Brooklyn Banks contest in 1989: Dennis McCoy is Crazy

It was September of 1989.  I sat on a bed in the hotel room Rich Bartlett and I were sharing in Midtown Manhattan for a contest weekend.  It was a Thursday night, BMX freestyle had "died" earlier that year, and sponsorships, even for top pros, had been sucked into the Bermuda Triangle and disappeared.  But Vision Street Wear was still jammin', and they paid for our room.  Crashing in our room for the weekend, because they had no sponsors at the time, were Dennis McCoy, Mat Hoffman, Steve Swope, some up-and-comer named Rick Thorne, and a couple of other Kansas City riders.

Dennis was the top overall rider in the world, and the favorite of New York City locals.  Mat Hoffman was the top vert rider in the world.  We were all in NYC for a 2-Hip Meet the Street contest, at the legendary Brooklyn Banks.  It was the beginning of  weekend destined to be epic.

The guys claimed floor space for sleep later that night, 3 or 4 guys actually camped out in the huge walk-in closet our room had, which was bigger than half of the bedrooms I had growing up as a kid.   Rich was pro BMX racer, who also rode dirt, street, and vert.  He was Vision's sponsored rider.  I was the video cameraman for Unreel Productions, Vision's video company, sent because VSW sponsored all of Ron Wilkerson's 2-Hip vert and street events.  Much like the punk rock scene of the 1980's, in BMX freestyle, whoever had a room paid for usually let several friends, and often strangers, camp out in their room for free.  Things were cool like that back in the ramen days.

I'm focusing on Dennis McCoy for this post, because of the crazy love the NYC locals had for him as a street rider.  Hoffman was there.  Dave Voelker was there.  Ron Wilkerson was putting on the contest, and riding in it.  But Dennis McCoy was the name I heard the locals talking about all weekend long.

So what made Dennis so special to them?  He was as "street" as it got.  He could ride anything, and was known for learning new tricks and having them on lock from one contest to the next.  You never showed Dennis McCoy a new trick you invented back then, until you had it completely dialed.  Because, if he liked it, he'd be doing it better than you at the next contest.  Nearly everyone thought Dennis McCoy was just gifted at picking up new tricks fast.  A couple years earlier, I found out otherwise.

It was late Sunday afternoon, the weekend of the Austin AFA Freestyle Masters contest, in 1987.  I worked for the American Freestyle Association (AFA), which put on the contests.  Bob Morales, freestyler turned serial entrepreneur and promoter, ran the AFA. We had 3 or 4 full time employees, and a bunch of volunteers at contests.

Austin was an epic comp, Kevin Jones had unleashed the Locomotive on us all in flatland, and upgraded version of the Backyard scuffing trick, and changed riding forever in an instant.  The contest before, in Oregon, the Backyard, a scuffing trick invented by NorCal rider Tim Treacy, blew up, and most serious competitors had learned it.

But the contest was over, Bob Morales had gone off to take care of the last paperwork and details with the venue staff.  I was in a big back room of the building, like a warehouse, riding by the big open truck door.  The place was empty... almost.  I heard a freewheel behind me, and turned around.  Dennis McCoy came riding out of the main hall, saw a glass bottle on the concrete floor, and in a well practiced move, flicked it, swap rock style, with his front wheel.  The bottle went shooting across the huge building at warp speed, slamming into the opposite wall.  It didn't break, but probably chipped a bit.  I'm pretty sure Dennis could take out a small animal playing swap rock.

He rode up to me, and asked what I was doing.  I'd met him a year before, and then wrote a zine article about how I thought Dennis should have beat Woody Itson in the 1986 finals, and he was pretty stoked, and I got to know him a bit.  I was goofing around doing my normal tailwhips or squeakers probably, fun tricks I had dialed in.

Dennis asked if I knew how to do Backyards.  He told me he missed the Oregon contest, the one before Austin, when the trick popped, and needed to learn them.  I told him I had tried them but never got them down.  Sometimes being the $5 an hour AFA wokrer guy pays off.  Suddenly there was Dennis McCoy and myself, positioning our bikes on the back wheel, handlebars backwards, one foot on a back peg, then stepping up into the Backyard, and trying to scuff.  I did it, and scuffed 2 or 3 times, then lost my balance and fell over.  Dennis stepped into it, scuffed a couple times, and lost his balance, and stepped out of it.  I tried again.  Then Dennis.  We went back and forth until we were both doing 6 or 7 scuffs each, rolling on the back wheel.

About that time, Bob Morales walked back into the area, and said he was done, it was time to head to the airport.  He stopped and we all talked a couple minutes, and Bob and I got in the rental minivan (the same one that Ron Wilkerson "kidnapped" us AFA employees in- previous post).  When I left, I could do the Backyard, stepping into it, just as well as Dennis McCoy.

I wasn't too interested in learning the Backyard, I was more into trying to invent new tricks, rather than learning the hottest new trick.  But the hot new tricks were what helped us riders place well at contests.  By the time the next contest happened, I could still step into a Backyard and scuff 4 or 5 times.  Dennis McCoy, however, had the Backyard on lock and soon worked into his contest routine.  I realized that he wasn't learning it any faster than me when we tried in Austin.  He just went back to Kansas City, and that crazy fool rode like 12 hours a day.  He just worked harder at freestyle than the rest of us.


Here's the AFA Freestyle Masters Finals from 1987, a few months after the Austin contest I spoke of.  At 11:41 you can see Dennis do a long backyard, working it  into circles.  Dialed.

So when Rich Bartlett and me wound up with Dennis, Mat Hoffman, Swope, Thorne, and the others to session with in big bad New York City, we knew DMC would be a hard guy to keep up with.  I have the next part of that story, the 1989 Brooklyn Banks Meet the Street contest, over on the new Block Bikes Blog, so go check it out. 

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