A backwards bunnyhop won real street at Rincon, over the rail, down the big drop. Fucking wow.
I learned backwards bunnyhops in 1988, because I was a dork, and knew I couldn't hang in flatland anymore, once the locomotive and whiplash were invented. And by "hang" I mean place in the middle of the pack, in a class of fifty 17& over intermediates, in flatland at an AFA Masters comp.
So I started trying a bunch of weird bunnyhop tricks, just seeing what was possible. Since I rode with skateboarders every weekend at the Huntington Beach Pier, I learned a few skate tricks on my bike, like half-Cabs (roolback to 180 bunnyhop) and no complys (footplant to 180 on flat), backside bonelesses (can-can footplant on a bank), and nollies (nosewheelie into a speed bump to hop).
In the freestyle world at the time, those weren't even tricks. Pretty much no one else did them. Eddie Roman did footplants to 360's, along with dozens of other weird, hard, and innovative tricks. So goofing around on my own, I got to where I could do 6-7 foot backwards bunnyhops on flat, 6-7 foot half-Cabs (on a freewheel, not freecoaster, so I could launch farther) and full Cabs (rollback to 360 bunnyhop, only landed a few). I tried a bunch of other bunnyhop tricks, and famously spent years trying to pull a bunnyhop tailwhop, but never landed a single one. None of those things were even considered tricks at the time.
Then, 15-20 years later, with stronger bikes, and when street riding had progressed a lot, riders discovered those old skate-inspired tricks, and took them to gaps, drops, ledges, and banks. They kept pushing them to new levels. So as a complete dork of a rider from the 80's and 90's, I'm stoked to see an completely fucking insane, HUGE backwards bunnyhop win Real Street at the X-Games. I never even dreamed something like that would be possible. Mad props to Colin Varanyak, and all these riders.
My favorite part of all the X-Games footage I've seen was the cutaway shot during the dirt jumping comp. The camera panned over to Cory Nastazio, standing near a pole, watching the action, and just goes, "Wow." Yeah... Wow.
I'm doing a lot of my writing on Substack these days, check it out:
First of all, Google maps has to add a new mountain range to their map every time there's a BMX dirt contest now. The size of the jumps is just ridiculous at this point. Second, everything the riders are doing, and almost doing, is fucking incredible these days. But I'm sharing this for one reason, the guy you see comment at 11:06. Wow.
Here's the Real Street Best Trick... at Rincon... BMX and skate.
Tony Hawk, during the best trick jam at the 1999 X-Games in San Francisco. I think it was on the 11th attempt he landed the first 900 on a skateboard ever. He'd been trying the trick for nearly ten years.
Ride a bike, it will take you places. SE Bikes brand manager Todd Lyons says that a lot these days, and he's right. There were about 5,000 stories of Tony Hawk landing this 900, the first ever on a skateboard, that night on a pier in San Francisco, a different story for each person in that crowd. This is my version. I was standing behind the pro skaters, less than 20 feet from the side of the ramp, talking to San Francisco BMX freestyle legend Maurice Meyer. My Sony Digital8 video camera was in my hand... with a dead battery. I'm glad actually, that was a moment I was happy to just stand there and witness, without trying to capture it on video, and keep him well framed during each try. More than a decade later, in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Sean Penn's character sums up that feeling better than I've ever heard it described.
I had finagled a press pass to the X-Games that year, planning to write an article or two for Dig Magazine in the U.K. about the contest. Maurice had nabbed a VIP pass, too. I rode with him and the other Golden Gate Park locals, most weekends, during the one year I lived there, in 1985-86. We ran into each other near the end of the BMX vert practice, and started talking about "the old days" and how much BMX and action sports had changed over 12 or 13 years' time.
While we were talking at the bike halfpipe, a red helicopter with a World Industries logo on the side of it, hovered near the ramps, and started dropping stickers. The handful of kids around the area ran around picking them up. Then we realized that something else was getting thrown out of the chopper, little wadded up pieces of paper. Because of the breeze, most were falling on the empty BMX ramp area, where we were, not on the skateboard crowd. Someone grabbed one of the pieces of paper, and unraveled it. "It's money" they said. Suddenly all of us jaded Old School guys were picking them up, too. Mike Dominguez Jr., amped up after an afternoon of free Mountain Dew, sprinted around and grabbed 30 or 40 of the wadded up dollar bills, I think. I wound up with four of them, each with a World Industries skateboard character, like Flame Boy or Wet Willie, rubber stamped on them. We laughed at yet another example of Steve Rocco's crazy promotion methods. When in doubt, just throw money on the crowd. I literally had real helicopter money in my pocket when Maurice and I decided to walk over and watch the skate best trick jam, which had just started.
Dusk was descending on the huge pier that housed the 1999 X-Games, next to San Francisco Bay. With our passes, we just walked over and stood behind the rows of chairs there for pro skaters and their girlfriends, wives, and a few kids. In some of the wide shots in the clip above, you can see two really bright lights, that look lke stars on the video. We were right below, and maybe 20 feet in front of those lights, they were shining over our heads, lighting up the skate halfpipe for the TV cameras.
Maurice and I kept talking, as the world's best skaters tried their newest and best tricks. As I recall, Pierre Luc Gagnon was trying to land a heeflip Caballerial, as Steve Caballero himself sat 10 feet in front of me. Bob Burnquist was trying a one footed Smith Grind to revert, I believe. Other skaters were trying their "Merry Christmas" tricks, the things they could land once in a while. For Tony Hawk, that was the varial 720. About 12 or 15 minutes into the half hour jam, he landed one. Then he went back up, and just stood on deck a few minutes.
Skaters dropped in, sometimes snaking each other, to try to pull that one big trick. It was the closest thing I'd seen to "real," everyday skateboarding in a contest environment. The best trick jam was a concession to the vert skaters, who still weren't really happy with ESPN's take on skateboarding, in their 4th year of the putting on the X-Games. The big TV contest idea for action sports was evolving, as skaters got more involved and vocal about how they were portrayed to millions of viewers.
It was obvious the bigwigs at ESPN didn't give a shit about the best trick jam, but they had a big crowd, around 5,000 people in the stands on the other side of the ramp, so they kept the cameras rolling. It would make for soem good highlight clips, I think that's how they saw it. Old School skater and announcer, Dave Duncan, called the action out live from the deck. Maurice and I watched and talked.
Then Tony Hawk dropped in again, and no one paid that much attention. Until he opened up out of what looked like a over-rotated 540. We stopped talking, "Did he just try a 900?" one of us asked the other. I can't remember who said it. Tony walked back up to the top of the ramp, and did the same thing a couple of more times. The second rotation got tighter and tighter. After the 3rd or 4th try, he walked off the side of the ramp, facing us, He was 15 or 20 feet away, and we could totally see his eyes, he had the stare, the "thousand yard stare," as I've heard some call it. He was looking right towards us, but saw nothing. Pure focus. I asked Maurice, "Did you see his eyes? He's serious. He's either going to land it or go to the hospital trying." Maurice agreed.
The whole aura of the place shifted. Other skaters stopped dropping in. The skaters on the deck knew Tony really wanted the 900, and stepped back in respect. It wasn't planned. No color commentary guy had to spew stats and percentages to hype people up. The energy in the whole area changed. This was real skateboarding at it's best.
A top skater just got a taste that tonight was the night to land the unlandable trick, and Tony just laser focused on it. Everyone stopped skating after a couple more attempts. It wasn't about trophies or prize money anymore. We all wanted to see Tony Hawk progress vert skating to the next level. Tony kept trying, getting more and more determined, and closer to landing it. Dave Duncan kept talking into the mike like only a hardcore skateboarder could. This was a moment, one way or the other.
I think it was on the 7th attempt that Tony landed on the board, made it a few feet, then washed out on the flatbottom. I jumped up in the air screaming, I gave that one to him. But he didn't ride away, it wasn't clean, he wanted it 100%. He kept trying. On the 11th attempt, I believe, is when Tony Hawk landed the first skateboard 900 air, totally solid. Everyone went nuts.
If you freeze that video above at about 6;03, you'll see Maurice right behind Tony, in a white hoodie, with sunglasses. He ran up there with all the skaters to congratulate Tony. I, for some reason, stayed right where I was, 30 feet away, watching the pandemonium. The place went nuts. But I had seen that happen before, 10 years earlier, up in Canada.
Mat Hoffman's first 900, at 14:43 in this clip, in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, in the spring of 1989. After the intro with Eddie Roman's girlfriend, this is the footage that I shot from that contest, with Eddie and friends doing their funny color commentary over it. This is from the 1990-2-Hip video, Ride Like a Man, edited by Eddie Roman.
Riding a bike did take me places. I was a dorky, unathletic kid who grew up in Ohio, spent 9th grade living in New Mexico, and then lived in Boise, Idaho through high school. The summer after my sophomore year, I got into BMX riding, then BMX racing, and then new sport of BMX freestyle, in 1983. A year after I graduated high school, my family moved to San Jose, California. I worked at Pizza Hut, started publishing a freestyle zine, and met the Bay areas freestylers, like Maurice, Dave Vanderspek, Robert Peterson, Hugo Gonzalez, and a couple dozen more. My zine led me to a magazine job in Southern California. I wasn't punk rock enough for that place, and I got laid off. I got a job editing a newsletter, which led to working at Unreel Productions, the Vision Skateboards video company, in late 1987. I was out riding three hours a night like everyone else, but didn't have the balls to make it to pro caliber as a BMX freestyler. By 1989, I was Unreel's camerman, traveling to all the 2-Hip vert and street contests to shoot video, because Vision Street Wear sponsored the contests.
While I was bouncing around the BMX and industries, the early skatepark riders inspired a bunch of great quarterpipe riders around the U.S. and Europe. In 1987, Haro pro Ron Wilkerson started putting on halfpipe contests. Riders like Todd Anderson, Josh White, Joe Johnson, and this kid from Oklahoma, named Mat Hoffman, moved up the amateur ranks and into pro. They pushed the older guys like Eddie Fiola, Brian Blyther, Mike Dominguez, as vert riding progressed.
The first 2-Hip King of Vert of 1989 was in Kitchener, Ontario Canada. The less than epic 2-Hip halfpipe was set up in a college gymnasium for the weekend, and the riders, amateur and pro, gave it their best. The talk of the weekend was that this crazy, unknown guy from Canada, called The Terminator, was going to do a backflip abubaca or fakie or something. No one except lake jumper Jose Yanez had done flips on a BMX bike then. No one had even tried them on vert. The Terminator was an amateur, and when his final run came up, he did a high fakie, leaned back a little, and crashed hard. The weekend up hype fizzled.
The rest of the amateurs rode their runs, blasting high and pulling their best tricks. Joe Johnson landed the first double tailwhip air, which was amazing. I was on the deck, with a $50,000, 35 pound, rented Ikegami Betacam, shoulder checking photographer John Ker for a good angle to shoot from. I was doing my best to get good footage of the days events.
Then came Mat Hoffman, in what I believe was his second pro contest. He won his first pro contest. At the end of his final run, with about 300 people watching, mostly Canadians, he nearly landed a 900. Mat got up, and went for it again, landing the first BMX 900 in a contest, and the first recorded 900 in any action sport. Even snowboarders hadn't pulled a 900 air at that point. I caught it on video from the deck, and Eddie Roman and another guy caught it from two angles below. Mat Hoffman, new pro vert rider and wonderkid, broke the 900 barrier in action sports, with video and photos to prove it. Word was the Mike Dominguez had landed a 900 or two on his own ramp. But there were no photos or video. Mat made it official, the 900 was possible.
By some weird quirk of fate, me, the goofy kid from Ohio and Idaho, was there to get video. And by an even crazier quirk of fate, I was in San Francisco a decade later to watch Tony Hawk do it, live, on a skateboard. The only other two people that I know were in both places were Mat and his buddy Steve Swope. But they were running the bike contest in 1999, and I don't think they were watching the skate best trick jam. I'm not sure. There may have been a couple of people who saw both happen live.
We live in a weird Universe, and really crazy coincidences happen now and then. It still trips me out that I somehow saw both of these happen live, right in front of me. Riding a bike did take me places, for the first 20 years of my adult life. I met alot of cool people, traveled around the U.S., and into Canada a couple of times.
Then I got injured, became a taxi driver, and things went into a downhill spiral. I think life wanted to kick my ass for a couple of decades to teach me some other lessons. One of the things I've learned is that there are a lot of ways to spend your time in life, and goofing around on bikes is one of the best ways. You never know where it will lead you. Ride on!
I didn't plan this, just wanted to watch this show this morning because I woke up early. But this ties in well with the post about rider-made BMX freestyle videos I wrote yesterday. We all bagged on the X-Games in the early years, because ESPN just didn't get the action sports mentality. But that was 20 years ago. The fact that they made a video segment contest is a testament to how far things have come, in FSMX, at least. I've been out of the bike video game for over 15 years, but it's really cool to see how much of a team effort video segments have become between riders and video guys.
Axel's clip was my favorite as well, just off the chain. They all rock, but I really love the clip by Raha, the young guys. Great stuff.
