Mike Dominguez's Best Public 900 Attempt

In 1988, the 2-Hip King of Vert Finals was literally a backyard affair.  Technically, I guess Ron Wilkerson's Enchanted Ramp was in the front yard, so it was a front yard affair.  I'm pretty sure I was a judge for this contest. I was there for two or three Enchanted Ramp contests, and judged at least two of them.

All that aside, this is about the 900.  There was a battle on for this trick.  Back in 1987, I think, Mike Dominguez told people he had landed a couple of 900's on his own ramp.  As crazy as it sounds to kids today, back then, we just rode.  We rarely shot video.  VHS camcorders and the new 8mm ones were expensive, and not many people had them.  So there was no video to prove Mike's claim.  But he WAS Mike Dominguez, the highest flying pro at the time, and the craziest vert rider around.  So even as early as the AFA finals in 1987, people were hoping to see him land a 900 in a contest.

Mike was the first person to claim to have landed one.  But all of us in the freestyle scene and industry had bets on who would land it first in a contest.  Personally, I was always betting on Brian Blyther.  Brian had the most consistent and smoothest 540's, so I figured he'd win the 900 race.  What I didn't understand then was that the 900 was really a "Fuck it and huck it" trick.  Brian went high and smooth, but hucking crazy tricks wasn't his style.  He tried some 900's, but wasn't too close.  Dave Voelker tried some, but didn't land it first.  Dennis McCoy was still struggling to land smooth 540's then.  I can't remember if he hucked any 900 attempts in '87 or '88.  He did land his first in Indianapolis in 1990, and many more after that.  As weird as it sounds, Mat Hoffman was still an amateur rider, and just coming up in '87 and '88, so most of us figured someone else would land the first contest 900.

To be brutally honest, a lot of us in the industry weren't really sure if Dominguez really had landed the trick.  He said he had.  And he was Mike Dominguez, but it seemed like he would have had somebody shoot video at some point.  And then came this final 2-Hip King of Vert in 1988.  Expectations were high that Mike would try the 900.  Sure enough, in his last run, at 4:57 in the clip above, Mike went for it.  As you can see, he made the rotation, he landed on his tires, and just had his weight a little too far off to roll away from it.  Everyone around that ramp that day was blown away.  First, it was so close, that us doubters truly believed he had landed the trick at some point.  Second, he damn near did it in front of us.  We joked that he was so close, if he had even farted mid-900 we would have finished the rotation more solid and ridden away from it.  But, it wasn't to be.  It was, however, on the table.  We all knew it was possible.  Sure enough, about six months later, in Canada, Mat Hoffman landed the first 900 in a contest.  That was a changing of the guards.  Mike faded from the contest scene, and Mat became the new daredevil trying the craziest of tricks.  Mike Dominguez opened the door on the 900 and landed the first couple on his own ramp.  Mat Hoffman brought it to the public.  But man, it would have been soooooo cooool if Mike had ridden away from this one.

I have two new blogs now:

Crazy California 43- This blog's about weird, cool, and historic locations that have an interesting story.

WPOS Kreative Ideas- This blog's about creativity, writing, art, blogging, and promoting creative work, and anything else I feel like writing about.   

Oz taught me how to sweep

August 1st, 1986 was on a Friday.  That was my first day of work at Wizard Publications, home of BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines.  It also happened to be the day before the BMX Action Ten Year Anniversary party.  I flew in Thursday night, as I recall, and after doing the basic new job paperwork Friday morning, I was helping get ready for the party.  There were a bunch of rental tables set up in the warehouse, and one of the jobs I got was to sweep the warehouse.  So I took the push broom and started pushing it in a straight line across the warehouse. 

I heard a noise behind me, and it was none other than Bob Osborn, the Wizard, the Great and All Powerful Oz of BMX, my brand new boss, telling me I was sweeping all wrong.  Loudly.  It scared the crap out of me.  On my first day as an editorial assistant at the magazines I was in trouble for sweeping the floor.  I didn't know what to do.  Andy J.peaked his head out of his office, wondering how the new guy managed to get in trouble on his first morning. 

Oz asked me if I'd ever swept before.  I nodded stupidly.  Then he said something like, "I was a fireman, I'll show you the right way to sweep."  I handed him the broom, and he demonstrated how I should sweep one stroke, then step sideways, sweep the next stroke, and keep doing that across the small warehouse.  By the end, I'd have one long line of dirt that I could sweep into a pile and scoop up.  So I started sweeping the way he taught me.  He watched for a minute to make sure I got the idea, and then went about his business. 

In the years since, I've swept parking lots for freestyle contests, big warehouses, huge stages on movie lots, and even an airplane hanger we used as a stage.  I learned to sweep switch to help fight fatigue on the big jobs.  I used Oz's fireman sweeping technique every time, and taught it to my crew on the set of American Gladiators.  Oz scared the hell out of me that first day, but I'm glad he took the time to show a BMX kid the way firefighters sweep.  It really came in handy. 

The Birth of Club Homeboy

The Birth of Club Homeboy

 By late 1986, I'd fallen into the rhythm of working at Wizard Publications.  Gork, the editor of BMX Action, and Lew, the assistant editor of FREESTYLIN', were my roommates.  We had moved into a three bedroom apartment in Hermosa Beach.  Andy Jenkins FREESTYLIN's editor, and his wife Kelly, lived half a block down the alley that our apartment faced.  Most mornings, after a quick breakfast, we'd pile into Gork's van, he'd crank up Metallica, and drive to the office.  Some days we'd ride our bikes the three or four miles or so to the Wizard office.  On an average day we'd end work around 5:00 or 6:00, pile back in the van, and head home.

Check out my epic blog post explaining why action sports exploded in popularity when they did 

"The Rise of the Action Sports"

After our bachelor suppers, Lew and I would jump on our bikes and head down to The Spot, our riding area on the north end of the Redondo Beach Pier.  Like any riding spot then, there were a handful of locals.  Most nights it was Lew, Craig Grasso, Chris Day, and me.  Gork came down to do some flatland 3 or 4 nights a week.  R.L. Osborn came down to ride on a regular basis.  Andy skated down a couple of times a week.  That was our core crew.  In addition, McGoo, the CW freestyle team manager at the time, showed up now and then, sometimes with Dizz Hicks and Ceppie Maes.  We'd practice our flatland and goof around for a couple of hours.  Some nights we'd take off and do a little street riding, jumping curbs or hitting local banks.  The Spot wasn't much different than most of the small freestyle scenes at the time, except for a couple of things.

One, we were right by the Pacific ocean, so we could hear sea lions barking off in the distance, and the ocean breeze brought a lot of moisture that made our brakes really sticky.  The second thing about the spot was that Andy and Lew had mentioned it in FREESTYLIN' from time to time, so every rider in the world knew it was there.  When an AFA contest was happening, we could roll down to the spot and find 75 riders from across the country riding there.  Everyone had to make a trip to The Spot when they came to Southern California.

One night, after our session, Lew and I rode over to Andy and Kelly's apartment to hang out.  Lew was a man of continual, and often pretty crazy, ideas.  On that particular night, he decided he wanted to find a name for The Spot locals.  I sat on the couch sipping a Coke as Lew and Andy threw different names around.  As I recall, Lew was getting into rap music at the time, a pretty new thing then.  But the term "posse," used often by rappers, didn't seem to fit our group.  Then, out of nowhere, Lew said, "How about Club Homeboy?"  They didn't like the name at first.  A few other names were tossed around, but Lew came back to Club Homeboy, and the name stuck.  So Lew, Gork, Me, Craig Grasso, Chris Day, Andy, and R.L. Osborn were original members of Club Homeboy.

For a few days, we just said the name as a little joke.  Then one night, Lew bought some sticker paper, and that night we stayed late working, giving him time to assault the Wizard Pubs copy machine.  While Andy, Gork, and I worked on magazine work, or petted Cosmo the factory watch cat, Lew flipped through a bunch of random, non-BMX magazines, lying around as creative inspiration.  He found a photo of this weird old guy.  He typed up the words, "Feelin' Nifty" on a typewriter, and started blowing up the words and giving them some distortion.  Half an hour later, the first Club Homeboy stickers were made and cut.  Long, skinny stickers with the weird old guy's face and "Feelin' Nifty" beside it.  He handed us each a few.  When we went home that night, I put one on the underside of my helmet visor, where it stayed for well over ten years, until I lost that helmet.

A couple nights later, Lew got some more sticker paper.  Flipping through a Japanese magazine called Popeye, he found the photo of Buckwheat from the Little Rascals.  Lew's amped up imagination went to work, and by the end of the night, the iconic Club Homeboy stickers with Buckwheat's face were being handed out to all of us.  That first batch was white, paper stickers.  A few days later, Lew found a place to buy neon green sticker paper, and he made a few dozen Buckwheat CHB stickers. 

The funny thing was, we were not supposed to use the copy machine for non-work activities.  So we actually hid Club Homeboy from Oz, our boss and the owner of Wizard, for quite a while.  But Lew went to the first 2-Hip King of Vert contest, in a barn in Wisconsin (or was it Minnesota?) soon after.  In any case, Lew took dozens of the Club Homeboy stickers with him, and slapped them all over the barn where the contest was held.  Nearly every top pro rider had a Club Homeboy sticker on their frame after that.  From that point on, random riders were always asking Lew for the stickers.

When I got laid off a couple months later, then end of December 1986, Club Homeboy was still, "officially," just The Spot locals, though other riders were asking for the stickers, putting them on their bikes.  A couple months later, Wizard hired Spike Jonze, who was a BMXer/skater kid, barely 18 years old.  He'd worked at Rockville BMX back east, then hopped in the Haor tour van, and became their roadie.  He wound up living at Ron Wilkerson's Enchanted House, with Kevin Martin.  

I wasn't the right fit for the Wizard office, and Spike Jonze definitely was.  As he got going in his first real job in California, Club Homeboy was evolving.  Oz finally asked Andy and Lew what Club Homeboy was, since he kept seeing the stickers everywhere.  They told him about it, and Oz liked the idea.  With his backing, suddenly little ads and mentions of Club Homeboy began popping up in FREESTYLIN'.  Already popular among the pro riders, and SoCal riders, it quickly took off and became an actual, paid membership organization.  For $20 or whatever, riders got a CHB T-shirt, a zine, a few stickers, a membership card, and a coupleof plastic wristbands.  

I was working down in Huntington Beach, at the AFA then, and I asked Lew for a T-shirt the next time I talked to him on the phone.  As an original member of Club Homeboy, that seemed like a reasonable request.  But in the few months I'd been away from Wizard, Club Homeboy  had morphed into something much bigger.  The original idea of it being locals from The Spot had faded away.  I kept bugging Lew, and finally got a Club Homeboy T-shirt for free.  But I never got the other stuff, or a membership card.  Being the uptight dork that I was then, I had some sour grapes against Lew for a while, over the Club Homeboy thing.  But I got over it, eventually.

As the next couple years went on, I heard Club Homeboy had thousands of members, and the "Chuck Brown" T-shirt, the Charlie Brown design, sold thousands of shirts.  The Club Homeboy Buckwheat logo wound up being one of the most iconic logos of 1980's BMX freestyle.  It's up there with the Haro chevron logo, the GT letters, and the Vision Street Wear logo in image recognition.  

If you google "Club Homeboy BMX" and search images, dozens come up.  Looking back from 34 years later, the cool thing about Lew's weird little idea turned icon is that it is a BMX freestyle thing.  The hardcore racers of the day don't get it.  And the Old School skateboarders, inline skaters, and snowboarders from that era don't know about Club Homeboy.  It's a freestyle thing... you wouldn't understand. 

I have a new blog now, checking out bike, skate, art, and other interesting spots, check it out:

The Spot Finder

 The Spot Finder      #thespotfinder

Freestyle BMX Tales: The Book

You can see me shooting video in this clip, on the far side of the left deck.  I was half asleep.  I spent the night before in the Phoenix airport with the $50,000 betacam camera in its case, between my legs.  A canceled flight left me stranded for the night, hoping the betacam wouldn't be stolen.  I got off the plane and took a cab straight to the baseball field where this contest was being held and climbed up on the deck right as practice was ending.  I think Mat's (1 footed) 900 here is his second ever 900 in a contest.  Someone, I never heard who, was making up names on the scoreboard for each rider.  A good day.

Freestyle BMX Tales: The Book (sort of) is coming February 1st, 2017.  You can order one of the limited run of 250 today.  Check back a little later for the link.

Generation Evel

For most of us kids in the 1970's, it started like the  kids in the clip above.  I never jumped anywhere near that far on my banana seat bike.  But I did jump it on a regular basis.  Inspired by daredevil Evel Knievel, we jumped tree root sidewalk lips on our mild steel banana seat bikes as little kids.  Then we moved up to scrounging bricks, concrete blocks, and random pieces of wood lying around our garages, and building rickety wooden jumps.  For most of us kids across the country, we went through the 70's not knowing that a handful of crazy Californians had started modifying their Schwinn Stingrays and started racing bicycles motocross style.  Bicycle Motocross was below our radar until the late 70's.

For me, seeing the Schwinn Phantom Scrambler in red and black in the window of a bike shop in Plymouth, Ohio in 1979 started the idea.  I never did get that bike.  In fact I moved to Carlsbad, New Mexico the next year, 9th grade for me.  I had a cheap ten speed then.  I used to ride it to an area called The Flume, where there were a bunch of off road Jeep and motocross trails.  I wished I had that Schwinn Scrambler then.  I still didn't know BMX actually existed.  One kid in 8th grade told us about it, but he was a hillbilly kid who lied all the time, so none of us believed him.

As luck would have it, I bought my first BMX bike, a Sentinal Exploder GX, for $5 off my friend Mike, a few days before we moved away from New Mexico.  It was red, mild steel, of course, and had curved, blade forks, and six spoke aluminum mags that I later realized were heavier than Motomags.  It was a piece of shit.  Even worse, it had a coaster brake that was all messed up.  Sometimes the pedals would go all the way around twice before it would catch and turn the back wheel.

We moved to Boise, Idaho, and my Exploder sat in the garage for a year.  Then my parents decided to buy a double wide mobile home and move to a trailer park outside of town.  The idea was for them to save money for a year so they could buy a house.  Little did I know that my Sentinal Exploder GX would change the course of my life while in that trailer park. 

Yes, folks, Freestyle BMX Tales is back... for a limited run, until February 1st, 2017.  More on the reason in the next post. 

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. 

A Different Kind of Pool Party

I'm continuing with my 25th anniversary look back at my 1990 video, The Ultimate Weekend.  We're up to one of my favorite sections of the video, the Nude Bowl section.  This week's clip is at 26:56 in the video above.  I'm skipping the wall fakie bit.  After the flyout jumping in last post's segment, there's a section of Keith Treanor, John Povah, and Alan Valek with a small ramp against the back of a shopping center in Garden Grove, CA.  I think John built the ramp, and they'd been sessioning this spot now and then, so I went along to shoot video.  Keith's wall fakies here are about as big as anyone was doing wall fakies at the time, and I was pretty amazed.  John and Alan add their own style to the session, and then some dumbass neighbor called the cops.  Typical.  By this point, I made it a rule to always keep the camera going when police showed up, which was actually a pretty new idea then.  Few guys were shooting video then, and rarely did we shoot somewhere that could garner a call from the 5-0.  This cop turned out to be about the coolest one we ever ran into, which is part of why I put him in the video.

OK, then we get to the Pool Party.  When I was editing this, halfway through the week long edit session in the back of a video store in Hermosa Beach, I decided I wanted to make this section an actual music video as much as I could.  For the young kids out there, there used to be this TV network called MTV, and back in the olden days they actually played music videos all day long.  But there had been no video with BMX freestyle on MTV.  Only Tom Petty's "Freefallin'" and a single obscure punk video ever showed skateboarding in a video.  So I was determined to make this section as a stand-alone music video that I was going to try and get played on MTV.  That was my thinking while I edited.

First, let me tell you about this song and band.  Believe it or not, it all starts with street skating legend Mark Gonzales.  He walked into an indy record shop, probably Vinyl Solution in HB, and found a punk album and bought it just because he liked the cover art.  When Unreel needed the skaters to find music for a skate video, Mark brought the album in to Unreel Productions, Vision's video company, where I happened to be working at the time.  The album was by a Toledo, Ohio punk band called The Stain, led by musician Jon Stainbrook.  So someone at Unreel called Jon to get permission to use the song in a video.  At the time, Unreel was searching all over for underground bands to get music to use in videos.  People didn't really bootleg music then, particularly professional production companies like Unreel.  Some of the "unknown" bands Vision approached for music rights included Agent Orange, Anthrax, Joe Satriani, musicians from Oingo Boingo, No Doubt, The Offspring, Big Drill Car, The Descendents/All, and many others.  Some bands were totally stoked to have their music in a skate video, and some bands were complete assholes and wanted absurd amounts of money to use a single song.  Then there was The Stain.

Jon Stainbrook was a positive thinking part of the punk scene, and nearly every band traveling through Ohio stayed at his house while in Toledo.  So while The Stain wasn't one of the best known punk bands in the late 80's national scene, pretty much every other band knew Jon and The Stain well from their travels.  But unlike many, Jon also had a businessman side to him.  When Unreel called about the rights to a single song that Gonz liked, Jon saw an opportunity for make some money to finance his own pursuits.  He sent us tapes with a whole bunch of tracks to choose from, and asked a reasonable price for the rights to use them in videos and TV shows.  Since his musicians, namely Mark and Jeff were incredible musicians with varied tastes and abilities, The Stain became composers of all different kinds of music for Unreel.  I was just a peon at Unreel, but it seemed to be a really good deal for both parties.  So for a couple of years, I was dubbing tapes with many different variations of music by The Stain on them.  When it came time for music for my own video, I was way too afraid to bootleg music, which became the norm a couple years later.  I called Jon, and he sent me a wide variety of tracks and we set a price.  Full disclosure, I never did pay him all the money I owed him, but I paid about 2/3 of it.  So if I ever win the lottery, Jon is one of the first people to get a check.

When I first listened to the tape he sent me (remember cassettes old timers?), the song "Pool Party" was my favorite.  When I asked him about it, he said he wrote it for some skater friends.  But it worked perfect for a bike pool party as well.

Months before all that editing and song picking took place, I would join forces with riding buddy/photographer Mike Sarrail, and the then unknown and chronically unemployed rider Keith Treanor, and we'd go shoot video somewhere almost every weekend.  I first heard about the Nude Bowl, and saw footage of it, from the Vision skaters.  That was one of the best perks of my job at Unreel, I made copies of every piece of raw footage that came in.  So I saw new pools and spots when they were still secret, and often the skaters would tell me where they were.  That's how I learned about and the directions to the infamous Nude Bowl.

As the legend has it, the Nude Bowl ruins the bikers and skaters loved had once been a nudist colony high on a desert hill in the general area of Palm Springs and Desert Hot Springs, California.  For some reason, the nudist colony went out of business, and skaters found the pool and began spray painting and sessioning it.  The great thing about the Nude Bowl was that you could drink beer, camp out, light a fire, and nobody gave a damn.  It was in such an obscure place, that police didn't care what happened there, unless the couple neighbors on the entry road got pissed off for some reason. 

This trip in this clip was my 3rd trip there, and I was totally stoked I got skatepark legend Brian Blyther, and his friend and Pipeline local, Xavier Mendez to show up.  It was between 100 and 105 degrees out that day, and it was scorching weather to ride in.  The only drawback to the Nude Bowl was that there was no shade.  In any case, I got out the video camera, Mike got his still cam, and Brian, Xavier (long hair), Keith, and John Povah sessioned the pool.  After shooting from several different angles, I had to get on my bike and ride myself.  Although I could never do a decent air to save my life, I loved carving pools.  To give you an idea of the gnarliness of the pool, you'll notice that Brian only gets about three feet out.  The pool had a weird transition, about nine feet including a foot of vert, and pool coping.  Although Keith, John, and Xavier could do do decent airs on ramps, none got very far out of the pool.  We sessioned, drank water, and sessioned some more for two or three hours, and all had a good ol' time.

When it got down to editing this segment months later, I realized that the other riders were just riding the Nude Bowl like a quarterpipe.  That's cool, but it's a POOL.  You gotta CARVE.  So I used a few clips of myself carving (in the Vision Street Wear shirt) to fill out the segment and show some carving.  At that time, in 1990, there were NO skateparks in Southern California.  To the best of my knowledge, there were no pools open to bike riding ANYWHERE in the U.S..  Underground legend Mike Tokemoto was out there sessioning pools with a couple friends, but no one else was. 

All in all, I was pretty stoked on how this Nude Bowl segment came out, although I never did find a way to get it aired on MTV as a music video.  Mostly, I just wanted to remind BMXers that there were a few empty pools still out there, and that they were a blast to ride.  Mission accomplished.