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.

Primo and Diane's Backyard Ramps

I'm continuing on in my 25th anniversary look at my 1990 self-produced bike video, The Ultimate Weekend.  Today's clip is at 19:40 in the video above.

Looking back now, it's easy to say The Ultimate Weekend was lame in many ways.  But at the time, there were only a couple of rider-made videos out.  The concept of each rider having there own section was kind of a new thing, and just one of many ways to make a video.  The few of us making videos at that time were just making this shit up as we went.  Eddie Roman made a low-budget action movie with Aggroman.  Mark Eaton chopped together amazing flatland on two VCR's in Dorkin' in York.  My idea was to show a group of us going to every amazing place possible in one weekend of riding.  This was at a time when halfpipe contests for bikes had only been around for three years, and street contests for two.  Believe it or not, this video was the first bike video to include riding on mini-ramps.  Seriously, the first mini-ramps.  So I was totally stoked that Gary Laurent got us permission to ride at Primo and Diane's house.  For those who don't know, Primo and Diane Desiderio were the first couple to do synchronized freestyle skating.  Primo was probably best know then for the Primo Slide, where he would go up on the side of his board and slide long distances.  You can see one a few seconds into this clip.  At the time I shot this video, they performed in a show at Sea World in San Diego.  I actually met Primo and Diane the weekend I flew down to interview for FREESTYLIN' magazine.  Gork and Lew took me to a skate contest at Oceanside, where I saw Mark Gonzales and Christian Hosoi ripping in street and met Primo and Diane.  I knew them and worked with them a few times at Vision, but Gary was also in the Sea World show then, I think.  He was the only BMXer that rode their ramps, and even though they were away on that particular day, they let us ride.  Perhaps the most amazing thing about their ramps was that none of the wood was stolen.  If you look close, you can see the name "Jack Files" near the coping on the tallest ramp.  He was a guy they knew from church that donated most of the wood to build the ramps.

Keith Treanor, in the black T-shirt, had never seen a set-up like this.  There were no skateparks... AT ALL... in California at that point.  We were freaking amazed when we saw that multi-ramp set-up.  Gary Laurent, in the black tank top, obviously had the ramps pretty dialed.  Keith was trying everything he could think of on this original set-up.  In addition, you see me doing a dodgy tailwhip footplant, and Mike Sarrail airing the hip... sort of.  And you also see the girlfriends.  One was Mike's then-girlfriend Paula, I think one was Gary's girlfriend.  Neither Keith or I brought a girlfriend that day, so I can't remember who the third girl was.  Anyhow, they sat there, bored out of their skulls, the whole two or three hours.

In addition to being the second mini-ramp in a bike video (the first was the H-Ramp at the beginning of this video), this was the first time BMXers riding a spine ramp had ever been in a video.  Spine ramps were also a new thing back then.  Gary had his familiar lines dialed on it.  Keith struggled a little at first, getting used to such a steep landing.  But whenever Keith was around a really good rider, like Gary, he always wanted to step-up his game.  Gary had never done a 360 over that spine.  After hearing that, it became Keith's goal for the day.  As you can see in this clip, he was a little sketchy on the first one, but landed a better one later on.  With the 360 thrown down, Gary stepped up his game and landed his own first 360 over the spine.

I really like this section of the video for several reasons.  First I did the little jump cut editing as we were walking into the backyard.  I stepped up my editing game a bit.  Second, I was showing the BMX world how cool a backyard could be if you could come up with a bunch of wood.  This scene was the second mini-ramp in a bike video, the first spine ramp in a bike video, and the first 360's over a spine in a bike video.  Riders today take all this stuff for granted, but somebody had to come up with it in the first place.  And someone else, me in this case, had to show the BMX world what people in the skate world were doing in their backyards, and spread the idea of mini-ramps.  In 1990, videos weren't just showing guys landing their hardest tricks, they were showing brand new ideas and concepts.  It was a cool time to be a BMX freestyler. 

2-Hip BMX Freestyle Show

I'm continuing on with my 25th anniversary look back at my 1990 BMX video, The Ultimate Weekend.  Today's clip is a 2-Hip freestyle show at 16:54 in the video above.

In the early and mid 1980's, each of the action sports like BMX racing, BMX freestyle, skateboarding, snowboarding, etc, was it's own entity.  There was crossover between them, of course.  But we didn't see them as one big movement then, we just saw weird, new emerging activities that were kind of turning into sports.  One thing that set BMX freestyle apart from the very beginning was the emphasis on going out and putting on shows.  From Bob Haro and R.L. Osborn in the earliest days, to the wave of mid-80's BMX freestylers across the country (and world), shows were an important part of what we did.  Some guys, like Ron Wilkerson and Dave Vanderspek in the San Francisco area, really promoted shows and turned them into a business.  Ron Wilkerson hooked up with Haro as a sponsor, moved to the San Diego area, and blended his trick team shows into the rest of his business endeavors. 

Myself, as a lowly editorial assistant at Wizard Publications in 1986, I did an informal survey of nearly all the riders I met, asking them how they got into freestyle.  Almost all of them told me it started with seeing a live show of one of the traveling teams, often a factory team.  Now, 30 years later, there are only a few professional and factory trick teams out there, and this may be one of the reasons there are fewer young kids getting into the sport.  Something for all you bike company owners to think about...

Somehow, through the freestyle grapevine, I got wind of this 2-Hip show somewhere in San Diego.  I think Gary Laurent let me know.  Mike Sarrail, his then girlfriend Paula, Keath Treanor, and I headed south to San Diego for a couple days of shooting video.  Mike's the tall, skinny guy who's always flipping me off in the video.  He didn't really want to be on camera, so every time I pointed the camera at him, he flipped me the bird, thinking I wouldn't use that footage.  Much to his dismay, I did.  All that aside, we caught this show featuring Ron Wilkerson himself (white helmet), Gary Laurent (yellow helmet), and a couple of flatlanders who I didn't know.  I didn't bother getting their names for some reason.  Sorry guys.  Mike went off to shoot photos, I was shooting video, and Keith and Paula parked themselves on the tailgate of my truck, affectionately known as Blue Hell.  I bought the truck off of Mike, and still owe him quite a bit of money for it.  I plan to make that money with The Ultimate Weekend II one of these days.  Anyhow, Keith and Paula were soon joined by a wandering, drunk homeless guy.  I learned a big lesson on action sports video making that day:  interview bums whenever you can.  This may be the first homeless guy featured in a BMX video, but many more found their way into action sports videos after that. 

I don't know who the show was actually for, it wasn't a bike shop or any kind of festival.  What I do know, and what I captured on video, was a lot of little kids being thoroughly stoked by seeing Ron, Gary and the guys bust out on their bikes.  That's how it grows.  I'm glad I got this show on tape to add to the video.  The riders weren't doing the biggest or craziest airs of their lives.  The flatlanders weren't the best in the world.  But they took BMX freestyle to some new people that day, and that is a huge part of what freestyle is all about. 

Magnolia Jumps

Last October was the 25th anniversary of my 1990 video, The Ultimate Weekend.  I'm continuing on with the look back at it, today at 14:00 in the clip above. 

Jumps.  When most of us look back to the early days of riding our bikes, even before many of us knew about BMX, there were the jumps.  There's just something amazing about taking a bicycle, made for human powered transportation on the ground, and making it fly.  That second or two of  weightlessness somehow makes us seem like we are getting away with something.  We jump our bikes and get a momentary reprieve from the Law of Gravity.

There had been a lot of jumps built in an around the Huntington Beach, California area.  I've heard tales that Greg Hill and other legendary racers hit jumps in the Bolsa Chica mesa area of northern H.B. in the late 70's and early 80's.  When I moved to H.B. in 1987, there were jumps at Hidden Valley, nestled in an actual little hidden valley (hence the name) behind the shopping center at Beach and Adams.  Those jumps are great in the winter, when many other places flood, and they were around in 1990, though not as elaborate as they are today.

The best known jumps in 1990 were at Magnolia, in the wetlands just south of the big power plant on Pacific Coast Highway.  So that's where this little session took place.  Sheep Hills, the now infamous jumps of that area, weren't built until about a year after this video was made.  We start off this session with a local kid named Mike jumping the style jump.  Rhythm sections had yet to take over.  In 1990, most jumps were trails where you pedaled a lot then hit the jump.  The style jump was 14 1/2 feet tip to tip, and happened to be the biggest double jump I , personally, have ever jumped.  In this clip we see Mike bust a one hander over it.  Keith Treanor does a 360 over it, and that was a pretty big jump to 360 in those days.  John Povah jumps it, and then gets pissed when he can't pull some trick over it.  We've all thrown and maybe even kicked our bikes in frustration at times.   But when John kicked his bike in this clip, he hurt his foot... for a month.  Sometimes it's the stupid things that get you hurt.

The guy with no shirt is a guy we met out there that day.  He said his name was Luke and he'd just come back from the Marines as I recall.  I think this may actually be the guy we know as Carter Holland today, but I'm not totally sure. 

After the style jump, we see a dork session of the guys doing a bunch of different variations over a little bump.  Nowadays, this kind of thing would never make it into a video.  But I specifically put this in to show our lifestyle of riding then.  We weren't always doing the biggest, baddest, most technical tricks.  Dork sessions were a fun and normal part of riding, and I wanted that in my video. 

Then we hit a flyout jump up on the canal bank.  At that time, I'd been trying bunnyhop tailwhips for about three years, and never landed a clean one.  I did manage a few toe-dragger bunnyhop tailwhips in late 1989, but never got the trick dialed.  Bill Nitschke brought that trick to us later that year.  But the idea of tailwhip jumps was out there, and we were all trying them... and not landing them.  On any given day of riding at the Huntington Beach Pier, we might decide to ride down to Magnolia and session a while.  And what's in this video is a pretty typical session.

The funniest thing that ever happened at Magnolia when I was there happened between Mike Sarrail (the tall guy who does the little kickout over the bump) and myself.  He was shooting photos one day of another jump at Magnolia, where we'd ride down off the canal bank, hit a little berm, and then hit a jump.  Mike and I were giving each other a hard time, and he started throwing dirt clods at me to try and make me mess up.  At one point, he threw a small rock at me as I was coming out of the little berm.  The rock went right between my arms and hit me square in the nuts.  I did a kind of rolling dead sailor and piled into the the ground.  It was the most accurate rock Mike ever threw, and he was laughing his ass off as I lay on the ground in pain grabbing my balls.  Aaaaahh... the things we remember about our sessions after time passes. 

Then next session after Magnolia is us riding some banks somewhere in an industrial area, either in Orange or Garden Grove, I can't remember.  That was the only time I ever rode there.  In that section we see John Povah trying, and then making the long manual.  Keith Treanor is going for the footplants.  I think it's Alan Valek who does the tailwhip on the bank, which was a pretty new trick then. 

Unlike today's videos where everyone gets a section and they spend months trying to land their absolute best tricks, in The Ultimate Weekend, I just wanted to show real riding.  No one had really done that yet.  Most of the mainstream videos up until then had guys riding in uniforms and flatlanding with helmets on.  I wanted to show what our world of BMX freestyle, jumping, and street riding really looked like.  I just happened to be one of the first guys to do that.  A tidal wave of other videos followed in the early and mid 90's, taking riding to new places.