Here's a Bob Haro demo in the U.K. from 1983, The Master, official inventor of freestyle, wowing the kids in the U.K. in the early days. This was the year that the Haro Master, the first BMX bike built for "trick riding" came out. I couldn't find a video of Bob actually doing the bar hop, but this clip is from 1983, the year I saw Bob's how-to in BMX Plus!.
As I've said many times in my blogs, I got into BMX in the summer of 1982, in Blue Valley trailer park, outside of Boise, Idaho. It was the summer between my sophomore and junior year in high school, and there were about ten junior high and high school guys in the park. Isolated from all the kids in town, we'd gather after dinner each night by the basketball court, at the end of the pond, to do something. There were only four teenage girls in the park, and only one of those who didn't have a steady boyfriend. With no girls to chase, us guys wound up playing basketball, football, whiffle ball, threw rocks at each other, or rode our BMX bikes, for a couple of hours after supper. In early summer, we'd switch off on the evening activities, one day football, one day whiffle ball. But as the summer of 1982 progressed, we spent more and more time out at our little jumps, pushing each other on our sketchy BMX bikes.
By late summer, we started buying BMX magazines once in a while, which spurred us to ride harder. At the end of October, we found the BMX track, and three guys raced one race, then we all piled into my dad's van the next weekend, and the whole crew raced the last BMX race of the season. We were hooked on BMX big time... just as winter began to roll in. Come spring time, we were amped to get riding again. It was sometime that spring that I bought a copy of BMX Plus! that had a trick how-to from Bob Haro himself. It was called the Haro bar hop. The trick was amazingly simple, ride along, standing on the pedals, jump up, kick your feet through your hands, and land sitting on the crossbar, still rolling forward. At the time, I was still the worst rider in the trailer park, and jonesing to learn a trick the other guys didn't know, hoping to move up to second of third worst rider. "BMX freestyle" didn't have a name yet, it was still "trick riding."
I checked down the hill, no one was out at the basketball court. The coast was clear. I took my bike, a red Sentinal Exploder GX (K-Mart special type bike from a store cheaper than K-Mart) and my copy of BMX Plus, determined to learn the trick before I showed the magazine to anyone else. It took about 20 or 30 minutes, but I got the Haro bar hop down. By the time another kid showed up, I was hopping over the bars, landing on the crossbar, and riding 10-20 feet like that. Boom! I was the kid with the new trick, upping my BMX game in the trailer park, which was my whole plan. My perceived level of BMX suckage dramtically decreased. Within 15 minutes, three other guys were learning the trick, rolling around the old, rough asphalt of the basketball court.
It was that drive to out-do the other guys that pushed us all. We were pretty broke, none of us were much good at anything, and we lived in a trailer park, where there was lots of negative reinforcement that we would always suck at pretty much everything. We were HUNGRY, we wanted to prove people wrong, just in general. We all wanted to be good at something. BMX skills became our way to do that. So we kept pushing each other. That spring day was the first time I was the kid with the new trick, and I won't lie, it felt fucking good.
As the months passed, I did Haro bar hops now and then. I wound up learning one of my biggest BMX lessons from that simple trick. One day I tried one, and my toe caught the handlebars, and I got squirrely and ate shit, getting jabbed in the side by the end of the bars in the fall. It hurt like hell for a minute. and I cussed and stumbled around. Since my side hurt, I didn't try the trick again that day. A day or two later, I tried it again. I was scared. I couldn't jump my feet over the bars. I either didn't jump right, or I caught my toe, and fell. My mind created a mental block, and I never learned to do that trick again. Ever. I never landed another Haro bar hop, easy as that trick was.
That bummed me out, but the lesson was clear, when I crashed on a trick from then on, if I could move at all, which I usually could, I got up immediately, and tried to land the trick again. There were tricks I never landed, and a few, like boomerangs, that I learned, but gave up on, in that case because everyone did them, and the killed my wimpy abs. But I didn't lose another trick after that while I was riding consistently. If I fell, I got back up and tried, usually until I landed it at least one more time. Later I also learned that visualization can help overcome phobias and mental blocks to many tricks.
But it was from the simple Haro bar hop, the one trick I actually learned from a how-to by Bob Haro himself, taught me my first life lesson from BMX. Get back up, keep trying, no matter what.
Crazy as it sounds, that lesson is something I do every day, in my current sketchy life situation. Things are rough right now, just in day to day life, but I get back up each morning, litterally of the ground, and work to do something creative every day. Standing up each morning, is another example of that lesson, keep going, no matter what life throws at you. Forty years after learning that simple lesson, I'm still applying it daily in completely different circumstances. Whatever your level, whatever your era in BMX, we all learned more than just tricks by riding day after day for years. That's a great part of the lifelong legacy of spending time in BMX freestyle, or in other action sports.
Before BMX, I was a kid who daydreamed amazing ideas. Man, I invented great shit in my head, or sketched out on paper. I had wonderful answers to the world's problems, and dreamed up all kinds of stuff. And then did nothing. I was a dreamer who didn't act on my great ideas, for the most part. When I did try something, if it didn't work, I'd be like, "Well I tried, it didn't work," and I'd give up. We all know what Yoda said about trying. BMX taught me persistence and perseverance. Life keeps testing me, and all of us, on these, and many other, basic life lessons.
These days my writing/blogging focus in more on what's happening now, in 2023. But most of you reading this blog check my blog out because of my Old School freestyle BMX tales. So I'm going to write a series of posts on the life lessons learned from BMX, to add to all the other BMX posts I've written. Enjoy.
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