History Lesson

Oddly, I can't find a video clip with BMX Action magazine in it.  But here's a bunch of classic BMX Action photos of R.L. Osborn and Mike Buff in the early BMX Action Trick Team days.  In true Gork fashion, it's all set to Metallica.  Off to never, never land...

On the last day in July in 1986, I got on a plane in San Jose, California with much of my bike in an odd-sized box, a suitcase (with my wheels in it so I wouldn't have to pay the airline bike fee) and $80.  I was so nervous about taking the job at Wizard Publications, that I had developed a serious case of the hives.  Not knowing any better, I laid out in the sun one day, making the hives even worse.  I wore a long sleeve, button-up shirt for the fist two weeks at the job.  The whole time my arms, chest, and legs were in red blotches.  On one hand I was stoked at the amazing opportunity of working at the magazines.  On the other hand, I had more hang-ups than Kim Kardashian's closet, more issues than the National Geographic magazine warehouse, and I was afraid I'd screw up the job somehow.

I made the short flight to LAX, where I was met by Andy Jenkins, Mark "Lew" Lewman, and Gork.  We threw my stuff into Gork's van, and instead of heading to the apartment I'd be sharing with Lew and Gork, we headed straight to the Wizard Publications office for an evening session at work.  By some weird quirk of fate, the BMX Action magazine 10 year anniversary party was that weekend.  So while Andy and Lew went to their offices to work on FREESTYLIN' magazine, Gork asked me to help him out.  Following his lead, I climbed up on the warehouse shelves, and we started digging through a bike box full of old slides.  Back then, in the olden days, the color photos for magazines were printed as slides.  Each roll of film (remember film?) ended up as a little yellow box with of slides of each photo.  Gork and I had the job of going through this huge box of slides and finding the best ones for a slide show that would play at the anniversary party.

The crazy thing was, I only got into racing in 1982, and hadn't seen a single copy of BMX Action until late 1983.  Only BMX Plus was on the newsstands in Boise, Idaho back then.  It was only when I started hanging out at Bob's Bike Shop (and Lawnmower Repair) did I see my first issue of BMX Action.  So I was clueless about the history of BMX.  Gork, as I quickly found out, wasn't.  He'd been racing since the late 70's, I think.  So as I checked out slides, I'd show him the interesting ones, and he'd fill me in on who the riders were, what their story was, and where they fit in the BMX history.

I seriously couldn't have had a better introduction to working at the home of BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines.  In a few hours that first night, I got an overview of the history of BMX, something I didn't know anything about.  Of all the slides, the standouts in my mind were early skatepark rider (and later MTB hero) Tinker Juarez.  He was blasting big jumps out of early bowls that blew my mind.  The other one I remember most was Trash Can Morgan.  This kid was testing bikes, jumping them while riding old school leather combat boots, and doing these crazy kicked out cross-ups three-four-five feet off the ground, which was huge then.  He earned the nickname "Trash Can" because that's where most of the bikes ended up after he was done with them.

Like all kids who came out of obscure places, (Boise, Idaho is where I got into BMX), I thought I was a better rider than I actually was, and I thought I knew a lot about BMX.  Gork's informal history lesson that first night really opened up the early years of the sport to me.  In the weeks that followed, I didn't have a lot to do at first, so I just started digging out old issues of BMX Action and reading article after article... and getting paid to do it.  Jealous?  You should be.

Each one of us plays a little role in a bigger timeline, and that first night at Wizard really made that clear to me.  Thanks Gork.

Freestyle BMX Tales: The Book

This is Freestyle BMX Tales: The Book, part 1.  That big square up top is all the pages of part 1, (20 full size pages) laid out.  I'm calling this "the coffee table book of BMX zines."  It's either one of my greatest ideas... or one of my worst.  I'm never sure.

Here's a few excerpts:

"On another street, I followed Rick Thorne between two big rig trucks, both of which were moving slowly.  Unfortunately for us, they were moving closer to each other.  We both hit the gas, cranking hard to get past them.  Rick pulled up his front wheel and turned the bars to squeak through the narrowing gap.  I did the same thing right behind him, yelling in excitement as I cleared the trucks."

"The sound wound up, and with a yell, Scot came screaming around the corner of the warehouse racks on an 80cc dirtbike.  Jay and I looked at each other, wondering if that was a normal thing in the SE warehouse."

"A few weeks later, completely out of nowhere, Andy (Jenkins, editor of FREESTYLIN') called me up at home, in San Jose, one afternoon.  He asked me if I was planning to go to the next AFA Masters comp in Tulsa, Oklahoma.  I told him I was.  'Would you like to cover it for us?'  I grabbed a putty knife to scrape my bottom jaw off the floor.  'Uh...yeah.' I muttered somehow."

"This punk kid sailed 25 or 30 feet down the hill, head high, blasting a huge no footer.  Nobody jumped like that back then.  Those were the first photos I saw of Chris Moeller..."

"'Uh-boo-buh-kuh,' Andy told me, I don't know what the trick is or how you spell it.  He's coming here in an hour and you'll be driving Windy and Ron to the photo shoot.'"

I got into BMX in a trailer park outside Boise, Idaho in the summer of 1982.  I saw my first local freestyle show in the spring of 1984.  BMX freestyle became my thing, and I dreamed of being a pro rider someday, getting free bikes, and touring the country.  I never did become a pro, but I did get some free bikes and managed one skateboard tour.  I didn't have the guts or charisma to start my own company in the 80's or 90's, so I became a kind of wandering sidekick, the right hand man to some of the top people building freestyle.  I became part of the Golden Gate Park scene in 1985, getting to know Dave Vanderspek, Maurice Meyer, Robert Peterson and the rest up there.  My zine landed me a job at Wizard Publications, where I worked with Andy J., Lew, Gork, and Windy.  I went on to work for AFA owner Bob Morales, the guy who turned trick riding into the sport of BMX freestyle.  That led to video work, and I worked for Don Hoffman at Unreel Productions, the Vision Skateboards/Vision Street Wear video company.  A lot of BMXers don't know Don, but he made several of the first freestyle videos, and his parents owned the legendary Pipeline Skatepark.  I went on to self-produce a video called The Ultimate Weekend, in 1990.  The next year, young Chris Moeller, who ran S&M Bikes out of the garage of a one bedroom apartment at the time, called me up to make their first video.  I became his sidekick/roommate for quite a while, and also lived in the P.O.W. House during the early 90's, rooming with guys like Dave Clymer, Todd Lyons, John Paul Rogers, Alan and Brian Foster, and a bunch more.

I have a lot of stories.  I'm putting the best ones into a weird book of sorts.  It's a handmade thing, a D-Ring binder, filled with 20 pages to start, all hand laid out by me, zine style.  It comes with a few custom stickers and a couple of 11" X 17" copies of my drawings.  Each book is signed and numbered, and I'm hand numbering the pages of every copy.  Part 1 of Freestyle BMX Tales:The Book is out now, and costs $20.  Every 4 to 6 weeks, I'll have another 20 pages (and some goodies) for $10.  I've got a lot of stories of those old school days of BMX freestyle.  I'll keep putting some on the blog for everyone to read.  But the best collection of my stories, thoughts, and lessons from those days will be in the book.  You can order yours today at my Go Fund Me page.  The books are numbered as the orders come in.  #3 is up for grabs as I write this (11/262016).  Order yours today.

Mike Dominguez's Best Public 900 Attempt

In 1988, the 2-Hip King of Vert Finals was literally a backyard affair.  Technically, I guess Ron Wilkerson's Enchanted Ramp was in the front yard, so it was a front yard affair.  I'm pretty sure I was a judge for this contest. I was there for two or three Enchanted Ramp contests, and judged at least two of them.

All that aside, this is about the 900.  There was a battle on for this trick.  Back in 1987, I think, Mike Dominguez told people he had landed a couple of 900's on his own ramp.  As crazy as it sounds to kids today, back then, we just rode.  We rarely shot video.  VHS camcorders and the new 8mm ones were expensive, and not many people had them.  So there was no video to prove Mike's claim.  But he WAS Mike Dominguez, the highest flying pro at the time, and the craziest vert rider around.  So even as early as the AFA finals in 1987, people were hoping to see him land a 900 in a contest.

Mike was the first person to claim to have landed one.  But all of us in the freestyle scene and industry had bets on who would land it first in a contest.  Personally, I was always betting on Brian Blyther.  Brian had the most consistent and smoothest 540's, so I figured he'd win the 900 race.  What I didn't understand then was that the 900 was really a "Fuck it and huck it" trick.  Brian went high and smooth, but hucking crazy tricks wasn't his style.  He tried some 900's, but wasn't too close.  Dave Voelker tried some, but didn't land it first.  Dennis McCoy was still struggling to land smooth 540's then.  I can't remember if he hucked any 900 attempts in '87 or '88.  He did land his first in Indianapolis in 1990, and many more after that.  As weird as it sounds, Mat Hoffman was still an amateur rider, and just coming up in '87 and '88, so most of us figured someone else would land the first contest 900.

To be brutally honest, a lot of us in the industry weren't really sure if Dominguez really had landed the trick.  He said he had.  And he was Mike Dominguez, but it seemed like he would have had somebody shoot video at some point.  And then came this final 2-Hip King of Vert in 1988.  Expectations were high that Mike would try the 900.  Sure enough, in his last run, at 4:57 in the clip above, Mike went for it.  As you can see, he made the rotation, he landed on his tires, and just had his weight a little too far off to roll away from it.  Everyone around that ramp that day was blown away.  First, it was so close, that us doubters truly believed he had landed the trick at some point.  Second, he damn near did it in front of us.  We joked that he was so close, if he had even farted mid-900 we would have finished the rotation more solid and ridden away from it.  But, it wasn't to be.  It was, however, on the table.  We all knew it was possible.  Sure enough, about six months later, in Canada, Mat Hoffman landed the first 900 in a contest.  That was a changing of the guards.  Mike faded from the contest scene, and Mat became the new daredevil trying the craziest of tricks.  Mike Dominguez opened the door on the 900 and landed the first couple on his own ramp.  Mat Hoffman brought it to the public.  But man, it would have been soooooo cooool if Mike had ridden away from this one.

I have two new blogs now:

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

WPOS Kreative Ideas- This blog's about creativity, writing, art, blogging, and promoting creative work, and anything else I feel like writing about.   

Oz taught me how to sweep

August 1st, 1986 was on a Friday.  That was my first day of work at Wizard Publications, home of BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines.  It also happened to be the day before the BMX Action Ten Year Anniversary party.  I flew in Thursday night, as I recall, and after doing the basic new job paperwork Friday morning, I was helping get ready for the party.  There were a bunch of rental tables set up in the warehouse, and one of the jobs I got was to sweep the warehouse.  So I took the push broom and started pushing it in a straight line across the warehouse. 

I heard a noise behind me, and it was none other than Bob Osborn, the Wizard, the Great and All Powerful Oz of BMX, my brand new boss, telling me I was sweeping all wrong.  Loudly.  It scared the crap out of me.  On my first day as an editorial assistant at the magazines I was in trouble for sweeping the floor.  I didn't know what to do.  Andy J.peaked his head out of his office, wondering how the new guy managed to get in trouble on his first morning. 

Oz asked me if I'd ever swept before.  I nodded stupidly.  Then he said something like, "I was a fireman, I'll show you the right way to sweep."  I handed him the broom, and he demonstrated how I should sweep one stroke, then step sideways, sweep the next stroke, and keep doing that across the small warehouse.  By the end, I'd have one long line of dirt that I could sweep into a pile and scoop up.  So I started sweeping the way he taught me.  He watched for a minute to make sure I got the idea, and then went about his business. 

In the years since, I've swept parking lots for freestyle contests, big warehouses, huge stages on movie lots, and even an airplane hanger we used as a stage.  I learned to sweep switch to help fight fatigue on the big jobs.  I used Oz's fireman sweeping technique every time, and taught it to my crew on the set of American Gladiators.  Oz scared the hell out of me that first day, but I'm glad he took the time to show a BMX kid the way firefighters sweep.  It really came in handy. 

The Birth of Club Homeboy

The Birth of Club Homeboy

 By late 1986, I'd fallen into the rhythm of working at Wizard Publications.  Gork, the editor of BMX Action, and Lew, the assistant editor of FREESTYLIN', were my roommates.  We had moved into a three bedroom apartment in Hermosa Beach.  Andy Jenkins FREESTYLIN's editor, and his wife Kelly, lived half a block down the alley that our apartment faced.  Most mornings, after a quick breakfast, we'd pile into Gork's van, he'd crank up Metallica, and drive to the office.  Some days we'd ride our bikes the three or four miles or so to the Wizard office.  On an average day we'd end work around 5:00 or 6:00, pile back in the van, and head home.

Check out my epic blog post explaining why action sports exploded in popularity when they did 

"The Rise of the Action Sports"

After our bachelor suppers, Lew and I would jump on our bikes and head down to The Spot, our riding area on the north end of the Redondo Beach Pier.  Like any riding spot then, there were a handful of locals.  Most nights it was Lew, Craig Grasso, Chris Day, and me.  Gork came down to do some flatland 3 or 4 nights a week.  R.L. Osborn came down to ride on a regular basis.  Andy skated down a couple of times a week.  That was our core crew.  In addition, McGoo, the CW freestyle team manager at the time, showed up now and then, sometimes with Dizz Hicks and Ceppie Maes.  We'd practice our flatland and goof around for a couple of hours.  Some nights we'd take off and do a little street riding, jumping curbs or hitting local banks.  The Spot wasn't much different than most of the small freestyle scenes at the time, except for a couple of things.

One, we were right by the Pacific ocean, so we could hear sea lions barking off in the distance, and the ocean breeze brought a lot of moisture that made our brakes really sticky.  The second thing about the spot was that Andy and Lew had mentioned it in FREESTYLIN' from time to time, so every rider in the world knew it was there.  When an AFA contest was happening, we could roll down to the spot and find 75 riders from across the country riding there.  Everyone had to make a trip to The Spot when they came to Southern California.

One night, after our session, Lew and I rode over to Andy and Kelly's apartment to hang out.  Lew was a man of continual, and often pretty crazy, ideas.  On that particular night, he decided he wanted to find a name for The Spot locals.  I sat on the couch sipping a Coke as Lew and Andy threw different names around.  As I recall, Lew was getting into rap music at the time, a pretty new thing then.  But the term "posse," used often by rappers, didn't seem to fit our group.  Then, out of nowhere, Lew said, "How about Club Homeboy?"  They didn't like the name at first.  A few other names were tossed around, but Lew came back to Club Homeboy, and the name stuck.  So Lew, Gork, Me, Craig Grasso, Chris Day, Andy, and R.L. Osborn were original members of Club Homeboy.

For a few days, we just said the name as a little joke.  Then one night, Lew bought some sticker paper, and that night we stayed late working, giving him time to assault the Wizard Pubs copy machine.  While Andy, Gork, and I worked on magazine work, or petted Cosmo the factory watch cat, Lew flipped through a bunch of random, non-BMX magazines, lying around as creative inspiration.  He found a photo of this weird old guy.  He typed up the words, "Feelin' Nifty" on a typewriter, and started blowing up the words and giving them some distortion.  Half an hour later, the first Club Homeboy stickers were made and cut.  Long, skinny stickers with the weird old guy's face and "Feelin' Nifty" beside it.  He handed us each a few.  When we went home that night, I put one on the underside of my helmet visor, where it stayed for well over ten years, until I lost that helmet.

A couple nights later, Lew got some more sticker paper.  Flipping through a Japanese magazine called Popeye, he found the photo of Buckwheat from the Little Rascals.  Lew's amped up imagination went to work, and by the end of the night, the iconic Club Homeboy stickers with Buckwheat's face were being handed out to all of us.  That first batch was white, paper stickers.  A few days later, Lew found a place to buy neon green sticker paper, and he made a few dozen Buckwheat CHB stickers. 

The funny thing was, we were not supposed to use the copy machine for non-work activities.  So we actually hid Club Homeboy from Oz, our boss and the owner of Wizard, for quite a while.  But Lew went to the first 2-Hip King of Vert contest, in a barn in Wisconsin (or was it Minnesota?) soon after.  In any case, Lew took dozens of the Club Homeboy stickers with him, and slapped them all over the barn where the contest was held.  Nearly every top pro rider had a Club Homeboy sticker on their frame after that.  From that point on, random riders were always asking Lew for the stickers.

When I got laid off a couple months later, then end of December 1986, Club Homeboy was still, "officially," just The Spot locals, though other riders were asking for the stickers, putting them on their bikes.  A couple months later, Wizard hired Spike Jonze, who was a BMXer/skater kid, barely 18 years old.  He'd worked at Rockville BMX back east, then hopped in the Haor tour van, and became their roadie.  He wound up living at Ron Wilkerson's Enchanted House, with Kevin Martin.  

I wasn't the right fit for the Wizard office, and Spike Jonze definitely was.  As he got going in his first real job in California, Club Homeboy was evolving.  Oz finally asked Andy and Lew what Club Homeboy was, since he kept seeing the stickers everywhere.  They told him about it, and Oz liked the idea.  With his backing, suddenly little ads and mentions of Club Homeboy began popping up in FREESTYLIN'.  Already popular among the pro riders, and SoCal riders, it quickly took off and became an actual, paid membership organization.  For $20 or whatever, riders got a CHB T-shirt, a zine, a few stickers, a membership card, and a coupleof plastic wristbands.  

I was working down in Huntington Beach, at the AFA then, and I asked Lew for a T-shirt the next time I talked to him on the phone.  As an original member of Club Homeboy, that seemed like a reasonable request.  But in the few months I'd been away from Wizard, Club Homeboy  had morphed into something much bigger.  The original idea of it being locals from The Spot had faded away.  I kept bugging Lew, and finally got a Club Homeboy T-shirt for free.  But I never got the other stuff, or a membership card.  Being the uptight dork that I was then, I had some sour grapes against Lew for a while, over the Club Homeboy thing.  But I got over it, eventually.

As the next couple years went on, I heard Club Homeboy had thousands of members, and the "Chuck Brown" T-shirt, the Charlie Brown design, sold thousands of shirts.  The Club Homeboy Buckwheat logo wound up being one of the most iconic logos of 1980's BMX freestyle.  It's up there with the Haro chevron logo, the GT letters, and the Vision Street Wear logo in image recognition.  

If you google "Club Homeboy BMX" and search images, dozens come up.  Looking back from 34 years later, the cool thing about Lew's weird little idea turned icon is that it is a BMX freestyle thing.  The hardcore racers of the day don't get it.  And the Old School skateboarders, inline skaters, and snowboarders from that era don't know about Club Homeboy.  It's a freestyle thing... you wouldn't understand. 

I have a new blog now, checking out bike, skate, art, and other interesting spots, check it out:

The Spot Finder

 The Spot Finder      #thespotfinder

Freestyle BMX Tales: The Book

You can see me shooting video in this clip, on the far side of the left deck.  I was half asleep.  I spent the night before in the Phoenix airport with the $50,000 betacam camera in its case, between my legs.  A canceled flight left me stranded for the night, hoping the betacam wouldn't be stolen.  I got off the plane and took a cab straight to the baseball field where this contest was being held and climbed up on the deck right as practice was ending.  I think Mat's (1 footed) 900 here is his second ever 900 in a contest.  Someone, I never heard who, was making up names on the scoreboard for each rider.  A good day.

Freestyle BMX Tales: The Book (sort of) is coming February 1st, 2017.  You can order one of the limited run of 250 today.  Check back a little later for the link.