Why did BMX freestyle happen?

 Blog post: Why did BMX freestyle happen?

How did 2020 go for you?  This is how a lot of people think of this year, drawing to a close as I compile this ebook.  I have no idea what was supposed to happen in this photo, but obviously it didn't go as planned.  BMXers weren't the first people to do stupid stuff on bikes.  But BMX freestyle took trick riding to all new levels, and to millions of people around the world, something that didn't happen in the 100 or so years of bike riding before freestyle got going.   

In the original version of this blog post, I embedded a video clip of a young man and woman, riding bikes on a domed roof of an old building.  In that clip, we saw a man and a woman, probably in their early 20's, around college age, riding bikes on the edge of this dome, on a windy day, at some point in the 1920's, the Roaring 20's, as they've come to be known.  Not insane by today's standards, but they had a 20 to 30 mph wind they were dealing with, it was definitely dodgy.  

I'm 54 now, as the crazy year 2020 draws to an end, and my grandparents were born between 1900 and 1909, I think, which would put these riders right around the same age.   So if you're middle aged like me, imagine your grandparents riding 1920's bikes on a domed roof in the wind, as young people.  Pretty radical for those days.

Then we see a guy on a 1920's mega ramp, below, basically, clearing a gap of 25 to 30 feet.  Sure, there are a lot of riders who could make that jump today, on their BMX or mountain bikes.  But that guy did it when the grandparents of us Old Schoolers were young, on a mild steel frame.  What we call 4130 chromoly (or chrome-moly) steel today, was aircraft technology from the 1920's, to the best of my knowledge.  It wasn't a material used to make bikes then, it was way too expensive.  All these old bike trick videos and photos were people riding what we call mild steel frames.  You know, the kind of frames you could snap in ten minutes at your local trails.  These are the bikes Mike and Frank from American Pickers find in a barn of they're having a really good day.  There were actually people riding bikes with wooden rims in that era. 

I don't care how good of a rider you are, would you try that gap below on a skinny tire, $200, mild steel, beach cruiser-style bike from Walmart?  Hell no, you wouldn't.  My point is, people were getting crazy on bicycles from about the time modern bicycles were invented, which was around 1875.  The Fred Flintstone-style, "hobby horse," foot push bikes, adult sized versions of today's toddler balance bikes, popped up around 1830.  But pedal bikes came along around 1875.

As I've thought about those early bike riders while blogging, and as I've dug into these old clips and vintage photos, it's become apparent that there were some crazy ass motherfuckers on bicycles from the earliest days.  And I mean crazy... by Morgan Wade Dakota Roche standards.  They were doing Evel Knievel caliber shit 120 years ago.  This photo below dates to 1905.  My oldest grandma was kindergarten age when this photo was taken. Most people rode horses into town in those days.

Speaking of grandmas, it wasn't just guys getting crazy back then, somebody's grandma did trackstands.

Not crazy enough for you?  I said above that some of these ancient bike tricksters were crazy by Morgan Wade standards, I wasn't exaggerating, like this guy below.

Yes, there were even sponsored riders back then, as well.  It was a lot different from today's sponsorship deals.  Young riders making $30,000 at one contest today, for five minutes worth of contest runs, makes them seem pretty badass.  But you know who was really badass, Annie Oakley.  She had a bike sponsor AND a gun sponsor... around 1900-1905.  Sure, Larry Edgar can do a 37 foot high tabletop off a curb jump, but can he shoot six glass balls out of the air with a lever action 30/30 before they hit the ground?  I don't think so.  Annie Oakley could.

 And yes, even back then, girlfriends and wives got pissed off when you bought too many bikes in those days.  Some things never change.

There were even street riders 120 years ago.

Not only were people doing crazy and amazing stuff on bikes 80-100-120 years ago, on mild steel frame bikes, they were shredding without Red Bull, without helmets, without Emergency Rooms, and without Red Bull video production budgets.  I don't know who this crazy fool is but I'm betting Morgan Wade is one of his descendants.  Morgan's my go to favorite rider these days (and Dakota Roche), when I want to watch amazing new school riding, which is why I keep mentioning him.

You get the idea.  There were people doing tricks on bikes from the get go.  My personal belief is that bicycle trick riding was invented about ten minutes after the first guy learned to ride the first bike, when a cute girl walked by.  That's just an educated guess.

We didn't know about this history when freestyle began spreading in the early 1980's, as Bob Haro, Bob Morales, Eddie Fiola, R.L. Osborn, Mike Buff, and other freestyle pioneers started doing demos and shows and letting other riders see what they had learned.  After 1980, trick riding on BMX bikes began to spread slowly around Southern California, and the BMX racing world.  Then a few hundred weird kids, myself included, caught the fever, and it blew up in small scenes dotted around the U.S., the U.K., and Europe, into the first wave of popularity in the late 1980's.  Martin Aparijo and Woody Itson, who could both jump and ride pools, focused on flatland, and opened all our eyes to the what was possible with a BMX bike and a parking lot.  We didn't all have skateparks, but we all had local parking lots for flatland.

So why did BMX freestyle, which started with Bob Haro and his friend John riding pools, just about on the 100 year anniversary of bikes being invented, take off and blow up world wide?  Why did all the other action sports seem to pop up, grow, and explode, just as us Generation X kids were coming of age?  This is one of the themes I went into in my online book/blog Welcome to Dystopia: The Future is Now, Book 1 (You can google it).

I think I've found the answer to this question, based on a little known social theory from India.  The concept comes from a thinker, and pretty weird guy, P.R. Sarkar, and it's called The Law of Social Cycle.  Basically, Sarkar came to the conclusion that there were four main mentalities of people in any society, The Intellectuals (smart people), The Acquisitors (smart people who focus on building wealth), The Laborers (average people who work normal jobs), and The Warriors (people focused on physical skills and courage).  At any given time, in every society, one of these mentalities dominates society.  That mentality is most looked up to, and shapes every aspect of their world.  These mentalities can dominate society for decades or hundreds of years.  But the mentalities dominate society in a particular order.  The Warriors, The Intellectuals, The Acquisitors, The Laborers, and back to the The Warriors again.

An American economist, of Indian background (India Indians, not Native American Indians), named Ravi Batra, applied this concept to the U.S. in the 1980's, and came to the conclusion that we've been in the Acquisitor Age since our colonial days.  The U.S. has been about business people, businessMEN primarily, as any woman who knows history can tell you.  In the 1980's, when Batra figured this out, he wrote that we're nearing the end of the Acquisitor Age, a time when things turn to massive business and government corruption, the common working people get the shaft, and their standard of living goes down and stays down.  Eventually, the working people become fed up, and they rise up in a huge populist movement.

Guess where we are now?  Yep, the Occupy Wall Street movement, in 2011, was the beginning of the American populist movement rising to national awareness.  It had been brewing under the surface for decades.  Then the unexpected rise of both Donald Trump (on the political Right) and Bernie Sanders (on the political Left) were more examples of the rising populist movement.  While they are on opposite ends of the political spectrum, they both tapped into millions of  average working people who were pissed off at how much of a struggle everyday life, and making ends meet financially, had become.  The new crop of both Progressive Left, and some of the Right Wing political extremes, tapped into millions of The Laborers rising up in protest.

In Sarkar's theory, The Laborers rise up, shit gets completely crazy and chaotic for a while, then one of two things happen.  Either the society collapses and/or gets taken over by a rival (the bad option), or The Warriors rise up and take control and lead a new version of society.  While the vast majority of people are Laborers, they aren't leaders, by nature.  So The Laborers' populist movement rises up, shakes up and collapses the business people's corrupt system, then it kind of dies out.  That vacuum is filled by Warriors, physically strong and truly courageous people.  The average working people are sick of smooth talking con men at that point, they want actual, courageous, leaders.

So what does this have to do with BMX freestyle and actions sports?  Simply, we as BMXers and Action Sports people, are one part of The Warrior mentality.  Watching Sarkar's theory play out over 30 years now, since I read the book about it, I realized that the Warrior mentality people don't just pop up when The Laborers revolt, they slowly build, and the Warrior mentality spreads across the society little by little.  

The entire action sports world, we are all part of the Warrior mentality that's been rising up in society, from the few weirdos on the fringe, decades ago.  When all those crazy and fun-filled riders in the photos above got crazy on their bikes, they were freaks.  Society wasn't ready for them, they didn't get thousands of other people to go out and do crazy things on bicycles. Bicycle trick riding was a novelty, but it didn't take off as a mass movement.  But bicycling itself, then newer than BMX is today, did grow in a practical way.  These shredders in the photos above, they were the handful of people pushing the limits in a highly conformist, Industrial Age, businessman's world.

But when Bob Haro and friends started doing tricks in the 1970's, they appeared on the heels of us Generation X kids seeing a couple of amazing and crazy people.  Those two people, who influenced so many of us as little kids, were Evel Knievel and Bruce Lee.  Their skills, daring, and general badassness really appealed to us kids, whose dad's (and a few moms then) worked either blue collar factory jobs, or suit-and-tie, 9 to 5 office jobs.

We were born into a world of massive, "company man" conformity, and Evel and Bruce showed us it was possible to be a bad ass.  Those two came along right after surfing got popular in the 1960's, and as martial arts was gaining steam in the U.S..  Motocross, the other root action sport, besides surfing, had been slowly growing in the U.S., as well.  These were all modern people with a Warrior mentality, but unlike the soldiers, police, and firefighters, professional athletes in mainstream team sports, the Warrior mentality people of earlier eras, these action sports pioneers turned that mentality towards a new group, a whole new kind, of "sports."

Another aspect of The Warriors that P.R. Sarkar described, was that people with the Warrior mentality are big on individualism.  They like to do their own thing.  So as the Warrior mentality was slowly spreading throughout American society in the soldiers, police, firefighters, and professional athletes in traditional sports, a whole new world of very individual-oriented sports, Action Sports, from BMX to rock climbing to surfing, and all the rest, evolved.

I published a zine in 1998 called "The Warrior Sports" explaining this idea.  I passed about 50 of those zines out at the X-Games in San Diego that year.  Much to my surprise, a year later, I was on the deck of the X-Games vert ramp, shooting video with a scammed press pass.  Dennis McCoy rolled out next to me.  Out of nowhere, he said, "Hey, that warrior zine you wrote last year was pretty cool."  I didn't even see Dennis the year before, he nabbed a zine I gave to Mark Losey.  But when Dennis McCoy remembers a zine a year after you publish it, you know you hit on a pretty cool idea.

So, in the Big Picture of things.  BMX and BMX freestyle happened when they did, and took off and grew worldwide in the way they did, because society was finally ready for some radness.  The Warrior Mentality was creeping through society, slowly becoming more acceptable to more and more people.  By the time Bob Haro got his bike into a skatepark about 1975, a whole bunch of kids in Generation X was ready and looking for something wilder and crazier than the things our parents did as hobbies.  You know, exciting things like bowling and miniature golf.  Us Generation X kids were looking for a new type of excitement, and BMX freestyle was it for us, skateboarding for others, surfing for others, and the same with all the other Action Sports.  Without realizing it, we all played a small part in creating a new version of the Warrior mentality.  We found ways to do scary stuff, push our physical and mental limits, and get crazy, without actually going to war and killing other people. The early human tribal people, and later warriors and soldiers, were the root of warriorship, and the warrior mentality in ancient times.

As we move forward in the world today, we'll see more and more people who are actually physically good at something, from many different Warrior-type backgrounds, rise up to positions of importance in society.  People are sick of silver-tongued, douchebag politicians.  OK, a lot of people are, not everyone, there are still plenty of those politicians in office.  As we navigate these chaotic times, we will see more courageous people emerge, actual leaders, and maybe some will be people we sessioned with in days past.  Hopefully we'll take this into a type of society that's better for the vast majority of people and less of a 1% versus the 99% world.

One last thing, if you spend a chunk of your time in a bike shop, take heart, you never know what a small group of people from a bike shop will accomplish.  Check the meme below.

The Wright Brothers' bike shop in Dayton, Ohio in the early 1900's. 

I have new blogs out, check them out:

Crazy California 43

The Big Freakin' Transition

 

Full Circle

Women's March 2018

I screwed up when I wrote this post earlier.  By mistake, I embedded a clip from last year's Women's March.  I apologize.  That said, I've heard there were at least 250 different Women's Marches over the weekend, with hundreds of thousands of total women marching.  That's lots of pink hats.  And lots of power.  So what is this all about?  It's not just about reproductive rights or our current president talking about grabbing the the pussies of women on a tape years ago.  There's a lot more going on here.  I picked this clip because AM Joy on MSNBC always has a great take on things like this.

Twenty-eight years ago, I picked up a book about economics, and I read it.  The book was called The Great Depression of 1990, by Ravi Batra.  Now I know we didn't have a great depression in 1990.  What we did have was a six year long economic lull, officially called a "double-dip recession" at the time.  I watched most of what Ravi Batra predicted happen, it just didn't happen to the depth and intensity he predicted.

In that book, Batra shared the basic ideas of a social theory by a thinker from India.  That concept is called the Law of Social Cycle by  P.R. Sarkar.  It's a deep and involved theory on how societies evolve and change.  Sarkar said there are four basic mentalities in every society, the Intellectuals, the Acquisitors, the Laborers, and the Warriors.  At any given time, one of these mentalities dominates a society, and that way of thinking shapes all of that society.  The ages that each mentality dominate can last for hundreds of years.  There's no set time period.  But the mentalities dominate in a certain order, the order listed above.  Ravi Batra applied Sarkar;s theory to the United States, and concluded that we have been in the Acquisitor, or businessmen's age, since we were English colonies.

Over time, the business people dominating society become more and more corrupt.  At the end of the Acquisitor Age, the average, working class people, the Laborers, rise up in a series of populist movements.  Things get really chaotic and crazy.  Sound familiar?  The rise of the Laborers leads to the end of the Acquisitor Age.  Unfortunately, the Laborers aren't capable of actually running society for long.  So one of two things happen.  Either the society collapses (not a good outcome), or the Warriors rise to power.  Where the Acquisitors earn their living in the world with success in business and finances (and often corruption), the Warriors earn their way using courage and physical ability.  In earlier societies, soldiers, police, firefighters, professional athletes are all examples of the Warrior mentality.  Action sports athletse, stuntmen, the more dangerous construction jobs,  and entertainment industry roadies are other aspects of the Warrior mentality in today's world.  But it's not their time... not yet.

Now is the time of the people.  Average, everyday, working people.  After reading Batra's book in late 1989/early 1990, and watching most of what he predicted actually happen, I started looking for a populist movement in the U.S.  It was a long wait, but now we're seeing it happen.  The very, very beginning of the Tea Party Movement might have been populist, but it was quickly taken over by evangelicals and Republicans within weeks.  The Occupy Wall Street movement was the first real look at the populist uprising in my opinion.  The reason that took off like wildfire was because many people across the U.S. were ready for something like that to come along.  When it did, it struck a chord.

Then came two HUGE populist movements in the 2016 election cycle.  As we all know, Billionaire Donald Trump tapped into latent anger in working class people who'd lost their manufacturing jobs years before.  He also tapped into the racist, sexist, and just plain xenophobic fears of a lot of people, mostly on the Right side of the political spectrum.  But don't forget, the Bernie Sanders' populist movement garnered just as big, often bigger, live crowds, and tremendous energy on the Left side of the political spectrum.  The 70-something social Democrat tapped into the intellectuals and the rising Millennial generation.  I keep reminding people in here in North Carolina, all those Bernie people are still out there.  We'll hear from them again.  I saw a sign in the women's march photos today that said, "Grab 'em by the midterms."  We'll see what happens this fall's election.  We might see big political changes even before that.

But the populist movement isn't just a political thing.  It's a "we average Americans are tired of being screwed over by those ruling the world" thing.  A year ago, in conjunction with Donald Trump's inauguration, we saw the massive Women's March.  In the crazy year since that movement, we've seen the #metoo Movement and the #timesup Movement both primarily female, rise.  We've also seen a huge number of young people, particularly in the Democratic party, start running for public offices up and down the ballots.  This weekend, we've seen another HUGE series of Women's Marches.  One source said there were at least 250 organized marches around the world, and it appears millions of women marched in them.  All of you women, and everyone else in these different populist movements, are part of the Laborer mentality uprising in the U.S. and much of the world.

There will be other # movements, there will be other groups rising up, and there will ultimately be a complete change in who runs our world.  And THAT really has the powers at be worried.  Personally, I've caught A LOT of shit for simply sharing these ideas.  And I've been sharing this basic idea since a zine I wrote in 1998.

This is big.  It is crazy.  And it will be chaotic.  And yes, the Trump followers AND the Sanders followers, AND the Women's March are all aspects of the larger populist uprising.  It will be chaotic for quite a while to come.  And it could all end really badly if all these aspects of populist movements continue to fight among each other.  This is a time for our highest selves and our highest ideals.  It's a time to find what common ground there is with people who may oppose much of what you believe.  It's a time to let our best selves shine.

Now you know what we're all a part of.  Where will it go from here?  That's up to us.  Let's make something amazing out of the mess we've inherited.