Mark Eatons Tribute to Dave Mirra

I was an industry guy who still rode a lot when Dave Mirra started popping up on the scene.  So my memories of him are a lot different than today's young riders who grew up watching Dave winning gold after gold in the X-games.  This is the best tribute to Dave I've seen from the guys in my generation.  It's no surprise that it comes from the video files of Mark Eaton. 

Another thing that most of you know now is that riders all over are painting their pedals gold as a tribute to Dave Mirra's legacy.  I'm not sure who started this idea, but it's going viral now.  Ride in Peace Dave.

Lets Talk About Suicide

Suicidal Tendencies, "Institutionalized."  All Mike wanted was a Pepsi, just one Pepsi...

For all of us who were around the punk scene in the 80's, the song above is a classic.  Most of us have felt like that at some point.  "Just leave me alone, I'll figure it out."  Most of us do "figure it out" one way or the other most of the time.  But some people don't figure it out.  They wind up taking their own lives.

The untimely death of BMX legend Dave Mirra brought this subject to the forefront.  We don't know what actually happened, we're left hanging with the vague words, "apparent suicide."  Rumors and theories will flow.  Try not to buy into them.  Most of us are still in shock.  From our outside perspective, he seemed to have it all.  Dave was a highly skilled, highly decorated rider, one of the best ever, he had one or more businesses, a family, was competing in other sports at a high level.

I'm not going to focus this post on Dave.  This post is for everyone out there.  I, personally, have been to the depths of suicidal thoughts.  For whatever reason, I'm still here.  I talked myself out of suicide at age eleven.  This brings me to the first point to understand.  In my experience, most people who get to thinking seriously about suicide don't want to die, rather they just don't see a way to go on living.  There's a huge difference.  People get overwhelmed.  Life throws more at them then they think they can handle.  Sadness turns into depression, which can slip into deeper levels of depression.  There comes a point where they don't see any way to continue living.  The problems just seem insurmountable.  For some people, abuse or trauma in the past can lead to this.  For others it may be a collapsing business, job, or financial obligations.  For some a break up or divorce can lead to these depths.  If you add addiction of any kind into the picture, things get worse in a hurry.  It's important to realize that this feeling of being completely overwhelmed can happen to anyone.

Sometime the person can "figure it all out" like Mike in the song above.  But many times they can't.  Many years ago, I met a young woman while working at Cirque du Soleil.  She was pretty crazy, which might be why we hit it off.  I never became her boyfriend, but instead I we became best friends for a few years.  She had been through horrific abuse as a kid.  When I met her, she was a "cutter," with several scars on her wrists.  On at least two occasions, I wound up on the phone with her while she had a razor blade to her wrist.  Her personal demons took her right to the edge, and I was the one who happened to be on the precipice with her.

Here's what I didn't do.  I didn't talk to her about God or religion.  To the highly religious people reading this, that may sound horrible.  But it's my experience that when a person is so close to suicide, talk about religion usually pushes them towards death, not away from it.  I don't remember what exactly I told my friend.  But for the most part, I told her really dirty jokes until I got a small laugh out of her.  I know that sounds horrible, but that's how I was able to break the spell. If you can break the person's spell of despair, there's a pretty good chance they'll make it through the night.  When things calm down, you can try to talk a little more sense to them.

This brings me to another point.  When someone is near the point of suicide, you don't have to help them find a reason to live the rest of their lives.  You just have to help them find a reason to live for ten more minutes, or half an hour.  Remind them of something they want to do in the near future.  Remind them of someone who pissed them off that they want to get revenge against.  Again, that sounds horrible, and I'm against revenge in general.  But that might give them a reason to keep going for now.  You can't get back at the people who've hurt you if you're dead.  (Forget all the vampire/zombie stuff, OK?  That's just movies and TV).

In the long run, I just loved my friend, as a friend, at a time when she truly believed she was unlovable.  I was there for her, and she for me, during both of our dark times for about three years.  Even though I never slept with her, we shared a weird intimacy that few know.  Ultimately, she didn't need me anymore, and went on to have a successful life.  It really hurt when we parted ways, but it was time for both of us to move on.

Another thing I'd like to mention is that you never know when you may be helpful to a complete stranger who is going through dark times.  I once had a woman get into my taxi and thank me for talking her daughter out of suicide.  I had no idea who she was talking about.  You have a lot of really weird conversations in taxis.  I thought the woman was messing with me at first.  But she was adamant about it.

The point of all of this?  When your friends seem to be going into dark places, be there for them as best you can.  Maybe they just need some time to figure things out, like Mike in the song above.  Maybe they just need a Pepsi.  Maybe they just need to know you're there to help them out.  Or... maybe, they can't get through it, and they need to seek professional help.  The human mind is an amazing, miraculous thing.  But it can also create fears and depression that drives people to do terrible things.  Do what you can to be there for the people in your life, friends, relatives, and strangers.  But don't let them take advantage of you.  This is something I still struggle with.  If things don't get back on track with you just being a friend, seek the help necessary.  But take a real close look at yourself, first.  You can't go around changing everyone into the person you want them to be.  Some times you just have to get away from really toxic people.  And sometimes, you are exactly the person to help them through the darkness.  You may never know for sure.  Do your best to help those you can.  I'll end this post with a quote that was helpful to me at one point.
"The mystic swims in the same ocean the psychotic drowns in." - Unknown
Do your best people.

The Death of Dave Mirra

This is the Dave Mirra I think about.  Going huge, smooth, and landing incredible tricks, particularly at high pressure moments in contests. 

If you're a BMXer from any era, you've no doubt heard of the death of BMX legend Dave Mirra by now.  His death surprised everyone.  The nature of his death, an apparent suicide, was even more surprising.  You never know what's going on in another person's head. 

I didn't know Dave well.  The first I heard of him was in 1988, while working at Unreel Productions.  Pat, our camerman, came back from shooting video at a 2-Hip King of Vert comp.  Jay Miron was a young up-and comer then, and we were looking at something amazing he pulled that weekend.  Pat said, "You know who else you need to keep an eye on?  That Mirra kid."  Pat searched through the footage and showed me a run by then amateur Dave Mirra.  He wasn't nipping at Mat Hoffman's heels then, but he definitely  showed a lot of promise.  The next year, 1989, I was the cameraman traveling to all the 2-Hip comps, and I did keep an eye on "that Mirra kid."

Two or three years later, at a 2-Hip comp in Arizona, I got footage of still amateur Dave Mirra pulling a 540, three or four feet under coping.  He was small and had to muscle it around, but he landed it.  I don't know if that was his first 540 in a contest, but I remember he was really stoked to land it. 

Then, in 1995, came the Extreme Games by ESPN, which changed its name to the X-Games in '96.  BMX (and many action sports) had been on life support for years during the prolonged recession of the early 90's.  The sports were beginning to build back up.  Rider made videos and rider owned companies were taking root.  But ESPN at the time didn't understand action sports very well.  They didn't get the huge difference in mentality between BMX, skateboarding, snowboarding, surfing, and mainstream team sports.  They needed a "winner" in sports where the winner was normally forgotten a day or two later.  The tricks pulled were what lived in people's minds.  This caused a lot of drama.  On one hand, BMX and other sports were finally getting major TV coverage.  On the other hand, the early coverage really sucked.  It didn't really show these sports as the lifestyles we had lived for so many years.  ESPN was looking for someone to champion.  They wanted someone clean cut who excelled at winning contests.  Dave Mirra was that guy.  He went on to set a record for X-Games medals, and became the face of BMX to millions of kids worldwide.  This also created contention.  The hardcore riders of earlier eras tended to see Dave as a "contest rider."  They didn't see him hucking himself down sketchy ass rails in low-budget videos.  He wasn't known for inventing tricks so much as perfecting them.  So not everyone had the best opinion of Dave Mirra.  But no one exemplified all aspects of riding.  Dave was a phenomenal rider and excelled at contests, and through that he introduced BMX vert and park riding ro millions of kids worldwide.  That explosion brought money to people throughout the BMX industry.  He found his niche in the BMX world and ran with it.  In doing so, he became a legend of the sport. 

Many years later, I finagled a press pass to the '99 X-Games, and found myself on the deck of the ramp during BMX vert practice.  Dennis McCoy was the only one on the deck who really knew me.  I was pretty incognito.  Dave Mirra rolled in and did a couple of huge alley-oops.  Then he flew out right next to Ryan Nyquist, who happened to be sitting on his bike right in front of me.  Dave asked Ryan, "If I did an alley-oop far enough, it would be just like an opposite air, wouldn't it?"  It sounded nuts to me.  So, a minute later he dropped in and pushed alley-oops as far as possible, trying to turn them into an opposite air.  He quickly found out that the momentum of an alley-oop keeps you twisting, past the point of an opposite air.  It was a trip to see his process unfolding right in front of me.  He gave up the alley-oop/opposite air idea and went back to his regular bag of tricks.  that included an eight foot out 540, 11 or 12 feet higher than that early 540 I shot of him many years before.  Pat the camerman knew what he was talking about way back in 1988 when he first noticed "that Mirra kid."  Any way you look at it, Dave Mirra was one of the greats of BMX riding, and he is missed by many, many people.  I hope he's up there having a beer with the Godfather of BMX, Scot Breithaupt, and proving to Scot that freestylers aren't really pansies, as Scot thought in the early years.  R.I.P. Dave Mirra.



 

The State of BMX Videos in 1990

Eddie Roman's Aggroman (Mat Hoffman clip above), was like a movie and it was awesome when it came out.  But after a couple views, we treated it like a porno, fast forward through all the sketchy acting to get to the good stuff.  This was the best known rider-made video when I released The Ultimate Weekend in 1990.  Mark Eaton's original Dorkin' In York came out around then, too.

At an AFA Velodrome contest in 1986, I was hanging in my hotel room with the rest of the Off The Wall factory team.  Off The Wall was a really crappy bike made by some Taiwanese company.  It's a long story, but it eventually turned into the Air/Uni and then the Ozone, which were good bikes.  Anyhow, Eddie Roman walked into our room with a VHS tape in his hand, and said he had something to show us.  It was a video, I think he made it for a class in school, and it was called "Aggro Riding and Kung Fu Fighting."  It was funny and had some good riding in it, but the technical quality wasn't very good.  But we didn't care.  It was a video made by an actual BMX freestyler, and not just any freestyler, Eddie Roman, Skway factory guy and street riding legend.  THAT was the beginning of the rider-made video movement.  But we didn't know that at the time.  After Eddie showed us the video, he ran out to some other room full of riders to show it off again.

The next year, 1987, I produced six videos for the American Freestyle Association.  They were real simple, and all contest footage.  In 1988, Ron Wilkerson called on me to edit the 2-Hip season video, which you can now find online as 2-Hip BHIP.  I was working at Unreel Productions by that time, the video company owned by Vision Skateboards/Vision Street Wear.  Eddie Roman got a job at a local video production company around the same time.  Meanwhile, across the U.S. in Pennsylvania, Plywood Hood Mark Eaton (we called him Lungmustard then) started making VHS videos of himself, Kevin Jones, and the rest of the Hoods.  All of these videos were pretty sketchy technically, but they had great riding.  That's what riders around the country, and around the world wanted to see.  There was no internet then, we only had magazines to learn about freestyle, and the occasional, completely over-produced BMX Plus!  or Vision video, where everyone was wearing leathers and helmets, even riding flatland. 

That was the environment when I decided to completely self-produce my own video in 1990, which, of course, was The Ultimate Weekend.  None of us considered rider-made videos a movement yet, we just wanted something that showed "real riding."  Nobody was making videos like that.  Our punk rock, D.I.Y. influence led Eddie, Mark, and I to make our own videos.  Little did we know, it was the start of a revolution, not only in BMX, but in all action sports.