Once upon a time, there was this guy named Gerard who lived in Hermosa Beach and ran a small surf video distribution company. Gerard was a kind of shady salesman guy, but he sold A TON of videos for all the independent video surf film producers, so they loved him. He also sold a lot for the bigger companies, like Vision Skateboards and Sims Snowboards. Because he sold so many videos for other people, he would call them up and say, "Hey, I'm making a compilation video, can I use a clip from your new video in it?" They'd always say, "Sure, go for it." He would say as many of his compilation videos as he did their videos, and he made twice as much money per video on the compilation videos. Shady... but it worked out for everyone involved, including me. Gerard hired me to edit and work for him for a while, and he sold 500 copies of my BMX video,The Ultimate Weekend, in the fall of 1990, in the U.S., and a bunch overseas as well.
As skateboarding and snowboarding took off in the late 1980's and early 1990's, Gerard's little distribution company also sold a ton of skateboard and snowboard videos, as well as surf flicks. After I left Unreel Productions, the Vision Skateboards video company, in 1990, I met Gerard, and wound up editing three videos for him. We did two issues of Skateboarder's Quarterly Video Magazine, and that was nearly three years before411 (skateboard) video magazine came out. I also edited this first issue of Snowboarder's Quarterly.
Most of these video clips are from other people's videos, edited with the mini-interviews Gerard and I did at the Action Sports Retailer trade show in San Diego, in the fall of 1990, as I recall. The Snowboarder's in Exile premier was great. There were maybe 100 to 150 people in the room watching the premier, and nearly every top snowboarder in the world was there. I watched that video probably 100 times over the next few years. In Snowboarder's Quarterly #1, above, you can see our quick interviews with the future 1992 Penthouse Pet of the Year (and Damian Sanders' then girlfriend) Brandy Ledford at 18: 12, and Sims Snowboards team rider Chris Roach at 35:12, among others.
At the beginning, you see ski/snowboard fimmaker Bruce Benedict, and producer Laura Mickelson, my former co-worker at Unreel, talking about their snowboard video, 20 Tricks. Laura Mickelson is now a working artist here in SoCal (which I just found out), as well as a long time video/TV/documentary filmmaker. Damian Sanders, one of the main guys in Snowboarders in Exile, did a ton of snowboarding, some motocross freeriding. He went on to start the Pimp N Ho Ball and the bi-weekly Club Rubber, with business partner Jon Huntington, in Costa Mesa, California, which turned incredibly profitable. Both the night club and the ball got so popular that they moved to Las Vegas. Check out this interview for a deeper look at Damian.
Damian and Brandy lived in Huntington Beach in the early 1990's, and even next door to the P.O.W. BMX House, in Westminster, for a little while. One night in 1992 or so, I was riding my BMX bike down Beach Boulevard in H.B., and got pulled over by the cops, since I didn't have a light on my bike. For some fucking reason, they called for back-up. The second pair of cops walked up, as the first pair was checking my ID. One of them said, "Last night we pulled over some crazy kid right here, driving a hearse, and he had "666" shaved in the back of his head." I said, "You guys pulled over Damian? I saw him and Brandy around downtown H.B. sometimes, and I knew Damian was driving a hearse then. The cops said, "You know that guy?" I said, "Everyone in H.B. knows who he is, that's Damian Sanders, he's one of the best snowboarders in the world." The cop just shook his head. I never actually met Damian, but I'd see him around town over the years, through the 1990's and into the 2000's, when I was a taxi driver and picked up lots of fares from Club Rubber. I think I got another ticket for riding my bike without a light, but I can't remember for sure. I got a few of them back in those days, but usually got off with just a warning.
This morning, I went digging into YouTube looking for Skateboarder's Quarterly #2, which is pretty hard to find. I haven't found it yet, but I ran into this Snowboarder's Quarterly video instead ( Finally found it later, fuckin' algos these days!) I haven't seen this video since probably 1991. I was the cameraman for all the little, in between interview and trade show footage, and I edited this video together, using big blocks from Snowboarders in Exile,20 Tricks, New Kids on the Twock, and a couple other videos that came out at the beginning of the 1990-1991 snowboard season.
This post is for all the freaks, geeks, dorks, and weirdos. Not the ones who check Tik Tok to find the latest way to dress "edgy." This is for the truly weird. Many weirdos look pretty normal from the outside, but have a lot of weird, often oddly wonderful, shit going on in their heads. If this meme made you smile, you're probably one of them. The memes are better, funnier, more sarcastic, and more fucked up on Pinterest. They just are. Welcome to another blog post about why I love Pinterest and hate that other app... what's it called? Oh yeah, Instagram. This meme above is one of the 711 memes on my NSFW Pinterest board.
Simply put, Pinterest is a platform where people collect photos and videos, then organize and curate those photos into different themes on "boards." Pinterest is the "bucket" for your Bucket List. It's the digital "board" for your dream board. It's where you can collect 748 sexy and sultry photos of famous women, put it on a board called Hot, and not look like a complete perv. A partial perv, maybe, but not a complete perv. Pinterest is where you can go for Art Inspiration, or to browse through 2,066 Street Art photos, looking for ideas. Or just because.
Pinterest is a search engine all its own, designed to find and share great images of all kinds, pulled from all over the web, even things like Hovercraft and Flying Cars. Don't worry, you don't get dragged digitally into Emo fashion and vegan cupcake recipes when you sign into Pinterest. Sure, you can pop open a White Claw (Careful! Don't chip a nail), and look up those things if you want to. But if you're reading this post, I'm pretty sure you don't want to. You can look up whatever you want on Pinterest. OK, not hardcore porn, but just about anything else you can take a photo of. Like I said, Pinterest is its own visual search engine.
This classic photo of Dino Deluca blasting a gigantic one hander one footer is just one of the 1,298 pins I have on my Freestyle BMX Tales board That's just the Old School BMX photos. I have another board for Mid School and New School BMX photos. Action Sports? I have some other boards, too.
JFA/Social Distortion flyer from my Punk Rock Flyers board.
What about the punk rock? That's what I said this post was about. Here ya go. Here's my board with 930 Punk Rock Flyers, including that one above. Here's my Punk Rock that I Like board. Just for some music roots, I have a Johnny Cash board, as well. Keeping with the sarcastic, punk rock vibe, here are some more boards.
Josh White with a stretched one footed turndown at Edison Trails, 1990. From the In Front of My Lens board.
You get the idea. Each of these links goes to a Pinterest board with dozens, or hundreds, of photos, and a few videos, to check out. Pinterest is great to find inspiration, to find new ideas, and mostly to waste a shitload of time if you have a real job. It's also a good way to collect something (digital photos and videos) that doesn't clutter up the house.
I'm an middle aged Generation X loser at this point. We grew up watching 1960's and 1970's re-runs on TV, and hearing our parents complain about the conformity in factory and office jobs. We had no cell phones, no video games, and no internet porn. We had to dig through boxes in our friend's basement to find porn, actual Playboy and Penthouse magazines his dad had stashed away. We played OUTSIDE as kids, and drank from somebody's garden hose when thirsty.
In the 1970's, "live streaming" meant actually wandering along a creek, looking for frogs and crawdads. Into our parents' world of white collar and blue collar jobs came two men. Evel Kneivel (157 pins), and Bruce Lee (715 pins). If we were lucky, our parents took us to see 20th Century Stunt Shows when we were kids. The prospect of either a boring working future, or a post-apocalyptic future, inspired many of us to want to be stuntmen or stuntwomen. That's where BMX and skateboarding came in, and other action sports later on. We could learn tricks on bikes and boards, and become neighborhood stunt kids.
Bruce Lee teaching and sparring. From my Bruce Lee board.
While most people have been scrolling through posers on Instagram, I've been collecting photos from all over the interwebs on subjects that interest me. I have over 100 Pinterest boards. I have a Because Pizza board, a board of some of my Grey Trash Alien drawings, a Legos are still cool board, a Scooby-Doo board, a board of Dave Vanderspek and The Curb Dogs, a 43 board, and a Josh Bender board. Of course, I have a White Bears (that aren't me) board. So when you need to waste some time at work, or are looking for things to make out of your old skateboard parts or old bike parts, my Pinterest page is the place to go. Now you know. Waste time. Find inspiration. Laugh at memes. Get cool ideas for shit to my your life more interesting. Enjoy.
This blog is rolling up on the 1,000 blog post milestone- this is post #995
I've been doing a lot of longer form writing on Substack lately, a platform actually designed for writers. Check it out:
I saw it was Eddie Fiola's birthday today (OK, yesterday now, I didn't finish this post yesterday), he's hitting the big 55 today. Happy Birthday Eddie. That seemed a good reason to blog about Eddie and the early days of freestyle, for us guys who jumped on that first wave of it in the mid 1980's.. When I got into BMX freestyle, Eddie was the best known pro, and one of the veteran"old guys,"being 21 or 22 then. Now, so many years later, he's only two years older than me, we're practically the same age, and he still is a blast to watch on a bike.
I went looking for clips to use, and decided to watch this whole, half hour video. I've only watched this video maybe two times, while I was working in video stores in Huntington Beach around 1994-1995. This video was produced by East Coast BMX freestyle promoter Ron Stebbene in 1988, and features two of my old bosses, Bob Morales and Don Hoffman, and industry legend McGoo, so there's a lot for me to write about here.
As I've mentioned many times before, I got into BMX jjumping, and then BMX racing while living in a trailer park outside of Boise, Idaho in 1982. I was 16 that summer, in between my sophomore and junior years at Boise High School. Us Blue Valley Mobile Home Park kids hit the last local race of the season in October '82, got totally stoked on BMX racing, and then had to suffer through an Idaho winter until we could race again. Before our dirt jumps dried up enough from spring mud to ride, we were making ramp to ramp jumps out of cinder blocks and plywood sheets on the street. We got racing again about March or April, but most of the guys faded in a couple of months. We were broke ass motherfuckers back then, and the "crazy" $2-$3 fee to race (minimum wage was about $3.35/hour then) was a lot to us. But I managed one race every couple of weeks or so, keeping the BMX stoke going.
What I haven't written much about was that my family moved back into town in the early summer of 1983. Suddenly I was out of the trailer park, back in a cool, middle class subdivision, but I didn't have any jumps or people to ride with. I kept racing pretty steadily all through 1983. But I also started to work some odd jobs, make a little bit more money, and I started buying BMX magazines.
At that time, "trick riding" was just starting to get more popular, and transitioning into the sport of "BMX freestyle." At the time, that meant you rode flatland, a wedge ramp, and quarterpipes. So there were trick how-to's in almost every magazine at the time. BMX freestyle was just on the verge of its first wave of popularity and breaking into mainstream consciousness. BMX Plus was the only magazine on the newsstands in Boise, either at 7-11's and Circle K's, or at the grocery stores. I stumbled across BMX Action later that year, in Bob's Bike Shop (and Lawn Mower Repair), my local shop in Boise.
In the January 1983 issue of BMX Plus magazine ("Skatepark Shoot out in the Badlands", scan pg. 27), I saw my first article about this crazy place in California called Pipeline Skatepark. There was this big picture of this HUGE concrete bowl, with all these kids sitting on the coping up on top, and all their bikes piled up in the bottom of the pool. The place looked enormous, and I couldn't imagine riding walls so vertical and steep. "Those skatepark guys are crazy." I thought. My only tricks at the time were a one handed wheelie, and I couldn't even ride it, just pop it up, do one crank while standing up, take a hand off, and then put the hand back on and drop down all sketchy. My other trick, a trailer park trick, was doing tire endos. We'd roll up to a car tire on the ground (plenty of those around a trailer park), pop our front wheel into it, then to an endo, curb endo style, but it was more stable. The only jumps I hit were two foot high jumps to flat, or the rolling tabletop at the Fort Boise track. So seeing the photos of the kids riding Pipeline blew my freakin' mind. In those pre-internet days when information barely traveled at all, I had no idea that kind of riding was even possible. It was that article that opened me up to this whole new kind of riding, carving huge vertical walls on pools, and airing out of vertical walls.
It was in that article that I first heard of the rider named Eddie Fiola, he had the top photo on the second page of the article. As time went on, and I saw more photos and articles about trick riding and freestyle, I realized this Eddie Fiola guy was the biggest name in freestyle, as he became the King of the Skateparks that year.
Even so, no one else I knew outside the Fort Boise BMX track had any idea who he was. My high school friends were outdoorsy fishermen and hunter types, we liked to fish, shoot guns, and smoke weed. Even in my high school, there were three grades, with 400+ students each, and I was about THE ONLY BMXer. The other riders I knew were mostly younger kids in junior high, or they went to the other high schools, Borah, Crapitol... I mean Capitol, or Meridian, the little town next to Boise. I was literally into a weird little sport that, for all intents and purposes, didn't even exist to the 1,200 people in my high school. And I was weird to start with, so it wasn't like anyone else wanted to jump on that bandwagon and follow me. 16-year-olds simply didn't ride "little kids' bikes" back then. Everyone just wanted me to grow up and give up my stupid BMX "hobby."
As I got more into BMX, read magazines, and went out for solo rides every day around the neighborhood, Eddie Fiola became the Michael Jordan of freestyle to me. On the edge of our subdivision was this 50 foot tall embankment, and at the top of it was the New York Canal. Much of the year it was 18 or 20 foot deep with fast moving water. But part of the year it emptied out and was dry, a big ditch with 45 degree banked sides. As I got more stoked on the riding of those crazy skatepark riders, I would ride up on the banked walls, do a tiny bunnyhop, and tilt the bike sideways a little, mimicking the tabletop aerials I saw skatepark riders doing. Yeah, we called them "aerials," still, in 1983.
I won a contest at the Fort Boise track, to re-design the track for 1984. That landed me something like 22 free races for the 1984 season. But coming out of the winter indoor races, I was losing interest in racing, and getting more and more into the emerging freestyle thing. I looked up to a lot of riders then, particularly the rider/entrepreneur guys like R.L. Osborn, Ron Wilkerson, and Dave Vanderspek. I was deathly shy, dreamed big, and never acted on my dreams, and it seemed amazing that those guys were putting on so many shows, actually get paid for shows, and in R.L.'s case, booking whole tours. A big part of BMX freestyle then was promoting the sport itself, letting other people know about this cool thing we had found, and how much fun it was to try and invent tricks on these little bikes.
But as a rider, Eddie was getting a bunch of coverage then, and doing most of the biggest aerials I saw in photos. He was the biggest name in the sport, as far as I knew. But I was a kid in Idaho, and it really didn't even occur to me that I could meet him someday, let alone would meet him. That spring of 1984, I heard about a local trick team having a show, went to it, and met Justin "Jay" Bickel, Wayne Moore, and Jay's parents. I wound up part of the trick team, and later Jay and I reformed it, when Wayne "retired" from freestyle at the ripe old age of 17. Jay's parents, Dwight and Cindy, were totally supportive of BMX freestyle, and became my "freestyle parents." Suddenly I could go to Jay's house and ride a six foot quarterpipe, and try to actually learn to do aerials. Every time I hit that ramp and aired coping high, I was pretending to be Fiola or Dominguez or R.L. or Wilkerson. Jay and I did a dozen or so shows around the Boise area that year, and rode in about 5 or 6 parades, and became the freestyle guys in Idaho at that time.
Then, in early summer of 1985, my family moved to San Jose, California. I stayed and worked my summer job in Boise, managing a little amusement park called The Fun Spot. I went to my first AFA Masters contest with the Bickels, the Venice Beach comp in June of 1985. It was the first time I actually saw pros and sponsored amateur freestylers ride, including Eddie Fiola. We had to leave before pro ramps on Sunday, but I got to see them practice on Saturday, and it blew my fucking mind. To see 7-8-9 foot airs, and canyon airs, for the first time, amazed me. I had a totally new frame of reference of what was possible on a BMX bike. Freestyle was blowing up, Eddie, R.L., and Wilkerson were in the Mountain Dew commercial that summer, and the sport and riding seemed to be progressing so fast. Still, Eddie Fiola was the biggest name in the sport to me. If outsiders knew anything about BMX, they knew one name, Eddie Fiola.
In August of 1985, the Fun Spot, the little Boise amusement park I worked at, closed for the season. I packed up my 1971 Pontiac Bonneville, which was just a tad bit smaller than a battleship, and drove solo to San Jose to live with my family again. Once there I got a job at Pizza Hut, started a zine, and found the NorCal freestylers like pros Vander, Maurice Meyer, Robert Peterson, and that whole crew, over the next few weeks. Somehow college was out the window (I was broke, and my parents didn't have money set aside to help me go), and BMX freestyle became the focus of my life. I made it to the fall 1985, and spring 1986 Velodrome contests, and moved on the edge of the national freestyle scene.
Then, in April of 1986, thanks to my zine, Andy Jenkins of FREESTYLIN' magazine tapped me to cover the AFA Masters contest in Tulsa, Oklahoma. On my flight layover in Dallas/Fort Worth, I ran into Eddie Fiola, Martin Aparjo, and some new guy named Josh White. Suddenly I was standing there talking to a couple of the guys I'd been reading about in the magazines for three years. The next morning, Eddie walked up and just started chatting, and I was stoked beyond belief. That weird wall between "those guys in the magazines" and "the rest of us out in anywhere USA," was collapsing. Things like that, talking to the pros you looked up to and hanging out with them, didn't happen in pro football or basketball. But in our weird little sport of freestyle, it did.
By that point, the skatepark era had faded, and quarterpipes had taken over. But I think the skatepark days, Pipeline Skatepark's Pipe Bowl, in particular, played a key role in vert riding. As all of us Old School BMX freestylers know, there's a documentary called The Birth of Big Air, about Mat Hoffman's mega quarterpipe, and his motorcycle tow-in mega huge airs in 1992-93. But I think the name's a misnomer. Looking back, I think "The Birth of Big Air" was really the Pipe Bowl era at Pipeline, led by Eddie Fiola. What Mat did a decade later was the birth of ridiculously humungous air. I wasn't there in the skatepark era, but from the photos, there were these shots of guys doing one-two-three foot aerials out of skatepark bowls at Lakewood or Whittier or Pipeline's Combi pool. And then, all of the sudden, there's Eddie, Mike Dominguez, Brian Blyther, Brian Deam, Tony Murray... and they're going 6-7-8-9 feet out of this one bowl. The Pipe Bowl at Pipeline. And that bowl had 8 feet of transition, and four feet of vert, but no coping. That stands out as the real birth of Big Air when you look back at magazine photos.
Then vert riding moved to quarterpipes, and we saw Eddie, Mike, and Brian getting those big airs on quarterpipes. Coming up on their heals, and soon passing them, were riders like Todd Anderson, Josh White, Joe Johnson, Dino Deluca, and Mat Hoffman. That was the generation bred on quarterpipes, but who were inspired by those 1983-1985 photos of Eddie, Mike, and Brian blasting huge at Pipeline.
As BMX freestyle grew and exploded in its first big wave of popularity, from 1984 to 1988, Eddie Fiola was on GT, and was touring, doing shows at bike shops and other events, letting kids see freestyle firsthand. I got picked up to work at FREESTYLIN' (and BMX Action) in August of 1986, as things surged upward. During my short stint at Wizard Publications, I got interested in how all the other riders got into freestyle in the first place. For me it was jumping in the trailer park, like I wrote above, then racing and into freestyle from the magazines. But seeing that first local show with Jay and Wayne in Boise, that was a key point in getting stoked on freestyle. So I started asking all the other riders, pros and amateurs, how they got into freestyle. It was an informal poll I did just because I was curious.
Almost every single rider I talked to said they got into BMX freestyle because they saw a live freestyle show, usually one of the factory teams. It was the live shows the really grew our sport back then, and then new riders started buying magazines, to get their monthly fix. This was especially true for the riders outside of Southern California. Throughout that whole time, Eddie Fiola and Martin Aparijo, along with Josh White and Dave Voelker, were out there, in the smelly vans (shoes and vehicles), showing kids everywhere this new thing called BMX freestyle. They were the GT guys, and then Haro was the other rock star team, with Ron Wilkerson, Brian Blyther, and Dave Nourie hitting the road as one team, and the other Haro riders as another.
During that time of five or six AFA national contests a year, six magazines covering BMX and freestyle, and 8 or 10 factory touring teams, Eddie Fiola continued as one of the biggest names, showing kids his smooth showman style on both flat and vert, show after show. When not on the road, I got to know Eddie well, since he was dating Wizard photographer Windy Osborn at the time. So he was in the Wizard offices most every day while I worked there, and no one tore up the T.O.L. ramp in the parking lot like Eddie did.
The funny thing was, during those years, 1986-1988, word in the industry was that Eddie was burning out, thanks largely to the long months of touring to promote GT bikes. We all knew he had a three year contract with GT, and everyone thought he was just biding his time, getting ready to move on, maybe into TV acting or something, and then he'd let the young guns, like Josh White, Joe Johnson, and wunderkid Mat Hoffman, take over the world of vert.
Meanwhile, I got the boot from Wizard, and went on to work for Bob Morales, who not only ran the AFA, but was doing magazine ads for several companies, and we designing products and part owner of Mor Distributing, as well. My official job was as editor and photographer of the AFA newsletter. But working for Bob Morales, I did a little bit of everything, from putting heat transfers on AFA T-shirts, to driving the van and 30 foot trailer to local contests and trade shows.
During that year, 1987, I did a feature interview with Eddie Fiola for the AFA newsletter. That was during the time Eddie was supposedly burned out and ready to give it all up and move on. I shot the photos with Eddie at Pipeline's Pipe Bowl, mostly as an excuse to see him ride there. I didn't have a car, and I couldn't get to Pipeline to ride it. But doing the interview there, I had an excuse to take the AFA van there for an afternoon, and then get a little riding in at the park I first saw in that crazy BMX Plus article in January of 1983.
Eddie showed up in his standard riding "uniform," Levi's, a T-shirt, and an open face helmet. Although I had been part of the BMX industry for a year at that point, it amazed me that suddenly I was shooting photos of Eddie Fiola at Pipeline, something I never even dreamed could happen back in Idaho, a couple of years earlier. The Eddie that showed up, was anything but a burned out has been. He fucking tore up the Pipe Bowl, and was just having fun riding. That was his home park at that point, his local spot, and he shredded it with his amazing style. More than anything else, Eddie Fiola made riding freestyle seem really damn fun. I wanted to be able to ride the Pipe Bowl like that, or at least try to.
As fate would have it, I started producing videos for the AFA that year, and that landed me a job at Unreel Productions, the Vision Skateboards/Vision Street Wear video company. Don Hoffman, who was the first guy to really make a bunch of BMX freestyle videos, including those skatepark videos used in the video above, was the head of Unreel. While little known to the riders outside Southern California, Don played a huge role in mid 80's freestyle, by making those skatepark videos, and later producing the big 2-Hip King of Vert finals (where Mat went pro) in 1989, producing the first syndicated Action Sports TV show series, and putting outFreestylin' Fanatics, and Mondo Vision.
Because Eddie Fiola, Bob Morales, Don Hoffman, McGoo, and Ron Stebbene, all played big roles in my years in the BMX freestyle industry, it was cool to watch the Eddie Fiola video above again. That video was produced right at the end of freestyle's first wave of popularity, right before we dropped into the "ramen days" of 1989, and the early 1990's.
Again, Happy Birthday Eddie, hope it was a cool one. Back in the late 80's, I don't think any of us dreamed BMX freestyle would be as big as it is now, that many of us would still be riding (I'll get back at it when I can afford a bike), or that rider's would be wearing skinny jeans in 2019. The weird little activity that turned into a sport and into a lifestyle, BMX freestyle, continues to grow in different ways, and evolve into new things. Eddie Fiola was a huge part of that in its earliest days, and is still part of it today. If you're around SoCal, hit the Huntington Beach Pier area on Tuesday evenings, for HB Tuesdays with Eddie, Martin Aparijo, and a bunchmore old schoolers hanging out ans sessioning. It's as much fun as it ever was.
