Has anybody done a podcast with Don Hoffman (Pipeline Skatepark/Unreel Productions/Vision)? Somebody should. Same with Frank Scura and Bob Morales (who started the AFA). On camera we have Frank Scura in the intro, and Don Hoffman behind the camera. Bob Morales put on the contest, and I was a roadie at it, and rode in the comp as well. This is the third video I produced and directed in 1987. Nearly an hour of 1980's flatland. Officially, this video is titled Texas Pro Flatland. Enjoy.
I'm doing most of my writing on a platform called Substack these days, it's designed specifically for writers. Check it out:
On occasion, I make it down to H.B. Tuesday, where Martin Aparijo, Sean Ewing, and the crew of old schoolers ride flatland in a beach parking, every Tuesday afternoon. Last week I made it down to H.B., and hung out for the afternoon. Honestly, going down there is the highlight of my month. While Fate has pushed me away from the BMX world for a really long time, I'm still a huge fan of doing tricks on "little kid's bikes" (as people called them back in the 1980's). Yes, I got fat and haven't ridden in many years, but I still love BMX freestyle, and I'll always be a fan of riding, and action sports in general.
Last week I met a guy there named Fish, from up in the Seattle area. He was ripping it up with a bunch of rolling tricks... backyards, frontyards, and sideyards, high speed hang 5's and a bunch more. Watching Fish, I realized that I was an "apartment flatlander" back in the 80's. I had no front, back, or side yards in my trick bag. I had no yards at all. My scuffing repertoire was limited to Shingle shuffles and funky chickens on occasion. My main tricks were sliders, Switzerland squeakers, a bunch of tailwhip variations, back wheel peg spin variations (megaspins that weren't "mega"), high speed 180 bunnyhops to half Cabs, and a few other obscure tricks.
Fish was familiar with my blogging, and we got talking, while Martin and a few others were riding. It was great to just talk about Old School flatland riding for a while, with someone I'd heard of, but never actually met. I brought up David Morris, a Seattle area guy, a really solid rider, who never got much coverage, but was the real Raleigh Factory Freestyle team, which I joined for a year in 1987. Fish had a cool story about meeting and riding David's team BITD. We also talked about the BMX business, and flatland over the many years since.
I told Fish how the whole rolling trick transition was when I clocked out of flatland, I just wasn't up for learning all those tricks, and street was getting more interesting to me. Fish said that's when it really got fun for him. His style and skill set rocked in the forward rolling era, and he's still riding hard today. Anyhow, great to meet and talk a while, Fish. Glad we got to hang out a while and share some stories.
Blogger's note- 10/18/2024- I rewrote this post quickly today, because the original post sucked. This started out as a couple of lines about meeting a cool Old School rider from Seattle, and then I rambled off topic, like usual. Sometimes that works, but in this post it didn't. So I cleaned it up today.
I'm doing most of my writing on a platform called Substack now, check it out.
Dave Voelker, blasting ten feet out of the rickety, 8 foot high, AFA Socko quarterpipe in 1987. This photo ran in BMX Action, not sure what issue, in 1987. Dave was always one of the most fun riders to watch ride, in contests or just screwing around outside. His riding blew my mind many times. #steveemigphotos
This wasn't a traditional contest, it was a Guinness Book of World Records contest. Brian Blyther won the high air part, with a 10' 2" air, setting the first official world record high air. Everyone new it was close with Voelker's high air, but the judges gave Brian the win. But with my Pentax ME Super, which was pretty much idiot proof, I snapped this shot from across the way showing that Dave Voelker at what looks to be about 10' 2". Dave rode his whole career for GT, touring the U.S. and the world promoting GT and Dyno bikes, and freestyle itself, for 25 years or so. He was always one of the guys going the biggest, and one of the most exciting riders to watch.
There are two ways to great photos. You can shoot photos of something great. Or you can shoot great technical photos of something. Ideally, a good photographer continually improves their the technical skills, so they can, when the opportunity presents itself, shoot a technically great photo of something great. Then, in more controlled circumstances, they can shoot incredibly good technical photos of something that may not be great in of itself, but the quality of the photo makes it an amazing shot. Some of the most historic photos are those taken by average photographers that happened to be at the right place at the right time to capture a historic moment.
Technology always scared me, I never did learn how to use a light meter, for example. So I've always tried to take pretty good shots of things that are interesting by their nature. I got interested in shooting photos during a couple of weeks when we studied photography in 9th grade physics class. I was living in New Mexico at the time, and had a little, old, 126 box camera. I started trying taking cool photos with that. I remember shooting photos of a tortoise that wandered through our yard, next to a model car. I hand made a little road sign that said, "Nuclear Test Site 2 miles." The tortoise, in the photos was bigger than a car, a nuclear mutant. Those weren't very good, but it got me started trying to take interesting photos. At some point I upgraded to a Kodak 110 Instamatic, the vacation snapshot camera almost everyone owned in the 1970's and early 1980's. That's when I started looking through big photo books at the mall, and trying to take better photos, when I was about 14, as a kid in New Mexico, with the simplest of cameras.
Also snapped with my Pentax ME Super, this is Dave Vanderspek bombing down the Palm Springs Tramway road on his GPV in 1987. This photo ran in BMX Action, FREESTYLIN', and Homeboy magazines. Andy, Lew, and Gork were big fans of Vander.
This was the first really big Gravity Powered Vehicle, or GPV race, in the summer of 1987. Unreel Productions shot video of the event, at 5:08 in this clip. GPVing was the little side sport to BMX and freestyle. It was first started by BMX guys, bombing down local hills on bikes with no pedals or chains, built from the spare bike parts in the garage. A few different groups got into GPV's. By this race, fairings had entered the picture, giving a huge advantage on this long, steep, relatively straight road outside of Palm Springs. But NorCal BMX legend, and Curb Dogs head guy, Dave Vanderspek went with the helmet, leathers, and his supertuck body technique.
I'll be honest, this photo was pure luck. It was only the second roll of film where I tried to shoot panning shots. With my Pentax, and its stock 50 mm lens, I could set the frame speed I wanted (1/15th or 1/30th of a second here, I forget), and it would automatically set the F-stop for the lighting conditions. At this event, BMX racer Tommy Brackens actually passed the video camera motorcycle, in a turn, and the motorcycle was doing 85 mph. Pat Wallace, the cameraman facing backwards on that motorcycle, told me this himself. These guys were hauling ass.
But I shot this photo within 100 yards of the starting line, and Vander was maybe doing 20 mph at this point. But the helmet came out sharp, and the panning worked well, and gave the impression of the real speeds the GPV racers were hitting that day. This photo ran in BMX Action, FREESTYLIN', and Wizard Publications two shot magazine, Homeboy. I had three or four photos, on the roll of 36, that came out about as good as this shot. Those guys loved this shot, since it was Dave Vanderspek, and used it in all three magazines, months after I'd been laid off there. Even BMX Plus! photographer John Ker complimented me on this photo, and John is a seriously technical photographer who has shot thousands of photos. If he says, "Great photo," that's a serious compliment in the BMX world.
Eddie Fiola (front), and Chris Lashua, practicing synchro wedge ramp stalls, while taking a break from doing shows at the World's Expo in Vancouver, over the summer of 1986. #steveemigphotos
I shot this photo in the little town square area of Whistler, British Columbia. At the time, they were just starting to promote the idea of mountain bikers riding trails at ski resorts during the summer. Honestly, that seemed like a stupid idea to me, at the time. There were hardly any mountain bikers, even up in the mountains, in 1986. The sport hadn't really taken off then. Obviously, I was wrong, and now things like this happen right there in the center of Whistler, where this and the next photo were snapped.
I flew up to Boise, Idaho, then rode up to this contest in the summer of 1986 with former freestyle teammate Justin Bickel, and his parents. They were my "freestyle family" for the first year and a half that I got seriously into BMX freestyle. This was a great week of riding fun, where I met a bunch of Canadian freestylers, Rob Dodds and Rob Thring, among them. The BMX Worlds were being held in Whistler that weekend, and they held an amateur freestyle contest as well. The BMX Worlds were kind of a joke then, and most racers stayed in the States to race ABA points races that weekend. The only pros in Whistler were Stu Thompsen and Greg Hill, as I remember.
Us freestylers just sessioned all day, and half of the night that whole week. The Canadians taught Justin and me to play "Touchdown," which is bascially hockey-like slams on a BMX bike. We'd all ride around and run into reach other, trying to get the other guys to touch a foot, or their whole body, on the ground. The last guy still on the pedals was the winner. There were some pretty solid slams happening during that. It's a whole different kind of bike riding, Canadian-style, eh..
Out of nowhere, the GT/Brittania motorhome rolled into Whistler one day. Out popped Eddie Fiola and East coast pro, Chris Lashua. They hung out for two or three days, before heading back to Vancouver, where they were doing shows. I snapped the photo above, and the one below, while Eddie and Chris were riding, practicing and just goofing around. Both of these photos ran in the summer tour article in the December 1986 issue of FREESTYLIN' magazine, while I was working there. They had no photos of Chris Lashua, so I showed them mine from earlier that summer, and these two made the cut.
Eddie Fiola rose to prominence at the very beginning of BMX freestyle as the first King of the Skateparks. He toured with GT for years, and then got into doing stunts in the TV and film industries. For years now he's worked as a stunt coordinator. But he still rides freestyle regularly.
Chris Lashua with a small ramp flipper, a front wheel 180 while hanging the back wheel over the top of the ramp. Whistler, BC, summer of 1986. #steveemigphotos
Chris ran the GT/Mountain Dew trick team on the East Coast for years in the 1980's. He went on to perform for both Ringling Bros. Circus, and then was a performer for Cirque du Soleil for many years, performing in the German Wheel. After that, he started a business building equipment for circuses. Several years ago, he and some friends founded Cirque Mechanics, which he runs and performs in still.
I had a couple of more photos published in the magazines, I think. After working for BMX Action and FREESTYLIN', I wound up contributing a photo or two, or an article or two, to all six BMX magazines of the 1980's, including BMX Plus! and Super BMX, and both of their freestyle magazines, as well as one issue of Homeboy. For most of 1987, I shot all the photos for the AFA newsletter, as well, but few copies of those have survived, so those photos are gone, except for one of Eddie Fiola I've seen on the web and social media.
I never became a great technical photographer, I still struggle with pretty basic technology, of all kinds, in the days when everyone shoots photos nearly every day. But I still love shooting photos, I have a pretty good eye, and get some cool shots now and then. I'm stoked I got a handful of photos published back in the 1980's, especially because I became a video guy, and shot a lot more video than still photos. I still see myself as some kid from Idaho who somehow stumbled into the BMX industry, and wound up seeing a lot of amazing stuff happen in the early days of BMX freestyle. I caught a little bit of that on film and video, along the way.
I've been doing a lot of writing on a platform called Substack, designed specifically for writers. Check it out:
Texas Pro Flatland was the official American Freestyle Association video for the flatland part of the Austin, Texas AFA Masters contest in 1987. This is the third BMX video, of six, that I produced and directed for the AFA in that year, with Unreel Productions video editor Dave Alvarez editing, and him and Don Hoffman guiding me through the process.
Austin, Texas. It was a hot bed for great music going back into the 1960's. The bars on 6th Street were a scene for a long time before people from other parts of the country ever heard of it. Then came Michael Dell, selling computers from his dorm room, and creating Dell Computers. Then came more tech companies. Keep Austin Weird as a motto. The South by Southwest music festival. That morphed into SXSW music/tech festival. Now it costs about $6,000 or so to rent a treehouse for a week on Air BnB. Well, now the real estate market is tanking in Austin, after soaring to astronomical levels in recent years. That's what Austin has become known for over the last few decades.
But way back in 1987, when BMX freestyle was just starting its first peak of popularity, Austin was already a hot city for freestyle. Robert and Ruben Castillo lived there. I think the Ninth Street trails were there already. That's what I knew about Austin when we flew down there for the AFA Freestyle Masters contest, the third of six comps in 1987. As the editor of the AFA newsletter (and all around AFA roadie), I flew there with Bob Morales, his girlfriend at the time, Suzy-Q, and his sister Riki, who also worked in the AFA office. It was storming when we all got to the hotel the Thursday night before the contest, as I recall. Bob parked the rental minivan under the little roof, and went in to check into our rooms. As Suzy, Riki, and I were sitting in the minivan, Haro pro Ron Wilkerson opened the driver's side front door, hopped in the driver's seat and kidnapped us.
The next day, we got up early, got some breakfast, and headed to the arena to get everything ready for practice, and the contest on Saturday and Sunday. A couple of guys who were not freestylers, and didn't have kids that freestyled, ran the local contests in Texas. The Patterson brothers kicked butt at supporting the local freestyle scene and putting on contests. One was a competitive water skier, and both were really cool, down to Earth, hard working guys. They also built the first really solid, steel framed quarterpipe, which became the official AFA ramp at this contest. With the Patterson brothers running the local AFA scene, and doing a lot of legwork for the Masters contest, we knew it would rock.
My main personal memory of this contest was going riding one of the nights with some locals and some of the riders I knew, downtown on 6th Street. After getting a jam circle going there, one of the locals suggested we go into one of the bars for a couple of beers. We all piled our bikes around a street sign, or some post, and locked parts of the bikes together, then headed into the bar. We had two or three beers, and sat there as some really good blues band jammed in the small bar.
After an hour or so, we headed back outside. I told the local guys, "Man, that bluesy guy on the guitar, with the big hat, that guy was pretty good." They laughed, "Pretty good? Dude, that was fucking Stevie Ray Vaughn." I had no idea who Stevie Ray Vaughn was, but I learned I liked the blues that night. About a year later, one of his videos went into heavy rotation on MTV, and the rest of the world who didn't know about him got to hear his music. Then he died tragically in a helicopter crash in 1990. There's now a statue of him in Austin down by the river.
On to the AFA Masters contest. Nearly all of the top riders were there, and it was a solid contest, one that changed BMX freestyle forever. I produced and directed this video, which sounds much cooler than it was, but hadn't watched it for about 35 years, until the other day. The video cameraman was Don Hoffman, who founded Unreel Productions, the Vision Skateboards video company.
In the intro, we see Frank Scura, BMX industry guy, brother to rider/inventor Brian Scura. I remember Frank most from the Odyssey "Cowboy" ad, and just being a funny guy at events. Frank is doing his Joe Isuzu impression (popular car commercials at the time), trying to get Don into the contest. Obviously they were just goofing around, since no one knew at the time if this footage was ever going to be made into a video. When editor Dave Alvarez and I went in to edit the video, he pieced their skit together, with some cool clips of various riders. In those short clips we see several riders. FREESTYLIN' magazine assistant editor (and my former roommate the year before we made this video) Mark "Lew" Lewman, does the rollback to stylish slide around. We also see Dave Voelker doing his super fast 360 bunnyhops, which I always thought were really cool. We see Mongoose pro Rick Allison with some crazy Miami hopper balance moves, and Dennis McCoy with some classic combos, along with several other riders.
My only real instructions for this video were to show all the pros whole runs. We had enough time so I could show a little bit of amateur highlights. We see three of the really young kids, doing hard tricks, then a few others. Then we see Plywood Hood, and York Pennsylvania rider, Kevin Jones, who was still fairly unknown to most riders around the country at that time. The time ends on Kevin's run with an elephant glide combo.
Then he sets his bike up, after time runs out, and pulls up into a locomotive, a no handed version of the backyard, the first popular scuffing trick, which got really popular at the previous AFA masters contest in Oregon. That's the first time the locomotive was ever done in a national contest. He not only scuffed the locomotive a long ways, but he began to glide it, something no one outside of York, PA had ever seen before. That blew our minds as riders. It was so far ahead of the current progression of tricks. That trick changed the direction of BMX freestyle flatland forever.
BMX freestyle became a "follow Kevin Jones sport" for the next three or four years. When Don points the camera to all of us riders up in the stands screaming (yeah, I was in that group watching), that was real screaming, we were really that psyched. The judges had no idea how hard, crazy, and innovative that trick was, but all of us other riders did. We'd seen bits of the locomotive in the jam circles, but when Kevin did the locomotive in this contest, the entire direction of BMX flatland changed in that moment. The one wheel forward rolling tricks took over as the prime direction of the sport, and Kevin Jones and the Plywood Hoods led flatland for years to come. Yes, it really was that big of a deal in BMX freestyle.
Then I added in some footage of Rick Moliterno, still an amateur then, because he was another guy who ripped, but never got enough magazine coverage, mostly because he was a Midwest guy, and the magazines were all in California. So I gave him a little footage in this video. That's followed by a little fun with Industry guy McGoo getting Craig Grasso to breakdance for the camera. Grasso was always down to get weird and have some fun. Lew chimes in, doing the beatbox for Grasso's breakdancing set. Then Don Hoffman does a quick interview with John "Dizz" Hicks, CW rider and master of the wedge ramp.
Then we move on to the pros. Chris Lashua, East Coast pro, then riding for Mongoose, starts things off. This is not his best run ever, but he does a solid backwards wheelie into a decade, and some really cool flail boomerangs, among other tricks. Following Chris is the favorite of the day in pro flatland, Haro pro Dennis McCoy. Dennis throws down a really solid run, rapping to his mixtape the whole way through. Some of my favorites in his run are the I-hops into a Miami hopper, a fire hydrant into a cherry picker, and his super fast footwork and front end combos.
Another Mongoose pro, NorCal rider Rick Allison is up next. He puts in a solid run as well, with his step-up, step-down, step back up surfer being a favorite, and his unique Miami hopper variations. R.L. Osborn, one of the original innovators of BMX freestyle, riding for General, is up next. My favorites in his run are the unusual walkaround variation, the backwards rubber (grip) ride, which he invented, and his upside down backwards wheelie in a circle.
Robert Peterson, another pro from San Francisco's Golden Gate Park scene, follows R.L., riding for Mongoose at this point. Bert goes through his standards, including a one hand version of The Peterson balance trick, and several other balance tricks, including a stomach stand. He's followed up by Fred Blood, riding for General. OK, Fred was a pro roller skater who got into freestyle, and he got a lot of crap, and this is not his best run ever. But he lands a rollback into decade and a solid double tailwhip, among other things.
The next rider in pro flatland totally surprised me, watching this video again after 35+ years. Rich Sigur is known mostly as one of the top early skatepark riders. Here he's riding for Vision Street Wear, and throws down a solid flatland run, with plenty of style. He pulls off a solid backwards infinity roll, which very few people did well, and a cool front wheel spin to tailwhip combo, among his other tricks.
Following Rich we have flatland legend Woody Itson, riding for Diamond Back at the time. Woody always showed up with a solid run. Highlights in this run include the super power move of a rolling L-sit straight into a press handstand, his pedal picker to upside down back to pedal picker, the super long glide boomerang, and then the pedal picker to side picker to backwards pedal picker.
From Woody we head back to NorCal with Skyway pro Maurice Meyer. And the sound cuts out, I have no reason why. My favorites of his run were the one footed G-turn, the backwards framestand, and a no footed front wheel spin. From NorCal roots we head down to San Diego's only representative in this pro flatland class, Dave Nourie. Longtime Haro pro, Nourie impresses us with a cherry picker into a pedal picker (on a freewheel, which is nuts), a bunch of combos, his unique balance combos, and a stomach stand.
Those are the highlights of this first AFA Masters video from Austin, Texas, the capitol of Texas and of weird. That was one fun weekend for everyone involved. Dennis McCoy won pro flatland. You can see the top five at the end.
Austin stayed weird, and built upon the already solid BMX freestyle scene there. In later years Terrible One, aka T-1 entered the picture, there is Empire BMX distribution company there, and Jimmy Levan bunnyhopped the church gap in the 90's. BMX freestyle was already strong in Austin before it became the tech geek mecca and everything that's happened since. What about the old guys? Ruben Castillo is still riding, and Robert Castillo has a posse, just sayin'.
A couple of last Austin references. This movie, and others you're more familiar with, like this one and this one, were made by a director who got his start in Austin. One night at a bar in Austin, a casting director met this guy, talked over drinks for a couple of hours, and hired him to say about three lines for that director's movie. That little gig launched his movie career. Fucking Austin man. It's always been kinda batshit crazy, which is why so many people love the place. Well, except people from the rest of Texas, but that's another story.
BTW, the shot of Kevin Jones doing the locomotive made it into Joe Kid on a Stingray, at 2:19. I'm pretty stoked on that since, only 50 or 100 of these videos sold.
I'm doing a lot of writing on Substack these days, check it out:
I bought this video mail order, not long after moving to San Jose, California, in August of 1985. I think it cost $30 plus shipping, for a 28 minute video.
I watched this video 7 times the day it came in the mail, two of those times I balanced on my Skyway T/A, in the living room, through the whole video. It just seemed more hardcore to do watch it that way. The second time I put a small couch pillow on my handlebar to sit on, since it hurt my ass the first time I sat on the end of my bar for half an hour. Flatland in full uniforms? Hell yeah! Bob Haro, McGoo, and John Ker actually talking? Hell yeah! Actual video footage of Pipeline Skatepark, which I'd only seen in photos? Freakin' amazing. Mike Buff's Blue Whale backyard ramp? You can do that in your backyard? Whoa!
That was 38 years ago. Watching this video happened right around the time that I started an ugly little zine called San Jose Stylin'. That zine ending up changing the entire course of my life for the better. This video was hardcore inspiration in 1985, and it was the first produced video I ever saw of the top freestylers of the day. The primary riders in the video are Martin Aparijo, Brian Scura, Robert Peterson, Scott Freeman, Mike Buff, Ron Wilkerson, Brian Blyther, Rich Sigur, Tony Murray, Mark McGlynn, and Steve McCloud. A whole bunch of other riders are featured in the contest footage from San Diego and Del Mar Skatepark.
"You can't get good by sitting around thinking about it, it's something you have to physically get out and do."
One of the original flatland innovators of the 1980's, long time GT pro, Martin Aparijo, is still riding a lot, and he just keeps getting smoother. Here are a three of his recent videos, all short sequences, of him in the last month or so, from Martin's YouTube channel. Above he does a silky smooth backwards wheelie variation.
If you read have read my blogs on any kind of regular basis, you know my BMX posts are usually my personal stories, sometimes my own little adventures riding, but often something I witnessed, usually involving a top rider or event. Basically, I write BMX memoir tales, mostly. It makes sense to add a little story here.
Thanks to my zine, and meeting FREESTYLIN' magazine editor, Andy Jenkins, at a contest, I got my first chance to do a freelance article for FREESTYLIN' in the spring of 1986. Andy asked me to write the article for the Tulsa, Oklahoma AFA Masters contest, which I was going to anyway to compete in. In the magazine world then, freelance writers would pay our way to an event, write the article afterwards, and then get a check for the work when the magazine issue was published, which was usually about three months later. I was working at Pizza Hut when I got the gig, making about $450 a month. I flew solo to Tulsa on a wing and a prayer, with barely enough money to scrape through the weekend. I didn't didn't have hotel reservations, I didn't even know where the contest was being held. It was the first time I had ever flown to a contest, and the first time I had ever flown solo anywhere. In other words, I was an idiot at traveling.
I headed out of San Jose airport, and like every flight west of the Mississippi seems to do, my my plane flew over the rand Canyon, and then had a layover at Dallas/Fort Worth. My dad had flown through DFW, and told me to find my next gate while on the first flight, since it could be a long walk, even a run, if I had to go from end to end of the airport. I got my bearings with the airport map in the online magazine, and made it to the gate of my second flight, and waited there. I didn't see any other BMX riders, but it was a huge airport, so I didn't really expect to.
Then, about fifteen minutes before the plane was ready to load, I saw Eddie Fiola, Martin Aparijo, and some blond guy walk up, across the aisle. I knew Eddie and Martin from all the magazine photos I'd seen of them. At the time, I was still incredibly shy, and hated to go up and introduce myself to people. I was like a Rainman level of shy then, or pretty close. But it was also my first major trip to an AFA contest, and I needed to meet as many top pros and amateurs as I could, to get info for my article. I got past the shyness, and walked over and introduced myself.
Martin and Eddie were totally cool, and they introduced me to the other guy, a kid named Josh White. Josh White had just done the photo shoot and interview for FREESTYLIN' that would blow him up as one of the top new vert riders, but the magazine wouldn't be out for a couple of months. So he was still unknown to most freestylers. I hung out and talked to them until the last boarding call, when I was getting really nervous. But we all walked to the ramp, and made the plane. That was the day I met Martin Aparijo, late March or early April of 1986.
I wound up meeting two other up-and-coming vert riders at that contest. I met an East coast kid named Joe Johnson at the Tulsa airport. There was another kid, a younger one, who was doing some crazy variations, as well, but I didn't get is name at the contest. As fate would have it, that kid got his first editorial photo in my first freelance article. That article, a review of my zine, and most amazing, the Josh White interview, all appeared in the July 1986 issue of FREESTYLIN'. The kid who got his first photo was none other than Oklahoma local, Mat Hoffman.
Starting with meeting Martin, Eddie, and Josh, that was the coolest weekend of my life up until that point. Joe Johnson introduced me to the Haro guys, and I crashed in one of their rooms for the weekend. I seriously felt like I had won some contest. The GT guys were at a different motel, but many of the top riders were at the trusty old Holiday Inn, where I stayed. It was a crazy weekend.
Right about the time that Tulsa article came out, I got flown down to Wizard Publications, to interview for a job there, and getting hired changed the course of my life. Part of my new job was driving Windy Osborn, the photographer, to photo shoots. One of the first bike tests we did was for a GT freestyle bike. We did a photo shoot with Martin Aparijo on a sidewalk in Redondo Beach, doing Miami hop hops. That was the first time I really talked to Martin at any length.
Here's Martin praying those mags would hold up, in that FREESTYLIN' photo from 1986. Windy Osborn photos, borrowed from the web.
Martin's an all around cool guy. Besides being a pioneering freestyler and a better dirt jumper than most people realized, he's always down to tell you a story or two. If you're struggling, he's likely to give you a pep talk to get back on track. When I make it down to H.B. Tuesdays in Huntington Beach, Martin's always there, gliding some new variation of the classic tricks, and telling stories.
I wanted to do a quick post tonight, and the thought of showing everyone who reads my blog Martin's YouTube channel seemed like a good idea. If you haven't already, go check out his channel, as he keeps adding more videos, and keeps getting smoother and smoother it seems.
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.
Here's a short New School how-to video on the BMX Half Cab. I didn't invent the Half Cab, but when I started down a new direction with my riding in 1987, Half Cabs soon became one of my favorite and strongest tricks. I was doing 7-10 foot Half Cabs in 1988-89, and nearly clicked lookback Half Cabs in 1989. For real. But Half Cabs weren't even considered a "real trick," back then. It was just some weird thing I did, since I rode with skaters all the time.
At the Oregon AFA Masters contest in the spring of 1987, a trick by NorCal rider Tim Tracy became the trick of the weekend. That trick was the Backyard, and it was the first scuffing trick that went viral in BMX flatland. Whiplashes were still new then, and the whole idea of rolling forward tricks was just beginning to change the course of the evolution of BMX freestyle.
People have always done tricks on bikes. But what we know as freestyle began around 1980, with Bob Haro's demos at BMX races. Flatland tricks then were things like rollback 360's, and front wheel 360's on flat ground. The idea of BMX trick riding began to grow, and Bob Morales, R.L. Osborn, Mike Buff and a handful more, showed us the early tricks. Front and back wheel hops. Hip whips. Rollback 540's and 720's. 360 bunnyhops or "floaters." Martin Aparijo, Woody Itson and others got into the mix. Along came boomerangs, flatland tailwhips, decades, Switzerland Squeakers, cherrypickers, sliders, backwards wheelies, lawnmowers, funky chickens, Pinky squeaks, balance tricks, among other tricks.
Across the U.S., and in a few other countries, early BMX freestyle converts started learning the basics from magazine photos, and then inventing their own variations and tricks. BMX freestyle began to grow, and with the AFA in 1984, Bob Morales turned it into a sport with flatland, wedge ramp, and quarterpipe contests. In those early contests, it wasn't unusual to see 50 different riders, from novices to pro, doing tricks we'd never seen before. Then some tricks, like boomerangs, decades, and cherrypickers became standards that nearly everyone did. For good or bad, I was always trying to invent new tricks, I didn't really want to do all the same tricks everyone else did. Some riders specialized in taking the most popular tricks, and really dialing them in to do a tight routine. Others, like Oleg Konings and Eddie Roman, for example, tried to do mostly completely original tricks and variations. Most riders did several standard tricks, with a couple original ones in 1984-85-86.
At the Austin, Texas AFA Masters in 1987, an amateur rider, Kevin Jones, from York Pennsylvania pulled up into a backyard in his run. He had completely dialed in the new scuff trick from a month before, and then he snapped up into a no handed version, we learned later he called it the locomotive. Kevin didn't only scuff no handed, he kicked off and began to glide. A big group of us in the crowd went fucking berserk, so much so, that all the judges turned around to see what we were yelling about. We pointed down to Kevin, on the floor. He had just changed the whole game of flatland freestyle, and somehow we all knew it.
Back home after the contest, I tried the backyard, and I could get about 4 or 5 scuffs after stepping into it. I knew that it would take me weeks to get that trick down to where I was average at it. The same was true of the whiplash, which I first saw done by Denny Howell in late 1986. The forward rolling tricks were about to take over flatland freestyle. And I just didn't want to learn them, to just be mediocre at them. The flatland world soon turned into a "Follow Kevin Jones and the York guys" sport. The stuff they were doing was really hard, and amazing. But I still wanted to break new ground, not just keep trying to learn their newest tricks.
Around that time, the GT team had a show in Huntington Beach, a couple blocks from my house. After watching a cool show, and getting super stoked to ride, Mike Sarrail and I showed some young kids a few basic tricks to work on. Eventually the GT guys packed up, the kids rode off, and Mike and I were just doing our flatland. I had been thinking to myself, "Flatland is turning into a forward rolling, scuff/glide sport. It's not "freestyle" so much anymore, it's becoming 'clone style.'" You have to learn a certain style of tricks to even be in the mix in competitions. I wanted to keep trying new stuff, even if it meant giving up on competitions. After winning one contest in Idaho in 1985, I'd been placing in the middle of the huge packs for 3 years or so. I decided to go a totally different direction with my riding. I'd start exploring what could be done with hop tricks. But not the stationary pogo hop tricks, those had been done. I decided to start working on what else could be done with hops on a bike. I did an endo, and went into a backwards wheelie (on the back peg), one of my favorite tricks at the time. In the middle of the wheelie, I tapped the brakes and did a small hop, and tried to land back into a backwards wheelie, and keep rolling. I'd never tried it before, and never seen anyone else try it either. After a couple of tries, I pulled it off. It wasn't very hard. It wasn't a big trick by any means. But that feeling of landing something completely new, that stoke, was there. I did a few more, and I started thinking about other types of hop tricks that might be possible. That was the summer of 1987.
One of my best tricks then was 180 bunnyhops... at speed. A couple days later I went to a basketball court in a park near my house. I started doing 180 bunnyhops, and then trying to bunnyhop while rolling backwards. My 180's were really low, and I took off of both wheels, rather than pulling the front end up up like a "real" bunnyhop. Doing them that way, I could do a bunnyhop 180 at nearly full sprint speed. I would land backwards, and sit down (high seat days), and backpedal to keep up with the freewheel. Usually I would do a 180 out, or "cool guy turnaround" as I called them, a Martin Aparijo trick where you turn the front wheel partly backwards and slide it around until you're going forwards. But that day at the basketball court, I started doing bunnyhops while rolling backwards. After and hour or so, I had them pretty dialed. I kept practicing backwards bunnyhops for a few days, and by then I was bunnyhopping 6-7 feet, maybe farther, backwards. That was pretty cool.
Every weekend in those days, if there wasn't a contest, I was riding at the Huntington Beach Pier. There were 3 or 4 of us regular bike freestylers, plus a few freestyle skaters. Pierre Andre', Don Brown, Hans Lingren, and H.B. local Jeremy Ramey, were the main ones. But since the HB Pier was a known spot, pretty much anyone could show up. Ed Templeton was a local street skater, and he came by often, as did Bob Schmelzer and Per Welinder. There was a whole crew of HB street skaters, and Mark Gonzales showed up now and then, too. On the bike side, guys like Martin Aparijo and Woody Itson rolled up once in a while to session, there was a crew from Lakewood that came by a lot, and anyone else, from Eddie Fiola to Josh White, might come by and ride flatland for the crowds for a while.
We had crowds every half an hour or so, usually with 100 to 200 people, gathered 'round. Sometimes up to 500 people would stop to watch. Normal people, even Californians, still stopped to watch BMX and skate freestylers back in those days, most people had never seen freestyle skating or BMX, since it was never on TV back then. Basically, we were street performers who never put a hat out. I once figured out that I rode in front of over 140,000 people during those weekends at the HB Pier, 100 to 200 people at a time. I spent as much time riding with skateboarders as I did riding with BMXers, in those years from 1987 to 1992 or so. My weekend riding was for crowds, so I added the high speed 180's and backwards bunnyhops into my trick bag. It wasn't long after that I started doing Half Cabs. For those not familiar, that's rolling backwards, and then doing a 180 bunnyhop back into riding forwards. The reason Half Cabs are upper case, is because "Cab" is a name, for the inventor, vert skater Steve Caballero. He invented a vert trick in the early 1980's called the Caballerial. He would roll backwards (aka fakie) up the transition, and pop off the wall and do a 360 Ollie (without using his hands). After spinning a full 360 on the vert wall, he would roll back down the wall forwards. This quickly became known as a Cab. When a skater did a fakie Ollie to 180, either on vert or on flat ground, then it was called a Half Cab. So after the straight backwards bunnyhops, I started hopping my 180's, which in skater lingo was a bike version of a Half Cab.
Since I rode a freewheel (I hated coaster brakes and freecoasters), my pedals would turn backwards when I was rolling backwards. I just had to backpedal a bit faster, which was not hard when I was sitting down. But freewheel gave me an edge doing flat ground Half Cabs. Because my pedals rolled backwards, I could put a lot of pressure on my outside pedal when I did Half Cabs, so I could really hop. And since I could do super fast 180 bunnyhops, I could roll backwards faster than pretty much anyone in freestyle back then. When I put those two together, I started getting a decent amount of distance on my Half Cab bunnyhops. I kept pushing those, and within a couple months, I was traveling 6-7-8 feet backwards, while turning around mid-air, in my Half Cabs. I've probably done 10 foot+ Half Cabs at times. Then, in 1989, the H.B. Pier bank opened up, when some skaters cut and "lost" the huge chain that had blocked it for years (it's supposedly buried in the sand, far out under the pier now). I started riding that bank almost every night. Before long I was jumping off the top of the bank (which was small and mellow) doing 180's. Then one night I did a little lookback attempt in a 180 flyout. I didn' get very high, so it wasn't very clicked, but it was fun. Since I landed those rolling backwards, I would Half Cab out of them. So I started trying a lookback in the 180 jump, then a lookback in the Half Cab turning back around. Those were really slow, and more of goofy "turnbars" than a lookback. But then I started trying lookbacks in my big, fast, long Half Cabs. And I could get them about 2/3 clicked. I was doing pretty decent lookback Half Cabs by the summer of 1989. To this day, I've still never seen anyone else do one.
As freestylers, we've all played games of FREESTYLE, like HORSE in basketball, where one rider does a trick, and then everyone has to pull it, or get a letter. When I was hanging out at the HB Pier, I would get into games of SKATE with skaters, usually street skaters. They'd do a skate trick, and I'd try to do the closest bike version of that trick. That was fun and got me thinking in totally different ways about what I could do on my bike. I had learned the original sidewalk crack nollies on a skateboard, and then took those to BMX, doing high speed nosewheelies into small curbs and speed bumps. launching low for a few feet off the front wheel. My BMX was getting more and more skate inspired, as I faded away from flatland.
One day at the pier I was playing a game of SKATE with some of the local street skaters, and one of them did a no comply. That was a real popular street trick at the time, and was a footplant ollie 180. So I did a footplant on my bike, and tried to boost into a 180, and land riding backwards. I don't think I got it first try, but I got pretty close. That turned into another skate inspired trick, and another hop trick as well. I got those dialed, and I think I was the first BMXer to do a flat ground footplant to 180, aka a skateboard no comply on a bike, back in 1989 or 1990. That's the one trick of mine that Eddie Roman put in the 1990 2-Hip video, Ride Like a Man. Eddie was doing footplants to 360's, and I had him trying one of those in my 1990 video, The Ultimate Weekend. When we sessioned for the shoot of him for my video, I showed him that I had been doing footplant 180's, and he had been doing them to 360, and neither of us thought of doing the other version.
The other big hop trick I was trying all through those years, is the bunnyhop tailwhip. I've written about that quite a bit in previous posts. I started trying those in the summer of 1987, and could come close in late 1989 and 1990. But I was never able to land a single one, and actually get both feet on the bike. You Old Schoolers know that Bill Nitschke, back in Indiana, invented bunnyhop tailwhips, aka the Whopper, in 1990. He was a much better rider than me, all around, and it took him a year to learn that trick.
My frustration with not being able to land bunnyhop tailwhips led to a couple of footplant versions of that trick. I did one that I called a no-comply tailwhip, where I would bunnyhop and begin to huck the back end of the bike around, and as I was doing that, I would jump off the back of the bike, plant both feet on the ground real quick, and then jump back on as the bike came around. Since that was just a dork trick, I could land those easy. They looked kind of cool, especially when I did them on banks. At the 1989 2-Hip Meet the Street at the Brooklyn Banks, I did a few of those on the small banks, and 3 or 4 other guys started trying them. I wasn't used to people trying tricks that I did, so that was pretty cool. I also learned to do a tailwhip footplant on the wall, at that contest. There was a section of wall a ways back, on the bigger banks, with a tiny, 1/2 inch wide ledge. It was just enough to help my foot get a little more grip on the wall, and help me stay on the wall a bit longer, and do a tailwhip footplant. I also used to do a straight footplant booster to tailwhip. That was probably the coolest trick to come out of my attempts at bunnyhop tailwhips. I'd ride along parallel to a ledge or bench, bunnyhop up and footplant with my right foot. Then I'd boost higher off that foot, throwing the bike around in a tailwhip at the same time. So the bike would be 3-4 feet off the ground. Then I 'd land on the top tube and pedal, like I would on the flat ground, no-comply taiwhips. Again, none of those things were considered "real tricks" back then. Nobody else, except Eddie Roman, was doing anything like a half Cab, or street tailwhip tricks.
Sometime in late 1989 or 1990, after doing big Half Cabs for a couple of years, I realized that I should try to keep going with the Cab idea. So I started trying full Cabs (rollback to 360 bunnyhop) one night, and then I tried doing them to 540 (rollback to 540 bunnyhop). I did land full Cabs on flat, in 1990, I think. I came close to the 540 Cabs, which I was going to call a King Cab, since I had a Datsun King Cab truck. I could kickstand them, sticking a leg out, but could never land a clean one. I also tried tailwhip Half Cabs, but could never even come close to those.
The last hop trick I tried back in 1989-90 was one I really wish I could had landed. As I wrote above, nollies on a bike became a favorite trick of mine. I loved hauling ass at a big speed bump, going into a nosewheelie a couple feet before it, and doing a nollie. In my opinion, it's not a nollie on a bike if you don't hit a bump with the front wheel. What most New School riders call "nollies" today are nose wheelies, in my opinion. They do amazing ones, nosewheelies to barspins off ledges, and nosewheelies to tailwhips, but they're not nollies, in my opinion. But that's the old salty guy in me.
So the other cool nollie trick that I actually tried for a while was a nollie tailwhip. I'd nosewheelie into a speed bump, pop off the front wheel, and huck the back end of the bike into a tailwhip. On flat ground, with just a speed bump, not off a ledge. The problem with learning that trick is that since I was only 2-4 inches off the ground, the back end of the bike would usually hit the ground about halfway around, then I'd land on my stomach, on top of the bike. That fucking hurt, every time. I did he bike more than halfway around at times, it was a brutal trick to try and learn, just landing on top of the bike, stomach down, getting poked by pedals, stem, pegs, and everything else, every time. So I just gave up on that one. But I know it is possible. After all, tailwhip Half Cabs, 360 tailwhip bunnyhops, and even a 720 bunnyhop have been done (really check YouTube). More is possible.
For those who knew me back then, you might be wondering why I didn't put any of these tricks in my 1990 video, The Ultimate Weekend. It's the same reason I didn't put any of our flatland riding at the pier in the video. I didn't think those tricks were really tricks. That stuff we did every weekend just seemed so "normal" to me, that I didn't even shoot video of it. I was trying to get the newer riding, which mostly street stuff. Plus, I thought I sucked at that point, so I didn't put much of my riding at all in the video. That's my biggest regret from The Ultimate Weekend, I didn't put any of our weekend sessions in, I never even shot video of that. Mike Sarrail was one of maybe the first) guy to do barspin and no handed Miami hop-hops, and undertakers, and Randy Lawrence could learn pretty much any trick in 10 minutes. But I didn't think that was worth shooting back then. I had a few unique flatland tricks as well, like no handed and barspin megaspins, and an opposite tailwhip-catch, to double tailwhip normal direction, and a few others. I never got any of those things on video, and that was stupid.
Obviously, I had no idea that 10-20 years later Half Cabs, bunnyhop tailwhips, and nollies would wind up being "cool" tricks. On one hand, those tricks I did 30 years ago that "weren't real tricks," that are now popular, is a cool bit of validation. I tried some weird stuff that wasn't cool BITD, but eventually, riding circled around and those tricks, like Half Cabs and nollies, found a home.
My other reason for writing this post is that at any point, there are one or two main styles of riding that are cool, but there are still different directions of riding waiting to be explored. In today's world of long frames, low seats, and freecoasters, a different bike set-up, with today's skill rider skill levels, would make all kinds of new types of new tricks and variations possible. Remember kids, it's called FREEstyle. you are free to completely ridiculous (and currently uncool) ideas, and see what happens. Just sayin'.
I have a new blog about BMX, skateboard, and action sports spots:
Me (Steve Emig), doing a Robert Peterson inspired balance trick, on my Skyway BMX bike, in the summer of 1985, at the Boise Fun Spot. Photo by co-worker Vaughn Kidwell.
In the photo above, I was 19-years-old, wearing way-to-short Op cord shorts, which I thought were what guys in California wore then. I was wrong. At that job I managed 12 employees, while making $3.10 an hour during the day, and practiced tricks on my bike for 2-3 hours every night. Everyone thought I was an idiot for wasting all my time on a "little kid's bike."
I got into BMX in 1982, while in high school, and everyone wondered why I spent so much time riding a "little kid's bike." I told them BMX freestyle was this cool, new,emerging sport. They didn't believe me. I graduated high school from Boise High in 1984, and I didn't have money for college, so I got a job at a big Mexican restaurant, and kept riding my bike as much as possible. I was one of the first 3 or 4 BMX freestylers in Idaho, and rode with Jay Bickel on the reformed version of the first Idaho trick team, the Critical Condition Stunt Team.
My family moved to San Jose, California in June of 1985, because my dad got a new job there. I rented a room at my best friend's house for the summer, and worked at the Boise Fun Spot as the manager. It had six carnival rides, a food stand, and a miniature golf course (I tied the course record, 31 for 18 holes), and was in Julia Davis Park, near the zoo, by the Boise River. It's gone now, there's a playground where The Fun Spot used to be. When The Fun Spot closed in August, I packed up my ugly, brown, 1971 Pontiac Bonneville, and drove solo to San Jose, and moved back in with my family.
I quickly got a job at a local Pizza Hut, and wondered how to find the BMX freestylers in the Bay Area. In those pre-internet days, things like that were hard. So I started publishing a zine about freestyle, and passed it out at local bike shops, hoping to meet some other riders. It worked, I soon met some San Jose local riders, and they told me about the monthly ramp jams, and that led me to Sunday sessions at Golden Gate Park, the tightest scene in freestyle at the time. I kept publishing a zine monthly, and sending copies to several BMX industry people. Pretty much everyone thought publishing a zine was pretty stupid, and it eventually ate up half my monthly pay from Pizza Hut.
The article in the August, 1986 issue of FREESTYLIN' magazine, where my zine, San Jose Stylin', was called the best in the U.S. at the time.
Then in July of 1986, I got offered a job at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines. At age 20, I moved to Southern California with a bike, a suitcase, and $80. I didn't really click with the guys at the magazines, and got laid off after 5 months. They hired a biker/skater kid from Maryland named Spike Jonze to replace me, and I went on to edit a freestyle newsletter. That led to me producing low budget BMX videos in 1987.
In 1988, I had the idea to do an "audio zine" about BMX, basically a cassette tape with contest highlights, interviews, some music I liked, and stuff like that. That didn't take off, and people thought it was a dumb idea. But it was basically an early version of a podcast, just 30 years too early. Sometimes an idea is just way ahead of technology.
I had another idea in 1988. The Godfather of BMX himself, Scot Breithaupt, sold a TV series to ESPN to produce bike shows. He and his editor rented our edit bay and cut the shows at night. I got the job of hanging out while they were editing. One night Scot asked if I had any ideas for the next show. I told him street riding was the hot new thing in BMX, and it took me about 20 minutes to sell him on that idea. I ended up helping him put on the first made-for-TV bike street contest, six years before the X-Games. It was called The Huntington Beach Street Scene. Short on time and money, Scot used me and riding buddy Randy Lawrence in the intro, as well. Even Scot wasn't sure about street riding, it was something BMXers had always done, he couldn't understand it as its own genre'. But the show wound up getting the best ratings of any show in his series.
In 1990, after working at the Vision Skateboard video company for 2 1/2 years, I decided to self-produce a BMX video. Only a couple riders, Eddie Roman, and Mark Eaton, had tried that at the time. Even riders couldn't figure out why I was making my own video. BMXer/mountain biker Dave Cullinan asked me, why are you making a video, you don't have a company? I told him I wanted to make a video that showed our real riding, not doing flatland, in a uniform, at a miniature golf course, something that one business did in their video. In 1990, I shot and produced a video called The Ultimate Weekend. I lost a bunch of money, but helped show other people that us BMX freestylers could actually produce our own videos. I wound up making the first BMX videos for the AFA, 2-Hip, and S&M Bikes. I produced or edited 12 early BMX videos in all, becoming one of the pioneers in the rider-made video movement, which happened in BMX, skating, snowboarding, and inline in the early 1990's. Obviously making videos has become a huge part of action sports, as the sports, and technology, continue to progress.
Wall ride over my sister Cheri's head, a still from The Ultimate Weekend. Blues Brothers Wall in Huntington Beach, 1990.
I published my first zine of poetry in 1992, with nearly 100 poems. That didn't seem like a good idea, even to me, but my nickname, The White Bear, came from the first poem in that zine. I did a handful of other zines during the 90's, 2 more of poetry, and 3 or 4 of action sports and random stuff. I've published over 40 zines, several 48 pages or more, in my life. People always think zines are kind of dumb, until you give them one, then they think they're cool. Zines blew up in the 90's, with thousands being published worldwide. Even one popular song mentioned them.
Many years later, I wound up homeless, while working as a taxi driver, living in my cab. When the business really took a dive (before Uber and Lyft), in 2007, I wound up totally living on the streets. No booze, no drugs, just the wrong job at the wrong time. After a year, I went to stay with my family for a while. My parents, and my sister's family, all wound up in North Carolina, though we were originally from Ohio. I went there in November of 2008, as the Great Recession economic collapse was happening. With nothing to do, and unable to find any job at all in NC, I used my parents' computer, and started blogging about my days in the BMX industry in the 1980's. In North Carolina, they though BMX was stupid, and most people didn't really know what a blog was.
I had never spent much time online before that, I was a Luddite, and didn't think much of the internet in general. But with nothing but time in NC, I started "surfing the web," as we called it back then, and blogging about BMX. No one thought anything would come of my blogging, especially me. But I've written over 2,400 blog posts across more than 25 blog ideas, and have raked in over 240,000 total page views, on personal blogs, in 12 1/2 years. I got real depressed in late 2012, a couple of months after my dad's death, and deleted all my blogs. But there are still well over 1,000 posts that I've written since then, online.
Later in 2015, still unable to find any job in NC, I decided to take my weird form of Sharpie art drawings, that I call Sharpie Scribble Style, and start selling them. I was living with my mom then, and literally didn't have a dime to my name when I started. I had my Sharpies, a sketch pad, and a $65 refurbished laptop. No one thought my Sharpie art would sell, even me. But I had few options at the time. I'd applied for over 140 local jobs, over a couple of years, and got 1 call back, but not hired.
Kurt Cobain Sharpie drawing that was in my first, and only, solo art show. The show was a small one, at Earshot Music in Winston-Salem, NC, in 2017. The shop owner, Phred, has since passed away, which is terrible, he was a really cool guy, and totally helped the music and art scenes in W-S.
So I started drawing every day, stepping up my art game. Who did I hit up to sell drawings? The BMXers around the U.S. and the world that read my blog. I had a solid following of several hundred readers at the time. Google #sharpiescribblestyle, on an image search, and you can see a bunch of my drawings. I've sold about 90 originals, and they take 40-45 hours each to draw. I didn't get rich, I didn't even make a living, but I survived as a "working artist," for five years, and am now known mostly as a blogger and Sharpie artist. Thanks to old freestyle friend Ron Camero, you can see prints of my drawings in several Wahoo's Fish Tacos locations. That's about the coolest "gallery" there is for action sports artists and photographers, in Southern California.
Do you see a trend here? OK, I excel at not making much money, that's one trend. But throughout my life, over the last 35 years, I kept getting ideas to try something new, something kind of weird or crazy. Every freakin' time, a whole bunch of people told me those ideas were stupid, and that I was wasting my time. This happens to everyone who has new ideas, and tries to make them happen. Over those years, I got much more in touch with my own creativity, and learned to work with my own creative process. Sometimes the ideas, like zines and BMX videos, turned into whole scenes, even creative movements. Some ideas, like the audio zine, fizzled out.
I've learned that whenever you get into something new, nearly everyone thinks it's a bad idea, BECAUSE... it's something new. It's outside their frame of reference. Once an idea takes off, most of those same people who talked shit tell their friends, "I always told him that would work." Most of the haters come around, at least those close to you. That's the arc of creation. You just have to endure and work through it.
"The person with a new idea is a crank, until the idea succeeds"
-Mark Twain
Recently I've been diving in and learning about art and NFT's, Non Fungible Tokens. In a couple weeks of research, I've learned one thing. There's something to these. From the creators, and the traders, buying and selling them, there's a crazy, frantic energy of this quickly moving thing. I recognize that energy from the early days of freestyle. Then there are the Haters. Much of the established art world, old school bankers who say crypto is going to crash (uh... like fiat already is?). And the Haters are really vocal. That's a sign something pretty cool is happening. Oh, and unlike the other movements I've been a part of, this one has ridiculous amounts of money involved. That's good and bad. But being a homeless artist sucks a lot more than being a pretty well set artist, I can tell you that.
I don't know where this whole thing is headed, but I'm already seeing that crazy energy in the NFT world, art, gaming, metaverse/VR, all across the board. I'll be making a few NFT's of some of my creative work in the not too distant future, and testing out the waters. I'm still in the deep dive and intense learning phase in all of this, but I already see there's something to all this new tech, and all the creativity surrounding it.
So that's my main focus at the moment, learning something new, a new direction to take my creative work. We'll see where it leads. But the more I dig in, not to the crazy money, but the actual creativity and work being done behind the scenes, the more interesting it gets. I've had this feeling before. I think it's going be a fun ride. I'll end with a meme I made about a couple of bike riders who had a really crazy idea a while back.
The Wright Brothers bike shop in Dayton, Ohio, circa 1905 or so. Two brothers in a bike shop, Orville and Wilbur Wright, had this crazy idea to make an airplane. Much to everyone's surprise, it worked, eventually. The rest is history. You never really known where a crazy idea could lead.
Skyway's Master of Balance, Robert Peterson, at the AFA Masters comp in Columbus, Ohio, in 1986, showing off is signature balance tricks, and signature style.
The irony of today's world is kind of weird, from my point of view. A virus, one of the tiniest things on planet Earth, has mutated into a form infectious to humans, and is wreaking havoc on hundreds of millions of us intelligent, sophisticated, technological, human beings. This is something that happens in nature, generally when animal populations get too numerous for the environment. Human scientists, understanding how viruses operate, have decreed a bunch of rules to keep this virus from spreading to more people than absolutely necessary. Because of this, most of you have been mostly cooped up in your house or apartment, very likely not working, for 4 to 6 weeks, or so.
Meanwhile, since years of really weird events have led to me being homeless right now, I'm wandering the streets of Los Angeles county, primarily in the San Fernando Valley. Like oh my God, fer shur. Homeless people have largely been left outside to die in this pandemic, myself included. Most of the businesses and places we rely on to survive, like fast food restaurants, and the libraries, have been shut down. So basically, while you were bummed about having to watch 17 hours of Netflix a day, I was trying to find a bathroom to take a dump. While most of you are chomping at the bit to get outside, and move around and ride, eat out, go to a club, and shop like normal, I'm working towards the day when I have my own apartment again, and can hole up and draw and write 14 hours a day... on purpose. Irony. On both sides of this equation, we have adapted, dealing with the weird rules, as this pandemic plays out across the U.S., and much of the world. As it turned out, being stuck outside turned out to be a blessing, since many communal living places, like homeless shelters, nursing homes, jails and prisons, are turning into virus hot spots, with many people dying.
In March and April, I spent a month seeking out power outlets where I could charge my laptop, and wifi guest spots still open, since McDonald's and the library, my usual work spots, are closed. I was barely able to keep up with posts and comments on Facebook, while most of you consumed more media than ever. Because of this, at a time when I really wanted to be writing the most I could, I have been blogging the least.
Searching my mental data banks for a blog post subject for all of you still cooped up, Robert Peterson came to mind. I first heard of Skyway's Master of Balance in an article in FREESTYLIN', in 1984, I think. Most pro rider' tricks seemed beyond me then, though I was full bore into freestyle, my skills on a freestyle bike were just starting to build. Bert's balance tricks showed me something I could start on that day, and then build upon. I could balance on my front peg, with my bars turned sideways, and soon climbed up, standing on the front wheel, and got the hang of balancing there.
I spent the Idaho winter of 1984-1985 in my small bedroom, in Boise, balancing on my bike, moving around from peg to front tire, learning to move around my bike in a tiny space, indoors. I learned to do The Peterson, the no-footed trick you see Bert do at :39 in the clip above. I also learned Dave Nourie stomach stands, and other balance variations. When I slipped and fell, I'd hit my bed, with one arm, my dresser with the other, and sometimes hit my head on my nightstand. That's how small my riding area in my room was. I learned to balance on the bike and juggle three tennis balls that winter, which became a signature trick for me in shows and the first contests. Then I learned to balance on the bike, and juggle two tennis balls and a bread knife from the kitchen. Balancing and juggling became a standard part of my trick show and contest routine. I even had "Go for the Juggler" printed on the butt of my leathers. Really. Go ahead, laugh, it's pathetic. But it was the 1980's, we were just making all this freestyle stuff up, a lot of goofiness ensued.
The next August, 1985, I moved to San Jose, California, with my family, and became a part of the San Francisco Bay Area riding scene. I met the Skyway guys, Robert Peterson, Maurice Meyer, Oleg Konings, and Hugo Gonzales. Later on I got to know Eddie Roman and "little Scotty Freeman, " as we called him then, as well. Since I was riding a Skyway T/A then that seemed epic.
San Jose was much warmer than Boise in the winter, and I could ride outside much of the time. But that winter of 1984-85, sessioning my bedroom, doing balance tricks, helped shape my early days as a BMX freestyler. I even invented a third version The Peterson. Bert invented the trick, hold the front brakes, and take both feet off the front tire, while balancing over the front end. Then he came up with version #2, doing The Peterson, one handed. My third version was to do a Peterson, but lift the back wheel off the ground, balancing no footed with only the front wheel touching the ground. I could balance 10 to 15 seconds, like that. I showed Robert my variation outside of Beach Park Bikes one day, and got his official approval on The Peterson, version #3. I was pretty stoked, as we both spent a few minutes doing my variation of his trick.
BMX freestyle, as we used to call this sport-type thing, is all about adapting, to begin with. Bob Haro took a standard BMX bike, adapted to its form, and started inventing tricks on that little machine. A whole bunch of us other weirdos thought it looked fun, and joined the party. So now, 35ish years later, a tiny virus has upended our lives. I thought a blog post about sessioning in my bedroom all one winter, doing Peterson-inspired balance tricks, would be a good reminder that whatever life throws at us, we have to adapt to it. So if you're cooped up and jonesing to ride, this may give you an idea. Get the bike in the family room, in the garage, the back patio, or up on the roof, and see if there are any balance tricks left in your trick bag.
In other blog news, I think this blog, Steve Emig: The White Bear, has pretty much run its course. I'm going to let this one creep up to 100,000 page views, which it's real close to. Then I'll let it sit here, for anyone who follows a link to one of the nearly 700 posts. I've started two new blogs, and I'll start focusing on those two soon. Here are the links to thenew blogs:
I have a new blog about BMX, skateboard, and action sports spots, check it out:
This is the AFA Masters contest in mid-1986 where a young Oklahoma kid named Mathew Hoffman got his first factory sponsorship. Eddie Fiola and I met Mat at the contest before this, in Tulsa, we just didn't realize it at the time. That story is below.
With the Covid-19 shutdown going on, I'm fighting to find power to charge my laptop, and have to pirate wifi any place I can find it. That's making blogging well damn near impossible. I just don't have enough time online each day to do decent blog posts. So here's a "golden oldies" post. Here are 5 of my most popular Old School BMX Freestyle posts, and each one got over 400 views originally. Check them out again, or maybe you missed them when I first posted. I'll get back to serious blogging as soon as I can everyone...
Blog post: Before the word "huck," there was Hugo Gonzalez
I wrote a whole big post offline, but when I went to cut and paste it, the code got wacky, and wouldn't format. So I'll write a new post. 13 years of blogging, I'm still a technical numbskull.
Like most of you who read my Old School BMX freestyle posts, I got into BMX, and then freestyle, in a place far away from Southern California, where both were born. As a kid in the 1970's in Ohio, I rode a Schwinn Scrambler knockoff, made from my dad's collection of spare bike parts. He was a packrat, and had tons of junk, so a purple, spray painted, 20 inch rat bike was my first ride. Then came the red, white, and blue banana seat three speed, T-shift on the down tube, for my 8th birthday. $50, straight from Grant's (like K-mart).
That's the bike I first hit tiny jumps on. Later came a 26 inch brown ten speed, I jumped that thing, too, on little, 6 or 8 inch tall, vacant lot jumps. I didn't even know BMX existed until 1979, when I saw Schwinn Phantom Scrambler in a bike shop window. I bought my first BMX bike the day before I moved away from New Mexico, in 1981. I paid $5for the complete bike, with 3 pound aluminum mags, heavier than Moto-Mags. I bought it from my friend Mike. But I didn't actually get into BMX riding until June of 1982, in Blue Valley trailer park, outside of Boise, Idaho. Those heavy mags had a jacked up coaster brake, and I hardly rode the thing for a year. When I started riding it, and got into BMX, I didn't stop.
Like most of you reading this, I was soon reading every single word of every BMX magazine that I could scrape up money to buy, back in 1983. I learned the names of those skatepark riders, Eddie Fiola, the first King of the Skateparks, Brian Blyther, Mr. Smooth, and Mike Dominguez, the up-and-coming super kid back then. Also in the mix were Rich Sigur, Tony Murray, Donovan Ritter, Steve McCloud, Brian Deam, Jeff Carroll, and a few more. But there was one who always stood out. Hugo Gonzalez. I soon learned from the magazines that he was the guy who would think up the craziest stunt to try every contest. Landing seemed completely optional for Hugo's last trick, and often some of the other tricks in his run. The high airs and new tricks of the other skatepark riders were amazing, but I soon began to wonder, "What did Hugo do at that contest?"
In Del Mar he raced across the long, concrete halfpipe, and launched a tabletop over the fence, crash landing in the next bowl. The next year he 360'd over the fence, and almost landed it. Hugo did the fence bounce at Pipeline, flying out of the banked section, landing sideways on the chainlink fence, then flying back into the bowl. That was the first recorded "wall ride" in BMX. He did the endo drop-in to knockout in the Pipe Bowl. A downside footplant attempt, out of the Pipe Bowl, on another rider's crossbar. Huge canyon airs at quarterpipe comps. 540 attempts over canyons. The big 720 launch off the pier an into the ocean, somewhere (photo sequence is in a Hugo tribute video on YouTube). Before we used the word "huck" much, there was Hugo. Is it a coincidence that those two words both start with "Hu?" Like, "Huh? Did he think he could land that?" I doubt it.
My personal favorite Hugo stunt was one that I think happened in Vancouver, in 1984. There was a contest at a horse track, much like the track at any fairgrounds anywhere. There was a paved area on the infield, where the contest was held, with a single quarterpipe at one end, and a wedge ramp at the other. There was nothing to gap to. No landings, no other ramps, no roof to flyout on. My teammate from Idaho, Jay Bickel, and his family went to the comp, and Jay's mom caught Hugo's run on video. I saw it when they got back. For his last trick, Hugo went hauling ass at the lone quarterpipe, and just launched off the side of it, to the left. He got 9-10 feet off the ground, in a big, tweaked out, semi-tabletopped arc. He flew over about fifteen feet of asphalt, over the rope fence, and went another 6-8 feet. He didn't even try to land it. He was leaned over in a table, and just landed in the grass, 20-25 feet from the ramp, in a tabletop. He just fucking launched into nothing. It was so ridiculous, and epic at the same time.
So for my 6th Old School BMX Freestyle pro drawing, I drew this pic below of Hugo. It's not his craziest trick. It's my Sharpie art take on a cool close-up photo (a BMX Plus cover shot), and it's at Pipeline Skatepark, where he did several epic stunts. He's also riding a Skyway, the sponsor he's best known for.
I first met Hugo at the Beach Park Ramp Jams in 1985, held at the shop in Foster City, at the bike shop where Robert Peterson worked. Hugo wouldn't do insane stunts at the ramps jams where it was just locals riding, but he pushed his quarterpipe airs to the limit. When you talked to him, he was cool and down to Earth, then he'd got on his bike and just go nuts.
At my first Old School Freestyle event in 2019, for Dom Phipps' book, The Birth of the Freestyle Movement. I wound up talking to Hugo for quite a while. He's a truck driver now, and had us laughing at cool stories for an hour or more. He's still a totally chill guy to hang out with, and he has a ton of great stories to tell. But he's the guy that really put the whole "just huck it and see what happens" idea out first, and had us all holding our breath at the end of every run when we saw him in a contest back in the day. He pushed the limits beyond what anyone thought was possible in the early and mid-80's, pioneering the way for other crazy riders to follow.
.jpg)
