Somehow I witnessed two first 900's live...

Tony Hawk, during the best trick jam at the 1999 X-Games in San Francisco.  I think it was on the 11th attempt he landed the first 900 on a skateboard ever.  He'd been trying the trick for nearly ten years.  

Ride a bike, it will take you places.  SE Bikes brand manager Todd Lyons says that a lot these days, and he's right.  There were about 5,000 stories of Tony Hawk landing this 900, the first ever on a skateboard, that night on a pier in San Francisco, a different story for each person in that crowd.  This is my version.  I was standing behind the pro skaters, less than 20 feet from the side of the ramp, talking to San Francisco BMX freestyle legend Maurice Meyer.  My Sony Digital8 video camera was in my hand... with a dead battery.  I'm glad actually, that was a moment I was happy to just stand there and witness, without trying to capture it on video, and keep him well framed during each try.  More than a decade later, in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Sean Penn's character sums up that feeling better than I've ever heard it described.  

I had finagled a press pass to the X-Games that year, planning to write an article or two for Dig Magazine in the U.K. about the contest.  Maurice had nabbed a VIP pass, too.  I rode with him and the other Golden Gate Park locals, most weekends, during the one year I lived there, in 1985-86.  We ran into each other near the end of the BMX vert practice, and started talking about "the old days" and how much BMX and action sports had changed over 12 or 13 years' time.  

While we were talking at the bike halfpipe, a red helicopter with a World Industries logo on the side of it, hovered near the ramps, and started dropping stickers.  The handful of kids around the area ran around picking them up.  Then we realized that something else was getting thrown out of the chopper, little wadded up pieces of paper.  Because of the breeze, most were falling on the empty BMX ramp area, where we were, not on the skateboard crowd.  Someone grabbed one of the pieces of paper, and unraveled it.  "It's money" they said.  Suddenly all of us jaded Old School guys were picking them up, too.  Mike Dominguez Jr., amped up after an afternoon of free Mountain Dew, sprinted around and grabbed 30 or 40 of the wadded up dollar bills, I think.  I wound up with four of them, each with a World Industries skateboard character, like Flame Boy or Wet Willie, rubber stamped on them.  We laughed at yet another example of Steve Rocco's crazy promotion methods.  When in doubt, just throw money on the crowd.  I literally had real helicopter money in my pocket when Maurice and I decided to walk over and watch the skate best trick jam, which had just started.  

Dusk was descending on the huge pier that housed the 1999 X-Games, next to San Francisco Bay.  With our passes, we just walked over and stood behind the rows of chairs there for pro skaters and their girlfriends, wives, and a few kids.  In some of the wide shots in the clip above, you can see two really bright lights, that look lke stars on the video.  We were right below, and maybe 20 feet in front of those lights, they were shining over our heads, lighting up the skate halfpipe for the TV cameras.  

Maurice and I kept talking, as the world's best skaters tried their newest and best tricks.  As I recall, Pierre Luc Gagnon was trying to land a heeflip Caballerial, as Steve Caballero himself sat 10 feet in front of me.  Bob Burnquist was trying a one footed Smith Grind to revert, I believe.  Other skaters were trying their "Merry Christmas" tricks, the things they could land once in a while.  For Tony Hawk, that was the varial 720.  About 12 or 15 minutes into the half hour jam, he landed one.  Then he went back up, and just stood on deck a few minutes.  

Skaters dropped in, sometimes snaking each other, to try to pull that one big trick.  It was the closest thing I'd seen to "real," everyday skateboarding in a contest environment.  The best trick jam was a concession to the vert skaters, who still weren't really happy with ESPN's take on skateboarding, in their 4th year of the putting on the X-Games.  The big TV contest idea for action sports was evolving, as skaters got more involved and vocal about how they were portrayed to millions of viewers.  

It was obvious the bigwigs at ESPN didn't give a shit about the best trick jam, but they had a big crowd, around 5,000 people in the stands on the other side of the ramp, so they kept the cameras rolling.  It would make for soem good highlight clips, I think that's how they saw it.  Old School skater and announcer, Dave Duncan, called the action out live from the deck.  Maurice and I watched and talked.  

Then Tony Hawk dropped in again, and no one paid that much attention.  Until he opened up out of what looked like a over-rotated 540.  We stopped talking, "Did he just try a 900?" one of us asked the other.  I can't remember who said it.  Tony walked back up to the top of the ramp, and did the same thing a couple of more times.  The second rotation got tighter and tighter.  After the 3rd or 4th try, he walked off the side of the ramp, facing us, He was 15 or 20 feet away, and we could totally see his eyes, he had the stare, the "thousand yard stare," as I've heard some call it.  He was looking right towards us, but saw nothing.  Pure focus.  I asked Maurice, "Did you see his eyes?  He's serious.  He's either going to land it or go to the hospital trying."  Maurice agreed.  

The whole aura of the place shifted.  Other skaters stopped dropping in.  The skaters on the deck knew Tony really wanted the 900, and stepped back in respect.  It wasn't planned.  No color commentary guy had to spew stats and percentages to hype people up.  The energy in the whole area changed.  This was real skateboarding at it's best.  

A top skater just got a taste that tonight was the night to land the unlandable trick, and Tony just laser focused on it.  Everyone stopped skating after a couple more attempts.  It wasn't about trophies or prize money anymore.  We all wanted to see Tony Hawk progress vert skating to the next level.  Tony kept trying, getting more and more determined, and closer to landing it.  Dave Duncan kept talking into the mike like only a hardcore skateboarder could.  This was a moment, one way or the other.  

I think it was on the 7th attempt that Tony landed on the board, made it a few feet, then washed out on the flatbottom.  I jumped up in the air screaming, I gave that one to him.  But he didn't ride away, it wasn't clean, he wanted it 100%.  He kept trying.  On the 11th attempt, I believe, is when Tony Hawk landed the first skateboard 900 air, totally solid.  Everyone went nuts.  

If you freeze that video above at about 6;03, you'll see Maurice right behind Tony, in a white hoodie, with sunglasses.  He ran up there with all the skaters to congratulate Tony.  I, for some reason, stayed right where I was, 30 feet away, watching the pandemonium.  The place went nuts.  But I had seen that happen before, 10 years earlier, up in Canada.  

Mat Hoffman's first 900, at 14:43 in this clip, in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, in the spring of 1989.  After the intro with Eddie Roman's girlfriend, this is the footage that I shot from that contest, with Eddie and friends doing their funny color commentary over it.  This is from the 1990-2-Hip video, Ride Like a Man, edited by Eddie Roman.  

Riding a bike did take me places.  I was a dorky, unathletic kid who grew up in Ohio, spent 9th grade living in New Mexico, and then lived in Boise, Idaho through high school.  The summer after my sophomore year, I got into BMX riding, then BMX racing, and then new sport of BMX freestyle, in 1983.  A year after I graduated high school, my family moved to San Jose, California.  I worked at Pizza Hut, started publishing a freestyle zine, and met the Bay areas freestylers, like Maurice, Dave Vanderspek, Robert Peterson, Hugo Gonzalez, and a couple dozen more.  My zine led me to a magazine job in Southern California.  I wasn't punk rock enough for that place, and I got laid off.  I got a job editing a newsletter, which led to working at Unreel Productions, the Vision Skateboards video company, in late 1987.  I was out riding three hours a night like everyone else, but didn't have the balls to make it to pro caliber as a BMX freestyler.  By 1989, I was Unreel's camerman, traveling to all the 2-Hip vert and street contests to shoot video, because Vision Street Wear sponsored the contests.  

While I was bouncing around the BMX and industries, the early skatepark riders inspired a bunch of great quarterpipe riders around the U.S. and Europe.  In 1987, Haro pro Ron Wilkerson started putting on halfpipe contests.  Riders like Todd Anderson, Josh White, Joe Johnson, and this kid from Oklahoma, named Mat Hoffman, moved up the amateur ranks and into pro.  They pushed the older guys like Eddie Fiola, Brian Blyther, Mike Dominguez, as vert riding progressed.  

The first 2-Hip King of Vert of 1989 was in Kitchener, Ontario Canada.  The less than epic 2-Hip halfpipe was set up in a college gymnasium for the weekend, and the riders, amateur and pro, gave it their best.  The talk of the weekend was that this crazy, unknown guy from Canada, called The Terminator, was going to do a backflip abubaca or fakie or something.  No one except lake jumper Jose Yanez had done flips on a BMX bike then.  No one had even tried them on vert.  The Terminator was an amateur, and when his final run came up, he did a high fakie, leaned back a little, and crashed hard.  The weekend up hype fizzled.  

The rest of the amateurs rode their runs, blasting high and pulling their best tricks.  Joe Johnson landed the first double tailwhip air, which was amazing.  I was on the deck, with a $50,000, 35 pound, rented Ikegami Betacam, shoulder checking photographer John Ker for a good angle to shoot from.  I was doing my best to get good footage of the days events.  

Then came Mat Hoffman, in what I believe was his second pro contest.  He won his first pro contest.  At the end of his final run, with about 300 people watching, mostly Canadians, he nearly landed a 900.  Mat got up, and went for it again, landing the first BMX 900 in a contest, and the first recorded 900 in any action sport.  Even snowboarders hadn't pulled a 900 air at that point.  I caught it on video from the deck, and Eddie Roman and another guy caught it from two angles below.  Mat Hoffman, new pro vert rider and wonderkid, broke the 900 barrier in action sports, with video and photos to prove it.  Word was the Mike Dominguez had landed a 900 or two on his own ramp.  But there were no photos or video.  Mat made it official, the 900 was possible.

By some weird quirk of fate, me, the goofy kid from Ohio and Idaho, was there to get video.  And by an even crazier quirk of fate, I was in San Francisco a decade later to watch Tony Hawk do it, live, on a skateboard.  The only other two people that I know were in both places were Mat and his buddy Steve Swope.  But they were running the bike contest in 1999, and I don't think they were watching the skate best trick jam.  I'm not sure.  There may have been a couple of people who saw both happen live.

We live in a weird Universe, and really crazy coincidences happen now and then.  It still trips me out that I somehow saw both of these happen live, right in front of me.  Riding a bike did take me places, for the first 20 years of my adult life.  I met alot of cool people, traveled around the U.S., and into Canada a couple of times.  

Then I got injured, became a taxi driver, and things went into a downhill spiral.  I think life wanted to kick my ass for a couple of decades to teach me some other lessons.  One of the things I've learned is that there are a lot of ways to spend your time in life, and goofing around on bikes is one of the best ways.  You never know where it will lead you.  Ride on!

33 years ago today Mat and Joe did some things...

A Facebook post by Mat Hoffman just reminded me where I was 33 years ago today.  I was in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, shooting video of a 2-Hip King of Vert contest for Unreel Productions.  Mat landed the first 900 in a contest that day (at 14:43), and Joe Johnson landed the first double tailwhip air on vert.  Epic day of BMXness.  This is about fifteen minutes of my footage of that day, narrated by Eddie Roman and friends for the 2-Hip video, Ride Like a Man.

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Damn camera guy in the way...

I'd like to thank Ken Paul for this photo he shot and apparently just found again.  That's Old School Canadian rider Rob Dodds in the air.  He says it probably a warm up air, maybe a 540.  Considering this is from 1989 at Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, that's a big 540, if that's what it is.  The reason I'm thanking them for finding this is because I'm the cameraman in the foreground.  I joke a lot these days about "my life in the background" in the 80's, because my assorted BMX/skate industry jobs landed me in the background of a bunch of photos.  Another funny thing is that when Windy Osborn shot the first few photos of me as a new editorial assistant at Wizard Publications, I was drinking a can of Coke, and she shot it with a fisheye lens, so the bottom of the can pretty much hid my face.  Other photos, taken soon after, were shot so my face always ended up being covered or hid because I was turned away.  It was a running joke at Wizard and then with other photographers for a while.  If you took a photo of me, you couldn't show my face.  So here's another photo like that. Too funny.  Just for the record, only one camera has broken when someone took a photo of my face.  Seriously, they were taking photos of the crew  for our security passes when I worked on a Cirque du Soleil tour.  After taking taking my photo, the camera broke, and they had to find another one.

On my end, I worked at Unreel Productions, the Vision video company, from December 1987  through 1988, and I was basically a a production assistant, what they call a PA in the TV industry.  My main job was dubbing copies of tapes of one thing or another for people throughout the Vision empire of companies.  But I did a little bit of everything, like running errands, picking up supplies, manning the phones at lunch, training the receptionists, and everything nobody else wanted to do.  I knew I had job security,though, because I was the only one who knew how to change the toilet paper roll in the front bathroom at the office.  So they couldn't fire me.

Sometime in late '88 or early '89, Pat Wallace, the staff cameraman, moved on to another job, and I became the new cameraman.  It sounds really cool, but mostly I did my same job, and then went out on video shoots once in a while.  The cool part was getting sent to every 2-Hip King of Vert and Meet the Street contest in 1989.  Since I was the token BMX guy in a crew of older surfer guys, it was great to travel to those on the Vision dime.  In those days, we used pro quality Sony Betacam video cameras that weighed 35 pounds and cost $50,000 each.  That's not a typo.  Broadcast quality cameras were crazy expensive in the late 80's.

The Kitchener contest was the first I traveled to as cameraman, and I had to rent an Ikegami Betacam, and then make sure I actually knew how to work it, once in Canada.  I traveled with a very attractive woman from the Vision promotions office, whose name I can't remember now.  That's probably good, because I was really a dork then, and probably made an ass out of myself around her. Like when we got to the hotel and I realized I hadn't booked a room.  I thought she handled that stuff as the promotions person.  I asked if I could crash on the floor of her room.  She was a seasoned traveler, a real road warrior who had worked for the NFL, and said something like, "No fucking way, you're sleeping the rental car if they're out of rooms."  I managed to luck out, there were empty rooms so I got one.  I guess March isn't a big tourist month in Ontario.

In typical BMX fashion, I ran into Rob Dodds while shooting the practice session that evening.  That's probably when the photo above was taken.

I met Rob and a whole host of other Canadianfreestylers when I went with my Idaho teammate Jay Bickel and family to a contest at Whistler, British Columbia 3 or 4 years earlier.  Since we were all there for a week in Whistler, we rode all day, sessioning with Eddie Fiola and Chris Lashua, who were taking a break from the GT Brittania Tour.  We all got to know each other pretty well during that week.  When I talked to Rob at this contest, he was looking for a room to crash in, having traveled from Western Canada.  I had a big couch in my room, and offered it up.

As luck would have it, the room beside us was the weekend home to Dennis McCoy, Steve Swope and Mat Hoffman.  Like every contest, we were wandering around talking and hanging out that night in different rooms.  The talk of the weekend was some Canadian guy named nicknamed the Terminator, and rumor was that he had learned some kind of backflip trick.  This was before the flip fakie and flair were even considered possible, even by Mat.  Some people said he was going to do an abubaca to backflip, some said a backflip fakie.  Sure, those don't seem so crazy today, but this was 1989, before all those young backflip triple whipper guys of today's scene were even born.  When it came to the am finals, the Terminator tried some kind of abubaca thing, leaned back, and just took a hard slam.  There was a big let down to the 300 or so of us in that gymnasium.  It was like the whole weekend of hype fizzled out like a dud bottle rocket.

Several of  the big name riders were trying to huck a 900.  Mike Dominguez had come agonizingly close at the final Enchanted Ramp contest in 1988, and he said held landed a couple on his own ramp, but never got video of them.  So the world hadn't seen one yet.  Several guys tried, and young Mat Hoffman hucked an attempt and, like Mike D., just barely missed landing it.

So he tried another one.  I was on the opposite deck, banging elbows with John Ker and the other photographers.  I had the only professional quality betacam in the room.  Mat's Skyway teammate, Eddie Roman, had his S-VHS camera on the ground.  Someone else had a camera on the deck where Mat was spinning.  This was the olden days kids, cell phones didn't exist (to poor people), and there were actually more bike riders there than cameras.  On the second attempt, Mat carved across the ramp and landed the first BMX 900 air in a contest.  And the first 900 air in ANY action sport in a contest.  We instantly forgot about the Terminator guy.

When we got back to the room, Rob and I cleaned up and were headed to the hotel diner to go eat, and ran into Dennis and Swope coming out their door.  They were also heading to eat.  We asked where Mat was.  Steve Swope said, "Look through the peephole."  Some how, the peephole in their hotel door got knocked out, so we could look in.  Mat was sitting there two feet from the TV, with a camera plugged into it.  He was watching the 900 over, and over, and over.  I guess he was analyzing it or figuring out just how he got it to work that time.  Dennis rolled is eyes, "He's been doing that for an hour, just watching it over and over."  So we all went in, watched it a few times, and then dragged Mat from the TV and we all went to eat.

On the walk there, Rob was talking to Mat about this crazy trick he'd been trying, a no-handed 540.  That was another impossible sounding trick at that time.  Rob said they would come around, but the bars would always drift away and he couldn't land one.  So Mat and Rob got into a serious vert rider discussion on how it might be possible to land a no-handed 540.

Guess what trick Mat debuted at the next contest at Woodward?

Thanks Ken for sharing the photo, and Rob for sharing it with me and adding to the legend that you can't show my face in a BMX photo.  Heh, heh, heh.

Here's the clip of Mat's 900 from Eddie Roman and another camera guy.  In the first shot, I'm on the opposite deck, just to the right of Mat during his warm-up air.  I was wearing the never fashionable Vision Street Wear black and white "cow pants that day.  Eddie Roman is the guy you hear doing commentary while shooting from the ground.

Below is what's available from my footage shot that day.  There was a lot of great riding going down.  This is from 2-Hip: Ride Like a Man, a video Eddie Roman edited.  That's Eddie and friends talking in the back ground.  Mat's 900 is at 14:43, at the end of this clip.  Epic weekend.



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Happy (43 + 3) Birthday Mat Hoffman

I was almost 20 years old in 1986, when Eddie Fiola walked up to me and started talking at the AFA Masters contest in Tulsa, Oklahoma.  My little San Jose' Stylin' zine somehow got me the job of writing about that contest for FREESTYLIN' magazine.  It was the biggest weekend of my life up to that point, and I couldn't believe it when Eddie just came up and started talking.  It was a fanboy moment, talking to the best know pro in freestyle like it was no big deal.  Then a curly headed kid and his buddy rode up and interrupted us.  Damn little grommets.  That kid was asking Eddie if he'd ever seen a trick, he did the motions of a switch-handed air.  Eddie had never seen that trick.  Neither had I.  The kid smiled and him and the buddy rode off. 

In the 1980's, a really weird, mostly screwed up, group of kids were attracted by the obscure, new, little sport of BMX freestyle.  Most of us were hardcore riders, if never really great riders.  Some guys excelled at riding.  I found my niche as one of the guys recording parts of our weird little world, first with a 110 camera and a typewriter, then at magazines, then a newsletter, then with video.  I wasn't one of the pro riders.  But I wound up part of the scene, sessioning with the best in the nightime jam circles and street rides, and then documenting them at the contest the next day. Because of that, I just happened to be standing there when I lot of really cool stuff went down.  On good days, I had a camera of some kind with me.  On the bad days, I waited for Windy or John Ker's magazine photos to come out.

The spring of 1986 in Tulsa was one of those good days.  Without realizing it at the time, vert legend  Eddie Fiola and I happened to meet an unsponsored Mat Hoffman and Steve Swope, before the national scene had heard of them.  Three years later, in a school gym in Ontario, Canada, was another good day.  I was the Unreel Productions (Vision) cameraman that day, the only person in the gym with a broadcast quality video camera on my shoulder.  The talk of the weekend was about some Canadian kid called the Terminator doing an abubaca backflip, or maybe a fakie backflip, no one was sure.  Both of those tricks seemed completely insane then.  He tried it earlier that day, but didn't commit, and it was underwhelming.  After that, there were no big expectations.  As usual, several riders hucked 900 attempts.  Then something amazing happened.  Go to 14:43 to see it.  Mat wound up having a good day that day, as well.  Happy Birthday Mat Hoffman.  Hope today's another good day, as well.

Remember everyone... you never know who that goofy looking kid who rides up to you at the skatepark may turn out to be.  Eddie and I had no idea what that curly headed kid would unleash into the bike world.  So don't be too quick to discount those crazy kids you run into out riding.