Chris Day stories

Here's flatland dynamo Chris Day, at the peek of the AFA Masters era, ripping it up on flatland in 1988.

At the beginning of August in 1986, I flew from San Jose to Southern California to start my new life working a Wizard Publications.  I was so nervous about it all that I got a horrible case of the hives, and had to wear long sleeve, button up shirts to work for two weeks.  And Jenkins and Lew gave me a hard time about that, thinking they had accidentally just hired a button up dork.  I was a dork, alright, just not a button up one.  Once the hives were gone I went back to rockin' my T-shirt collection.

I moved into Gork and Lew's two bedroom apartment, and slept on the couch for a couple of months.  They showed me around the office, around Redondo Beach, and took me to their flatland area, The Spot.  The Spot locals at the time were Lew, Gork, Craig Grasso, and this young kid named Chris Day.  Chris was about 14 or 15 then, and did these amazing flail boomerangs, whipping his legs around and snapping the trick like no one else at the time.  Chris was amazing to watch.  When R.L. Osborn was in town, he'd usually come ride at The Spot once or twice a week, and it was obvious he was keeping tabs on Chris.  Chris was one of the young generation of riders, and R.L., an old school veteran then, didn't want to miss any progression happening in the sport.

As a young kid, though, Chris could be kind of annoying.  I soon learned that he would ride over to our apartment, barge in the the door without much of a knock, and head straight for the cookie jar Gork kept well stocked.  We didn't really mind him eating cookies, but it would have been cool if he at least asked first.

When the magazine deadlines were close, Andy, Lew, Gork, and me all wound up working late at Wizard, which was a small warehouse with an office area up front.  All of our offices were in the back, along the walls of the warehouse.  Sometimes Chris would ride over there at night to hang out.  But we were busy doing the work we should have been doing in the previous three weeks, and we didn't need any more distractions.  Gork would always have his ghetto blaster blasting metal, usually Metallica, on those nights.  In between songs we'd often hear Chris knocking on the warehouse door and yelling, "Hey guys!  It's me!  Chris!  Hey guys!  Let me in!"  We'd laugh, and the next song would start, then we couldn't hear him anymore.  When that song stopped, we'd hear Chris yelling and knocking again.  One might he did that for about two hours.

It wasn't that we didn't like Chris.  Generally speaking he was a pretty cool kid as well as a great up and coming rider.  But he would wear on our nerves, and we just needed some time without him around now and then.

As the fall progressed, Gork, Lew, and I decided to move into a three bedroom apartment, so I could get off the couch.  We looked around for a while, an found one about a half mile away in Hermosa Beach, right down the alley from where Andy and his wife Kelly lived.  We moved in one weekend, and decided to not tell Chris that we moved.  We still went down to The Spot every night and rode with him, but we just "forgot" to tell him we moved.  Every once in a while he'd say, "I was knocking on your door yesterday, and nobody answered."  One of us would tell him we must have been at the store or something.  It took Chris three weeks to figure out we moved to a new apartment and then find it.  After that, he went back to raiding the cookie jar until Gork stopped stocking it.

Somewhere along that time, Gork's grandma sent him some homemade persimmon brownies.  No offense to Gork's grandma, but they didn't taste good.  We had a new cookie jar then, some ceramic animal or something.  And we stopped leaving cookies out for Chris to eat, so he left the jar alone.  So grandma's persimmon brownies sat in that jar as kind of a science experiment.  After five or six weeks, they all had about a quarter inch of hairy mold on them.  We had a party one weekend, and Chris showed up, along with a bunch of other people.  When the chips and other munchies ran out, Chris asked if we had anything else to eat.  We'd all had a few beers at that point, and one of us said, "there's some homemade persimmon brownies in the cookie jar."  I think Chris had snagged a couple beers, despite being under age, so he was a bit buzzed.  He opened the cookie jar and started chowing down on the mold covered persimmon brownies.  I think he ate all of them.  We just sat there laughing our asses off.

I soon got laid off and moved south to Huntington Beach to work for the AFA, and I only ran into Chris Day at contests then.  He kept improving and rocked on flatland for quite a while.

Years later, when I was working on my video, The Ultimate Weekend, Jess Dyrenforth called up and said he'd been riding this cool ramp near San Diego, and that he wanted me to come shoot some video.  So I headed there with Randy Lawrence.  Much to my surprise, along with Jess were Pete Augustin, underground legend Mike Tokemoto, and Chris Day.  Chris was doing these amazing sweeper footplants on the spine.  None of us had seen anything like them before.  Chris also did these sprocket slides to revert.  I wasn't sure what to call them, kind of a 540 sprocket bash.  But they were fucking amazing.

You can find that section of video here.  Go to 38:03 in the video.  Here are a couple angles of Chris Day's sweepers in 1990.

As of the late summer of 2023, I'm going in a new direction with my writing.  Check out my new stuff on my Substack:

Steve Emig: The White Bear's Substack

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.