The first video I produced and directed: AFA Oregon Pro Flatland in 1987

Held in an arena in Portland, Oregon, in 1987, this video of AFA Freestyle Masters was the first video I ever directed.  Getting the job of producing this video is another thing that pretty much changed the course of my life in the BMX world, though I didn't realize it until months later.  Unreel Productions editor Dave Alvarez and founder Don Hoffman shepherded me through the video production process, because I didn't have a clue what I was doing.  I haven't seen this video since about 1988, I just stumbled on it on YouTube.

The riders in the intro are: Ron Wilkerson, unknown, Darren Pelio (?), Mike Loveridge, Mike Perkins, Kenneth Evans, Jason Parkes, Rick Allison, Dave Vanderspek (with skateboard), Dave Nourie, Martin Aparijo, and R.L. Osborn (not counting the mugshots of riders watching). 

This video has all of the pro flatland runs, start to finish, with no cuts.  Basically, it was cheaper to do it that way, to not edit the runs.  Plus , we didn't pay for the edit time at Unreel, ($150 to $200 an hour or so then), we couldn't take forever editing this.  I think we edited this video in two eight hour edit sessions.  The pro riders, in order, are: Robert Peterson, Josh White, Dave Nourie, Rick Allison, Ron Wilkerson, Martin Aparijo, Fred Blood, Dave Vanderspek, Chris Lashua, Pete Agustin, and R.L. Osborn.  

I was at the Oregon contest, mostly as an AFA roadie, but also as a rider.  What I remember most from this contest was that Oregon 1987 was the contest when scuffing took off, thanks to the backyard, the backwards on the back wheel scuffing trick, which came from out of the San Francisco Golden Gate Park scene.  I think Tim Treacy invented the trick, but I can't remember for sure.  

But that was the trick of the contest, everyone was trying to learn it in the jam circles around the contest site, and at the hotel at night.  The first scuffing trick I know of was one Oleg Konings did, as far back as 1984, standing on one peg, on the side of the bike.  Of the pros at this contest, only Robert Peterson did a single scuffing trick.  But that one trick, the backyard, caught fire at this contest, and began to change freestyle forever.  It started with a whole range of one wheel, forward rolling tricks, while scuffing.  Soon after, came the popularity of the hang 5, the whiplash, Kevin Jones and the locomotive, and the trend towards one wheel scuffing, and later gliding tricks.  So while there's not a single backyard in this video, that was the big bit of progression that happened at this contest.  

Another phase of riding changes was the trend toward linking tricks together that was gaining popularity in early 1987.  R.L. Osborn was one of the first pros to begin linking tricks.  He also did the backwards grip ride at the end, a mind blowing trick for that time period.  As far as the linking went, several other pros were still in the: do a trick, ride a bit, do a trick, ride a bit, format.  That had been the standard until then.  In the intro, you can see an amateur rider, who I think is Darren Pelio (SE uniform) linking several tricks, and also Kenneth Evans (white uniform) also linking several tricks.  That was another rising trend at the time.  Soon they merged, with the scuffing and gliding, one wheel rolling tricks being linked together.  As far as riding goes, those were two big trends at this contest. 

Another thing at this contest was the ever revolutionary Dave Vanderspek, always ahead of his time, using a skateboard in his run.  You can hear the crowd cheering, we all loved it.  The judges, unfortunately for Dave, didn't like it, and Dave placed at the back of the pro pack, getting 7th or 8th I think.  After we got back to California, Dave called the AFA, trying to figure out why he didn't place higher.  Since I had ridden up in the Bay area for a bit, I wound up on the phone with Dave for maybe 20 minutes, trying to explain that I didn't know why the judges didn't like the skateboard addition to his routine.  He got more people cheering than anyone, but judging was based mostly on doing the most popular tricks well, not touching down a foot, and a little bit of originality.  For what it's worth, Dave's crazy bike/skate run later got featured in the Vision Street Wear video Mondo Vision, which sold about 40,000 copies, and no other BMX flatlander got featured.  In the long run, Dave Vanderspek got far more coverage from this contest than anyone else. 

The one other thing I remember from this contest was that the parking lot had a couple of levels.  There was a big, wide ramp up to the higher level, kind of like a flyout jump, but for cars.  As the main AFA roadie guy, I got sent out in the rental minivan to run errands, several times, on the day or two before the contest.  The parking plot was completely empty then.  Every time I hit that ramp a bit faster, and finally hit it at 50 or 55 mph.  I'm pretty sure I got the minivan completely off the ground.  So that was memorable for me.  I may have just topped out the shocks, but I think I got a couple inches of air.  If so, that's the only time I ever jumped a motorized vehicle.  

It would be hard for today's riders to even imagine the BMX freestyle world of the 1980's.  No cell phones, no Instagram, no social media at all, no internet, and only a handful of people owned their own video cameras, mostly big VHS ones,  personal computers were just becoming a thing, the revolutionary Apple Macinstosh had only been out for 3 years.  One of them might have 6 KILObytes of memory, if you had an external hard drive.  A kilobyte is 1/1,000th of a megabyte.  None of those desktops could edit video, they were for word processing and simple games, the "desktop publishing" revolution was just getting going.  Back in those days, when we went riding, we just went riding.  Nobody was shooting video or photos, unless you were doing a magazine photo shoot.  We didn't document our sessions, we just rode.  

In 1987, when I produced this video for the American Freestyle Association (AFA), only BMX companies made videos, riders didn't make their own videos.  The only rider-made freestyle videos I'd seen before this were some 5 minute clips edited by New York rider Carl Marquardt, Eddie Roman's school project, the 15 or so minute version of  Aggro Riding and Kung Fu Fighting, and the Gork Video, which BMX Action editor Gork made, all from 1986.  

In the mid 1980's, professional video cameras cost $20,000 to $50,000, and the equipment.  To make a video of anything back then, from an industrial training or promotion video, to a local TV commercial, to a BMX freestyle video, you had to hire a professional video production company.  One early BMX video cost $40,000 to shoot, edit, and produce.  Then you had to get the VHS tapes made, about $3 each, and design and get boxes printed, and then ship out the orders.  The BMX Action Trick Team/magazine video,  Rippin', came out in 1985, and was produced in a full documentary style.  That's what the video crew knew how to do, make short documentaries.  The BMX Plus! video, Freestyle's Raddest Tricks, also came out in 1985, in more of a live TV show style.  That was the first video I bought, and I watched it 7 times the day it came in the mail, twice while balancing on my bike in the living room through the whole video.  Seriously.  GT Bikes made GT-V in 1986, and only a handful more videos came out before 1990.  

At that point, the first skateboard videos, , and Powell-Peralta's The Bones Brigade Video Show (1984), and Vision's SkateVisions (1985), had only come out a couple years earlier.  The whole concept of making skateboard and BMX videos was just being invented.  The natural idea was to make a "little movie on video," with some bad acting, and often some goofy comedy bits.  There was no standard way to make a BMX or skateboard video yet.  So different people were trying different ideas for several years.

The cheaper way to make videos was Wayne's World style, by producing TV shows for a local PBS channel, where you got to borrow cameras and editing equipment.  You had to produce a TV show to air, but you could also work on your own ideas while you had the borrowed equipment, or make a home video out of your public access show.  That's what Don Hoffman, who later formed Unreel Productions with Vision Skateboards did.  If you're an Old School BMX freestyler and don't known who Don Hoffman is, you should.  Don made videos like this, which also aired as local TV shows on PBS, before making videos for Vision Skateboards, Sims Snowboards, and Vision Street Wear.  He started BMX and skateboard videos in about 1984, before the other companies got into the game.  In this short clip, you can see Don Hoffman on the left, Bob Morales, who started the AFA, in the middle, and, of course, Eddie Fiola on the right.  Don was actually the biggest pioneer of BMX videos, having made 7 or 8 PBS shows/videos by 1987, of most of the ASPA/AFA skatepark contests.

Bob Morales hired me to be the editor of the AFA newsletter, American Freestyle,  in late January of 1987, about a month after I got laid off from FREESTYLIN' magazine because I didn't like the band Skinny Puppy.  For the ballin' amount of $5 an hour (CA minimum wages was $3.35/hour then), I became the editor/photographer of the monthly newsletter that went out to about 3,000 AFA members.  But the AFA was a tiny business, consisting of just Bob, his sister Riki, and me, when I started.  So I also answered phones, put heat transfers on T-shirts, helped fold and address all 3,000 newsletters, was a roadie at AFA contests, and did anything else that came up.  I went from a few months of sitting in an office without much to do most of the time, to doing all kinds of different stuff every day.  

About three months into working there, Bob walked into the back office where I worked and asked if I wanted to make a TV commercial for the Austin, Texas contest.  He learned he could buy local spots on MTV for $25 each.  Since I had absolutely no idea how to make a TV commercial, and since I worked for Bob and new he expected me to do it anyway, I said, "Sure."  There was a huge, "We'll figure it out as we go" attitude at the AFA, DIY all the way when it came to anything new.  "How do I make a TV commercial," I asked.  "Call Don Hoffman at Unreel, he'll tell you," Bob replied.  I had no idea that 30 second conversation in 1987 would lead to me producing 15 BMX, skateboard, and snowboard videos, working on about 10 Vision videos, and working on over 300 TV episodes of about a dozen different shows.  But that's how life works, sometimes little conversations or incidents lead to a whole new direction in life.  

For the 1987 AFA Freestyle Masters national series, Vision Street Wear clothes were a sponsor.  Part of the deal was that they would send a cameraman to each of the six contests around the country.  For the Oregon contest, that was an Unreel producer/cameraman named Gary Langenheim.  He had worked mostly on surf TV shows before Unreel.  The deal with the video footage was that both AFA and Vision/Unreel could use any of the footage for commercials, home videos, or whatever.  So I called up Don Hoffman at Unreel, and he said to come over the next day, and they'd give me VHS copies of all the raw footage, window dubs, as they were called.  There was a box in the picture when the videos played, a "window" with rolling numbers.  That told me the time code.  I would watch the videos at home, and write down the time code of each shot I wanted, then make a list of all those shots.  When I did that, they told me to come back, and they'd set up a session to come in an edit the video.  

Luckily I rented a room from a guy who was an ex-video editor himself, so we had a cool TV and VCR set-up, which made it easier.  So I spent a few nights and part of a weekend watching all the footage, maybe three hours of total footage.  But when you pause the video to write down the numbers, it takes much longer to "log" the footage.  I went through all the video, and wrote down everything interesting, the best riding, and also face shots and crowd shots (cutaway shots), and the start and end times of each pro rider's run.  After about a week, I had that done, and called up Unreel again.  

They scheduled an edit session with their video editor, a techno wizard in the form of a 25-year-old guy named Dave Alvarez, with long, straight brown hair, Vision board shorts, and a different tie dyed shirt every day.  They led me back up to Unreel's $500,000 Betacam edit bay (similar to this), which was capable of editing broadcast TV shows.  The room was in the back, on the second floor, of the Unreel offices.  It had about a dozen monitors (TV screens), and two banks of VTR's (pro caliber VCR's), which cost $5,000 to $20,000 each.  There were two really nice office chairs on a linoleum floor, then a bar type thing behind them.  You could step up, and there was a big, black leather chair and couch, so other people could watch an editing session.  That room blew my mind, and intimidated me.  I felt like I was on the bridge in Star Trek in there, except the lighting was always low.

For the intro, Dave picked some music, which I think he and another guy named Dave had created and recorded themselves.  It was either that or canned music, which in the 1980's was usually kind of bland, electronic music, that video producers could buy, and use in videos as much as they wanted.  You could get seriously sued for using popular, copyrighted music in those pre-internet, pre sharing economy days.  Canned music was used in a wide variety of home videos in those days.  I remember hearing some of the same music used in a BMX Plus! video also used in multiple porno videos.  

Anyhow, Dave introduced me to what he called "fancy news editing." By laying down the music track first, he could then play me a short piece of the music, and say, "I need a shot that looks like this sounds."  I'd go through my log sheets, to a shot that was about the right length, that I thought would fit the music, and tell him the time code.  Dave would pull up that shot, and fit it over the music, so that the beginning of the shot, any movements, and the end of the shot, would all fall right on beats of the music.  This takes much longer to do well, than just chopping shots together, but it flows and watches much better.  That was one of the first video editing tricks Dave Alvarez taught me.  

It was really fun sitting there and directing a video, shot by shot, in that crazy edit bay room.  Dave and I got along well, and only argued about the length of the shots.  As a video editor, he wanted to "keep the video tight," and get out of a shot as quick as possible.  That makes the video flow better, and not seem to lag.  But as a BMX freestyler myself, I wanted to extend shots, to show that the rider actually landed the trick and rode away.  We argued quite a bit at first about this, and wound up splitting the difference much of the time.  He'd make shots a tad longer than he normally would have, but they would show the landing of the tricks, not just a really quick shot mid trick.  Actions sports videos actually did change how videos and TV shows got made later on, bringing our views as riders and skaters into account.  Things like shooting with a fisheye lens close-up, to get the full body in a shot, and riding skateboards or rollerblades with a camera, next to someone to get shot, and many other things became more popular from all their use in 1990's BMX, skateboard, snowboard, and other action sports videos. 

In the edit bay, Dave and I spent most of the first day just editing the intro of the video, and the second day we edited the rest of the video, because they were much simpler, cuts edits, and because the pros flatland runs were 4 minutes long, with no editing during the runs.  This made this a pretty simple video to edit, from Dave's standpoint.  There were minimal effects, and long segments, so the editing went quick.  "Effects are an excuse for bad editing most of the time" Dave taught me.  

When we got to the credits, I was actually surprised when Dave told me I was the "director."  In my head, a director was someone like Steven Spielberg or George Lucas, spending months or years making big, complicated movies.  But Dave explained how it worked in home videos.  The executive producer was one or more people who paid for the thing, or ran the company that paid for it.  They often had nothing to do with actually making the video.  The producer was the person in charge of actually making sure the whole project got done.  The director was the person who actually picked what shots went in the video, and in what order.  The editor was the person actually at the controls, editing the video clips together.  So, for the whopping sum of $250 that I got paid to be the producer and director of this AFA video, I was both producer and director.  It sounded way more prestigious than it was, but I was cool with that.  

After we finished editing the show, Unreel made a duplication master, that's a high quality copy of the original master tape, so they didn't wear out the master tape every time they made copies from it.  Everything was edited on actual videotape then, digital video editing was still a few years away for the high end TV shows, and about a decade away for prosumer video.  Since the AFA only sold a few dozen of this video, and the ones that followed, Unreel made us a few copies when we needed them. I went over Costa Mesa and picked them up, then we'd ship them out at the AFA ourselves.  

Home videos generally cost about $30 each then, so even after paying me and paying Unreel for the video copies, there was a good profit in it for the AFA.  Selling 40 to 60 of each of these contest videos, made the AFA maybe $500 to $1,000 bucks on each video.  That's not huge by video standards.  But money was always tight at the AFA.  Bob Morales didn't take much of a salary from the AFA, if any at all.  He actually made his living then mostly from creating ads for several BMX companies, and his other business ventures, like Mor Distributing, and Auburn Bikes.  

So that's how I wound up being one of the first actual riders to produce and direct a few of the early, if not that popular, BMX freestyle videos.  I ended up doing six videos for the AFA in 1987, one each for flatland and ramps, from the Oregon, Texas, and Ohio contests.  A couple of the clips from those videos made it into Mark Eaton's Joe Kid on a Stingray BMX documentary, many years later, in 2005.  The shot at 2:18 of Matt Hoffman in that trailer, and the following shot of Kevin Jones doing a locomotive, were from the AFA videos I did.  I had nothing to do with Joe Kid on a Stingray, but it was cool to see a couple of those AFA videos survived  for over15 years, and that Mark used a couple shots from them.  

I mentioned at the top of this post that Dave Alvarez was a techno wizard of an editor.  I'm not just saying that because he made this video, and the next 5 I did for the AFA, look really professional.  Local TV new personality, Chuck Henry, ended up stealing Dave from Unreel Productions in late 1989, I think.  Dave went to work at KABC, editing Chuck's news magazine show, Eye on L.A.*.  In his first year of editing in Hollywood, Dave Alvarez won an emmy for his work, so he really was, and is, a top notch video editor.  

So that's the story of the first video I produced and directed.  The Oregon Pro Flatland video led to those five other videos for the AFA, and then to getting hired to work at Unreel Productions in December of 1987.  Beginning as a guy dubbing videos for different people at Vision and Unreel, I wound up becoming an decent cameraman, and working on a whole lot more home videos and TV shows, over the next 8 years.  That 30 second conversation with Bob Morales, agreeing to make a low budget TV commercial, changed the direction of my working life.  

As of the late summer of 2023, I'm doing most of my new writing on Substack, a platform designed for writers.  Check it out:

Steve Emig: The White Bear's Substack

*This isn't one of the shows Dave edited, just one episode available on YouTube.  But there is some skateboarding in the end of that episode linked.  

Watching the GT-V video for the first time

Blog Post: Watching the GT-V video for the first time

 

East coast legend, and GT/Mountain Dew sponsored pro, Chris Lashua, hanging the back wheel out with a wedge ramp flipper in Whistler, British Columbia, Canada.  Summer 1986.  I stayed with the Bickels in that hotel in the background that week. My photo.

 

After the first night in Whistler, we got to kind of know the other riders, and then next morning we were back out on our bikes wandering around, exploring the area, when much to everyone's surprise, the GT Brittania tour motorhome pulled up.  Somebody saw it coming up the road, and we all rode over to see it.  It came to a stop, and out popped GT pro riders, Eddie Fiola and Chris Lashua.

It turned out Eddie and Chris were doing demos at Expo 86, a sort of World's Fair, being held in Vancouver at at the time.  They had a few days off, heard about the freestyle contest in Whistler, and drove up to hang out for a few days.  So we had 30 or so freestylers from Canada, Jay and I from Idaho (OK, I lived in San Jose at the time), a handful more from Washington and Oregon, and vert legend Eddie Fiola and east coast pro rider/promoter Chris Lashua hanging out, and riding for about 4 days.  It was an epic time for freestyle that week in Whistler.

 

On their second day there, Eddie and Chris got a small package from GT Bikes headquarters in Huntington Beach, California.  It was late morning, and a few of us were hanging out in the town square area.  Eddie and Chris came up, said they just got the first copy of the first GT Bikes freestyle  video, GT-V, and asked if anyone had a VCR in their room.  It was on VHS, but their huge RV didn't have a VCR in it.  Hey, it was the 80's, no YouTube or smart phones back then.  A lot of people didn't even have VCR's yet in 1986.

Obviously, all of us unknown riders were psyched to see a new video, before its official release date, and riders took off (no cell phones then) to find anyone who might have a VCR.  No one did.  We went into the mountain bike shop, one of the few things open in Whistler during the summer months, and they didn't have a VCR.  I think it was the guy in the bike shop who suggested the bar next door.  We were all kind of frustrated, freestyle videos were few and far between then, and we were all amped to watch it.  Eddie and Chris were both excited to see it, to since they were GT riders, and Eddie was a star of the video.

Finally, Eddie went into the bar, and which was pretty dark and dingy, and had about five morning drinkers in it.  This wasn't some hip, ski area sports bar.  It was a dive bar in a tiny mountain ski town, in the off season.  Eddie got the OK from the bartender to play the video... if those of us watching it bought something to drink, at like 11:00 am.  There was one other rule, only guys of legal age, which I think was 19 years old in B.C. then, could come in the bar and watch it.  About 10 or 15 riders were sitting on their bikes, outside the bike shop next door, still thinking someone might have a VCR we could borrow, so we could all watch it in the bike shop.  Then Eddie Fiola and Chris Lashua came over, and told us the bar would show it.  But only three or four of us were legal age and able to go in and see it.

So we went into the bar, I was legal , but Jay, my old teammate, had to stay outside.  We wound up with Eddie, Chris, and 3 or 4 of us riders sitting at the corner of the bar, buying Cokes, so we could watch GT-V for the first time.  Even the Canadians didn't want a beer that early in the morning.  We got the bartender to turn the TV, so the ten or so riders who were under age, could peer through the glass window, and sort of, kind of, see the video, 15 feet away, but not hear the sound.  And that's how I watched the first GT Bikes video, GT-V, for the first time.  You can watch the final version of GT-V (with lame audio) on YouTube by searching " (1986) GT-V Absolutely Unreel," as of the time I'm writing this.  Premiere parties didn't become a thing for at least 10 or 12 more years.  When a video came out, you plugged into whatever VCR was around, with a few friends, and that was your "premiere."

I was sitting at a bar, drinking a Coke, with  Eddie Fiola, Chris Lashua, and about three Canadian riders I'd just met over the previous couple of days.  The GT/Brittania RV that's in the opening shots of the video, was parked half a block away.  Seriously, for a dorky kid from Idaho (and San Jose), it was just surreal.  Every few minutes, we'd kind of look over our shoulders, and see this group of faces pressed up against the window behind us, trying to catch every bit of action in the video they could.  They would pull their faces back every little while to keep from fogging up the glass with their breath.  In those days, we got all of our news and visuals about BMX freestyle from BMX and freestyle magazines, and the two or three videos that had come out over the previous couple of years.  The main ones were two videos by BMX Plus, and Rippin' by the BMX Action Trick Team.  There was also a Curb Dogs video, but not many people had seen it at the time.  We were all so desperate to see video footage of freestyle back then, we'd do about anything to see new footage of the pros riding.

The GT-V video started with Eddie, Fiola, Martin Aparijo, and Brian Scura teaching some dorky kid (played by Josh White) to be a good freestyler.  The video shows those four, plus Dino Deluca and Brett Hernandez, doing flatland in Huntington Beach, Hollywood, and at a school show.  There's also ramp riding at the BMX Action T.O.L. halfpipe, and on the GT Brittania quarterpipe.  Eddie does his best airs, and shows off the "over and out," his can-can to one footer, which I'm pretty sure is the first multiple variation air, something Mat Hoffman got known for a year or two later.  Martin showed off a ton of flatland, including the quickspin and bar rides, new tricks at the time.  Josh White showed off all his crazy variations and his insane flexibility.  And... Chris Lashua wasn't even in the video, because The Man was still keepin' the East Coast riders down then. 

That version of GT-V, and the copy I ended up with a year later, had the original music, which started with Motley Crue's "Home Sweet Home," as they turned the ignition key in the motorhome at the beginning.  It was actually a pretty cool sound track for the day.  Then, after the video was completely finished being edited, some lawyer told the producers that the music could get GT sued.  So they put in this crap canned music.  Back in those days, producers could pay $100 or something for a whole cassette tape of mediocre electronic music that came with the rights to use it in any video.  "Canned music," as it was called, was also used in porn videos in those days.  So it wasn't unusual to watch an 80's BMX video, and then hear the exact same electronic instrumental song in a porno video later on.  I know at least two songs from the first BMX Plus video (1985) were in popular porno videos at the same time. 

After we watched GT-V in the bar, which Eddie and Chris themselves were seeing for the first time, we all went out, and talked about it to the younger riders, and described all the new tricks we could remember from it.  Later that day, someone paid like $50 to rent a VCR from somewhere, and I think they showed it in the mountain bike shop, and in someone's hotel room once or twice.  The video wasn't released for another month or so, so it was this awesome sneak preview for those of us in Whistler.  I wasn't really a part of the industry yet, though I had hung out with most of the pros in Tulsa, a couple months earlier.  I was doing my zine, covering the NorCal freestyle scene then, and I took some photos of Eddie and Chris Lashua while we were all riding together for those few days.  The photo of Chris Lashua, above, is one of those photos. 

For the next two or three days, I hung out and rode with Jay Bickel, Eddie Fiola, Chris Lashua, and the Canadian and Northwest U.S. guys.  The two Canadians I remember the names of are Rob Dodds, a really good vert and all around rider from B.C., and Rob Thring, a top rider and freestyle organizer in eastern Canada.  Monte Hill, a good, but unknown, vert rider from Washington, was also in the mix that week.  Basically,  that week was this crew of totally unknown, but hardcore and solid riders from Canada, Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, plus pros Eddie and Chris.  

We sessioned flatland in the town square, and the quarterpipe and wedge ramp when they got set up that Friday, as I recall.  We also pushed our bikes up the mountain, and did a little riding on the hiking and mountain bike trails. They weren't crazy MTB trails with big jumps and drops, like today's MTB trails, they were hiking trails, basically, used by cross country MTBers.  But there were some fun downhill sections to haul ass down.

  

We also rode the BMX track before the racers showed up.  Two pro racers, I think it was Greg Hill and Stu Thomsen, showed up that weekend, but I never talked to them.  They were up at the BMX track most of the time.  There was a story that Greg was chasing Stu through the little town one night, just screwing around.  They carved around the corner of a building, and a local woman pushing a baby stroller was right there.  Stu bunnyhopped the kid in stroller, and Greg carved around it, freaking out the woman pushing the stroller.  A couple of the Canadian guys said they saw the incident happen. 

 

The BMX track had this huge, insane gap between the second and third berms.  It made like a ten foot high, 25 foot plus gap, that dropped downhill.  Today it would be a big jump on a BMX bike, and a solid MTB jump.  In 1986, that gap was Evel Knievel level shit.  Two or three of the Canadians challenged each other to jump it one night, and after a couple of huge, bails, one guy made the gap.  At that time, that was the craziest thing I'd ever anybody seen do on a BMX bike.  I don't even remember the guy's name who jumped it, and I didn't have my camera when he did it.  It was a hint of things to come a decade later, when dirt jumping really took off and jumping got insane.  

Eddie Fiola also had a brand new trick he just invented that week, called the "Expo."  He learned it right before coming up to Whistler, while he and Chris were doing demos at the Expo '86.  It was a quarterpipe trick where he would ride up the ramp, and do a 90 degree flyout, landing sideways on the deck.  Then he'd hop once or twice, then hop back in spinning 90 degrees, going in fakie, and rolling backwards off the ramp.  At the time, Ron Wilkerson had not yet invented the abubaca, and hopping in backwards was a really gnarly trick.  Eddie showed us that one, and it blew our minds.  We usually don't think of Eddie as someone who did lip tricks, but if you ever see him riding a skatepark, yell, "Hey, Eddie, get a foot out," and see what he does.

Then, on Saturday morning, we had the flatland contest, as the "World Championships" BMX race (with only two top pro racers), was going on up the hill.  Like most BMX freestyle contests I've competed in, I remember nothing of the contest itself.  Yeah, Jay and I competed against all the other guys.  I think Jay placed well, and I was in the middle of the pack, as usual.  Let's face it, the contest itself has really always been a way to justify going to ride with friends from other regions for a couple of days, and we usually forget the contest itself, and remember the riding from the rest of the weekend.

Since I,rode up to Whistler with the Bickels, and we had a long drive back to Boise, we left right after the flatland comp, and missed the ramp riding.  We didn't see a sasquatch or a bear on the drive back either, which is probably a good thing.  The Bickels gave me a ride to the Boise airport, and I flew back to San Jose, and my "normal life" of making pizzas and riding around San Jose every afternoon.  At Pizza Hut in San Jose, we did have Canadian bacon to put on pizzas.

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Crazy California

Creative Life - 4/25/2019: A new beginning...,

You know that moment when you're waking up, but you're still in a dream, and for a few seconds they both kind of make sense.  Then you wake up more and go , "Oh shit, that was weird."  The last nine months have been like that for me.  This weird Robin Williams photo is part of a collage I made on an old skimboard years ago.

For nearly two decades, my life has been really weird.  For a bunch of reasons, I couldn't make a decent living, and it's just been a long, long struggle to just get by.  Taxi driving, 5 1/2 years, most living in my cab, led to full blown homelessness in 2007-2008 in Orange County, California, then my family flew me to North Carolina.  In ten years in NC, I couldn't get hired for ANY job, except taxi driver for a year, and that didn't pay.  Again, there was a bunch of weird shit going on behind the scenes, which I still can't fully explain.  Last August, looking at 30 rough days in jail for my arrest for buying donuts at an Adli grocery store (really, buying donuts), I escaped North Carolina.  But my limited money only got me to Richmond, Virginia, where I've been since.  The charges were dropped months after I left NC, a place I have no desire to ever set foot in again (but my family lives there).

I got off a bus here in Richmond (50 shades of Greyhound), with about $3.50 in my pocket.  I was in a city I'd never been to before, that I knew nothing about, and where I didn't know a single person.  I had a typical, book bag sized backpack, a duffel bag with a few clothes, and art supplies for my Sharpie art.

After a couple weeks of mostly sleeping outside, simply laying down under the stars on loading docks and in parking lots, I got drenched in the rain one night, and wound up with a leg infection called cellulitis.  It's something people with diabetes get a lot.  Despite a family history full of it, I don't have diabetes.  But my health got bad when I was a taxi driver, well over 350 pounds much of that time, and I started getting cellulitis, so I'm kind of prone to it.

In my first bout with it, back in early 2007, I didn't go to the hospital because I didn't have insurance.  My left lower leg swelled up to 3 times its size and turned bright red with infection, and I just laid in my cab, outside Fashion Island mall, in Newport Beach, with a temperature of 102 to maybe 105 degrees, for five days.  I finally went to the hospital, and spent three days getting pumped with medicine to kill the infection.  How bad did it get?  One doctor talked about possible amputation of my lower leg, at one point.  Luckily, that didn't happen.  I also learned that homeless people (I qualified as a taxi driver, living in my cab) are nearly always covered for medical, or by hospital's emergency funds.

So when I got the cellulitis here in Richmond last August, I went to VCU hospital, the local med student teaching hospital.  They gave me three IV bags of medicine.  Then I turned pink, and we realized I was seriously allergic to the medicine.  So the medical team there spent the next 6 days trying to save me from the allergic reaction.  I was damn close to dying.

I turned pink, then red, then dark red, then even kind of black in places.  My body puffed up in random places.  I couldn't even stand up for about a day.  My face looked kind of like the elephant man at one point.  Here's the weird thing.  Well, it's all weird.  But the weirdest thing.  I had this deep sense, not really a dream, but kind of an inner knowing right as I began to turn the corner and get better.  I had this sense that it would be an incredible struggle to simply survive the winter here in Richmond.  I'd been homeless, in different ways, for about 9 years over the past 18 years.  It was going to take everything I learned about survival to stay alive all winter.  At the same time I turned the corner and I began to get better, this blog crossed the 43,000 page view threshold.  43 is everywhere, especially for old school BMXer Has Been's, like me.

But my inner sense was that IF I could survive the winter, Spring would bring a new beginning, in a big way.  If I survived this test the Universe was throwing at me, I would see a turning of the tides this Spring, and would finally begin to rebuild my life into something cool again.  There were several times over the winter when I just wanted to give up.  Two or three times, I did give up... for 20 or 30 minutes.  I screamed and cussed and stomped around, or just stood in the cold without my jacket, thinking.  Then the frustration passed, and I kept trudging on.

I was outside during a ten inch snowstorm, all night, for 17 1/2 hours, in December.  I slept outside on nights down to 12 or 13 degrees, with wind.  Nearly everything I own got stolen.  I lost two borrowed sleeping bags and a third one that I bought, along with three moving blankets that helped me keep warm.  My bag with all my spare clothes was stolen in December.  I've been living in the three layers of clothes on my back since.  Yeah, I smell pretty bad most of the time.  I clean up when and how I can.  I've had my toes, and fingers and ears frostnipped more times than I can count, that's the beginning stage of serious frostbite.

There were three times this past winter, where, even after all the crazy years of adeventures I've been through, I thought, "That's it, I am not going to survive this."  Make that four, counting the hospital stay.  But I'm still here.  And now it's Spring.

Sleeping outside is still not safe, but it doesn't have the every night, life or death consequences that a 20 to 25 degree night does.  Through all of this, I've been blogging, and drawing my Sharpie pictures to sell, as I could.  In addition, about a dozen people stepped up and gave me money to get a room for the night, or a few nights, and that was HUGE.  I really appreciate it, and plan to pay all of you back as finances allow.

A couple of weeks ago, my plan was to write a zine about how to use blogging, the internet, and social media to help small businesses make more money.  I got pretty good at this stuff in the three years of promoting my artwork, but the art just didn't have the profit potential to get me completely off the streets. As I started writing these ideas down, old BMX friend Rich Bartlett contacted me.  We talked for quite a while, and I became the person starting a blog, and doing more social media promotion, for Rich's new project, the Block Bikes Online BMX store.  He's had the Block Bikes shop in Lancaster, CA for 25 years or more now, and seeing where business is headed, decided last year it was time to take it online.

Though his shop is well known, Rich isn't a millionaire, and the work I'm doing didn't come with a big fat weekly check to start.  We're working together, and the online store needs to start cranking in sales to be able to pay me well, as well as the other employees, and Rich, of course.  This is the bike world, I need to get traffic heading to that online shop, to earn my keep.  As we all know, there are no Angel Investors in the BMX world.  It's not like high tech, where people have an idea, pitch it to a super rich person, and get $4 million to burn through, losing money every month, HOPING the idea will make a fortune some day.

In the BMX industry, we're real entrepreneurs, we have to actually make shit that sells, and keep innovating and selling, to make things work.  So I started the Block Bikes Blog, and it's had nearly 1,000 page views in the first ten days, which is a great start.

So... I survived 8 1/2 months of homelessness, brutal and crazy the whole time.  It felt like I was earning my PhD in street survival.  Spring came, and so did a whole new start for me.  Full circle, back into the BMX industry, 14 years after moving out of Chris Moeller's condo in 1995, and striking out on my own.

So that's where I'm at.  Rich and I will be dropping the first Club White Bear T-shirt, probably tomorrow, available only through the Block Bikes Online Store.  It's a way to help jump start the store, and raise money to help me stabilize my living situation.  Rich bought my tiger drawing, and has helped me out as he could, and I've had a room a few days since we started working together.  But I'm still homeless for the moment, and panhandling for food money and bus fare money when needed.  But things are looking up.

Here's the T-shirt design.  I can't float anyone free T-shirts right now, even the people who helped me out.  I'll settle up with all of you, and send some gifts, once I get a stable roof over my head, and am making consistent cash.   Let me know what you think of the T-shirt...

As I write this (morning of 4/25/2019), the T-shirts aren't ready to go... yet.  But you can order one (or 5 or 20), either later today or tomorrow, here:  Block Bikes Online BMX Store  (Not sure of the price yet) .

 Here's another "new start" I made once.  Back in August of 1986.  It changed the entire course of my life.  I had no idea the adventure that new start would lead to.  Now 33 years later, I have no idea where this one will lead either, but I'm stoked to get going...

I have a couple of new blogs I'm getting off the ground.  Check them out:

Steve Emig Adventuring

Small Business Blaster

Why is the economy collapsing and the world going crazy?  I wrote this online mash-up book/blog thing to give my thoughts on that question.  Here it is...

Welcome to Dystopia: The Future is Now (Book 1)