Martin Aparijo's Quaterpipe Session

I'm continuing on with my 25th anniversary look back at my 1990 self-produced bike video, The Ultimate Weekend.  Today's bit is a short but great session at Martin Aparijo's house.  It starts at 29:08 in the video above. 

As I've said a few times before, when I started taking my video camera different places to shoot video, several riders wondered what the hell I was doing.  Back then, as a rule, only established companies made videos.  But as spring turned into summer, word got around that I was making my own BMX freestyle video, and I got offers to go shoot different places.  I don't really remember how it happened, but I think I ran into flatland legend Martin Aparijo somewhere, told him I was making a video, and he told me he had a quarterpipe, and that I should come by some day and shoot video.  Something like that.  So I did. 

I went there with Keith Treanor and John Povah, and we pulled up at someone else's house first, to find Steve "Bio Air" Bennett and another guy playing "Dueling Banjos."  I pulled out my camera and started shooting.  Steve Bennett was a early skatepark rider, as you can tell from his yellow ASPA shirt.  That stands for American Skate Park Association, which was what Bob Morales created when he first put on bike contests at the skateparks.  The ASPA was the predecessor of the AFA.  So that T-shirt was already old school in 1990.  I'd never met Steve B. before, so that was a cool bonus. 

Then we drove over to Martin's house nearby.  Martin (white helmet), Todd Anderson (black cap backwards), and Jess Dyrenforth (turquoise shorts) were already there riding.  Keith Treanor (black cap forwards), and John Povah (white cap) joined the session. 

The ramp was a weird one for that time.  It was about six or 6 1/2 feet high, and under vert.  At a time when no BMXer anywhere had a mini-ramp yet, and when vert halfpipes were usually 9 to 10 feet high, this ramp was odd.  But that led to a great lip trick session.  Keith's ice pick was a pretty new trick then, as was Jess's nose pick to fakie.  Todd's barspin abubacas were something I'd never seen before, as was Jess's peg disaster.  Then Martin blew all our minds by flying out on the roof.  Most of us 80's riders think of Martin as a pure flatland rider of the time, but he was a former magazine test rider and a good jumper.  In fact, for years Martin claimed to have done the first front flip off a jump.  It was a steep jump with a really soft landing, he said, and as was typical then, no one shot video.  It seemed ridiculous at the time, but he swore he landed one or two.  Of course, now we know that front flips and even front flip variations are possible, so Martin's story is more believable.  Hell, they even front flip motorcycles now, which is beyond insane. 

In any case, this little QP session got me a few more firsts on video, and added Martin and Steve "Bio Air" Bennett to the list of riders in the video.  Strangely enough, years later I ran into Martin, after not seeing him for quite a while, and his first comment was, "remember when you shot video on my ramp that day?"  This short but awesome session stuck out in his mind as well. 

The H Ramp

Yeah, I know I'm lagging.  My laptop died, so I'm blogging without my own computer right now, which sucks.  Anyhow, October 2015 was the 25th anniversary of the release of my first self-produced BMX video, The Ultimate Weekend, in 1990.  So I'm going to jump ahead to 1990 in this blog, and tell the story of this video, section by section. 

At 2:08 in this clip, after the intro, we get to a mini-ramp.  Seems like a pretty lame section of mostly Keith Treanor, with a bit of John Povah and Alan Valek riding.  What's cool about this section is that I think this is the first time a mini-ramp appeared in any BMX video.  To the best of my knowledge, the first mini-ramp was the Towne Street ramp in Costa Mesa, California, built by a bunch of the Schmitt Stix skaters.  They originally built a 9 foot high vert halfpipe, but the neighbors complained (typical) and the city inspectors came to check out the ramp.  Backyard ramps were really rare in those days, even in California, and the city guys weren't sure what to do about it.  After some research, they realized it wasn't illegal to have a ramp, but it had to be no higher than six feet.  So the skaters chopped the the top three feet of their vert ramp off, and BOOM, the first under vert mini-ramp was born.  They soon realized that an under vert ramp allowed a whole bunch of new tricks to be performed, and the idea caught on.

A year or two later, some skaters in Santa Ana, CA built two mini-ramps side by side, and they had a little spine in between the two so skaters could transfer from one to the other.  The ramps formed a big letter "H", and became known as the H-Ramp.  Skaters from all over came to session it.  Later on it was rebuilt into an "L" shape with a hip, five feet tall as I recall.  Then at one end of the "L" was a larger, six foot mini.  That's the set-up you see in this video.  The reason Keith Treanor does a million tail taps, and not much else, is because this footage was shot on his second of third trip to the H-Ramp.  Keith went on to become a master of mini-ramps, but this was when he was just learning to ride them. 

Other stories about the H-Ramp... My boss, Don Hoffman, at Unreel Productions was shooting footage of Vision skaters there one day when he accidentally stepped off the back edge of the deck.  He fell five feet awkwardly, and the camera slammed him in the face.  That doesn't sound like too big of a deal, but we used 35 pound Betacam cameras then, and Don got worked by that beast.  He looked kinda like the Elephant Man for about a week, and the fall cost about $3,000 damage to the camera and $4,000 to Don's face.  We never let him live that one down. 

Another story there is one time I was riding the ramp with Keith Treanor, John Povah, and Jess Dyrenforth.  At that time, Jess was changing from a BMX rider to an inline skater.  He brought his girlfriend, Angie Walton, to the ramp.  She was also a skater, and was trying to learn some kind of handstand drop-in thing on her blades.  Somehow, I got the job of holding her ankles while she was in the handstand to stabilize her before she tried to drop-in.  I was trying to be a gentleman and not look down her shorts to see her underwear as I did this.  But I wasn't a great gentleman and she had pretty standard issue white underwear on.  If her name sounds familiar, it's because she became a major force in the inline world, publishing a magazine (called Daily Bread, I think) and then she was the main force behind starting the Warped Tour, which was a damn cool idea.