This is my edit of the first 2-Hip Meet the Street contest in Santee, California, in 1988. This was the second street riding contest ever, (Dave Vanderspek put one on in NorCal earlier), and the first to get coverage in the BMX media. Vision Street Wear, near its peak at the time, sponsored all the 2-Hip events, and sent Unreel Productions cameraman (same place I worked then), Pat Wallace, to shoot video of all the 2-Hip events. While I didn't shoot the footage, Ron Wilkerson tapped me to edit this video of the 1988 2-Hip contest season. I edited it as a side job in early 1989, and sent the $500 I made to my sister Cheri to help her pay for college. She's a veteran 4th grade teacher in Greensboro, North Carolina now, with her Master's and National Board. I'm the guy ghost riding my bike into the wall, and BMX video pioneer Eddie Roman shows up at :43 1/2 seconds in, and a few other spots. Now called 2-Hip BHIP, this 1989 video was the 7th BMX freestyle video I produced, and the first one I edited.
In early 1986, the Apple Macintosh personal computer was two years old. Nobody I knew had one. Hair was big on both guys and girls, Preppies were the popular kids, Ronald Reagan was president, and was seen as kind of a joke, known for eating jelly beans a lot and falling asleep in national security meetings. He wasn't near as popular as he is now, after 30 years of good PR. MTV played music videos all day and night, and we would go to actual little stores, called arcades, and put quarters in big tall machines to play video games.
In 1986, BMX freestyle was a weird, tiny, mostly unknown sport/activity done by a handful of weirdos. I'd moved from Boise, Idaho to San Jose, California the previous September, and started publishing a zine covering the NorCal BMX freestyle scene. The Bay Area freeestyle scene was legendary then, Dave Vanderspek and the Curb Dogs, and the Skyway factory team were there. A weekend at Golden Gate Park could be a jam circle with Vander, Maurice Meyer, Robert Peterson, Rick Allsion, and sometimes even Oleg Konings (put a helmet on Oleg!), and a bunch of great amateurs. Down in San Jose, Hugo Gonzales was getting crazy on his quarterpipe.
My zine, paid for with Pizza Hut earnings, typed on a 1920's-era Royal, manual typewriter, and a photos shot with a 110 Kodak, landed me the weird gig of Team Manager for a horribly made Taiwanese bike called Off The Wall (later OTW morphed into Air-Uni then Ozone). Our team was me, John Ficarra, Mike Perkins, Tim Treacy, and Mike Golden, I think. We headed down to the spring 1986, AFA Masters Velodrome contest in a rental van with my boss, the guy who talked the Taiwanese family into make freestyle bikes. Sitting in our one motel room that night, working on our bikes and drinking Cactus Coolers, Eddie Roman poked his head in the room. "Hey, I got a video to show you guys." For me, that was the first taste of the rider-made BMX freestyle video idea. It was a class project he made a school, called "Aggro Riding and Kung Fu fighting. It was wonderful and horrible at the same time. Bad acting, poorly laid out fight scenes, and some god riding. I think it was like 20 minutes long then. But Eddie Roman MADE IT. HIMSELF. That was the cool thing. Eddie roamed room to room that night, showing his video to everyone.
With all the other stuff going on in the world, the march of new technology was chugging along, at what seemed like a fast pace then. Only a few years earlier, it took equipment worth tens of thousands of dollars to make any kind of video. But full size VHS cameras and VCR's were making their way into the lives of a few people. People like Eddie Roman. New technology, combined with creativity, and a weird, new little sport, led a few actual freestylers to making our own videos in the late 1980's. Eddie Roman led the charge. I got into it in 1987, when my boss, Bob Morales of the AFA, walked in one day and asked, "Do you want to make a TV commercial ?" I did, and then I produced six AFA contest videos later that year.
Back East in York, Pennsylvania, flatland legend and Plywood Hood Mark Eaton, started shooting video of Kevin Jones, himself, and the York posse riding their bikes. He did some ultra-low budget VCR to VCR editing, and Dorkin' in York was born. The three of us, Eddie Roman, Mark Eaton, and myself (Steve Emig), were the main three riders making BMX freestyle videos over the next two or three years. Other guys were shooting video, some, like professional video editor Carl Marquardt in New York City, made short, amazing little videos. But Eddie, Mark, and myself made a bunch of full length videos, coming at it from different directions.
Eddie got a job at a place that did video work for the public, I think, and learned skills on the job. Mark Eaton, as far as I know, took the self-taught, VHS to VHS route in those early years, documenting the best flatland happening in the country. I started working with the Vision Skateboards/Vision Street Wear video company, Unreel Productions, to make a couple of AFA commercials for MTV, and then six AFA contest videos. I was at Unreel so much, they hired me away from the American Freestyle Association in December of 1987. Like Eddie, I was a peon at work but began learning video skills as I worked.
Other people were making BMX freestyle videos in those years. BMX Plus made three, I think. Dave Vanderspek and the Curb Dogs had a video made of them, but didn't self-produce it. BMX Action magazine made one. GT Bikes made three videos, I think. Unreel/Vision Street Wear made a BMX racing TV show, a full length freestyle video, and had clips of freestyle in other videos and commercials. But that was the "corporate" stuff. Eddie Roman and Mark Eaton wanted to make their own, entirely self-produced videos. This was at a time when BMX freestylers simply didn't make our own videos. Only big bike companies or magazines made BMX videos. That's just the way it was. Nobody saw a reason for riders to make our own videos.
East Coast rider, and inventor or the barspin air, Jeremy Alder, clued me in on the fact that he and his brother Joe made a couple videos on the East Coast in that era as well. Alder Tricks You Can Stand came out in 1988, produced by the Alder brothers. It was huge in the Rockville, Maryland/Eastern Seaboard scenes. I saw video of Jeremy's first barspin air, and thought it was just another kid's home video. I didn't realize they produced full length videos back then as well. East Coast freestyle, still being under-represented in 2018. Thanks for letting me know Jeremy. Alder Tricks 2 came out some time later.
Things stay "the way they are" until someone tries something new. I've found that most new things come from people asking one or both of two basic questions, often while sitting around bullshitting or drinking. AND THEN, they actually take action and make the new idea happen. Those two great questions are:
1) Why doesn't somebody make/do ___________?
2) Wouldn't it be cool if I/we _____________?
In the next post, I'll list the early rider-made videos from 1986 to about 1992, which is about when everyone grabbed a camera and shit blew up. But to start, I just found this gem on YouTube. This seems to be a later, re-edited version of the video Eddie Roman brought into our motel room in the spring of 1986. Some of the riding is definitely late 1987-88 or so. Enjoy.
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