Around 5,000 retail stores, all from major chains, have closed in the last year, are closing now, or scheduled to close this year. What Napster did to music, Amazon and outlet malls are doing to department stores and mall stores. Here's an update on my Get Weird Make Money blog.
I gave up on that blog, here's my new ones (October 2021):
I met Jeff Cotter in 1987, while working for the AFA. He was part of the Lakewood posse that included Ron McCoy, Nathan Shimizu, Ron Camero, his little brother Tim Cotter, and Derek Oriee. All of those guys were good riders, and always at the SoCal local AFA contests. Jeff was sponsored by Ozone at one point, and by Vision Street Wear. None of that crew became top pros, but they were always good, polished, flatland riders. They often came down to the Huntington Beach Pier on the weekends where Mike Sarrail, myself, and a few of the Vision freestyle skaters would ride for the crowds.
So why am I showing a clip of one of the hundreds of good flatlanders from the heyday of 1988? Because Jeff went on to take a job riding in Ringling Bros. Circus not long after this. He flew to Japan and was doing shows with Jose Yanez, the inventor of BMX backflips. When Jeff came back to SoCal in 1990, I was shooting footage for my first self-produced bike video, The Ultimate Weekend. Jeff told me he could do backflips into water, and I went to Long Beach to shoot footage of him. While he was flipping into the lake, I asked him if he'd ever tried backflip variations. He said he never really thought of it, so he gave it a shot. He did a stretched one handed flip into the lake, and a real quick no hander, which made him the first actual freestyler to do any kind of backflip variations. Mat Hoffman was doing backflip fakies and flairs on vert then. But no one in the BMX freestyle world had done flip variations on video. Jeff Cotter, Lakewood area flatlander, wound up being that guy.
I shot the footage of Jeff flipping into the lake right as I was getting ready to edit my video. Back in those days, I had to pay $25 an hour to rent the edit equipment, and I set a solid deadline to stop shooting footage. Jeff called me a week after that deadline, and said he had learned flips ramp to ramp, making him the first freestyler to do so. But I was just getting ready to edit, and I didn't go shoot footage of him for the video. That was my mistake.
Jose Yanez was a rider from Arizona who learned flips and then double backflips into water, back when everyone thought that was impossible. But Jose wasn't a serious racer or freestyler. Jeff, the flatlander from Lakewood, became the first freestyler to do flips ramp to ramp, and to try one handers and no handers. In the weird world of BMX riding progression, you never know who will break new ground with the tricks that change everything. Jose did it first. Mat Hoffman took flips to halfpipes first. And Jeff Cotter brought flips into the mainstream freestyle world.
At 44:11 in this clip, you can see Jeff flipping into a lake in 1990.
just ran across this, and the first minute or two of this clip is pretty amazing. Until I got to the part where Guy Martin heard the "World Record" for a gravity racer... 84 mph. You think we should tell him that when he was in kindergarten, BMXers built pieces of crap out of spare parts called GPV's, gravity powered vehicles. At the Palm Springs tramway race in 1987, Tommy Brackens passed the camera motorcycle on his GPV, which was doing 85 mph... in a turn. I've personally watched GPV's hit around 90 mph and skate luges hit 110 mph+. Here's the next video, where Guy "breaks the record" at 85.612 mph. Just fast forward til the end. Then he crashes trying to go faster. It's a good crash, worth the watch.
Hey Guy, it was a cute little go kart you guys built... but this is how you go fast using gravity:
I went to this event with NorCal friend John Ficarra, who didn't fair so well. On that day engineer Dan Hannebrink's fairing won the day. There were a few other events, and Hannebrink crashed hard in one. He had the technology, but not the balls of pro BMX racers like Tommy Brackens. Here's the lead up to the video above, starting 5:10 in the clip. You were 5 years old when this happened Guy Martin.
Go to 1:03 in this video and you'll see the enigmatic Skyway pro Oleg Konings doing a scuff trick. I can't remember what he called it. Why is this a big deal? Because, to the best of my knowledge, this was the first scuffing trick EVER. I personally saw Oleg doing this trick in 1985, when I first moved to the Bay Area. He had been doing it a while at that point. For those of you who found freestyle in the very late 1980's or later, "scuffing" is the act of pushing a foot on a tire, then dragging that foot to control the speed, which helped you keep your balance.
Right before I left NorCal for my job at FREESTYLIN', Golden Gate Park local Tim Tracy had invented another scuffing trick, it was a forwards side glide with his leg over the handlebars, scuffing on the front wheel. It was amazing at the time, but like Oleg's earlier scuff trick, it didn't catch on.
At an AFA Masters contest in Oregon in the spring of 1987, the NorCal crew unleashed the Backyard, and that was the trick that blew up and got the whole freestyle world learning scuff tricks.
Here's Dennis MCoy in 1987 bustin' some scuff tricks. At 1:01 in this clip he does a funky chicken, into a spinning front peg scuff thing. Then at 1:45, he goes into a locomotive, which is what the backyard soon morphed into, thanks to Kevin Jones. At 1:56 Dennis does the backyard, the trick that started a whole flurry of scuffing moves. Within a year, scuffing moves started turning into gliding moves, and that was the foundation for all of today's flatland. And it all started with a weird kid from NorCal called Oleg Konings.
One night in the mid-2000's, when I was a fat taxi driver, I got a call from the BMX guys at Barspinner Ryan's house in Huntington Beach. Somebody needed a ride from a party at their house. I was the old, washed up Has Been BMX industry guy, so all the BMX guys called me when they needed a cab... especially if they didn't have money.
In any case, I picked up one of the Sheep Hills Locals, can't remember which one, hopped in the cab with a couple younger guys I didn't know. As I was driving them, the Sheep Hills guy told them, "Hey man, this is The White Bear, he's the guy that made the 44 Something video." Much to my surprise, one of those guys was a rider just breaking into the big time, Ryan "Biz" Jordan. He said, something like, "I used to watch that video EVERY DAY before I went out riding." To say I was stoked is an understatement. When I shot video and sat down to edit that video in a corner of the S&M Bikes office, my main goal was to make a video that made people want to go ride. It's as simple as that. When I made my first self-produced video in 1990, riders didn't really make videos then. Eddie Roman had made Aggroman, and Mark Eaton had mad a couple of VHS mastered Dorkin' In York videos. But videos were made by companies to promote their bikes. So I spent a long time that year trying to figure out what the real goal of my video was. When it all came down to it, my criteria for a good bike video was that I wanted a rider to be walking their bikes out the front door to go ride before the video ended. I've actually seen that happen with my videos fromtime to time.
But when Ryan Jordan was in my cab that night, it was the first time that a serious pro rider told me that my video got him stoked to go riding before he was a pro. That's a good feeling. So all you riders out there, if you run across some old HAS BEEN BMX guy whose photos or video parts or videos they produced stoked you out when you were younger, let them know. It's a really great feeling to know that the video I got paid $450 to edit in 1993 actually made people want to ride.
