This is footage I shot in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada in the spring of 1989. It was only when an edited version of this came on Facebook this past Sunday, that I realized that day, March 31. 2024, was the 35th anniversary of two legendary vert tricks.
At 11:29 in this clip you see Joe Johnson, riding for GT Bikes, land the first double taiwhip on vert. I'm pretty sure it was his first double tailwhip ever, but definitely the first in a contest and on video.
Then, at the end of this video, at 14:43, you see Mat Hoffman, in his first full contest as a pro rider, land the first 900, in a contest and on video. Not to take anything away from Mat's awesome accomplishment, but Mike Doninguez said he landed the 900 months before, on his own ramp, a couple of times. There's a shot of him at the 2-Hip contest at Ron Wilkerson's Enchanted Ramp coming really close to landing one. But, no photos or video exist of Mike Dominguez doing a 900. So this 900 by Mat is the first time Mat landed the 9, the first BMX 900 in a contest, the first BMX 900 in a video, and the first aerial 900 in any action sport. Even snowboarders hadn't landed the 9 in 1989. Mat and Joe changed BMX history with these two tricks, 35 years ago, this past Sunday.
This video segment was edited by Eddie Roman, for the 1990 2-Hip video, Ride Like a Man. He and some friends did the funny commentary to this clip, "Fire that cameraman!" Heh, heh, heh. For all of you youngsters out there, double tailwhips and 900's are older than most of you are. For all of the old schoolers, like me, thinking, "Holy shit that was 35 YEARS AGO?" Yep, we're fucking old. But that's life.
For those of you wondering about the history of spinning tricks in BMX, check out this crazy blog post I did back in 2021:
Tony Hawk, during the best trick jam at the 1999 X-Games in San Francisco. I think it was on the 11th attempt he landed the first 900 on a skateboard ever. He'd been trying the trick for nearly ten years.
Ride a bike, it will take you places. SE Bikes brand manager Todd Lyons says that a lot these days, and he's right. There were about 5,000 stories of Tony Hawk landing this 900, the first ever on a skateboard, that night on a pier in San Francisco, a different story for each person in that crowd. This is my version. I was standing behind the pro skaters, less than 20 feet from the side of the ramp, talking to San Francisco BMX freestyle legend Maurice Meyer. My Sony Digital8 video camera was in my hand... with a dead battery. I'm glad actually, that was a moment I was happy to just stand there and witness, without trying to capture it on video, and keep him well framed during each try. More than a decade later, in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Sean Penn's character sums up that feeling better than I've ever heard it described.
I had finagled a press pass to the X-Games that year, planning to write an article or two for Dig Magazine in the U.K. about the contest. Maurice had nabbed a VIP pass, too. I rode with him and the other Golden Gate Park locals, most weekends, during the one year I lived there, in 1985-86. We ran into each other near the end of the BMX vert practice, and started talking about "the old days" and how much BMX and action sports had changed over 12 or 13 years' time.
While we were talking at the bike halfpipe, a red helicopter with a World Industries logo on the side of it, hovered near the ramps, and started dropping stickers. The handful of kids around the area ran around picking them up. Then we realized that something else was getting thrown out of the chopper, little wadded up pieces of paper. Because of the breeze, most were falling on the empty BMX ramp area, where we were, not on the skateboard crowd. Someone grabbed one of the pieces of paper, and unraveled it. "It's money" they said. Suddenly all of us jaded Old School guys were picking them up, too. Mike Dominguez Jr., amped up after an afternoon of free Mountain Dew, sprinted around and grabbed 30 or 40 of the wadded up dollar bills, I think. I wound up with four of them, each with a World Industries skateboard character, like Flame Boy or Wet Willie, rubber stamped on them. We laughed at yet another example of Steve Rocco's crazy promotion methods. When in doubt, just throw money on the crowd. I literally had real helicopter money in my pocket when Maurice and I decided to walk over and watch the skate best trick jam, which had just started.
Dusk was descending on the huge pier that housed the 1999 X-Games, next to San Francisco Bay. With our passes, we just walked over and stood behind the rows of chairs there for pro skaters and their girlfriends, wives, and a few kids. In some of the wide shots in the clip above, you can see two really bright lights, that look lke stars on the video. We were right below, and maybe 20 feet in front of those lights, they were shining over our heads, lighting up the skate halfpipe for the TV cameras.
Maurice and I kept talking, as the world's best skaters tried their newest and best tricks. As I recall, Pierre Luc Gagnon was trying to land a heeflip Caballerial, as Steve Caballero himself sat 10 feet in front of me. Bob Burnquist was trying a one footed Smith Grind to revert, I believe. Other skaters were trying their "Merry Christmas" tricks, the things they could land once in a while. For Tony Hawk, that was the varial 720. About 12 or 15 minutes into the half hour jam, he landed one. Then he went back up, and just stood on deck a few minutes.
Skaters dropped in, sometimes snaking each other, to try to pull that one big trick. It was the closest thing I'd seen to "real," everyday skateboarding in a contest environment. The best trick jam was a concession to the vert skaters, who still weren't really happy with ESPN's take on skateboarding, in their 4th year of the putting on the X-Games. The big TV contest idea for action sports was evolving, as skaters got more involved and vocal about how they were portrayed to millions of viewers.
It was obvious the bigwigs at ESPN didn't give a shit about the best trick jam, but they had a big crowd, around 5,000 people in the stands on the other side of the ramp, so they kept the cameras rolling. It would make for soem good highlight clips, I think that's how they saw it. Old School skater and announcer, Dave Duncan, called the action out live from the deck. Maurice and I watched and talked.
Then Tony Hawk dropped in again, and no one paid that much attention. Until he opened up out of what looked like a over-rotated 540. We stopped talking, "Did he just try a 900?" one of us asked the other. I can't remember who said it. Tony walked back up to the top of the ramp, and did the same thing a couple of more times. The second rotation got tighter and tighter. After the 3rd or 4th try, he walked off the side of the ramp, facing us, He was 15 or 20 feet away, and we could totally see his eyes, he had the stare, the "thousand yard stare," as I've heard some call it. He was looking right towards us, but saw nothing. Pure focus. I asked Maurice, "Did you see his eyes? He's serious. He's either going to land it or go to the hospital trying." Maurice agreed.
The whole aura of the place shifted. Other skaters stopped dropping in. The skaters on the deck knew Tony really wanted the 900, and stepped back in respect. It wasn't planned. No color commentary guy had to spew stats and percentages to hype people up. The energy in the whole area changed. This was real skateboarding at it's best.
A top skater just got a taste that tonight was the night to land the unlandable trick, and Tony just laser focused on it. Everyone stopped skating after a couple more attempts. It wasn't about trophies or prize money anymore. We all wanted to see Tony Hawk progress vert skating to the next level. Tony kept trying, getting more and more determined, and closer to landing it. Dave Duncan kept talking into the mike like only a hardcore skateboarder could. This was a moment, one way or the other.
I think it was on the 7th attempt that Tony landed on the board, made it a few feet, then washed out on the flatbottom. I jumped up in the air screaming, I gave that one to him. But he didn't ride away, it wasn't clean, he wanted it 100%. He kept trying. On the 11th attempt, I believe, is when Tony Hawk landed the first skateboard 900 air, totally solid. Everyone went nuts.
If you freeze that video above at about 6;03, you'll see Maurice right behind Tony, in a white hoodie, with sunglasses. He ran up there with all the skaters to congratulate Tony. I, for some reason, stayed right where I was, 30 feet away, watching the pandemonium. The place went nuts. But I had seen that happen before, 10 years earlier, up in Canada.
Mat Hoffman's first 900, at 14:43 in this clip, in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, in the spring of 1989. After the intro with Eddie Roman's girlfriend, this is the footage that I shot from that contest, with Eddie and friends doing their funny color commentary over it. This is from the 1990-2-Hip video, Ride Like a Man, edited by Eddie Roman.
Riding a bike did take me places. I was a dorky, unathletic kid who grew up in Ohio, spent 9th grade living in New Mexico, and then lived in Boise, Idaho through high school. The summer after my sophomore year, I got into BMX riding, then BMX racing, and then new sport of BMX freestyle, in 1983. A year after I graduated high school, my family moved to San Jose, California. I worked at Pizza Hut, started publishing a freestyle zine, and met the Bay areas freestylers, like Maurice, Dave Vanderspek, Robert Peterson, Hugo Gonzalez, and a couple dozen more. My zine led me to a magazine job in Southern California. I wasn't punk rock enough for that place, and I got laid off. I got a job editing a newsletter, which led to working at Unreel Productions, the Vision Skateboards video company, in late 1987. I was out riding three hours a night like everyone else, but didn't have the balls to make it to pro caliber as a BMX freestyler. By 1989, I was Unreel's camerman, traveling to all the 2-Hip vert and street contests to shoot video, because Vision Street Wear sponsored the contests.
While I was bouncing around the BMX and industries, the early skatepark riders inspired a bunch of great quarterpipe riders around the U.S. and Europe. In 1987, Haro pro Ron Wilkerson started putting on halfpipe contests. Riders like Todd Anderson, Josh White, Joe Johnson, and this kid from Oklahoma, named Mat Hoffman, moved up the amateur ranks and into pro. They pushed the older guys like Eddie Fiola, Brian Blyther, Mike Dominguez, as vert riding progressed.
The first 2-Hip King of Vert of 1989 was in Kitchener, Ontario Canada. The less than epic 2-Hip halfpipe was set up in a college gymnasium for the weekend, and the riders, amateur and pro, gave it their best. The talk of the weekend was that this crazy, unknown guy from Canada, called The Terminator, was going to do a backflip abubaca or fakie or something. No one except lake jumper Jose Yanez had done flips on a BMX bike then. No one had even tried them on vert. The Terminator was an amateur, and when his final run came up, he did a high fakie, leaned back a little, and crashed hard. The weekend up hype fizzled.
The rest of the amateurs rode their runs, blasting high and pulling their best tricks. Joe Johnson landed the first double tailwhip air, which was amazing. I was on the deck, with a $50,000, 35 pound, rented Ikegami Betacam, shoulder checking photographer John Ker for a good angle to shoot from. I was doing my best to get good footage of the days events.
Then came Mat Hoffman, in what I believe was his second pro contest. He won his first pro contest. At the end of his final run, with about 300 people watching, mostly Canadians, he nearly landed a 900. Mat got up, and went for it again, landing the first BMX 900 in a contest, and the first recorded 900 in any action sport. Even snowboarders hadn't pulled a 900 air at that point. I caught it on video from the deck, and Eddie Roman and another guy caught it from two angles below. Mat Hoffman, new pro vert rider and wonderkid, broke the 900 barrier in action sports, with video and photos to prove it. Word was the Mike Dominguez had landed a 900 or two on his own ramp. But there were no photos or video. Mat made it official, the 900 was possible.
By some weird quirk of fate, me, the goofy kid from Ohio and Idaho, was there to get video. And by an even crazier quirk of fate, I was in San Francisco a decade later to watch Tony Hawk do it, live, on a skateboard. The only other two people that I know were in both places were Mat and his buddy Steve Swope. But they were running the bike contest in 1999, and I don't think they were watching the skate best trick jam. I'm not sure. There may have been a couple of people who saw both happen live.
We live in a weird Universe, and really crazy coincidences happen now and then. It still trips me out that I somehow saw both of these happen live, right in front of me. Riding a bike did take me places, for the first 20 years of my adult life. I met alot of cool people, traveled around the U.S., and into Canada a couple of times.
Then I got injured, became a taxi driver, and things went into a downhill spiral. I think life wanted to kick my ass for a couple of decades to teach me some other lessons. One of the things I've learned is that there are a lot of ways to spend your time in life, and goofing around on bikes is one of the best ways. You never know where it will lead you. Ride on!
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.
Dennis McCoy shralping in pro flatland in New York in 1986. At one of the velodrome contests that year, I thought Dennis, who had the freshest, new style in pro flatland at the time, should have beat Woody Itson, the veteran icon of the day. I wrote that in my zine. It was my honest opinion at the time. Dennis, of course, was stoked when he saw the zine, and Woody was a bit bummed. Both of them rode great at that contest, and, like always, it came down to a subjective call by the five judges. Were Woody's well known tricks, executed flawlessly, better than McCoy's new style and flair and energy? No matter what the call, someone always gets pissed off.
When I got into BMX racing in 1982, it was usually easy to see who won. It was a race, after all, first guy (or girl) across the line was the winner. But even at the local BMX track there were issues. It had become a custom to stop pedaling about 30 feet before the finish line, and coast over the last little set of doubles and the finish line just beyond. No one even tried to actually race the last 30 feet. It was kind of like a gentleman's agreement, your place coming out of the third turn at the Fort Boise track was your place in the race, forget racing the last straight. I think it was much the same at other tracks, and at the national level, as well.
Us kids from Blue Valley trailer park, brand new to BMX racing, hungry to win a trophy in anything, decided to pedal to the finish, and pass the points chasers who were coasting. Then people got mad when we said, "Hey, I beat those two guys who were coasting." So even in the black and white world of a race with a distinct finish line, there were sometimes issues. For a couple of races, we made the lazy kids pedal those last 30 feet. Other riders gave us crap, then we eventually stopped pedaling at the end, and we too, and joined the program.
But when BMX freestyle came along, and it was a brand new sport in 1984, we all soon learned the problems of subjective judging. Subjective judging is simply anytime that a group of judges judge an event, score the contestants based on their person opinion of the performance, and the winner is the person with the highest total score. There's no absolute winner by objective facts, like being the first over the finish line. With subjective judging, you have a few personal opinions that find the winner. And personal opinions can be affected in a whole bunch of ways, as we all soon learned.
This was one of the reasons that pro freestyler R.L. Osborn, and a few others, at first, didn't like the idea of even having BMX freestyle competitions. It's hard to believe now, but for maybe a year, that was actually an issue. Up until then, flatland and quarterpipe riding had been a demonstration sport. Riders performed in shows, and people clapped and cheered, or they didn't. But eventually competitions were accepted as a necessary, if kind of annoying, part of freestyle.
Since a flatland or ramp routine was a performance, like music or dance or figure skating in that respect, that meant a group of people had to judge the performance, and score each contestant against the others, and the high overall score would win. This opened up several cans of worms, and suddenly half of the riders, or more, were mad at the judges at the end of the day at every contest. Ultimately, over the course of those first 3 or 4 big years of AFA contests, we all learned the basic truth of subjective judging.
Subjective judging sucks. Sometimes it works in your favor. Sometimes it works against you. Deal with it!
One of the first issues was, who do we get to judge? Since BMX freestyle was a new sport, there were no old pros, who had ridden for years, to judge. So industry guys, usually former BMX racers, originally judged freestyle pros, and the current freestyle pros were tapped to judge the amateurs. This didn't work too well, though it seemed to make sense at the time.
It turned out that veteran racers, while great BMX riders, didn't know the nuances of the ever evolving world of freestyle tricks. Having never done most of the tricks, they just didn't know which tricks looked hard, and which tricks were hard. At the same time, when the sport was so new, there might be 40 different riders, at every contest, doing tricks that were completely new. Those were tricks that no one had seen before, outside of that rider's group of friends. So no one knew if the tricks were actually hard. Some easy tricks look great, like Dennis McCoy's fancy footwork back then. It looked amazing, but wasn't really hard at all. I'm not dissing Dennis, he did plenty of really hard moves, but the footwork that blew people's minds at first, was flashy, but technically not that difficult.
Another issue was that pro freestylers made lousy judges, by and large. Judging a freestyle contest (or any event with lots of participants), takes concentration, among other things. We soon found that the last thing pro riders wanted to do at a big competition was to watch dozens of younger, mediocre riders, and try to place their routines in the precise order of who was better than who. Pros wanted to hang out, talk to old friends, meet girls, and have fun. They didn't want to watch goofy kids from Idaho balance on their bike and juggle tennis balls. That was what I did my first contest, by the away. Nothing blows your concentration like starting your first routine at a major contest and having the announcer say, "And here's Steve Emig, from Boise, Idaho, with his balls in his hands."
In time, and especially as competitions grew, and the AFA had to deal with huge groups of 50 or more riders in a single class, we learned that parents of riders made the best judges. The parents were less distracted, they were older, more mature (usually) and they were much better at concentrating and trying to fairly judge a large group of riders, many of whom were very close in talent level. From a purely functional level, the parents that volunteered at contests made good judges.
Having parents judge the large amateur classes, of course, led to the most obvious problem with judging, bias towards, or against, certain riders. If a parent was judging their own kid in a contest, everyone expected them to judge their kid above the other riders. That did happen on occasion, and the AFA tried to get other judges to fill in for the classes when a judge's kid was riding. With a limited number of parents to judge, and lots of riders, that wasn't always possible.
There were other issues with parent's judging. As hard as it is to believe, sometimes a rider's parent would judge their own kid harder, just to make sure that everyone thought they were being fair. Then the kid actually placed lower. It didn't happen often, but it actually did happen. Another issue with parents judging contests is that they don't know all the tricks, especially the new ones, which leads to new tricks getting judged at lower scores than older, better known tricks. Another issue with parents judging was that the tricks they were most familiar with were the tricks their kids did, or were working on. So if Timmy was good at boomerangs and decades, but never did tailwhips, then boomerangs and decades got judged higher, usually without the parent doing it intentionally. Another weird aspect of parents judging their kids is that sometimes they would judge their own kid on how good they usually did the trick, not how they actually performed it in the contest. At times, and again this was largely unintentional, a parent would watch their kid ride and think, "Bill dabbed his foot on that decade, but usually he can pull it every time," so they wouldn't count it against them.
All of those things were issues we had with parents judging at those AFA local and AFA Masters contests in the mid to late 1980's. While their were issues, mostly the parents did a better job judging than anyone else would have. I know. I worked for the AFA in 1987, and I got stuck judging a few classes at the big Masters comps. Seriously, watching 50 kids, especially like 14-15 novice or intermediate flatland, just plain sucked. I tried to be fair, like all the judges, but most of the kids were boring as fuck to watch, and it was easy to get distracted for a few seconds, and miss that one good trick they did. Then, trying to get the 30 middle riders in a reasonably correct order, though they all were pretty much the same, was pretty much impossible. To make it even worse, we judged knowing at least 5 or 10 kids would be bitching at us the rest of the weekend because they got 27th in 14-15 intermediate, and they thought they were better than the kid who got 14th. We just wanted to scream sometimes, "Go practice more so you'll stand out, kid!"
Another issue was just the dynamics of actually judging. What score do you give the first kid? If he's awesome, do you give him a 98? What if three more guys are better later on? We soon took to giving the very first rider a 75, which gave us room to judge both up and down from there. If the first kid was really good, then most of the riders would score below 75. If the kid sucked, most of the other riders would score above 75. Then kids in one class would say to their friends, "Hey, I got an 82 and you got a 72 in your class, so I'm better than you. But the scores didn't transfer from class to class. Also, the riders that rode last pretty much always scored better. It just always worked out that way, even though we tried to score fairly. But it was impossible to explain that to kids. So those were some of the issues we dealt with for the masses of riders in the amateur classes. No matter what, some kids were always mad, that's just the nature of subjective judging. The top few riders always stood out, but even getting them in the correct order was still hard.
Judging the pro classes was a different story, for several reasons. First of all, there was money on the line. OK, it was the AFA in the late 80's, the first wave of BMX freestyle popularity, and there wasn't much money. But a little change in judging could mean a couple of places, and several hundred dollars more or less in prize money. Another thing was that the pros, mostly, were all pretty close in riding skills (Fred Blood excepted, of course ; ) ), and so the judging was always tighter. Then there were titles on the line, winning the contest looked a lot better to the rider's sponsors than getting third. The pros also did harder tricks, and had different styles, so the judges were often judging one rider's style against another. That was the issue at the Velodrome contest where Woody Itson beat newcomer Dennis McCoy, but I thought Dennis should have won. Was Dennis' style and showmanship really better than Woody's classic, known to be hard, tricks. Flip a coin, on any given day it could go either way. Because the class had far fewer people, we often had either pro flatlanders judge the ramp riders, and vice versa, or top amateurs judge the pros. That worked pretty well. It's much easier to pay close attention to 8 pro riders than to 50 novices.
Then we finally get to the issue most people think about with subjective judging, personal bias. Did that amateur rider from Hutch score Mike Dominguez higher than Eddie Fiola because Mike rode for Hutch? Did someone pay a certain judge to throw the contest? Did someone score a pro higher because they were a fan of that pro years earlier, when they were just getting into riding? Did a rider get scored higher because their style was just the trendy style at the time, and there were, and still are always trendy styles. Did the technical rider doing harder tricks score higher than the rider doing less hard tricks, but with more style? That was the classic issue in skateboarding at the time, with Tony Hawk's tech tricks versus Christian Hosoi's high air and style. Did a certain rider have an off day, but still score high just because of their name recognition? All of these things happened at some level. Overall, most of the judges, most of the time, tried to do the best job they could. But there were problems.
And that's my whole point with subjective judging. IT'S NEVER FAIR. Period. Sometimes you get screwed as a competitor. Sometimes things worked in your favor. Over the long run, the best riders score well on a consistent basis. But it's never fair, whether it's a local contest with five kids, or it's figure skating in the Olympics. And the more that is at stake, the harder it is to judge accurately, the more likely it is to be contested, and the more pissed off someone will be.
This is my big problem with BMX freestyle and skateboarding being in the Olympics. Those huge, once every 4 years, contests are about "crowning champions." Those champions are then used in all kinds of money making and sponsorship ventures and commercials. The drive to rig the system is incredibly high, because there can literally be millions of dollars at stake. And as freestylers, and I was a hardcore, if not great freestyler, for 20 years, we know that one placing at one contest really doesn't mean all that much. It's nice. But it doesn't make you the "best rider ever." It doesn't make you the most progressive rider, or the most influential rider. Winning one contest, ANY CONTEST, doesn't make you THE CHAMPION. That's kind of the whole point of action sports. Lots of different styles, lots of different riders, and no one's really the best ever, until you get to a long term innovator like a Mat Hoffman or Kevin Jones.
Winning at any major contest means that a certain group of judges, who may or may not have tried to do a legit job, who all had their personal biases, judged you to be the best, on that day, in that location, at that time. You won the day. Maybe you deserved it, maybe you didn't. And that's just the way it goes with subjective judging. Again, it's never completely fair. So should you make $3 million for getting on the Wheaties box and in the TV commercials, and the rider who came in second on that day be completely forgotten? Most of us who've put time into learning an action sport at some point say, "No." But that's how it goes with the Olympics, or even the X-Games.
One more thought. Subjective judging seriously stifles creativity and innovation. Ever see a figure skater do a SWITCH triple Lutz? No. Never. You haven't. Do you know why? Because there is no pre-figured out score for doing anything switch, or opposite direction, in figure skating. Yes, it would be much harder, but they don't do it, because they wouldn't get scored for it if they did.
Figure skating has been a competitive, subjectively judged sport for at least 160 years. The origins of the sport go back to at least 1772. But no one does the high level tricks in the opposite direction in the Olympics. In skateboarding and BMX freestyle, people started doing switch tricks in the late 1980's, only a few years into BMX freestyle or street skating competitions. In a few years those sports evolved more than figure skating did in 160 years. Why? Because riders and skaters progress naturally, organically, and without certain number scores being given to particular tricks. The creativity in figure skating (or gymnastics, or any older judged sport), has been dramatically reduced to turn it into a sport. The same is true of BMX vert, park, and street today. Imagine a top rider in a comp today doing a major contest routine WITHOUT a single flip, barspin, or tailwhip. Boom, they're not even in contention for a top placing, no matter what they do. Does that mean the riders who don't do those tricks are worse riders? Think of a run by Brian Foster, Chris Doyle, or Gary Young. Oh, those guys are/were as good as the top contest riders, and they can blow your mind in a contest setting, without the "standard" tricks. But they're not going to win a contest in nearly any case, because they don't do the current trendy tricks like 25 barspins, tailwhips, and flip tricks.
I'm not against contests in actions sports, they provide a good reason to push harder, to progress in some areas of riding (but not necessarily creativity except for best trick comps), and to travel different places, which gives riders and excuse to ride with new people. But it would be really cool to simply acknowledge BMX freestyle (or flatland, park, street, vert, whatever) contests, with subjective judging, for what they do. They tell you that on this day, in this place, this group of judges thought this person was the best. That doesn't make that person the best ever, it makes them a really good rider who won that day.
I know that's a lot to ask. But a few of us got into a big Facebook discussion on this the other day, starting with the question of whether BMX freestyle (park, street, and maybe vert) should be in the Olympics. I say they should not be in the Olympics. Anyhow, that online discussion gave me the idea to write down some of my ideas about subjective judging, and it's role in action sports, and other sports, in today's world. If you have comments, let them fly in the Facebook groups, or wherever. I'll read them, and reply when needed.
I just started a new blog for Marvin Davits, to promote Marvin's business, installing dinghy davits on boats and yachts. Check it out.
In the spring of 1989, I traveled to Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, with a woman from Vision promotions. I forget her name. I hadn't booked a room, I thought she was handling it. I wound up getting the room right next to the room where Mat Hoffman, Steve Swope, and Dennis McCoy were staying. I was the cameraman for Unreel Productions, the Vision Street Wear video company, my job was to shoot footage of the contest, and I had the only broadcast quality video camera at the event, a rental Ikegami Betacam.
I ran into Rob Dodds, who I met in Whistler three years before, and he was looking for a place to crash, in typical low budget rider style for those days. Since I had a spare couch in my room, and Vision was paying for it, so he crashed there, and we wound up having dinner that night with Mat, Swope, and Dennis. Rob also shared this trick he'd been working on with Mat, a no handed 540. Guess what trick Mat landed at the next 2-Hip?
The big talk of the weekend was some Canadian guy nicknamed the Terminator, who was supposed to try a backflip abubaca, or backflip fakie. No one did any backflip tricks then. But it fizzled into a lackluster crash. The contest turned into just another rad 2-Hip King of Vert. And then this happened. At 14:43 is this clip, you see Mat Hoffman pull his first 900, and the first 9 ever pulled in a BMX freestyle contest. This whole clip is my footage, used in the Eddie Roman produced/2-Hip video Ride Like a Man.
Just over a decade later, I took a break from my job as a Hollywood lighting technician, for the summer, to get a hernia fixed. My insurance company gave me the runaround all summer, and that never happened, so I wound up working as a taxi driver. That job didn't require heavy lifting, like the lighting job did.
But while I was taking that summer off, I drove up to the 1999 X-Games, after scamming a press pass as a writer from Dig BMX Magazine. My purpose was to wander around, shoot some cool footage to put into a little BMX video, and use that to get some of the newer riders stoked on letting me shoot them for a hardcore, self-produced BMX freestyle video later on.
After shooting some footage of BMX vert practice, I ran into old friend, Maurice "Drob" Meyer, and we started talking about "the old days" of 80's freestyle in San Francisco. While we were talking, a red helicopter drifted in close, and someone threw stickers out the window. That was pretty funny, a sticker toss taken to a whole new level. Then the chopper drifted near the ramps again, except someone was tossing wadded up dollar bills out of it. That turned out to be World Industries owner Steve Rocco, and you can see the inside-the-chopper footage in the documentary, The Man Who Souled The World. I picked up four of the dollars, each with a World Industries figure stamped on it. Mike Dominguez, Jr. wired from drinking Mountain Dew all day, ran around an got about 50 of them. The funny thing was, almost all of the money fell on the BMX halfpipe, missing the skate halfpipe next to it, the intended target. If you know anything about Steve Rocco's hatred for BMX, that's petty dang funny.
Anyhow, Drob and I kept talking, and since we both had cool guy passes, we walked over to watch the skate best trick contest, which was getting started. Unlike everything else in the X-Games up until then, it was like an actual, real, skate session. A bunch of the very best vert skaters trying their hardest tricks. I think Bob Burnquist was trying a one footed Smith grind to revert. PLG was trying a Caballerial heelflip, or maybe a frontside Cab heelflip. It was off the chain. Tony Hawk landed his trademark varial 720 halfway through the half hour jam. Maurice and I kept talking about how huge these sports had become, and how crazy the whole scene was, compared to when I rode at Golden Gate Park with him and the other guys in 1985-86.
Then Tony Hawk got this crazy idea, and decided to try the elusive 900 he'd been trying to land for ten years, since about the time Mat pulled the bike 900 in Kitchener. Tony hucked a couple of wild spins and unraveled at the end of each. But on about the third or fourth try, he started to get it back towards the landing. Suddenly, it went from a crazy huck to looking possible. Maybe.
There were about 30 folding chairs, in 3 or 4 rows, in the skater's area next to the halfpipe. Those were filled with the skaters, girlfriends, a couple of wives, and a few bros. Drob and I were standing about ten feet behind those. From our vantage point, we could see that after that 3rd or 4th try, Tony Hawk suddenly had the thousand yard stare. We could see it in his eyes. He wanted the 900... BAD. I looked at Drob, "Holy shit, he's serious now, he's either going to land it or wreck himself." Drob agreed. We both knew that intense stare. We'd seen it before, and we'd had it before. Pure focus.
Tony kept trying, everyone else stopped skating, and it became a scene I'll never forget. There was nothing about competition. It was real skateboarding. One guy, focused on landing one trick, and everyone of the other skaters wanted to see it happen. Everyone in the seats, and us just behind, wanted to see it happen. The 5,000 spectators in the crowded bleachers on the other side of the ramp, wanted to see it happen. It took tony 11 attempts, I think. But he landed the first skateboard 900 ever, and it was amazing to see.
The funny thing for me was, I'd been shooting video all day with my little Sony Digital 8 camera. My batteries were dead. I watched this whole scene with a dead camera in my hand... and I didn't care. I didn't want to be a cameraman right then, focusing on framing the shot each try. I just wanted to see the whole thing play out. I wanted to just experience it happening. And that's what I did.
When Tony landed the 900, a bunch of people, including Maurice, ran up to congratulate him. You can see Drob if you freeze it at 6:04, when Tony has is mouth open. That's Maurice in the sunglasses and light colored hoodie, to Tony's right.
Those were two huge jumps in the progression of vert riding and skating. The impossible became possible. Somehow, for reasons unknown to me, the Universe saw fit to put me there to see those two events happen, in person. Both were moments I'll remember my whole life, you know, unless Alzheimer's kicks in, of course.
Last night at the X-Games, 30 years after Mat's 900, 20 years after Tony's 900, Mitchie Brusco stepped the progression of vert skateboarding up another huge notch, adding a 360, and landing the first 1260 on a vert mega ramp. Freakin' amazing. Congratulations Mitchie.
This post was inspired by seeing a photo of Joe Johnson, that I'd never seen before, in a Facebook group a few days ago. It's the photo you see at 3:58 in this clip. I saw that, and I realized I forgot just how high Joe Johnson could air. When I saw that photo, and the string of comments, I thought to the time I first met Joe, and I knew I had to write a blog post about what I remember of him and his riding. So here it is. When I went looking on YouTube for footage of him, I first found this clip above, which I'd never seen before, and then realized this was part of a documentary video on the New England scene. So I watched the whole thing. A Wicked Ride is long (1:44:00), but it's a great video of a scene that I knew little about, even though I knew some of the people in it fairly well.
Like many firsts in my BMX freestyle life, this story starts with the Tulsa, Oklahoma AFA Masters contest in April of 1986. I moved to San Jose from Boise, Idaho the previous September, following my family there, a year after graduating high school. I started a freestyle zine, called San Jose Stylin', as an excuse to meet the great riders of the San Francisco Bay area. It was the most cohesive scene in the world at the time, where everyone from the region got together every Sunday at Golden Gate Park in The City. My zine, covering the scene, which contained interviews with Dave Vanderspek, Maurice Meyer, Robert Peterson, and Hugo Gonzales, caught the eye of Andy and Lew at FREESTYLIN' magazine. I sent each of them a copy every issue, along with the BMX Plus editors. At the first contest of 1986, at the Velodrome in SoCal, I went up and introduced myself to Andy, who introduced me to Lew. I was floored when they said they really liked my zine. I mean, I was a kid from fucking Idaho, I still read every single word, including the ads, of every issue of FREESTYLIN'. Suddenly I was talking to the editors and hearing their stoke on my zine. Serious fanboy moment.
A few weeks later, I got a call out of the blue. Andy Jenkins, editor of FREESTYLIN', was on the phone. He asked if I planned on going to the next AFA Masters contest in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I had saved up my Pizza Hut earnings for a plane ticket, and was going to go there and compete. Glad to hear that, he asked if I wanted to write the contest article for FREESTYLIN'. I can't remember how long it took to pick my jaw up off the floor, but I muttered "Yeah," and we went over the details. Windy, the Wizard Pubs photographer, was going to shoot the photos, but they needed someone to write the article. Somehow, thanks to the zine I typed on a 1920's era, manual, Royal typewriter, I would write the article.
I was 19 at the time, it was the first time I flew to a place where no one was there to pick me up. I couldn't rent a car, and I didn't bother to figure out exactly where the contest was being held. I packed my suitcase, putting my wheels in it, and put the rest of my bike in an odd sized box and called it "camping equipment," a trick Robert Peterson taught me to avoid the $40 bike shipping fee airlines charged at the time. You could do things like that then. My parents dropped me off at the San Jose airport, and I flew to Tulsa, via Dallas. In the DFW airport, I ran into GT pros, Eddie Fiola, who I'd met before, Martin Aparijo, and some blond kid I didn't recognize. Eddie, after I introduced myself at the gate, introduced me to Martin, and then said, "This is our new guy, Josh White, he just did this crazy photo shoot for FREESTYLIN'." We were all on the same flight into Tulsa, and I asked if there was a chance to catch a ride to the contest site with them. They had a small rental car, three guys, gear, and bike boxes, so there just wasn't room. No problem, I thought, I'll just hang in the luggage area, there will be a ton of riders flying in, it's freakin' Tulsa, after all, nobody lived close by. I'd just catch a ride with some other riders.
I sat, alone, in the baggage area, for about an hour after my flight, and didn't see anyone with a bike box. I was in a strange town, on my own, not enough money for a taxi, too young to get a rental car, and I had no idea where the contest was actually being held. I was starting to get worried.
Finally, I saw some dark haired kid dragging a bike box off the conveyor belt. He was a really average looking kid, straight dark hair, very normal haircut, jeans and a T-shirt. He was also alone. I had my stuff on a luggage cart, and I headed over and said, "Hi," to him. I followed him as he got a luggage cart and loaded his stuff on it. He said his name was Joe Johnson, that he rode for Haro, and was from New England. I told him I was writing the magazine article for FREESTYLIN'. We both probably thought the other was lying, but didn't say so. I was thinking, "You ride for Haro? OK, co-sponsor kid from the East Coast, that's cool." Just two random BMX freestylers meeting in an airport, and connecting because we were freestylers.
Joe said he had a ride coming, and I could probably bum a ride to the hotel, and then to the contest site. I said, "Cool." We both were pretty quiet, and talked on and off, and did infinity rolls and any other trick we could think of on our luggage carts for 45 minutes or so.
Suddenly I looked up, and a van pulled up. The Haro tour van. WTF? My jaw dropped again, and stayed on the ground, as legendary Haro pro Ron Wilkerson got out of the driver's side and yelled, "Hey Joe, what's up?" Or something like that. I was lost in another fanboy moment. There were about 8 people and bikes crammed in the van already, but they offered me a ride, I jammed my bike box and luggage in the back, and sat on a bunch of bike top tubes, my feet hanging over all the handlebars, all the way to the hotel.
It was a Holiday Inn Holidome, with a swimming pool, miniature golf holes, a pool table, and a bunch of couches and chairs under roof, with a wall of windows on one end. Everywhere I looked there were pro or top amateur riders. Joe told them I was writing the contest article for FREESTYLIN', and that became my intro. Jon Peterson, the Haro assistant team manager, took me under his wing, told me I could crash on the floor of their second room, along with Joe, Dennis McCoy, Rick Moliterno, and manager Billy Hop, as I recall. I literally felt like I'd won some kind of BMX freestyle lottery. Not only had I lucked into a ride to the hotel, I was staying with the Haro team.
Only 8 months before, I was a kid in Idaho, riding with my trick teammate Jay Bickel, an SE co-sponsored rider. My biggest dream at that point was that, maybe, someday, I could tag along on a magazine photo shoot to watch. Suddenly I was hanging in the hotel with freestyle royalty, and playing pool with Woody Itson. I hung with the Haro team all weekend, and I learned that those two new kids I met, Josh White and Joe Johnson, both fucking ripped. They were both exploding onto the national freestyle scene that weekend. There was another kid I met there, nobody caught his name over the weekend. We all referred to him as "The Storm Trooper" because he wore a full face helmet, knee pads, elbow pads, and shoulder pads to ride vert. That was at a time where most pros wore only an open face helmet and leathers to ride. Windy got a couple really good photos of that kid, and Andy Jenkins called me up a week later to find out if I knew his name. I called around, and learned that kid's name was Mathew Hoffman. The weird thing is, although I actually shot photos from the deck of the Haro quarterpipe in practice, and watched all weekend, I don't remember any riding really. So much other stuff happened, I blanked out on the riding since. I guess I was just overwhelmed with being in the middle of the guys I'd been reading about in the magazines for a couple of years.
In a really cool coincidence, my article from the contest, an articlearticle about zines, listing my zine first in the country, and Josh White's epic first photo shoot, all came out in the August '86 issue of FREESTYLIN'. For you old schoolers, that's the one with the white cover and the little tiny photo on it... of Josh White. You can check out a scan of that magazine here. In that first magazine article I ever wrote, is this passage about the 16Expert ramp class:
"In (16 X Ramps) White didn't quite pull the air he did in practice, but he edged out the ever incredible Tony Murray- anyway- that may give you a clue to where this guy's headed. Tony's new Haro teammate, Joe Johnson, took third. If his name doesn't ring a bell, give it time. Executing prime lookbacks, can-can lookbacks, and NO HANDERS five feet out, Joe is a force to be reckoned with."
I'm not sure what a "prime" lookback is, I think I was just trying to use unusual adjectives in the article. Reading that article again, for the first time in probably 30 years, reminded me of another thing about freestyle ramps in the 1980's. Every ramp rider had a home ramp they rode, ranging from the early six foot high, Bob Haro era quarterpipes, to 8 and 9 foot ramps. Generally, no bike ramps had vert then, but some had a few inches of it. Transitions had yet to be standardized, and ranged from round to very elliptical.
My first and only driveway quarterpipe, for example, was bought for $25 from skaters. It it went up to vert in five feet of height, but that transition only spanned three feet from bottom of the ramp to where it hit vert, going forward, it was a complete ellipse, with a gap in plywood and then a foot of vert. That's an extreme example, but homemade ramps ranged from my beast to the GT tour ramp, which was nine feet high and smooth, but only five feet wide.
My point here is that every rider was used to their own ramp, it's particular transition, how high it was, how much flex it had, how much it moved, where the soft spot in the tranny was from those two curved 2 X 4's, and every other nuance. Then riders went to a contest, and had to get used to a totally different ramp. So pretty much every ramp rider could get two or three feet higher on their own ramp, then they did at contests. The best ramp riding was never at contests in the early years. So when I wrote in the article that Joe was doing variations five feet out, as an amateur, that was amazing for its day. Most of the ams who could do 6 to 8 foot airs at home, maybe did high airs of 4 or 5 feet at a contest. Though it doesn't sound that impressive now, Joe doing the hardest variations of the day, head high, at a contest, really set him apart.
That August issue of FREESTYLIN' hit the newsstands in late June '86, and on August 1st, I started my new job at Wizard Publications. I was suddenly in the industry, and Josh, Joe, and Mat became this amazing new wave of vert riders who seemingly popped out of nowhere, from random parts of the country not known for great riders, and made the pros nervous with their skills. I got to know them all a bit, and watched as Josh went pro, and Mat and Joe ruled the amateur class for another couple of years.
The other thing I remember about Joe was that he did the best version of several variations, including the pros. His no footed can-cans and one handed no footed can-cans, were better looking in photos, and more consistent in real life, than anyone else.
Like everyone else in BMX freestyle, I watched these new vert guys blast the eight foot quarterpipes at the AFA Masters contests. Then Ron Wilkerson started up the 2-Hip halfpipe contests, in 1987, because that's where vert riding was headed. Joe, Mat, and Josh, all brought up on quarterpipes, really adapted well to the halfpipes, and I think that's where Joe, especially, was really able to show his stuff and set himself apart even more.
The ramps got bigger, I think the traveling 2-Hip halfpipe in 1987 and beyond was 9 or 9 1/2 feet high, with a touch of vert. But it always seemed to get set up with one side slightly over-vert, and one side slightly under. For that reason, nearly every rider, amateurs and pros, had one side they favored, and they did all their variations on that side. So in 1987-88-89, contest runs were: pump air, variation, pump air, variation, pump air, variation. And if a rider landed low on a single air, BAM, momentum gone, and three or four airs were needed to get back up to height. One of our Unreel cameramen, at the big 2-Hip finals comp in Irvine, CA in 1988, asked Dave Voelker, an amazing quarterpipe rider, about the halfpipe. I loved his answer, "You have to be able to land on these things. I never really had to do that before."
Joe Johnson was the first rider I remember who consistently did back to back to back variations, at height. In those days, "height" meant 5 to 6 feet out, usually. But it made a huge difference in his runs. Even the pros didn't do as many hard variations back to back then.
In the clip from A Wicked Ride, above, he and Windy Osborn both mention the photo shoot at his house. That happened during my short stint at working at Wizard Publications. I know this because I remember Windy talking about how insanely high his airs were at that shoot. I also remember because she hand printed the black and white 8 X 10 photos in her darkroom, like always. The favorite ones got picked to be in the magazine, and went with the artwork to the printer. All the other B&W 8 X 10's became fair game for Andy, Lew, Gork, and me to snag and tack up on our office walls.
At the very end of the clip, you see the black and white photo of Joe doing a front foot rocket air, called a Neil Armstrong, with both feet on the front pegs, which was, and still is, freakin' impossible in my book. The photo is phenomenal. I love that photo. I don't think it got shown in the first article about Joe, because I had that original, Windy Osborn shot and printed, 8 X 10 on my office wall. Really.
Even crazier, years later, when Wizard Publications was closing down, I was roommates with Chris Moeller of S&M bikes fame, who had been a test rider and contributing writer at Wizard. He got the call that they were cleaning out the building, and Moeller and I went down and dug through the "trash." That included HUNDREDS of 8 X 10 photos. This huge box of them had been thrown in the dumpster. I wanted to keep all of them, being the only guy thinking about the distant future then. But Chris, Bill Grad, and me shared a tiny, 1 bedroom apartment. Chris had the bedroom, I had the living room floor, and bill had the 2 cushion couch. We just didn't have room to save the Wizard photos. God's gonna pimp slap me for that one in the afterlife, I know. So Chris and I went through them, and picked a few each to keep. One of the three or four I kept was that shot of Joe doing the Neil Armstrong that had been on my office wall. You know how I talk about losing all my videos and stuff when I moved to NC in 2008? That photo was in the storage unit I lost. Damn.
I went on to work at the AFA, and then Unreel Productions. As a rider, I started doing tailwhip footplants on street, real slow and clunky, but original for the time. Joe, meanwhile, invented the tailwhip air. I became convinced that they could be done on a jump, and started trying them. My problem was, I didn't get much air and sucked at jumping. I just didn't get high enough to get the bike all the way around and land them. I also convinced myself that bunnyhop tailwhips were possible, and I began trying them in 1987. At that time, telling people I was trying bunnyhop tailwhips would be like a rider today saying, "I'm working on bunnyhop double backflips." It was so impossible, it became a joke. Nobody thought that trick would ever happen.
Meanwhile, Joe Johnson, who actually had amazing riding skills, got single tailwhips on vert wired, and the started doing one handed ones. While most of the 1988 vert riders hucked 900 attempts, Joe worked out the double tailwhip. Like you see in the clip above, Joe landed the first double tailwhip, on vert, at the 2-Hip King of Vert in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. I hate to admit it, but I totally forgot that was the first double tailwhip he landed. I forgot, because a bit later that afternoon, Mat Hoffman landed the first 900 in a contest... and that overshadowed everything else from that contest. What makes forgetting Joe's first double tailwhip even worse is that I was there... on the deck of the ramp... with a fucking $50,000 professional betacam camera. Yeah, really... here's my footage of Joe's first double whip, at 11:31.
Somehow I forgot I happened to shoot that epic trick the first time he landed it. Sorry Joe. That 900 Mat landed at 14:43 in this clip above dulled my memory of the rest of the weekend.
I do remember, though, being at Woodward in Pennsylvania for the 2-Hip King of Vert there a couple of months later. Again, I was the Unreel Productions cameraman, sent there because Vision sponsored the 2-Hip contest series. At :38 in the top clip, you can see Joe huck the first attempt at a triple tailwhip. It was the spring of 1989. My footage from that contest was edited into the Ride Like a Man video by Eddie Roman. The triple tailwhip try isn't in the video. I do remember that I got to State College, PA for that college, and found that the airline had lost the batteries and videotape for my camera. I got them at the last moment, and I think a battery went dead or something.
Luckily, in this here internet era with YouTube and all, I found this clip, with just Joe's runs from Woodward. You can really get a sense of how freakin' high Joe was getting really well from this angle. If you read this blog on a regular basis, you know that the stories of the old freestyle days I tell are my memories of these events, usually stoked back into my head by watching video of the events if possible. I'm not telling all of you the unbiased, official, historical account of these events. And like I've said many, many times, I was an industry guy with a weird string of jobs. Because of that, I wound up standing nearby when some amazing stuff went down. I mean that absolutely literally. At 3:49 in this clip, Joe flies out to catch his breath and stoke up the crowd. You'll see a guy on the deck, just to the right of Joe, in a Vision Street Wear T-shirt and lavender shorts (they were free from Vision). That's me. Standing nearby as the crowd chants for Joe to try a triple tailwhip. Then Joe rolls in, and four walls later, tries a triple tailwhip for the first time in human history. We went berzerk. Joe actually came crazy close. No... wait... he got the bike all the way around on the third whip, and he's from New England. He came wicked close to pulling the triple tailwhip that day.
On the way out, I was walking with Mike Miranda (Vision BMX team manager) and a couple other guys, including Karl Rothe. We saw Joe in a car window, and Karl said something like, "Man Joe, you must be sportin' some major wood after almost landing a triple whip." Then he saw an older woman in the car next to Joe. I think it was Joe's grandma. We just started cracking up as we walked off.
That year, 1989, was the year that the mainstream bike industry decided "BMX is dead" and pulled money out to put it into mountain bikes. Things faded everywhere as top riders lost sponsors. I don't think I ever ran into Joe after 1989. He faded away into New England life I guess. That December, I came agonizingly close to landing a few bunnyhop tailwhips. But not quite. I never did land one. But in 1990, Bill Nitschke, a much, much more talented rider than me, made them real in front of a Burger King. The Whopper, the kind with all hop and no cheese, was born, sparked, no doubt, by seeing Joe Johnson make the tailwhip and double tailwhip airs a reality.
As time went on, Mat Hoffman took vert to yet another level in the Eddie Roman produced video, Headfirst. He became the vert rider most people in later years think of when asked about the late 1980's. But vert would never be what it is now with out the clean cut, quiet, New England guy, Joe Johnson.
I'm going to be sharing my most of my old school BMX stories on the new Block Bikes Blog from now on, check it out...
Here's old school BMXer Rick Thorne with even older school skate legend Steve Alba at one of my favorite places in the world, The Nude Bowl. Way out in the SoCal desert, on a hillside past Palm Springs and overlooking Desert Hot Springs, there lies the remains of a nudist colony. Sometime in the late 1970's or early 80's, the naked people abandoned it. Somehow, skaters found it.
I started working on an old school BMX project today, and looked up some riders from BITD on You Tube. Much to my surprise, I found Rick Thorne's Pool Hunters. The bald guy in this clip looks vaguely familiar. Anyhow, I watched four different clips tonight, and this one at the Nude Bowl with pool skating legend Steve Alba reminded me of my sessions there. A blog post was inevitable. I even learned a few things about the pool I didn't know in this clip.
I first heard of the Nude Bowl in 1988, in my little cubby hole of a room at Unreel Productions, the Vision Skateboards video company. The biggest part of my job then was dubbing copies of videos for people throughout the Vision world. People of all different jobs needed videos, mostly VHS copies, of different things, and I made those copies. I was also the tape librarian, so I made window dubs of all the raw footage that got shot, labeled the tapes, and organized them in the tape vault. One of the best parts of that job was that I got to watch raw footage that the skaters shot, usually a day or two after it happened. In those tapes, I first saw footage of this crazy pool out in the desert called the Nude Bowl, and several other skate spots. This was at a time when Del Mar skatepark closed, and the sole surviving skatepark in Southern California was Pipeline in Upland.
While I always sucked at riding ramps, and never could air much above coping, but I loved riding pools. Figuring out lines and carving pools was a blast, just pumping around at speed seemed one of the best things to do on a bike. I finally bought Mike Sarrail's old truck in '88, and managed to ride Pipeline five or six times right before it closed. Since I happened to work for Don Hoffman, whose parents owned Pipeline, I was able to ride Pipeline a bunch more times after it closed. I loved riding pools from then on, even though I never rose above coping.
Sometime in late '88 or early '89, I got the job of taking a couple of the Vision skaters out to the Nude Bowl for a session and a low key video shoot. I can't remember which skaters, though Kele Rosecrans comes to mind. So we made the trip inland, and I bounced the little Unreel Toyota van off road and got about 100 yards from the pool. The road was too gnarly at the time to get the van to the top. We hiked the last little bit, and when I first saw the pool, it seemed like the best thing in the world. In those days, we had to worry about police or security guards nearly every spot we rode. But at the Nude Bowl, nobody gave a fuck. That was awesome.
I went out to the Nude Bowl two or three more times in '89, to shoot video of skaters, and I made sure to take my bike and carve some lines when I could. In those days, when there were no concrete skateparks at all, it was amazing to ride a pool, hour after hour, and not worry about anybody shutting the session down.
When I started working on my self-produced video, The Ultimate Weekend, in 1990, a session at the Nude Bowl was one of the first places I thought of. It was sometime in the summer when I finally got it to happen. Somehow, I was able to talk skatepark legend Brian Blyther to make the trip out there, though he wasn't riding vert all the time then. He brought Xavier Mendez, another skatepark rider from the 80's. I got the then unknown ripper Keith Treanor, English vert rider John Povah, and flatlander/photographer Mike Sarrail, and we headed out. Despite it being 105 degrees out, we had a great little session. I got footage for my video, and it was a good day all around, despite the heat. You can watch it at 25:54 in this video.
As luck would have it, that session at the Nude Bowl wound up being the first time the pool showed up in a bike video. To make it even better, I used music from Toledo punk band, The Stain, and they had recorded a song called "Pool Party" for some skater friends. It was the perfect song, and I had these crazy dreams of making it a music video and getting it played on MTV. That never happened, but it was a cool video section anyway. In these two clips, you can see a 27 year span of one of the most legendary skate/bike pools ever. Props to Rick Thorne for doing a great series on real life pool riding and skating.
Rick's Nude Bowl clip had 2,605 views when I wrote this post. I'm just curious how many views this post may help it get.
I'm doing most of my new writing on Substack now, check it out:
When I thought of great, all-around riders from the 1990's, my old P.O.W. House roommate Brian Foster was the second one who came to mind. He's got pro racer speed, gets huge air, rides all kinds of terrain, and has one of the classic styles of all time. The first guy to pop in my mind was Ryan Nyquist, but I know he'll be on the list below on no time flat. Yes, I know Brian was riding in the 80's, and this clip is from a few years ago. But he really made a name for himself in the 90's.
To add a name to this list, I need three separate riders from the era to nominate that person. You can submit names to me on Facebook (Steve Emig-Winston-Salem, NC) or email them to stevenemig13@gmail.com . I expect to be overwhelmed, so be patient, it may take a while for your nominee to get put on the list.
Never met him, but Morgan Wade has been one of my favorite riders to watch in the 2000's. To add a worthy rider to the list, I need three separate riders to endorse that name. You can contact me (Steve Emig- Winston-Salem, NC) on Facebook or email me at stevenemig13@gmail.com . It may take a while to get your guys on the list, have patience.
