Ultimate Weekend Flatland

Hey guys, I'm sorry I haven't posted for a while.  My computer broke, and accessing other computers has been sketchy at best.  Anyhow, I'm continuing on with look back on the 25th anniversary of the release of my self-produced 1990 video, The Ultimate Weekend. 

Today's section starts at 4:37 in this clip, with a Huntington beach flatlander named Red.  As I recall, his real name was Joe Goodfellow.  He's no relation to "Crazy Red" Mike Carlson, found later in this video.  By 1990, I had given up on ever being a pro flatlander, although I would still go out and practice flatland nearly every night.  During 1987 and 1988, the scuffing/rolling tricks took hold, led by the Golden Gate Park crew debuting the Backyard to the world.  Technically, scuffing started with the insanely original NorCal  Skyway pro Oleg Konings in about 1985.  But his scuffing tricks didn't catch on.  In 1987, the Backyard caught on, and then Kevin Jones blew minds with the Locomotive, his no hand version of the Backyard.  Suddenly, the many individual styles in flatland began to merge into the forward rolling tricks movement.  Let me correct myself, actually, Denny Howell doing the whiplash in 1986 got the forward rolling trick idea going.  Then the others I mentioned followed.

On one hand, these tricks were super hard for the time period, and really innovative.  But on the negative side, everyone's riding style started to look like everyone elses.  That bummed me out.  Since my motivation was to always be trying something new, I took my flatland in a different direction.  While nearly everyone else was stoked on rolling tricks, I started trying to invent new hopping tricks.  Not the stationary hops of the mid-80's, but a new kind.  I did a backwards wheelie one day, and tapped my back brake and hopped in the middle of it, then landed and continued the wheelie.  I kept playing around with weird tricks like that.  By the time I shot this video, I could do half-cabs six or eight feet, looback half-cabs, rolling backwards bunnyhops, nollies, full cabs (rollback 360 bunnyhop) and I was trying "King Cabs (rolling backwards into a 540 bunnyhop).  I also had this absolutely crazy trick I tried for about three years, the bunnyhop tailwhip, which I never landed cleanly.

Now, I know these days most of those are standard street tricks.  But in 1990, these tricks were considered stupid.  So I didn't put any of them in this video.  I went with the Huntington beach locals like Red, Andy Mucahy, newcomer Sean Johnson (the black dude) and a few others.  I met these most of kids when they were just getting into BMX freestyle, and I was one of the guys who taught them some basic tricks.  Over the years they became damn good flatlanders.  They weren't the top riders in the country by any means, but they were good, they were local, and I gave them five minutes in the video.

One other thing to note was that I used a skateboard to film some of the tricks, like the Hang 5 at 4:53, Andy's hitch hiker at 5:19, and one or two other tricks.  To BMXers and skaters, that was simple, low budget camera work, and it looked pretty cool.  But a year later, working on an actual TV production, I showed these shots to pro cameramen, and they were blown away.  They had no idea how I got those shots rolling around a moving rider.  When I told them I did it on a skateboard, they flipped.  Not only were us BMXers and skateboarders progressing in our own weird little sports, we were also progressing in art, photography, and in video camera work.  Our weird little videos not only stoked riders, but they helped change the way Hollywood did its work years later.  Pretty cool.

The H Ramp

Yeah, I know I'm lagging.  My laptop died, so I'm blogging without my own computer right now, which sucks.  Anyhow, October 2015 was the 25th anniversary of the release of my first self-produced BMX video, The Ultimate Weekend, in 1990.  So I'm going to jump ahead to 1990 in this blog, and tell the story of this video, section by section. 

At 2:08 in this clip, after the intro, we get to a mini-ramp.  Seems like a pretty lame section of mostly Keith Treanor, with a bit of John Povah and Alan Valek riding.  What's cool about this section is that I think this is the first time a mini-ramp appeared in any BMX video.  To the best of my knowledge, the first mini-ramp was the Towne Street ramp in Costa Mesa, California, built by a bunch of the Schmitt Stix skaters.  They originally built a 9 foot high vert halfpipe, but the neighbors complained (typical) and the city inspectors came to check out the ramp.  Backyard ramps were really rare in those days, even in California, and the city guys weren't sure what to do about it.  After some research, they realized it wasn't illegal to have a ramp, but it had to be no higher than six feet.  So the skaters chopped the the top three feet of their vert ramp off, and BOOM, the first under vert mini-ramp was born.  They soon realized that an under vert ramp allowed a whole bunch of new tricks to be performed, and the idea caught on.

A year or two later, some skaters in Santa Ana, CA built two mini-ramps side by side, and they had a little spine in between the two so skaters could transfer from one to the other.  The ramps formed a big letter "H", and became known as the H-Ramp.  Skaters from all over came to session it.  Later on it was rebuilt into an "L" shape with a hip, five feet tall as I recall.  Then at one end of the "L" was a larger, six foot mini.  That's the set-up you see in this video.  The reason Keith Treanor does a million tail taps, and not much else, is because this footage was shot on his second of third trip to the H-Ramp.  Keith went on to become a master of mini-ramps, but this was when he was just learning to ride them. 

Other stories about the H-Ramp... My boss, Don Hoffman, at Unreel Productions was shooting footage of Vision skaters there one day when he accidentally stepped off the back edge of the deck.  He fell five feet awkwardly, and the camera slammed him in the face.  That doesn't sound like too big of a deal, but we used 35 pound Betacam cameras then, and Don got worked by that beast.  He looked kinda like the Elephant Man for about a week, and the fall cost about $3,000 damage to the camera and $4,000 to Don's face.  We never let him live that one down. 

Another story there is one time I was riding the ramp with Keith Treanor, John Povah, and Jess Dyrenforth.  At that time, Jess was changing from a BMX rider to an inline skater.  He brought his girlfriend, Angie Walton, to the ramp.  She was also a skater, and was trying to learn some kind of handstand drop-in thing on her blades.  Somehow, I got the job of holding her ankles while she was in the handstand to stabilize her before she tried to drop-in.  I was trying to be a gentleman and not look down her shorts to see her underwear as I did this.  But I wasn't a great gentleman and she had pretty standard issue white underwear on.  If her name sounds familiar, it's because she became a major force in the inline world, publishing a magazine (called Daily Bread, I think) and then she was the main force behind starting the Warped Tour, which was a damn cool idea.

Before The Ultimate Weekend Was Made

This is Freestyle's Raddest Tricks, produced by the crew at BMX Plus! magazine in 1985.  This is a good example of the handful of highly promoted videos in the 1980's.  What's way cool is that it is introduced by Bob Haro himself, the creator of BMX Freestyle.  What sucks is that the camera work is terrible because the professional cameramen had no idea which direction the riders were going most of the time.  Everyone's wearing leathers, usually a helmet, and Robert Peterson even has goggles on his helmet.  Everything is staged at a time when flatland jam circles were what really happened in parking lots and at contests.  On many occasions, the editors don't show the landing of a trick, which riders always want to see.  This video is what happened when the guys at a magazine hired a video production company which usually produced corporate training and promotional videos.  The budget for a video like this in the mid 80's was usually $30,000 to $40,000 or more.  I'm not kidding.  At that time, consumer video cameras shot poor quality footage, and professional cameras could cost $50,000 for a broadcast quality betacam (NOT Betamax) with a good lense.  It just plain cost a ton of money to make a video, which meant you had to sell thousands of copies to make any money.  Because of those dynamics, very few BMX freestyle videos got made back then, and they often lost money for the company that produced them.

To be fair, I was SO STOKED when I got this video in the mail, that I watched the whole video SEVEN TIMES the first day.  One time that day I watched the whole half-hour video while balancing on my bike, in the living room, in front of the TV.  I'm not kidding.

A year after I got this video, I was working at Wizard Publications.  The next year I produced a really lame TV commercial for the American Freestyle Association to promote a contest in Austin, Texas.  That led to producing six really simple AFA videos while I worked as newsletter editor there.  AFA owner Bob Morales had advertised the videos, but just didn't have the time to produce them.  So I went to Unreel Productions, the video production company owned by Vision Skateboards/Vision Street Wear.  Vision Street Wear sponsored the AFA national contests, and sent a cameraman to shoot video of each event.  I got to go through all that footage and pick the shots that I wanted in each video.  Then I took my paper list of tapes and time codes to Unreel, and they put me in their $500,000 edit bay with a young but incredible video editor named Dave Alvarez.  Dave showed me how editing worked, and I told him what riders wanted to see, like the landing of every trick, for example.  Then we argued a bit, and Dave edited the videos as I called the shots.  I was 20 years old at the time, and completely blown away by sitting in a room that looked like the bridge of the Star Trek Enterprise and actually producing videos.

I spent so much time at Unreel that year, that they hired me at the end of 1987 to make dubs of tapes.  In the real TV world, that job is called being a "production assistant" or "PA."  But at Unreel, they called me The Dub Guy.  During my time there, I watched the Unreel staff make skateboard videos, snowboard videos, fashion videos, BMX videos, and the first action sports TV series.  We also put on the Vision Skate Escape contest, and the '89 2-Hip King of Vert event, which were the biggest skate and BMX freestyle contests ever put on at the time.  I was the low man on the totem pole the whole time, but I was also the only BMXer in a office full of surfers, so I did get some input on the bike videos.  Not much, but a little.  One one hand, it was really cool that we made an action sports TV series, seven years before the X-Games.  On the other hand, all of our videos seemed kind of hokey to me, and they didn't really show the lifestyle I was living then.  I rode every night after work.  On the weekends I rode for crowds at the Huntington Beach pier, basically I was a street performer who never put out a hat.  I hung out with a bunch of freestyle skaters like Pierre Andre and Don Brown, and other street skaters would cruise by the pier.  Street skating was just beginning then, and Mark Gonzales, Ed Templeton, and a load of other great skaters were there often.  On the bike side, well known SoCal local Mike Sarrail was at the pier every weekend, and guys like Martin Aparijo and Woody Itson showed up once in a while.  The Lakewood Posse of amateurs: Jeff Cotter, Ron McCoy, Nathan Shimizu, Ron Camero, and others were there often.  We did flatland for the crowds, and then went off in our own directions to ride the streets and jumps the rest of the time.

What I was living and what I saw in the handful of BMX freestyle videos then were two different things.  Spanning the two worlds, Ron Wilkerson called me up and asked me to edit the 2-Hip video for the 1988 contest season, which was the seventh BMX video I produced.  You can find it online now as 2-Hip BHIP.  With that video I tied with Don Hoffman for the number of BMX videos produced.  He had also made seven BMX videos.  Don Hoffman?  Few of you know his name, but he was the top guy at Unreel, and he made a bunch of early videos with Bob Morales at the AFA during the skatepark era.  While I worked at Unreel, Don was trying to make Vision videos which were as cool as the Powell Peralta Bones Brigade videos, which were the top skateboard videos of that era.  He also led the push to get action sports on TV, which he did.  We called it the Sports on the Edge Series.  To give you an idea of how popular these sports were then, here's the reply Unreel got from ESPN when they tried to sell the network an action sports TV series in 1988.  The suits at ESPN said, "Nobody wants to watch skateboarding on TV... and what the hell is snowboarding?"  Don Hoffman and the Unreel crew was ahead of our time.  We actually did syndicate the series of six TV shows, but Vision started to have financial troubles at the same time.  The company hit its peak and sales started to drop as the skateboarding trend dropped off.  Vision wasn't prepared to spend $75,000 the next year, plus production costs, to keep the action sports TV series going.  Instead, in early 1990 Vision shut down Unreel Productions, and laid off everyone but the production coordinator and me, the two cheapest people on the crew.  Don Hoffman continued to work on a freelance basis, and the other crew members moved on to other jobs.  The two of us left got moved into an office at the main Vision warehouse, and we sat there and didn't do much of anything for months.  The production coordinator found herself a job in Hollywood.  Then it was just me... sitting in an office in Vision, waiting to be called to shoot video of one thing or another.  That happened maybe once a week.  The rest of the time I just sat there doing next to nothing.  I edited little videos and watched old footage and got paid for it.  But I was bored out of my skull.  I was tired of working on hokey videos.  I wanted to make a video that showed the BMX freestyle world that I lived in.  So I bought an S-VHS camera, some video tape, and I teamed up with Mike Sarrail and started shooting video of different riders almost every weekend.  And I saved my money up to make my own video.  I didn't really know if I could make a video all by myself.  But I wanted to try.  That was my goal for the year of 1990.

The Idea for The Ultimate Weekend video

Here's my 1990, self-produced BMX freestyle video, The Ultimate Weekend.  This month (October 2015) is the 25th anniversary of the release of that video.  I really wanted to make a sequel and "where are they now" companion video for this anniversary.  But it just wasn't in the cards.  So I'm going to spend some time blogging about the story behind The Ultimate Weekend, one of the first rider-made videos.  Many thanks to Alan Valek for uploading it to You Tube. 

Every human-made creation, whether it's a movie, a book, a piece of art, a product, or a company, first starts as an idea in a single person's head.  The Ultimate Weekend came out in the fall of 1990, but the initial idea goes back to the fall of 1986.  I started a BMX freestyle zine in 1985 in San Jose, California.  Over the course of several issues, I interviewed Dave Vanderspek, Maurice Meyer, Hugo Gonzales, and several other pros and amateurs from the San Francisco Bay Area.  At that point, freestyle had become the focus in my life, and I reported on the NorCal scene, which was like no other in the freestyle world at that time.  Much to my surprise, my zine led to writing a contest article for FREESTYLIN' magazine.  Even more to my surprise, that led to a full time job at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines.  Suddenly I was not only part of the freestyle industry, but I was getting paid to help put out the coolest magazines, and I was riding all the time. 

One evening, at the end of our working day, FREESTYLIN' editor Andy Jenkins summoned Lew, Gork, and me out to the parking lot.  He said he'd been thinking about approaching Oz (aka Bob Osborn, our publisher and boss) with the idea to make a video.  The bad part was, Oz had paid a huge sum of money to have a video production firm make a video about the BMX Action Trick Team a few years before.  The video was well produced, but it cost tens of thousands of dollars to make, and it lost a lot of money.  There just wasn't a market for BMX videos in those early days.  Andy wanted us to brainstorm some ideas for a new video, one that could be done for much less money, yet have the backing of the two Wizard Publications magazines.  But the idea had to be amazing before Andy would take it to Oz.  We sat on the curb and threw ideas around for half an hour or so.  My best idea was to recreate our real lives.  We would get off work on Friday night, and just have "The Ultimate Weekend," riding with top pros, going to shows, contests, and even doing some "street riding," which was a new idea then. 

That was basically what we did every weekend.  Gork, Lew, and I were roommates, and Andy lived a few doors down with his wife.  If there was a local contest, we'd pile into Gork's van and go to it, or to a show in the area.  If there was nothing going on that weekend, I'd wake up Saturday morning, make a HUGE stack of pancakes, watch the Bones Brigade II, Future Primitive skate video, and then go ride all day.  Part of the day I would explore Hermosa Beach, Redondo Beach and the surrounding area on my own.  Part of the time I'd ride with the locals, like Craig Grasso, Lew, Gork, Chris Day, and even R.L. Osborn now and then.  To me, that seemed like it would make a great video. 

But it wasn't a strong enough idea for Andy.  In fact, none of our ideas were strong enough, and Andy never did take the video idea to Oz.  We did, however, make a home made video.  Someone loaned Gork a 8mm video camera, and he shot random riding and funny bits, and chopped them all together.  For an intro, he intended to spell out the letters V-I-D-E-O on his computer.  Keep in mind, this was a Kaypro, mid-80's word processor.  There were no fancy graphics back then.  So Gork spent hours making a huge "V" out of little v's on his computer screen.  Then he shot a few seconds of it on video.  Then he erased the "V" and made a big "I" out of i's.  He literally spent hours doing this.  When the whole thing was edited together on a VHS tape, Gork showed us his masterpiece.  One small problem.  Spelling wasn't Gork's strong suit, and he spelled the intro V-I-D-I--E-O.  It was a pretty funny video with some good riding in it.  We called it the "Gork Vid-I-eo."  I don't know how many people actually saw it, but the biggest thing that video did was to make us realize that we could actually make a low-budget video that was worth watching.  At that point, there were only a handful of BMX videos, and they were all made by "professional" video production companies.  Those people knew video, but they didn't have a clue about BMX.  So they would often lose the rider out of the shot.  Or they wouldn't show someone landing a trick.  Or they spun the camera around and made the watcher dizzy.  Those videos were good on one level, but totally sucked from a hardcore rider's perspective. 

At the time of our parking lot meeting at Wizard, I think the only rider-made video was Eddie Roman's "Aggro Riding and Kung Fu Fighting," which I think he did as a school project.  Actually, there was also a professional video editor named Carl Marquardt (I think that's how he spelled it) who was also a rider in New York City.  He made short videos, five minutes or so, and sent them to us at the magazine.  As far as I know, those were the first rider-made videos. 

After that brainstorming session at Wizard, I kept that idea of a video showing a really awesome weekend of riding in my head.  In 1990, as my job at Vision was dying, I started shooting video on my own, different riders or locations each weekend, and made my first self-produced video, and that became The Ultimate Weekend.

The End of BMX Plus

I found this clip above on You Tube of a BMX Plus! photographer shooting Gary Young doing a one hand tabletop wall ride for the 30th anniversary cover of the magazine.  Classic style.

If you're an old school BMXer of any kind, then you probably already know that BMX Plus! magazine is being shut down after thirty-seven years in business.  Those of you who know me or have read my blogs know that I worked for a short time at Wizard Publications, home of BMX Action and FREESTYLIN', so you may think I'm glad to see Plus close up shop.  Well, I'm not.  The first BMX magazine I traded my hard earned money for was the December 1982 issue of BMX Plus! with Stompin' Stu Thomsen  on the cover.  In those early days of my BMX life, BMX Plus! was the only BMX magazine carried at the grocery stores in Boise, Idaho, where I lived.  Later on, in a bike shop, my friends and I discovered BMX Action, but it was Plus that we flipped through first.  In those pre-internet days, magazines were the only source of BMX news for us riders in obscure parts of the country.  For Southern California riders, where the BMX scene developed, it was different.  They actually knew many of the riders in the magazines.  But for the rest of us around the U.S., and around the world, we had only those photos and words to learn about the BMX world.  Magazines were magic in those early days.

But we don't live in those days anymore.  Our little, weird sport of racing and doing tricks on a little kid's bike has now spread across the world.  The technological advances since then have led to many other forms of media (like this blog, for example) exploring, talking about, and showing the BMX world of today and yesterday.  For us old guys, it's sad to think that those days of awesome, full page photos that we ripped out of magazines and taped to our bedroom walls, are over.  No more stories of John Ker shooting a full roll of film of a rider doing a single hard trick, just to get that one perfectly focused photo.  Like it or not, the magazine days are drawing to a close.  It's always hard to see something we invested our time, money, and interest in come to a close.  I still love going to Barnes & Noble and flipping through magazine after magazine, not just BMX, but many different types.  That store is the only place around here that still has a huge magazine section.  Like all of you, I'll miss BMX Plus!.  I think I had one small article in it in the 80's, and a few words and a photo or two in Hi-Torque's freestyle mag, American Freestyler.  So I contributed a tiny amount to the 37 year history of BMX that it represents.  I read many, many copies of the magazine, put dozens of its photos on my wall, and knew firsthand some of the people who made that magazine in years past.  We now come to the end of an era.  But in this new world, other forms of media will rise up to take its place.  Thanks to the entire staff of BMX Plus! for all that you have brought us over the years, and I hope all of you are successful in your future endeavors.  

Crazy California 43- This blog's about weird, cool, and historic locations in California that have an interesting story. 

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30 Years of Self Publishing

Blog post:  Zines, and my 30 years of self-publishing

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The second zine article in FREESTYLIN' magazine, August, 1986.  My zine, San Jose Stylin'; topped the list.

A zine is a small, self-published booklet.  They can contain thoughts, interviews, rants, photos, collage, artwork, poetry, and anything else you can put on a blank piece of paper.  They're usually made by a single person, but occasionally by a small group.  The Asian pop culture magazine Giant Robot started as a Xerox zine, for example.  Often there's theft involved, if only "borrowing" the office copy machine and paper, or maybe stealing staples or copy paper form work.  Sometimes they were called fanzines or chapbooks.  Thomas Paine's Common Sense, which helped inspire the American Revolution, was a basically a zine of its time period.  Zines are often horrible and wonderful at the same time.  You can say whatever the fuck you want in a zine, there are no editors or censors.  For much of the 20th century, from sci-fi in the 1930's to poetry in the 1960's, and exploding with punk rock in the 1970's and 1980's, zines have been a counter culture media staple for decades.  Despite the amazing internet publishing technology of the 21st century, zine culture remains strong. 

It's kind of depressing that the short documentary, "$100 & a T-Shirt," is the best thing on YouTube about zines.  Thousands upon thousands of different zines were published over the last few decades, but no one got around to doing a full on film about the many zine scenes.  In any case, that documentary sums up the zine publisher's motives pretty well.  (That video was embedded in the original version of this blog post, published in September 2015). 

The other day I was cooking pancakes for breakfast, and my mind was wandering as I cooked.  For some reason, it suddenly occurred to me that this month, September 2015, marks my thirty year anniversary in self-publishing.  Like many self-publishers from Generation X, it all started with a zine.  Just over thirty years ago, in late August of 1985, I finished my summer job at the Boise Fun Spot, a small amusement park in Boise, Idaho.  I packed up my 1971 Pontiac Bonneville, which was approximately the size of an aircraft carrier, and drove to my parents' new home in San Jose, California. 

My first couple of weeks in San Jose were spent unpacking, getting to know my new city, and looking for a job.  I soon found a job at a Pizza Hut, and began a routine of working nights at the restaurant, coming home and doing balance tricks in my room for an hour or two, caffeine buzzed on Pepsi and Mountain Dew I drank at work, and then going to sleep.  I'd wake up in the late morning, eat some breakfast, do the chores that needed done, and hop on my bike and street ride around San Jose.  I knew there were lots of good riders in the San Francisco Bay area, but I had no idea where they were or how to meet them.  Things were like that in the pre-internet days.

I had been toying with the idea of publishing a zine in Idaho, but I never got around to actually doing it.  I'd first heard of bike and skate zines in FREESTYLIN' magazine, and the idea of making a zine was appealing to me.  I'm not sure why.  I didn't think of myself as a writer then, I kind of thought of myself as a photographer, even though I only had a Kodak 110 camera.  Remember those little things?  After thinking about it for a couple of weeks, I decided to make my first zine, using photos from Idaho, and my trip to the 1985 AFA contest in Venice Beach, California.  

Like most zine publishers, I had a couple of problems when I started.  First, I'd never actually seen a real zine, I'd only read about them.  Second, I didn't have a typewriter.  Yeah... a typewriter.  Sure, the first Apple Macintosh computers had come out a year earlier, but only rich people bought those things then.  So I went to the huge San Jose swap meet, and bought a manual Royal typewriter for $15.  By "manual," I mean that it wasn't even electric.  It came in a big case, and looked like it was from the 1920's or something.  With that piece of crap typewriter, I began my writing and self-publishing career.

My sole purpose in making my first zine was to meet other freestylers in the San Jose area, and eventually, the other Bay Area riders.  Much to my surprise, it actually worked.  My first zine was three sheets of paper, with stories and photos on both sides, stapled in the corner.  I didn't even know that you were supposed to fold the pages in half like a little book.  I dropped off copies of my zine to a few local bike shops, and (snail) mailed copies to the editors and writers of the main BMX magazines.  I don't know why, it just seemed like the right thing to do.  My zine was called San Jose Stylin', and it was horrifically ugly.  But, in those pre-internet days, I started publishing news of the BMX freestyle world a month after it happened, at a time when the major magazines printed the news three months after it happened.  I became the de facto source for up-to-date freestyle news in the U.S..  That was totally by accident, the whole thing blossomed and evolved as it went.  I also interviewed the top riders in the Bay Area, who included pros Dave Vanderspek, Maurice Meyer, Robert Peterson,  Oleg Konings, Hugo Gonzales, and Rick Allison, as well as lots of incredible amateurs.

Very much to my surprise, my zine was chosen as the top BMX zine in the country, by the guys at FREESTYLIN' magazine the next time they did an article about zines.  That led to writing a contest article for them as a freelancer, then ultimately a full time job at Wizard Publications, home of BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines.  I had no idea when I started, but publishing that first zine led to a totally different direction in my life.  FREESTYLIN' magazine editor Andy Jenkins changed the course of my life with one phone call.  He asked if I wanted to interview for a job at Wizard Publications, because of my self-published zine.  Andy himself really understood this, because his life changed when Wizard publisher Bob Osborn offered Andy his job, because of a post card Andy had written to him, after winning a bike in a contest.  Andy knew the randomness of serendipity, and the huge ways it could change someone's direction in life.  

I only lasted five months at Wizard, mostly because I wasn't punk rock enough, and didn't like the band Skinny Puppy.  And because I was a kind of bossy, uptight dork back then.  I didn't meld well with that crew, and they laid me off.  They permanently replaced me with some East Coast biker/skater kid named Spike Jonze.  He was a cool kid, I wonder whatever happened to him?  Heh, heh, heh. (By the way, I stole "heh, heh, heh" from Andy J.)

After Wizard, I wrote and edited the American Freestyle Association newsletter for all of 1987.  From proofreading two magazines, and being a gofer at Wizard, I was suddenly writing, shooting photos, and laying out an 8 to 16 page newsletter every month.  And in my spare time I was putting heat transfers on T-shirts, and helping put on the AFA's local and national contests.  Less money, but I learned a lot more, and it was more fulfilling, and frustrating, at the same time.  

While at the AFA, I started producing BMX freestyle videos, and really bad TV commercials for AFA contests.  I also put out a single issue of an audio cassette zine that year.  Yeah, an audio cassette zine.  I made a kind of mix tape, with contest play by plays, interviews straight to tape, and random thoughts about freestyle, and some music.  Basically, I made a podcast 20 years before podcasts were invented, and 30+ years before podcasts became cool.  It wasn't the greatest idea, but it was fun to try in 1987.  You don't know how ideas will fly unless you try. 

From the AFA, I got hired at Unreel Productions, the video production company owned by Vision Skate Boards/Vision Street Wear.  My main job there was duplicating tapes for anyone in their companies who needed them.  During that time, I started publishing Periscope zine.  The idea that sparked that zine was that we all only see a little piece of the world through our own "periscopes."  Each of us focuses on certain things, a small part of the total reality, much like a submarine captain looking through a periscope.  So I wrote to the world about what I saw through my periscope.  That zine had a lot of BMX freestyle in it, but also other random thoughts and ideas about other things I was interested in.

The punk rock inspired, D.I.Y. idea of self-publishing morphed into video self-production, led by rider/producer Eddie Roman in the late 1980's freestyle world.  I produced or edited 7 BMX freestyle videos in the late 80's, six for the AFA and one for Ron Wilkerson at 2-Hip.  Much of that time I was a production assistant working with the crew making Vision skateboard, snowboard, and BMX videos and TV shows.  

Then in 1990, I self-produced my own video, with some late financial help from riding buddy, Mike Sarrail.  The video was called, The Ultimate Weekend.  I lost some money, but made a video I was pretty stoked on.  That led to producing and editing the first two videos for Chris Moeller's garage BMX company, S&M Bikes.  Ultimately, I produced, and/or edited 14 low budget BMX, skateboard, and snowboard videos.  Due to my video production background, I also wound up working in the TV industry in the early 1990's.  I worked on the crew of over 300 episodes of a dozen different TV shows, including four seasons on the hit show American Gladiators. 

A couple years later, while sleeping on the floor of the tiny apartment where Chris Moeller ran S&M Bikes, Chris showed me a book of Henry Rollins' poetry.  At that time, I had been writing poetry for several years, hiding it, and not telling anyone about it.  After reading Rollins' poems, I decided to do a zine of my best poems.  It took months to edit, type (this time on an electric typewriter), and publish that zine. It had 80 or 90 poems, and had so many pages that I had to duct tape the zine together, staples wouldn't go through all those pages.  The first poem in that zine was called "Journey of the White Bear," written after getting dumped by a girlfriend in 1988.  From that came my nickname, The White Bear, which became my pen name for years.  Chris Moeller kept calling that, making fun of me, and the name stuck.  I did two more poetry zines in 1996 and 1997.  I published several other zines in the 1990's and 2000's, a few of them 48 pages or more, which is huge by zine standards.

 Many years later, in 2001, I walked into the Van's Skatepark in Orange, CA, and freestyle legend Dennis McCoy was standing at the counter.  When he saw me, he told the guy he was talking to, "This guy makes the best zines!"  He couldn't even remember my name at the time, but he remembered my zines.  As many concussions as Dennis has had, I'm surprised he even remembers his own name anymore, but I was really stoked at his compliment, especially because I hadn't seen him in over a year.*  Another time, at the Huntington Beach U.S.Open of Surfing contest, I ran into former freestyle skater, long time friend, and Etnies vice president, Don Brown.  The same thing happened, he pointed at me and told his friend, "This guy does the best zines."  On that particular day, I had some of my newest zines with me, and gave them each a copy.

All told, I've published about 40 separate zines over the years.  Then, in 2007, working as a taxi driver, I first heard of blogs.  Blogs are easier than zines on many levels, and you can, potentially, reach a much bigger audience, thousands, even millions of people.  But they don't have the same feel that an actual physical zine does.  My taxi blog sucked, but it opened me up to a new form of self-publishing.  

In late 2008, after several tough years working as a taxi driver, which led to a year of homelessness, I went to stay with my family in North Carolina for a little while. Unable to find a job there as the economy collapsed into the Great Recession, I wound up getting stuck there for a decade.  But when I stayed in my parents' apartment, I finally had a computer to start learning about the internet, and everything I'd missed in years working 80+ hours a week as a taxi driver.  I was such a Luddite, I barely ever used a computer at all before 2008.  I actually went to the library and rented a computer for an hour to check email and Google a few things, up until that point. 

I started my first Old School BMX freestyle memoir blog, FREESTYLIN' Mag Tales, in North Carolina, just to vent.  I soon started connecting with people from the early days of freestyle, both people I knew in the flesh, and ones I didn't.  I had no idea there was an old school BMX community online, but I tapped into it with my blog.  I also completely pissed off a couple of the people I once worked with at Wizard Publications, although that definitely wasn't my intention.  I was still figuring out the line between my personal stories, and other people's personal boundaries, at the time. 

After the FREESTYLIN' blog had run its course, I started a new, old school BMX freestyle blog called Freestyle BMX Tales.  That let me write about the rest of my time in the BMX freestyle world.  Later, as a joke, I started a blog about panhandling and homelessness called Make Money Panhandling.  I actually started that blog just to learn the basics of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  I wanted to start a blog with the stupidest name possible that had "make money" in the title.  Then I wanted to move that blog to the top of the Google rankings, using SEO techniques.   Once I got going on it, I found I had a lot to say about homelessness and panhandling, since I'd struggled with it for a few years at that point.  

Those three main blogs garnered over 210,000 page views in their lifetimes.  Now in 2021, the third version of Freestyle BMX Tales (still up now, version 2 was on Wordpress), has over 38,000 page views.  The personal blog I retired a few months ago, Steve Emig: The White Bear, now has over 120,000 page views in about 3 1/2 years.  My newest personal blog, Steve Emig Adventuring, is creeping up on 2,000 page views, a few months into it's run.  That's over 370,000 page views across a few niche blogs, mostly about Old School BMX freestyle, Sharpie art, and economics. (Stats updated in 1/2021 for this ebook). 

All told, I've written well over 2,500 blog posts across 30+ blogs.  Most of those blogs sucked.  Sometimes I would get an idea for a blog, try it a while, and then realize it was a dumb idea, and give up.  But through publishing them, I have learned a lot about how "new media" works, and how to use it effectively.  By "new media" I mean, blogs, the various social media platforms, YouTube, Vimeo, Medium, the late Squidoo site, and all the apps people use daily now.  I studied the work of people like Seth Godin, Mitch Joel, Gary Vaynerchuk, Amanda Palmer, and others who use these new platforms well.  More importantly, I've spent 12 years online writing about things I find interesting.  Hundreds of thousands of page views show that some other people find these things interesting as well. 

At a really dark time in my life, shortly after my dad's death in 2012, I took all the blogs I did up until then down.  I deleted close to 2,000 posts in one evening.  I immediately regretted doing that.  But I needed to keep writing and to keep blogging.  So I started blogging again, not long after, and I'm still blogging regularly, even after threats to severely beat me, buy a lynch mob-type group, because of my blog, in North Carolina.  Hoka hey, it's a good day to write.

Now (2015), 30 years to the month after publishing my first zine, I have two blogs.  The new version of Freestyle BMX Tales, which you're reading right now, and Become Your Own Hero, which is about two things.  (2020 note: Become Your Own Hero turned out to be one of the dumb idea blogs).  One, it's my journey to start all over in life as a middle aged guy reinventing himself.  Second, it's about making the most out of our lives.

I've done a really wide range of things over the last 30 years.  Most of the best things I've done can be traced back to my love of BMX freestyle, and my decision to publish that first crappy BMX freestyle zine in September of 1985.  More than anything, that first zine took me from being a daydreamer who never acted on my ideas, to a person who acts on some of my ideas, and then follows through to finish projects.  That's huge.  That's what publishing the first couple of zines did for me.  Everyone has good ideas.  Most people rarely, or never, act on them, and even fewer follow through and complete their own projects.  In today's new media world, completing your own projects is half of the game.  

I never became the financial success that many of my friends have up to this point, but my crazy adventures in life have left me with a wealth of stories.  And stories are what this particular blog is made of.  I have no idea where these current blogs will lead me, but I'm excited to keep writing them, and I'm stoked that all of you read them.  Thanks everyone for reading my stuff.  Who knows, maybe I'll still be at this in another 30 years.

(Note: December 2020: Five years later, and I updated this post a bit, and it is making it into my first ebook.  Still self-publishing, now for 35 years, and no end in sight).

*Dennis McCoy actually has a really good memory, check out his BMX Hall of Fame speech on YouTube.

This original post was written five months after I made serious suicide attempt in April 2015.  After my dad's death in 2012, but not specifically because of it, I started having serious mental health issues.  It was primarily serious depression, but I had other symptom for a while, as well.  I was on several medications at different times after that, and went to therapy consistently as well.  For over a year in 2013-15, I was on horrible medication that made me feel like a zombie, I had an asshole for a psychiatrist, and the meds killed my creativity and sapped all my energy.  I was living with my crazy mom, couldn't work, and was absolutely miserable.  

I stopped taking my meds for a month, my symptoms came back, and I took a massive overdose one morning.  I should have died, I took enough lithium to kill a rhinoceros, and another medicine as well.  I should have had massive brain damage.  Somehow I survived, which is pretty much a miracle.  I got a really cool psychiatrist afterwards, got on reasonable meds, continued with my group therapy, and focused heavily on my creativity from that point on.  After nearly dying then, I realized that for me creativity is what matters.  

Two months after writing this original blog post, I decided to try and sell my Sharpie scribble style artwork in a serious way.  I had no other way to make any money at the time.  I wasn't known as an artist at all.  I've sold over 90 originals since, a bunch of prints, and am now known mostly as an artist and blogger.  I weaned myself off psych meds in late 2017, with the help of a friend from my group therapy, who kept an eye on me during that time.  My life is much more fulfilling now, and it's finally starting to improve at the financial level, as I write this in part in December 2020.  

Suicide is not all it's cracked up to be.  If you're in or near that place, get to a hospital or call a hotline, and get some help. 

The Kuna Parade

My Story: The Kuna Parade

 I was a senior at Boise High school in the Spring of 1984, when I went to Bob's Bikes (and Lawn Mower Repair), my local bike shop.  I needed a brake cable or something else I could barely afford.  By that time, Bob knew I was into freestyle, and he pointed a flyer out to me on the display case.  "There's a trick show over in Meridian next weekend," he said.  My mind was blown.  As crazy as it sounds now, I didn't know there were any other BMX freestylers in Boise, then a city of about 100,000 people.  "Trick riding" was morphing into "BMX freestyle," and I'd read about the BMX Action Trick Team, and guys like Bob Haro and others who did trick shows.  But none of those teams had made it anywhere near Boise.  A few BMX racers did some tricks, but I was the only rider really into freestyle that I knew.  I read the flyer, and learned that there was actually a trick team in Boise, and they were doing a show.  Mind blown.  

I borrowed my mom's car that next weekend (which always involved drama), and went to watch the show.  I was so shy then, I was afraid to talk to the two riders, who actually had a "huge," six foot high, 8 foot wide quarterpipe.  I watched the first show, sitting on my bike, my brand new Skyway T/A.  After their first show, in a bike shop parking lot, I started doing some really basic tricks on my bike, maybe 100 feet away.  A short blond woman with lots of energy walked up, and asked if I was a freestyler.  At the time, no one in my high school of 1,200 people knew what BMX freestyle was.  I told her I was, and she was super friendly.  "I'm Jay's mom, Cindy," she said, pointing to the two freestylers sitting near the quarterpipe.  You need to come meet them."  So I sheepishly followed the woman back over to the quarterpipe, and she introduced me to her son, Justin "Jay" Bickel, who was 15, and his friend Wayne Moore, who was 17, like me.  

After about 30 seconds of awkwardness, we all started talking freestyle.  I hung out the rest of the day, and by evening, we were all friends.  From then on, I started driving across town to ride with Jay two or three days a week.  Not long after, Wayne decided to "retire" from freestyle because he got a job.  Jay and I reformed his trick team, dubbing it the Critical Condition Stunt Team.  Jay's parents, the only adults I knew who thought BMX freestyle was a good thing, became my "freestyle family."  Soon I was doing shows and riding in parades with Jay, all set up by his mom, at the time.

Living in Boise, the tiny, nearby town of Kuna was best known for the Kuna Cave.  It was an ancient lava tube where people would go to party, and occasionally crawl back as far as possible.  The cave was maybe 12 feet diameter where you climbed down into it, then turned to a 4 foot tube maybe 30 yards into it.  I went there once with my Fish &Wildlife class when I was in high school.  In those days, the ladder didn't have a safety cage around it, it was just a big, metal ladder going down about 20 feet to the floor of the cave from the opening above.  The inside of the cave looked then about like it looks in today's YouTube videos, except we found a dead black cat that someone had apparently sacrificed, which is really lame.

In those early days of the 1980's, when BMX trick riding was turning into freestyle, nearly every group of riders around the country had their own trick team.  That's just what we did back then.  Of all the shows and parades we did, the one that sticks out in my mind was the parade in Kuna. Like I said above, it was best known for the cave nearby.  Every year Kuna would have a big parade, and about a thousand bikers (the gnarly, old school Harley Davidson kind, not the BMX kind) would show up in Kuna to watch the parade, and party for a couple of days.  That was a time before Yuppies entered the biker scene.  Most of the bikers were burly, blue collar workers who liked to party and occasionally fight.  Those bikers scared the hell out of me.  But that was the scene when we showed up for the Kuna parade.

Jay and I had recruited two or three other riders who knew a few tricks, and we rode down the parade route doing 360 floaters, rock walks, bunnyhops, and a trick I called "chasers."  A chaser is when you jump off the bike, and it goes rolling along in front of you, then you run after it and jump back on.  It sounds stupid, and it was, but crowds loved it.  I got to the point where I would run in front of the bike, so it was chasing me, then fall back and jump on it.  Yes, I actually practiced that trick, just to do it in parades. 

The funny thing about the Kuna parade was that the town was so small, the entire parade would follow the parade route through town, and then turn around and go back through town the opposite direction.  That's what they had to do to make the parade long enough to be worth watching.  Now, like all parades, there were horses in it.  That meant that on the way back through town, we had to not only do tricks, but we had to dodge the horse poop.  So we were all bunnyhopping horse poop on the way back.  

Also, like most parades, there was a judges stand, and that's where all the parade participants could pause and do their best performance to try and win a trophy.  On the way to the parade, Jay told me that if we got second or lower in our class, he'd let me keep the trophy, but if we won, he wanted to keep it, with the other parade trophies his team had won before.  I was cool with that.  For our big trick, we decided I would do a big bunnyhop.  Now, in those days, every rider could do both high and long bunnyhops.  But I wasn't able to bunnyhop his bike seat, the way we R.L. Osborn and Mike Buff did in the magazines.  I was better at long bunnyhops.  So we had two of the other riders lay their bikes down, seat and bars to the inside, wheels out, and I would bunnyhop over the pair of bikes.  I'd never tried that before, so we practiced it a couple of times before the parade started, and I did it no problem.

The parade started, and we took off, doing our thing.  When we got to the judges stand, the guys laid their bikes down, and I bunnyhopped the two lying bikes with ease.  The crowd went nuts.  Most people had never seen a bunnyhop then, they thought you needed a ramp to jump a bike off the ground.  To average people, it looked like magic to make the bike fly so far without a ramp.  That's the same thing I thought when I first saw a BMXer bunnyhop.  We were all stoked, and we continued down the parade route.  On the way back, we passed the judges stand for the second time, and I had the two guys lay their bikes down with a gap of two or three feet in between them.  I had never really bunnyhopped an obstacle that big before, so I got a long running start and hauled ass towards the two bikes.  Jay's mom took a photo of me, and I was pulling up as I cleared the first bike.  I went so fast that I peaked after the second bike, clearing it by about ten feet.  While it wasn't up to Mike Buff standards, it was a good 13-14 foot bunnyhop.  The crowd REALLY went nuts that time.  All of us riders were stoked, and we ended up winning our class in the parade.  Jay kept the trophy, but I didn't care, we had a blast. 

Jay's mom was our main show coordinator then, and she set us up to do two shows on a basketball court near the parade route later in the afternoon.  We set up, like we normally did, and people started to gather around as we warmed up before the show.  By the time the first show started, we had about 500 bikers, virtually all of them in black leather of some kind, watching us.  I was scared shitless, I DID NOT want to piss that crowd off.  But I had nothing to worry about.  

We went through our normal show routine, and the hardcore biker crowd loved it.  They were hootin' and hollerin' and clapping through the whole show.  To close the shows in those days, I would jump off the back of our four foot high wedge ramp... onto the flat.  I usually did what I called a "wobbly,"  where I would wiggle the bike side to side like I was out of control and about to crash, and then drop my back tire and land real smooth.  Again, the crowd went nuts.  Several of the big, burly biker guys, and their wives/girlfriends came up afterward and told us how much they liked our show.  That was so cool.  It was the best show the Critical Condition Stunt Team ever did, in my opinion. 

Then, after the show, something else happened.  A cute girl, a couple of years younger then me, came up and said "Hi."  I was totally shy then, but my bike gave me courage, and I ended up hanging out with her all day.  My first show groupie.  I was so stoked on freestyle then.  We won our class in the parade thanks to my bunnyhops, we had two shows with huge, excited crowds, and I met a cute girl.  Life was good... and I was hooked on BMX freestyle.

My First BMX Freestyle Show

This clip is sketchy, old, Super 8 footage of a BMX Action Trick Team show in 1984.  These days it's hard to explain how new and amazing freestyle seemed in those days.  Although I later worked and rode with R.L. Osborn,  I never actually saw a BMX Action Trick Team show with R.L. and Mike Buff. 

In the spring of 1984 I was a dork in my senior year at Boise High School in Boise, Idaho.  My passion was BMX, and at that time I was a mediocre racer, track designer, jumper, and interested in trick riding.  On a trip to Bob's Bikes (and Lawnmower Repair) I saw a flyer that changed the course of my life.  Bob showed me a flyer for a trick show that was happening in the nearby town of Meridian.  I wrote the date on my calendar and counted down the days.  I couldn't believe it, there was actually a trick team in Idaho! 

On the appointed Saturday, I drove to the bike shop parking lot in Meridian and watched as a couple of freestylers, along with their parents set up a quaterpipe and wedge ramp.  The ramp looked HUGE.  It stood six feet tall and eight feet wide.  What was funny was that the ramp broke into two, four foot wide sections, and they stacked the two sections on the back of a pick-up truck to transport the ramp to the show.  On the way, they hit a bump and the top section of the ramp bounced off of the truck and into the road.  It got scraped up, but wasn't seriously damaged.  They laughed about the accident, and set up the ramps. 

The riders that day were Justin "Jay" Bickel, who was about 14 then, and Wayne Moore, who was 17.  The first show started and I was blown away.  They did a bunch of flatland tricks that I had only seen in the magazines, and then kick turns on the wedge ramp, and finally airs on the quarterpipe.  I was so stoked.  They were getting two or three feet out of the ramp, doing variations, and that blew my mind. 

After the first show ended, I started talking to Jay's mom, and showed her a trick I had just learned, which happened to be a trick Jay did in the show.  She was psyched, and walked me over and introduced me to Jay and Wayne.  We talked about BMX and trick riding for quite a while, until it was time for the next show.  I watched that show, and then got Jay's number.  His mom, Cindy, said I should come over and ride with Jay and Wayne sometime.  From then on I started losing interest in racing, and I became a BMX freestyler.  I made the trip over to Jay's house to ride the ramps every chance I could.  That changed the whole course of my life.  I owe a great debt to Jay, and his parents, Dwight and Cindy.  They became my "freestyle parents,"  and I joined the trick team a couple months later when Wayne "retired" from riding, at the ripe old age of 17.  Like so many other riders in the early and mid 1980's, it was seeing a trick team perform live that really got me into freestyle.

The Haro Bar Hop

In the trailer park outside Boise, Idaho, where I first got into BMX in 1982, we were jazzed by the first couple races we went to.  Around that time, we started scraping money together to buy BMX magazines.  BMX Plus! was the only one on the grocery store news stands, but someone discovered BMX Action on sale at Bob's Bikes, the bike shop we all went to.  Technically, it was Bob's Bikes and Lawn Mower Repair.  That was our shop.  We all bought gold anodized parts because he would give us a deal on them because everyone else hated gold colored parts.  That became an inside joke among our crew.

Anyhow, whenever one of us bought a BMX magazine, we'd hole up in our room that night carefully going through the magazine, page by page.  That was our lifeline to the "real" BMX world then.  We ate up every word of each magazine, often reading every article... and add... more than once.  Then, the next day, we'd share our magazine with the other guys in the trailer park.  We'd all crowd around the magazine, getting inspired by every picture, and dreaming of the bike we would buy... if we had a bunch of money.

Around that time in the BMX world, something else was happening.  A guy named Bob Haro started doing tricks on his bike in the late 70's.  He and others started riding bikes in skateparks.  Trick riding was born, and it was in its early stages in 1982 and 1983 as us trailer park kids devoured those magazines.  We did a handful of tricks then.  We did tire endos, where we'd roll our front wheel into an old car tire, and do an endo, then roll out.  I also learned how to pop a one handed wheelie.  I couldn't ride it, I would just crank once, put the handlebars against my leg, and left go for one crank.  Then one day, I saw a how-to by Bob Haro himself.  The trick was the bar hop.  Looking back, it's crazy to think that a trick that simple actually made it into the magazine.  I don't even think it was called "freestyle" then, it was still "trick riding." 

All of us were really competitive then, and I decided to learn the Haro Bar Hop before I let anyone else see that magazine.  So I went down the hill to the basketball court, and no one was around.  I rode in circles for half an hour trying to get the guts up to jump my feet up through my arms, and land sitting on the crossbar.  That was it, that was the trick.  Yet it scared the hell out of me.  I would pick up the magazine and look through the pictures, then I'd roll around and try to get the guts up to do the trick.  I was getting close when another rider, I don't remember who, rolled up.  "Whatcha doin' Steve?"  "Uh... I'm trying this bar hop trick I saw in the magazine."  He checked it out.  Then he started trying it.  The pressure was on at that point, I had to land it or else be heckled by everyone who learned it before me.  After a few more tries, I jumped my feet up, through my arms, and landed my butt on the cross bar.  Holy crap! I thought, I just did a MAGAZINE TRICK.  The stoke washed over me.  A few minutes later, the other rider pulled it, too.  It was early evening, and all the riders started showing up, everyone started trying the Haro Bar Hop, and most of them learned it that night.  But I learned it first, which was really cool, because up until then, I was the worst rider in the trailer park. My status improved a bit that day among the Blue Valley locals.

I learned another big lesson that day.  After doing the trick many times, I missed once and my bike went sideways and I came down with my hip hitting the end of the grip.  It hurt quite a bit.  And I walked my bike back up the hill and didn't try the trick again that night.  The next day after school I rode down to the basketball court and tried the bar hop again.  I was totally afraid to try it, and I never did another Haro Bar Hop.  Ever.  But I learned a big lesson from that.  When you fall, get back up and try that trick immediately.  Even if it hurts.  If you don't, the fear sets in, and that can be really hard to overcome.  I remembered that simple lesson the rest of my years of riding.

My BMX Racing Career

On one hand, this McDonald's commercial from the early 80's is ridiculous.  On the other hand, it sums up my early days of racing pretty well... except that I couldn't afford to eat at McDonald's when I raced.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I went to my first BMX race in Boise, Idaho in the fall of 1982.  That race, I watched my friends compete.  The next week, I raced myself and I think I got a third.  I started racing in Boise, Idaho, and I never made it out of the 17 Novice class.  When you stop laughing, you can read the rest of this post.

All of us BMXers from Blue Valley Trailer Park raced that last race of 1982, and then we had to wait all winter to race again in the spring.  We made snow jumps.  We cleared off a section of the frozen pond in the trailer park and did flat track-type slides across the ice.  In the spring, before our jumps dried up enough to ride, we made ramp to ramp jumps out of plywood and cinder blocks to practice on in the street.  By the time spring came, a few of the guys had lost interest.  The remaining few raced once every two or three weeks, as much as we could afford to. 

In the early summer of 1983, my family bought a house in town, and I left the trailer park scene.  Those guys got more into cars and girls.  None of them kept racing.  I kept riding every day and racing when I could.  Because the racing scene wasn't that big in Boise, I rarely got to race as a 17 novice.  I usually got bumped up to either the intermediate or the expert class.  The funny thing was, I usually got second or third no matter who I raced.  I won motos on a regular basis, but never won a single main.  If I raced four novices, I would usually get second.  If I raced two novices and two intermediates, I would get second or third.  If I raced three intermediates and two experts, I would get second or third.  I had some kind of mental block about winning, I guess.  But I routinely beat riders in the intermediate and expert classes. 

I raced through the summer of 1983.  Late in the year, the track officials announced that they wanted to redesign the Fort Boise track, and they would hold a contest to come up with a new track design.  As luck would have it, my dad was a design engineer, and we had a drafting board at home.  In those days, designs for products were actually hand drawn on paper.  Having grown up seeing my dad's drawings, and with some tutoring from him, I was a pretty decent high school draftsman.  So I put a lot of thought into the track design, I asked lots of riders what they did and didn't like about the track, and I asked the top riders what they liked about the tracks at triple pointers and nationals they raced.  Then I drew a big professional drawing of my new track design.  I also drew a second drawing which had a side view of each of the new jumps.  Most of the other design ideas in the contest were hand drawn by kids ages 8 to 12.  My drawings blew all of the others out of the water.  Why did I spend so much time on the track design?  For one, I wanted a better track to ride.  The second reason was that the winner of the contest got to race free the entire next year.  For a broke racer like me, that was a big incentive. 

When all was said and done, I won half of the prize, something like 22 free races for 1984.  Three younger guys who had some pretty good ideas, but did not have the drawing skills I had, split the rest of the prize, 6 or 7 free races each.  After the last race, we went to town rebuilding the track, and it was much better afterwards.  I'd gone from being a old, novice racer to being part of the organizing staff of the Fort Boise scene.  That felt pretty good, and was a faint hint of my future in the BMX industry

That winter I raced in nearby Caldwell, Idaho.  At first, the races were in a cow barn at the fairgrounds, and had wooden jumps.  There was no actual jumping in those races, it was all about speed jumping the clunky wooden jumps as fast as possible.  I continued to get seconds and thirds, usually racing intermediates and experts.  The other older riders usually talked me into riding 17 Open as well, so they had enough people to have a class. 

Later in the winter season, they brought in a tractor and actually built a new track each race in the cow barn.  After each race, the track was leveled, and a new design was thought up for the next race.  That was better than the wooden jumps, but it meant mostly tiny jumps and flat turns. 

When the spring of 1984 finally came, I started racing my free races at Fort Boise.  Around the same time, the organizers decided to build another track in Boise, so the points chasers could race seven days a week in that area.  I was tapped to design the new track, which I did.  The thing everyone hated about Fort Boise was that it was basically a race to the first turn.  It was hard to pass on the narrow Fort Boise track.  On the new track I designed a wide, fast, nearly flat first turn.  That led into a huge "step double" jump.  I combined the idea of a step jump, with a double jump.  Any jump with a deep gap scared me, so I came up with a cross between a step up and a double jump, which didn't scare me.  I know that's lame, but it worked.  I also designed the track with two berms back to back, which basically formed a dirt spine jump.  I wanted to learn 360's, and that berm jump was the perfect place to do it.  Before mid season, I was doing 360's in my motos, and still qualifying for the main.  I'd read that Eddie Fiola did 360's in races, and I wanted to emulate him.

Just as I was settling into the 1984 racing season on the two Boise tracks, the track operators decided to stop giving away trophies.  They wanted to cut expenses to favor the points chasing racers.  I didn't have the money to travel and race every day, so I was mostly in it for the trophies.  Around that same time, BMX freestyle entered the picture, and I faded out of racing even though I had six or seven free races left that season.  From then on, I was a BMX freestyler.  After a year and a half, my BMX racing career ended.

The Blue Valley Posse invades Fort Boise Track

In the last post, I wrote about the first time I went to a BMX race in late 1982 in Boise, Idaho.  The four of us who went to the race were psyched when we got back to the trailer park, and we told the other guys all about it.  The three guys who raced showed off their trophies.  By the end of that night, we all wanted to race.

There was one race left in the season, and we all planned to be there.  Problem number one was how to get us all there.  We were all in high school or junior high and none of us had our own car.  It was a trailer park after all, and we were broke.  As luck would have it, my dad drove a full size Ford van at the time, and he agreed to let me take it, and everyone who wanted to go, to the race.  Then we all had to come up with money to race.  I think it was three dollars or something then, so we each scraped up the money, plus a little for the van's gas tank.  Then we rode our asses off that week.  We did standing starts with each other.  We practiced speed jumping our jumps.  We carved our little berms as fast as we could.  We did soda can slaloms on the street and slaloms on the dirt to practice our flat turns.  We jumped our cheesy little jumps to flat and hit the tiny double jump we had.  Finally Saturday morning came and we were ready.  We piled bikes and bodies into the van at my house, and headed to the track in near downtown Boise.  We were about the first ones to arrive, that's how excited we all were to race.  We were determined that Blue Valley Trailer Park would make its presence known at the track.  We practiced as much as we could at the track, and coached each other on how to take the turns and jumps.  We practiced our gate starts... ON A REAL GATE.  Holy crap!  We couldn't believe how cool it was that there were actually BMX races in Boise.

Then came the races.  Since only three guys raced the weekend before, we were all novices.  But we soon learned that if there wasn't enough for a novice class, that we got thrown in with intermediates.  The races started, and one thing soon became clear.  Even with our piece of crap bikes, we were as fast as most of the experienced racers in our classes.  Our posse started winning and getting seconds in most of our motos.  I think nearly all of us made it to our mains.  I can't remember exactly how everyone placed, but almost all of us took trophies home.  What I do remember is that there were seven shop teams at that race.  We figured out that if us guys from the trailer park had been an official team, we would have got second.  Oh yeah, Blue Valley kicked some butt at that race.

The local racers kept asking each other where these fast guys on completely lame bikes came from.  Those local racers weren't used to getting beat by guys in jeans with paper plate number plates.  A lot of the locals got pissed off because we messed up their points in so many classes.  Points?  Racers get points?  We had no idea.  None of us had seen an ABA paper at that point.  We were new and we were in it for the trophies.  We had a blast.  We won a bunch of trophies.  Then we sessioned the tabletop jump for a about an hour after the race with all the locals.  We drove home to the trailer park stoked at how we had done, and bummed out that there were no more races until Spring.  We unloaded the van at my house, and everybody headed home to show off their trophies.  We weren't just dirty kids in a trailer park anymore... we were BMX racers. 

My First BMX Race

It's amazing that this is on You Tube, but this is what the Fort Boise BMX track was like in the fall of 1982 when I went to my first race.  I think this clip is actually from 1983, not 1984 like it says, because we rebuilt the track in late 1983 and it had better jumps.

There was a good size crew of BMXers in the Blue Valley Trailer Park outside Boise in the summer of 1982.  There was one family which had Mike, Steve, Greg, Brian and Andy, two families of divorcee parents that remarried, kind of like an all male Brady Bunch.  Then there was Scott, Rocky, Buzzard, Shane, James, and myself.  Yes, I actually knew a kid known as "Buzzard."  He had a real name, but nobody remembered what it was.  I was going to be a sophomore in High school, and most of the guys were a year or two younger than me.  In any case, we rode our jumps nearly every night through the summer and into the fall of 1982.  Then, somehow, someone learned that there was a BMX track at the north end of Boise, an area called Fort Boise.  This was long before the internet as we know it today, so we couldn't just look stuff up like we do now.  Our whole group rode together for months not knowing there was a BMX track in town, and several more in surrounding towns. 

It was the second to last race of the season when we packed four guys and three bikes into Scott's mom's Ford Pinto.  For those of you who remember Pintos, this wasn't even a hatchback.  The two of us crammed into the back seat had a bike (minus the front wheel) across our laps.  It was Scott, James, Brian, and me that went to that first race.  Scott had lived in California, and had been to a couple of tracks before, so he was the only one that had any idea what to expect.  We pulled upto the track, which we later found out was built in a former sewer pond.  Seriously.  The first thing that struck me was that there were forty or fifty other BMXers.  I had no idea that ANYBODY else in Boise rode BMX besides us.  That's how small the sport was then.  It NEVER got on TV in those days, and many people had never even heard of BMX.

We piled out of the Pinto and checked out the track.  It just seemed so cool that there was actually a place MADE for BMX.  The other three guys put their front wheels back on, and went to sign up for the race.  I was just watching that first race.  We only had room in the car for three bikes, so I decided to be a spectator.

The track had a six person, hand-held gate on the hill leading into the old sewer pond.  That meant that the starter actually held a pole attached to the gate that held the gate up.  He would yell the start signals."Riders ready, pedals ready, GO!" and then let go of the pole so the gate would drop.  The track was a backwards "M" design.  The first hill led down to a rounded tabletop jump, into a tight first turn to the left, then through some moguls, over a roller jump, and into the big second turn to the right.  Coming out of the second jump the track operators would actually make a mud hole in the third straight most of the time.  Then there was a tiny, one foot high berm in the third turn to the left, and a small double jump that most riders just speed jumped before the finish line.

My trailer park friends started practicing while I watched the lines other riders took, and then we all discussed how best to ride the track.  Before long, the race started.  I don't remember exactly how the guys did, but they all got trophies to bring home.  Despite never racing before, they were all right in the mix with the experienced racers.  Our competitive nature in the trailer park had honed our skills fairly well.

After the race was over came something I hadn't expected.  There was a lip built on one side of the backside of the tabletop jump.  Riders lined up on top of the first berm, which was built into the side of the hill, and they started taking turns jumping off that lip for style.  It was my first real jumping jam, and at that point I was totally bummed I didn't have my bike.  Tabletops, X-ups, and kick out cross-ups were the main jumps being thrown at that time.  I watched as my friends sessioned  the jump.  Then we piled into the Pinto again for the ride home.  All we knew is that there was one more race left in the season, and we were going to be there.  BMX racing was our thing.    

My Start in BMX

I'm going to go back to the beginning of my BMX life, and write a few posts about the early days.  I covered all this in the original incarnation of Freestyle BMX Tales, but I took all those posts down when I got real depressed shortly after my dad died in 2012. 

For me it started in the small town of Willard, Ohio, which is in the farm country of northwest Ohio.  One of the hillbilly kids in junior high told me that he competed in a BMX race where they had a water jump filled with goldfish that they had to jump over.  That was in about 1978.  Unfortunately, the kid had a reputation as a liar, and nobody believed a word he said.  So we all thought BMX was dumb because of him.

A couple years later, my dad's company was having trouble, and he went looking for another job.  He found one in Carlsbad, New Mexico.  We moved there that summer, and it was a total culture shock for me.  The city was about 70% Latino, and as a smart, pudgy white kid, I was a minority of a minority.  I took two years of Spanish in Ohio, but I still didn't understand the names they were calling me in New Mexico.  It was a tough year for me in many ways.  But the best part of that year was time I spent out wandering the desert with my dad and his friends.  I experienced four wheel drive off roading for the first time.  It was amazing.  There was an area called The Flume near our house that had tons of Jeep and motorcycle trails going every which way.  Once in a while I'd ride my ten speed over there and ride the trails.  After a while, I decided I needed a BMX bike to do it right.  I bought one from my friend Mike for $5.00.  It was a Sentinal Exploder GX.  Never heard of it?  Neither has anyone else.  It was a "K-Mart special" bike.  A double diamond hardtail frame, a single gooseneck, six spoke aluminum mag wheels that weighed more than Mongoose Motomags, and knobby tires.  Oh, and it had a coaster brake that didn't  work right.  Sometimes the pedals would go around twice before it would catch and spin the back wheel.  It was a piece of shit.  But it was my piece of shit. 

As luck would have it, we moved to Boise, Idaho the week after I bought it, so I never road it out to The Flume trails.  We moved into a nice, suburban subdivision in Boise, and my BMX bike sat in the garage for a year.  Then we moved outside of town to a trailer park.  My parents wanted to to save money for a year and then buy a house.  Suddenly, I lived miles from town, surrounded by "desert."  It's technically not desert, I think it's actually called steppe, which is miles and miles of waste high sagebrush as far as the eye can see.  There were some little jumps in the desert at the edge of the trailer park.  Every night, the boys of the trailer park would gather when the temperature cooled down, and we'd play wiffle ball or football or basket ball.  Or we'd hit the jumps on our crappy BMX bikes.  That was June of 1982. 

As the summer progressed, we rode our bikes more and more.  When we broke parts, we'd save up our money and buy better parts.  Every night we'd hit the jumps, trying to out-do the other guys.  BMX became our thing.  The summer days turned into a routine.  We'd watch TV during the hot afternoons, then we'd meet up and ride our little jumps in the evenings.  Then we'd occasionally sneak out of our houses at night and try to wake up other people and wander around, or maybe make out with one of the girls of the trailer park.  There wasn't much else to do.

Our riding improved little by little.  When somebody had a couple dollars, they'd buy a copy of BMX Plus!, the only BMX magazine on the newsstands in Boise.  We would all take turns looking through the magazines, and then try to do the jumps we saw pictures of.  I saved up my babysitting money, and finally bought a set of Z-rims.  They were never quite true, but they were so much better than those awful mags. 

In the fall of 1982, someone heard that there was a BMX track in Boise.  In the next post, I'll talk about my first couple of races.

Memories of Scot Breithaupt Part 4

This clip is a bunch of still shots of Scot Breithaupt and friends from the early days of BMX racing, and his company SE Racing.

It was those nights watching Scot edit his ESPN shows at Unreel Productions that I really got to know the Old Man of BMX.  He was on yet another comeback, and his outrageous enthusiasm was flowing heavy.  While his editor pieced together his TV shows, Scot told us tales of his life in the early days of BMX, and some of his crazy tales from outside BMX.  The story that stuck in my mind was Scot telling me that once, at one of the early downhill tracks, he actually passed another rider by jumping right over the guy's head and landing in front of him.  By that point, I knew to take everything Scot said with a grain of salt, and sometimes half a salt shaker.  He did lots of crazy stuff in his life, but he also was prone to exaggeration. 

I think it was early 1989, when Scot approached me and said he needed a cameraman to shoot video at a race for the weekend.  He agreed to pay me $200 and rent a car for me to drive to Reno with all the equipment after I finished work on Friday.  The race was the Reno Nationals, and I picked up the car and camera equipment and headed north from Costa Mesa, California.  I'd been to Reno once before, in the summer, and planned to take the same route.  I'd head north to Sacremento, then head west over the mountains into Reno.  Somebody, I don't remember who, said it was a lot shorter to take route 395 through the mountains.  I didn't know any better, so I took that route... in January.  I hit Bishop, the last town before Mammoth and June Lake, and I was told I needed to buy chains for the car because of the snow up ahead.  Now I grew up in Ohio and Idaho as a kid, so I was used to driving in snow and it didn't bother me much.  But I drove right into a snow storm.  When it got bad, I pulled over to put the chains on.  I put the first chain on the back wheel when a driver from another car walked up to me.  "Uh... do you know that car is front wheel drive?" he asked.  It was a rental, and I had no idea.  So I took the chain off and put them on the front wheels.  I plugged along slowly, not realizing how far it was from Bishop to Reno.  I tool off the chains and put them back on a couple of more times.  In all, it was a frustrating 11 hour trip through a blizzard to get to Reno.  But I finally made it. 

I was exhausted, and got my key at the front desk and headed to my room.  There was Scot, watching TV, next to a king size bed.  I just wanted to sleep, and I asked Scot why the hell there was only one bed.  He said that was the only room available.  I'll be honest, I was worried.  I knew Scot liked women, but I wasn't sure if his tastes went any farther than that.  He assured me it the king size bed was an mix up, and I went to sleep.  Scot didn't bother me in any way, and we got up early the next morning and headed to the track. 

For the first time, I saw Scot Breithaupt in his world, the world of BMX racing.  He knew everyone, and everyone knew him.  I went out on the track and shot video for an hour or two, and then I'd touch bases with Scot, to see who he wanted me to focus on in the upcoming races.  At one point, Scot was hanging with a bunch of older guys between motos.  They all had raced with him in the 70's, and were sharing stories from those days.  I realized I was watching BMX history and I just hung out and listened.  Then one of the guys said, "Hey Scot, do you remember that time you jumped right over my head at Corona?"  They all laughed about it and shared their memories of  that race.  I thought, "Holy crap!  It actually happened.  Scot literally jumped right over this guy's head in a race and passed him."  Then another guy chimed in, "Hey, you jumped over my head, too, at another track."  Scot himself had forgotten all about that one.  My mind was blown.  Here I was shooting video for one of the best BMX racers ever, a guy who was one of the main promoters of the whole sport in the early days.  My skepticism of Scot's stories went down dramatically that afternoon. 

After that day's racing, we put the camera gear in the room and headed downstairs for dinner.  Scot led me to a blackjack table, bought some chips, and handed me a few $2 chips.  He said to just bet one chip per hand and have some fun while he won us dinner money.  I shook my head.  In the next 20 minutes, Scot won about $50 at blackjack, then said, "OK, let's go eat."  After dinner, we switched to a room with two queen beds, and I plopped down on my bed, exhausted."  Scot wanted to go to the bar and check out the ladies.  I just shook my head.  "Man, I'm still tired from yesterday.  Wake me up in the morning."  He took off to go have some fun, and I crashed out.

The next day he raced and hung out with the old timers, and I shot video.  We packed up the rental car after the race, and headed back to Southern California... the right way.  The whole trip back he told me stories about BMX and all the crazy stuff he'd done in the early days.  He also told me some of his plans for producing TV shows.  On one hand, I was stoked at the opportunity to hear all those crazy tales from a legend in the sport.  On the other hand, I was wondering if he was actually going to pay me for working that weekend.  As we got into L.A., Scot said he was a little short on cash, and he gave me $30 of the $200 we agreed upon.  He said he'd pay me the rest in a couple of weeks. That was Scot in action.  He would amaze you with his ability to get things done, like sell a bike TV series to ESPN, and produce shows on a shoestring, and then he would wind up short on cash, and he'd end up owing you.  The crazy thing is that I didn't mind that much.  I had a fun time that weekend shooting video and listening to legendary BMX racers talk about the good ol' days.  I never did get that other $170, and at this point I couldn't care less.  I was one of the many people who got to know Scot Breithaupt personally, and I have my tales to tell about this guy who, more than any other single person, made BMX what it is today.  Ride in Peace, Scot.  C-ya!  

Memories of Scot Breithaupt part 3

This You Tube clip shows various incarnations of Scot Breithaupt as a TV announcer in the late 1980's.  That was the time I worked closely with Scot on a few projects.  The other on-camera guys are veteran alternative sports announcer Dave Stanfield, and BMX freestyle promoter Ron Stebenne.

I crossed paths with Scot Breithaupt again in 1988.  I forget exactly how he came back into the picture, because two things were happening at once.  I was working at Unreel Productions, which was the video company owned by Vision.  At the time, several companies were under the Vision banner. Vision, Sims, and Schmitt Stix skateboards, Sims snowboards, and Vision Street Wear clothing were all part of the Vision  family.  Don Hoffman, a former surfer and skateboarder, was into video work, and put together Unreel to do all the video work for Vision's companies, as well as trying to make TV shows about alternative sports.  Vision was growing in leaps and bounds at that time, and put a lot of money into Unreel.  They built a half million dollar edit bay in a nice office unit in Costa Mesa, California and hired about eight people to staff it.  Unreel produced a skateboard halfpipe contest called Holiday Havoc, and made a TV show out of it which they pretty much gave to ESPN to try to get their foot in the door with the young sports network.  In 1988, Unreel was producing high quality TV shows about skateboarding, BMX racing, BMX freestyle, snowboarding, and body boarding, which they planned to sell to ESPN.  But ESPN wasn't interested in those sports at that time.  So Unreel was having trouble selling the shows.  ESPN didn't think there was a large enough TV audience to justify airing action sports. 

Unreel hired Scot Breithaupt as an announcer for the 1987 Socko AFA Masters finals TV show.  I was just a production assistant at Unreel, so I don't know exactly what the deal was, but they hired Scot to try to sell Unreel's shows to ESPN.  Scot saw an opportunity, and wound up selling ESPN a TV series of his own.  He found a video editor, found some events to cover in the bicycling world, and approached Unreel to rent their edit bay to edit his shows.  The heads of Unreel didn't totally trust Scot, but he was paying good money to rent the edit bay, so they let him and his editor come in at night to edit his shows.  I got the job of staying there with Scot and his editor to keep an eye on him.  It was totally easy.  I would do some of my dubbing work, and when I ran out of my work, I sat around down stairs watching surf videos.  When that got old, I'd sit in the back of the edit bay and watch Scot and his editor put the shows together.  Scot called his production company L.M. Productions, which stood for "last minute."  His logo was a clock with the hands set at two minutes til midnight. That summed up his production practice.

Scot's shows were hurriedly put together, and didn't have near the quality of the TV shows Unreel was making.  The difference was that Scot actually sold his shows because of his incredible ability as a salesman and promoter.  I think Scot was a salesman and promoter first and foremost, and then a BMXer.  I'm not trying to put him down, but he was such an enthusiastic guy by nature, that he blended that with his love of BMX and was a main force in building BMX racing in the 70's.  In the late 80's, he put that same enthusiasm into producing TV shows.  That's how one particular show came about.

Scot was editing his show on a Sunday night, and asked me if I had any ideas for the next show.  He needed to shoot video of some kind of bicycling event and make a TV show in two weeks, which is unheard of in the TV world.  He had already covered cycling, mountain biking, trials riding, and GPV's and skateboard luges.  He wasn't sure what to do next.  At the time, BMX street riding was just starting to take off.  Ron Wilkerson at 2-Hip held the first major bike street contest earlier that year. Dave Vanderspek actually held the very first bike street contest in northern California, but it didn't get any magazine coverage.  Ron's contest in Santee (near San Diego) really sparked freestylers to take to the streets en mass and ride the world like it was one giant skatepark.  So I replied to Scot, "How about street riding?"  His first question was something like, "What, just riding around the street?  BMXers had always done that, jumping curbs and riding off loading docks.  I explained to Scot that street riding was becoming its own thing, just as dirt jumping was beginning to do at the time.  I told him we were doing wall rides, box jumps, wall fakies, footplants, and all kinds of other tricks in urban environments.  I can't remember specifically, but I probably pulled out some of the footage of the 2-Hip Meet the Street contest to show him.  I do remember that it took me about 20 or 30 minutes to talk Scot into the idea.  It sounded weird to him, but he needed a show, and he agreed on a street contest.  Then came the interesting part, where Scot's amazing ability to make stuff happen came into play.  We started planning the contest.  Scot decided he would get the "stonehenge" ramp from GT, a junked car, and a few other obstacles.  He would find a place to hold the contest.  My job was to get word out and make sure a lot of good riders showed up.  By the time we were done talking, his enthusiasm had transferred to me.  I was totally stoked, we were going to put on a BMX street contest, and it was going to be on TV.  Holy crap.

Scot and I worked out details each night while his editor was working on that week's show.  Somehow, Scot made his promoting magic happen.  He got the parking lot of the old surf theater in downtown Huntington Beach, which was right behind Wimpi's burgers, for any of you old school HB locals.  By that next Saturday, we had GT's stonhenge jump ramp, a wrecked car, some oil drums, and some wall ride ramps.  My work alerting the riding community panned out as well, and we had about 50 riders show up.  Craig Grosso and Pete Augustin were doing huge (for the time) wall rides, Rich Bartlett, Randy Lawrence, and many others launched over the jump ramp, and the Huntington Beach Street Scene was a rousing success.

Scot and co-announcer Dave Stanfield met myself, Randy Lawrence, and a few other flatlanders at the Taco Bell at Bolsa Chica and Heil in Huntington Beach, and we shot the introduction to the show in about half an hour.  Everything was totally low budget and on the fly.  Then Scot and his editor showed up the next Sunday night to start editing the show.  To put this into perspective, Unreel spent several months working on each TV show it produced.  Scot and I agreed on the idea on a Sunday night, had the contest the next Saturday, and the show aired on ESPN eight days after that.  It was insane, but a lot of fun.  The Huntington Beach Street Scene wound up getting the best ratings of any of Scot's shows, by far.  It also was the first made-for-TV BMX street contest ever, seven years before the X-Games began.  I'd love to show you all the show, but it's not online.  The master tape is probably in a box somewhere with the rest of Scot's footage.  As I learned over and over again in the BMX world, amazing things happen when you wind up in the right place at the right time.  What started as a boring job for me, staying up all night while Scot edited, turned into something really cool.  I got to see Scot's promoting ability in action that week, and it reminded me how we can all make cool things happen if we focus our energies on an idea.  That couple of weeks are my best memories of Scot Breithaupt, the Old Man of BMX.