Freestylers Dirt Jumping in 1990

Like Hannibal from The A-Team used to say, "I love it when a plan comes together."  I'm continuing on with my 25th anniversary look back at my 1990 bike video, The Ultimate Weekend.  As luck would have it, the Boozer Jam 360 is happening tomorrow at Sheep Hills in Costa Mesa, California.  Dirt jumping has evolved incredibly over the years, as the old schoolers looking back at this, then watching the riders tomorrow can attest.  Today's clip starts at 23:15 in the video above.

Before the jumping, though, is a quick shot of me.  There's a quick triple shot of me doing 50/50 grinds (aka double peg) on a little painted ledge at a shopping center on Beach Boulevard in H.B.  At the time I shot this, double peg grinds on street were pretty new.  I kept myself out of this video for the most part because I knew the guys I rode with were better riders than me, and the weird tricks I was learning then weren't very popular.  At the time I shot this video, I was doing 7 or 8 foot half Cabs, full cabs (rollback 360 bunnyhops), lookback half Cabs (which I've STILL never seen anyone else do), 8 or 9 foot rollback bunnyhops, and I'd been trying bunnyhop tailwhips for nearly three years, but never landed one clean.  Looking back, I really wish I would have put those tricks in the video.  But I didn't.  What I did put in was these 50/50 grinds.  I learned them at about 3 am somewhere in the middle of Texas on a skateboard tour with Mark Oblow.  We stopped for gas, we were both delirious from long hours on the road, and Mark found a little ledge on the back of the gas station.  He started ollying up to 50/50 grinds, which gave me the idea.  After a few tries I did a double peg stall.  Then I kept going at it faster until the stalls turned into little grinds.  The next day we picked up am vert skaters Mike Crum and Chris Gentry, and later met up with Buck Smith and did three weeks worth of demos across the South.  Just for the record, the grinds in the video I did with knurled, screw on pegs that were tiny by today's standards.

And then comes Oceanview, one of the coolest flyout jumps ever.  I first got to know Keith Treanor and John Povah at that jump one day, and we started riding together a lot.  This video came out the year before Sheep Hills was built, just to put it into perspective.  In the late 80's, there were two distinct kinds of jumpers.  There were freestylers who liked flyout jumps and doing crazy and usually unstylish tricks.  Then there were the racer jumpers, who jumped double jumps mostly, rarely did 360's, and jumped with more style but less crazy variations.  At the first King of Dirt Jam in 1987 that Gork from BMX Action and Rich Bartlett put on, the split in styles was obvious.  But as street riding contests started happening soon after, the styles started to merge.  Racers started doing crazier variations, and freestylers (some of them, anyhow) learned how  to pedal and started jumping farther and with more style.

This segment at Oceanview includes Keith Treanor (black T-shirt), John Povah (blue tank top), flatland legend Woody Itson (turquoise shorts), vert superstar Josh White (white T-shirt/shorts), and the most surprising to me at the time, H.B. local flatlander Andy Mucahy (jeans).  Now this jump, on the corner of Warner and Gothard, is the only flyout jump I've ever seen with a concrete runway up to a seven foot high jump... to flat.  Early in this clip you see Keith blast the jump for height, going an honest nine or ten feet off the deck.  I've seen Keith go a full two feet higher off that jump, but never caught it on video.  He had this crazy habit of showing up somewhere and going way bigger on his first hit then ever again.  It got to the point where I would actually turn the camera on in the car and point it at Keith because he did that everywhere we went.  The cover of the video was a photo Mike Sarrail shot and I made high contrast of Keith jumping over John's outstretched hand, like he does in this segment. 

This segment  backed by The Stain's "Flashing Red" song, one of my favorites in the video.  The riders go through the gambit of freestyle jumps at the time.  360's, one hand 360's, no footers, no handers, tailwhip attempts, and a decade attempt by John Povah.  The air they're getting seems tiny today, but this was serious freestyler jumping at the time. 

Near the end you see Josh White almost land a tailwhip.  There's a story there.  In '88 or '89 (I can't remember exactly), there were some jumps where the condos above Sheep Hills now sit.  I learned about them when Mike Miranda took Rich Bartlett there to shoot photos for a Vision ad, and I shot video of the photo shoot.  There was a good sized (for the time) hip jump, a couple small doubles, and a ditch jump.  Since the spot was literally only a few blocks from where I worked at Unreel Productions, I started riding over and jumping during my lunch break and after work.  I loved me a good ditch jump. 

One day I rode over and ran into Josh White.  As good a rider as Josh was, he hadn't learned tailwhips off jumps, and that's what he was trying that day.  I was also trying to learn them then, so we took turns missing tailwhips until my chain broke as I rode down into the ditch.  Big, painful faceplant slide, and I scootered my bike back to work, half of me covered in dirt and blood.  I didn't run into Josh for a year or so after that.  When I did run into him, he was at Oceanview one evening... trying again to learn tailwhips.  He'd still never landed one.  I had my camera, so I started shooting video as he got closer and closer to nailing that trick.  The one you see in this clip where he almost makes it and then runs off the bike was the second to last one I shot.  The next try, Josh White landed his first tailwhip over a jump... and my camera battery went dead while he was in the air.  I shit you not.  I missed it.  Josh was so bummed.  I was so bummed. So Josh's first tailwhip was one of the things that didn't make it in the video.  Sometimes things work out, and sometimes they don't.  It still really bums me out that the freakin' camera battery picked that exact instant to die.  But that's life.