The first big innovator in lip tricks on vert, Haro pro in the 1980's, 1/2 of the 2-Hip Trick team, and the guy who started putting on 2-Hip King of Vert, and then Meet the Street contests, in 1987-88. Later came Wilkerson Airlines. Ron Wilkerson, one of the most influential BMX freestyle riders ever. Hey, he invented the abubaca, and a bunch of other stuff.
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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.
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.
Back to the 25th annivesary posts about my 1990 video, The Ultimate Weekend. If you go to 9:54 in the video, you see a quick little night time street session at a place in Huntington Beach many of us called the Slater Ditch. It's some kind of a pump house or something along a canal that feeds into Bolsa Chica wetlands. The younger guys, like Andy Mulcahy, whose mug is in this section a couple of times, called it The Cancer Ditch. They called it that because the water at the bottom of the riding area was so nasty that it would probably give you cancer if you fell in.
At one time, this had been a well known skate spot, but the city workers built some speed bumps across it to deter skating. After that it was a place for BMXers to session, usually late at night, like in this video. Personally, the best I could do was footplant the wall, and jump this little step up on the other side. In this clip you see Keith Treanor and Randy Lawrence sessioning, while Andy and Sean Johnson look on. Back in 1990, video cameras could not handle low light well, so I wasn't even sure I could use this footage. I used the editing system to pump up the video level so it was just barely watchable. The Stain's quick song, "My Grandma's Got a Mohawk," worked perfectly to end the "Friday Night" phase of the video. I can't even count how many times I rode this spot in the late 80's and 90's. Usually alone, but sometimes in groups like this. The Cancer Ditch is one of those obscure little places that got a little famous because of BMX.
