John Povah is an 1980's BMX freestyler from England, who came to the U.S., found work painting cars, and wound up working for years in the BMX and action sports industries. He was a team manager for Schwinn Bikes, working with guys like Jay Miron, Dave Osato and others. He later became BMX team manager for Etnies, working with riders like Rooftop, Taj Mihelich and others. In this podcast Ryan Fudger, Mike, "Rooftop" Escamilla, and Nathan Williams interview John. This podcast tracks John's life, riding, and work in a BMX freestyle career spanning five decades.
This may sound weird, since I've written hundreds of blog posts about BMX freestyle, but I rarely listen to BMX podcasts. The main reason is that I'm always busy doing other work. When I draw my Sharpie drawings, I spend hours listening to things on YouTube, but it's usually music, interviews, and documentaries, about the musician I'm drawing. That's because I usually draw musicians. When I'm writing and blogging, I usually listen to music, often pretty mellow, stuff in the background. That's pretty much all I do, seven days a week. So I just don't get around to listening to many BMX podcasts. But I've really liked the few I have listened to. This podcast with John is my favorite, mostly because I knew John well in the early 1990's.
I met John and Keith Treanor at the Oceanview flyout jump, in Huntington Beach, in the spring of 1990. Actually I met Keith at the H.B. pier a couple weeks earlier, but I talked to so many people there, Oceanview is where I first remember meeting Keith. In any case, I started hanging out more with them, and shooting footage of them, for my 1990 self-produced video, The Ultimate Weekend.
That's John holding his hand up, on the cover of the video, with Keith blasting over him at the Oceanview jump, 1990. I took Mike Sarrail's photo, Xeroxed it zine style, and went high contrast, because I sucked at graphic design. I still suck at graphic design.
John and Keith became the main riders in the video, which I shot footage for, from spring to the fall of 1990. You can see John, Keith, as well as Josh White, Woody Itson, and H.B. local Andy Mulcahy, at the Oceanview jump, at 23:28 in The Ultimate Weekend.
John and Keith were both really good, and just getting known, so I just asked them when I was going riding, or they'd call up and I'd take the camera when they went riding different places at times. The Huntington Beach area scene then, in 1990, was Chris Moeller and his roommates, The P.O.W. House guys in Westminster, Keith, John, Sean McKinney, Alan Valek, Hippy Jay and Hippy Sean just beginning to build Sheep Hills, flatlanders Andy Mulcahy and 3-4 other guys, and me. We were all spread out around the H.B./ Westminster area, riding in little groups through the recession days of the early 1990's. As people got jobs or lost jobs, we moved in and out of different houses and apartments, among the BMX rider houses.
I was totally surprised, when the podcast spent several minutes going through The Ultimate Weekend, looking for the footage of John doing the first ice pick grind down handrail, which is in TUW at 32:30 (at that link above). The dark shot of Keith Treanor, after John's ice pick grind, is the first handrail down steps in a BMX video. Street riding was still really new, and progressing fast then, so every video in 1989-1991 had several first ever, or first on video, tricks. Listening to this podcast is what inspired me writing this post on Substack, where I tried to figure out the sequence of the first double peg grinds on street, in those early videos in 1990.
At one point, 1993, I think, I got a better job, and John Paul Rogers and I did a house switch. I moved out of the P.O.W. House, and J.P. moved in. I took his place, renting a room in a house in Westminster, with Chris Moeller, John Povah, and John's girlfriend at the time, Bitch Girl, who is mentioned in the podcast. So I was roommates with John for several months during that period. In those days, all the people in that scene were riding with each other in groups, on dirt or street day to day. At night, we were meeting up and going to see punk bands play, or going to night clubs to meet girls. Almost every night, at the P.O.W. House living room, a group would form, then they'd drink a little, and head out to the night's adventure, in one of more groups.
Those were fun, often broke, and crazy times. BMX, according to the bike industry, was "dead" from 1989-1995, between the end of the 80's boom, and the beginning of the X-Games. During that time, the young kids at Sheep Hills became the SHL crew, and riding just kept progressing. I broke away and went off on my own in 1995. While still riding, I was riding alone daily, and not going to events, until about 2003. I would see guys once in a while, but not often. So all the stuff John Povah did after that, the amazing stuff, like being Schwinn team manager and then on to Etnies as team manager, I didn't know about until many years later. So much of that was new to me, hearing it first in this podcast.
All in all, with Rooftop leading into lots of crazy stories, this is a hilarious and great podcast. Also, like everyone Rooftop asked, I agree, John Povah is really an all around cool human being. Just a solid, hard working, dependable guy who was also a really good rider. It was cool to hear all the stories of the years I didn't know much about, like Jay Miron doing the first double backflip, and all His time working at Schwinn and Etnies.
If you bothered to read this blog post, stop reading, listening to me babble, on and just watch/listen to the podcast. It's great stuff if you're an Old School or Mid School BMX rider from the late 1980's, up through today.
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