter. It turned into a jumping and wall ride contest mostly. But that's the stuff that looks the best in person and on camera.
Like I said, coming into the contest, Dave Vanderspek, Eddie Roman, and Pete Augustin had the biggest reputations as street riders. That day in Santee moved Dave Voelker, Craig Grasso, R.L. Osborn up into the mix. One more rider, the one from farthest away, dropped jaws with the trick of the day. English rider Craig Campbell, best known for vert, threw out solid tricks all day, and then blew what few brain cells we had left at the end with a huge wall ride to 360. I don't think anyone else had even imagined that, let alone thought of trying it.
I'll give the hardcore street riding roots medal to NorCal, early originators of street style riding since 1982-1983, like Dave Vanderspek, Maurice Meyer, Robert Peterson, and the whole Golden Gate Park crew. Being from the San Francisco area, with so much crazy terrain everywhere, street riding was in their DNA. That's the place Ron Wilkerson came from originally. But the street riding torch got passed to the San Diego crew that day in Santee. Yeah, Eddie Roman and Pete Augustin could bust some cool tricks on street, we knew that before. Look at the results, Vic Murphy won the Good class, and Dave Voelker won Great, with Eddie Roman, Pete Augustin, and contest promoter, Ron Wilkerson, who lived in Encinitas then, also among the top 8 in the Great class.
The first 2-Hip Meet the Street contest not only put the San Diego riders front and center in the new street riding genere', it opened everyone's mind to the potential riding available in the urban jungle around all of us. We all rode away looking at the city streets around us completely differently after a few hours at that contest. A few months after, the contest photos came out in the September issue of BMX Plus!, and probably the September issue of FREESTYLIN'. I don't have my magazine collection anymore, and oldschoolmags.com is missing that issue, so I couldn't check. The BMX Plus issue is on their site.
Much like the first King of Dirt jam at Rich Bartlett's dad's haouse, a year earlier, the Santee 2-Hip Meet the Street changed the way everyone there looked at the world around us, and what was possible on a BMX bike. The magazine photos, and later the videos above, spread that vibe to thousands more riders. And BMX street riding spawned into a sport, as well as just something fun to do between racing and freestyle sessions. Bike riding was never the same after that day in Santee, and street riding continues to evolve now, 35 years later. Even crazier, many of the riders there that day are still riding. None of us expected that.
Nearly a year later, I got a call from Ron Wilkerson, asking me if I wanted to edit the 2-Hip contest season video. I jumped at the chance. I was able to borrow Unreel's S-VHS "offline" edit system, and chopped it all together in the spring of 1989, 5 vert comps and this street comp. Why did Ron ask me? The year before I produced six videos for the AFA, and I was the guy who seemed to have the basic skills to edit a low budget video at the time. Eddie Roman's "BMX movie," Aggroman, came out later in 1989, which really sparked the rider-made video movement in BMX freestyle. For the next year or two it was Eddie, Mark Eaton of the Plywood Hoods, me, and Jeremy Alder Back east, producinga few rider-made, low budget videos. By about 1991, a whole lot more people start putting out low budget BMX videos, which sparked a video revolution during the recession of the early 1990's, after BMX "died," and only the hardcore people were left. This video embedded above, became part of the 2-Hip BHIP video, check it out.
So that's my story of the first media covered BMX street contest, one sunny spring day, in Santee, California in 1988.
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