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.     

Memories of Scot Breithaupt part 2

This is a You Tube clip showing the legendary SE Racing bus that toured the U.S. in 1977.  Along with Scot, I know Perry Kramer, Stu Thomsen, and Bob Haro were on that tour, I'm not sure who the rest of the guys were.  The turret on top of the bus in some of the photos housed a tennis ball cannon.  When one of the SE riders won a race, they'd shoot tennis balls over the pit area.  The turret got torn off by a low overhang once, as did all the bikes stacked on top of the bus. 

It was either late 1984 or early 1985 that my Boise riding buddy and trick teammate Justin Bickel called me up.  "I got co-sponsored by SE!" he yelled over the phone.  Jay, as we usually called him, soon got his SE Quadangle, put a coaster brake on it, and a standing platform so he could do framestands.  He was the soul freestyler in Idaho that was sponsored, and that was the coolest thing in the world then.

In the summer of 1985, Jay's parents, who had become my "freestyle parents" at that point, offered to take me to the AFA contest being held in Venice Beach, California.  I paid them some nominal amount that didn't come near to covering the cost of my trip, and we were off in their Mercedes station wagon.  Jay's dad was a lawyer, so we stayed in a stylish hotel in Marina Del Ray, just up the bike path from Venice.  It was my first trip to Southern California, and I was amazed by the endless suburbs, insane traffic, and the best freestyle riders in the world at the contest. 

On our first full day in SoCal, we went to the SE factory.  It was a big shock to me.  I had taken field trips to the local factories on Career Day in 8th grade in Ohio, and I thought every factory was a huge building with dozens, if not hundreds of workers toiling away.  When we got to SE, I knew almost nothing about the company, it's history, or Scot Breithaupt.  We were greeted by Scot as we walked in.  Perry Kramer was also in the office that day, as was Mike Devitt (I may have misspelled his name), he was the business guy at SE, who kept the operations running.  After we all talked for a while, Scot took us on a tour of the operation.  On one side of the warehouse was the  shipping area, with the typical heavy duty shelving units stacked with products.  They had a shopping cart there they used to pull orders, and it had handlebars welded on to it, and a number plate that said, "Shipper Ripper."  I thought that was the coolest thing.  What struck me as weird is that there was nobody working in the shipping area. 

Scot led us back to the back of the shipping area, and there were two big quarterpipes, eight feet high and eight feet wide, facing each other.  At that time, most kids who had quarterpipes built them six feet tall, so the SE ramps seemed huge.  They were built so SE's ramp rider, Todd Anderson, could practice when in the area. 

After showing us the ramps, Scot led us to the manufacturing side of the building.  There was one welder, just one, working in his booth welding frames.  I learned that Scot had dropped out of the scene for several years in the early 80's due to his bad habits.  When I visited the factory in 1985, they had just been getting the company going again for several months.  SE Racing was on an upswing again, this time incorporating the emerging sport of freestyle into the mix along with racing.  I couldn't believe that this major bike company only had about four people working at it.  It really put the tiny little BMX industry, which seemed huge to me as a kid reading the magazines, in perspective. 

Once the tour was over, Scot told Jay and I to grab our bikes and session the ramps, so we did.  At that time, I could air just about at coping on a six foot ramp, and Jay could get two or three feet out.  I was airing under coping on the eight foot ramps, and Jay got out a little, I think.  At one point, we were taking a breather, when we heard an engine rev in the front of the building.  Next thing we know, Scot came screaming around the shelving units on an 80cc dirtbike.  He passed us with a big smile, and dove down another aisle.  He raced a few laps around the warehouse, passing by us each time.  Then he handed the bike over to Perry, who took a few laps, trying to go faster than Scot.  Then Scot took a few more laps, then Perry again.  Jay and I just shook our heads.  "These crazy guys run one of the best companies in BMX?"  we asked ourselves. 

After a good session on the ramps, Jay and I got some water, then we all wound up in the shipping area, listening to Scot and Perry tell us stories about the SE Racing bus and the crazy nationwide tour they went on in 1977.  He talked about the magazine photos on the wall, and gave us each an old Oakley poster, which was already a classic in 1985.  It was a group shot of about 20 top BMXers from around 1980, and the caption said, "Oakley:  Our R&D team works weekends."  It would be really cool to have that poster today.  We all thanked Scot and Perry for their hospitality, and headed over to ACS, which gave Jay and I each a brand new thing called the ACS Rotor.  We had to put our bars up about an inch for the Rotor to fit, which made our bikes feel kind of weird.  We went back to the hotel and practiced the rest of the night, getting used to the feel of our bikes with higher bars. 

The next day, when we both competed in flatland, Scot was on hand to encourage us.  IN addition, we hung out with Todd Anderson, Craig Grosso, and I think Fred Blood was on SE by then.  Steve Broderson, another Camarillo Ramp rider who rode a cruisier, was also part of the group we hung with.  I was blown away by the riding that weekend, there were so many amazing riders and everyone had a different style back in those days.  I went back to Idaho with a lot more passion about riding, having tasted the national scene for the first time.  Meeting Scot and Perry Kramer, the "P.K." in P.K. Ripper, was one of the highlights of the trip.   

Memories of Scot Breithaupt part 1

This clip is from a GPV (Gravity Powered Vehicle) race that Scot Breithaupt promoted and televised on the then sketchy sports network known as ESPN.  Scot and veteran announcer Dave Stanfield are doing the  commentary.  Pat Wallace, the Unreel Productions staff cameraman is the guy riding backwards on the camera motorcycle that reached speeds of 135 mph.  I worked as an AD (assistant director) on this show.  Near the end, (at 12:57) there's a shot of myself and Randy Lawrence taken from another show in Scot's Action Sports Cycle Series.  In the middle of this clip is the worst crash ever captured on tape at a GPV race.  There year was 1988. At a time when ESPN show everything from fishing to kickboxing, Scot sold them a series that included cycling, trials riding, GPV's and skate luges, and a few other bicycling sports.  It was one of the first times most of these sports were televised in the U.S.  This is the period when I worked with Scot on several occasions, and when he was doing things like producing TV shows, that much of the BMX world was unaware of.

For any of you that haven't heard, Scot Breithaupt, the Godfather of BMX, was found dead in Indio, California this past Saturday, July 4th, 2015.

Brian Foster Documentary

I'm way out of the loop of the BMX scene these days.  But I saw a Facebook post about a Brian Foster documentary called BF-it the other day.  I was a roommate to both Alan and Brian Foster at the P.O.W. BMX House in the early 90's, so I was anxious to check it out.  I followed the link to watch it.  Unfortunately, I have Fred Flintstone's old laptop, and my computer froze up sixteen minutes and 47 seconds into the video.  Crap.  Tonight I managed to watch the whole thing, and I dig it. 

Oddly, the first memory of Brian that popped into my head wasn't riding.  One night we were sitting around the P.O.W. House living room.  The guys who had some money all had $5 pizzas from What-a-Lotta-Pizza.  Those of us who didn't have much money that night were eating ramen or microwave burritos.  Brian finished his pizza, but left the crusts.  He held his box up and said, "Pizza bones!" offering the leftovers to us human roaches.  I grabbed the box and scarfed down the crusts.  It was a treat in those ramen days. 

Then the other memories popped into my head.  Riding the backyard ramps with Brian.  Watching him tear it up at Sheep Hills and other local trails.  The craziest memory I have of Brian from those days was shooting video of several riders jumping the insane gap jump at Dover.  Years later, doing a magazine interview, I asked Brian what the craziest thing he ever jumped was, and he said it was that jump at Dover.  I don't know what nutcase had the idea to build that jump, but it would still be big by today's standards.  The riders would sprint across the field, and drop in a near vertical roll-in at first straight speed.  It went down about fifteen feet, then curved up in to a seven foot high kicker.  I actually stepped off and measured the gap, and it was 25 feet, though it looked much bigger.  The insane part was that it was a flat landing... eight feet higher than the takeoff.  Mid jump, riders were about 30 feet above a brush filled ravine.  As luck would have it, one of my shots of Brian jumping there is in this documentary. 

I didn't see Brian much after about '95, so a lot of what's included in the video is new to me.  For whatever reason, Brian had that timeless style when I first met him in the early 90's, and he has built upon that style in the many years since.  He's one of the great BMX riders of all time.  If you haven't seen BF-it, follow this link and check it out.