Mike Dominguez BLASTING airs in 1988

I've been going through old video clips for research on my book, and I saw this one pop up on the side on You Tube.  Had to watch it.  I was at this contest watching this.  The ramps are both 8 foot high quarters with no vert, I know, I've helped set these ramps up.  This is Mike Dominguez at his peak.  Before Simon Tabron and Jamie Bestwick and Kevin Robinson and Dave Mirra and when Mat Hoffman was just a hot up and coming (though already full factory) amateur, was Mike Dominguez.  The railing on these ramps are exactly four feet high.  His first air is a solid 12, maybe 13 feet out.  His 540 is AT LEAST 8 to 9 feet out if you count by lowest point of the bike, like many did at the time.  If you go by sprocket height, it's 10, maybe 11 feet out.  I think this is the highest 540 I've ever seen done live.  EVER.  This isn't footage I shot, but I'm sure glad somebody shot it.  These are some of the highest airs ever, by anyone, on the AFA era 8 foot quarterpipes.  Austin, Texas AFA Masters 1988.  Enjoy.

My main blog now is about building creative scenes, check it out:
The White Bear's Making a Scene

Recent BMX drawings

 Here's the three I've done over the last few months.  On the left is my take on a classic early photo of then Haro pro Ron Wilkerson.  Top right is my color take on one of my favorite street photos ever, the epic black and white shot of Vic Murphy launching a one foot tabletop off a curb jump.  Bottom right is my color drawing of the best photo I've ever taken, a B & W panning shot of Dave Vanderspek on his GPV (gravity powered vehicle) at the Palm Springs Tramway race and ramp jam in 1987.  I do sell these drawings, and I'll also be giving some away now and then to people who buy my BMX magnus opus:  Freestyle BMX Tales: The Book. 

 Here's a closer look at the Wilkerson drawing.  I usually add words and phrases to my drawings.  In this case, a bunch of things Ron contributed to BMX freestyle.  All three of these drawings are 18" X 24", and all done in my unique "scribble style" with Sharpies on paper.

Vic top, Vander bottom, slightly closer up pic.  You can see more of my work on my art blog: Steve Emig Art.

My main blog now is about building creative scenes, check it out:
The White Bear's Making a Scene

My Footage of Mat Hoffman and the First BMX 900 in a Contest

I stumbled across this a couple of days ago and linked it on FB, so some of you have seen it.  I won't go into the details right now, I'll do that next post.  But this is footage I shot in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada (eh) in early 1989, as a cameraman for Unreel Productions, the Vision Street Wear video company.  It's the first 2-Hip King of Vert of the year and there was still snow outside, as I recall.  Mike Dominguez, who pioneered the 900 attempts, and pulled a couple on his own ramp, was retired.  As you can see in this clip, Brian Blyther and Dave Voelker both hucked 900 attempts in this contest.  But it was Mathew Hoffman, then 16 or 17, and still an amateur, who landed one.  It's at the very end of this clip.  As you can tell by the crowd reaction, the 900 was a huge deal then.  Twenty-seven years later, they're still a pretty big deal.  I have a lot of stories from this contest, which I'll go into in the next post.  For now, just enjoy the hilarious commentary by Eddie Roman and friends in the beginning, and the first 900 (in ANY action sport) at the end.

I have new blogs now, check them out:

The Big Freakin' Transition- The future and economics

Crazy California 43- Weird and historic locations in California

Full Circle- Writing and the writing life

and a fiction blog- 

Stench: Homeless Superhero

Eddie Fiola flatland

During the summer of 1985, while I was living in Boise, Idaho, I went on two trips.  Both of those trips were made possible by my "freestyle family," the Bickels.  First they took me to the Venice Beach AFA contest in June of 1985.  Later that summer we went to a then little known town called Whistler, British Columbia, for a freestyle contest held in association with the BMX World's races. 

Jay Bickel and I spent a day and a half staring out the windows of his parents' Mercedes station wagon looking for sasquatch in Idaho, Washington, and British Columbia.  We didn't see one.  We arrived in the ski resort town of Whistler which was pretty much empty in the summer of 1985.  That was fine by us.  Since it was the Bickel's vacation, they landed us a two story suite in the main hotel which had a sauna in the suite among other things.  Once we unpacked, Jay and I took our bikes to the town square area where a bunch of Canadian riders were hanging out.  We soon learned what a Norklifter stem was.  A company in Canada called Norco made knock-offs of all the main parts, including the Redline Forklifter stem, which was real popular then.  There were 40 or so Canadians, a really fun bunch to ride with, and a group the freestyle world didn't even know existed.  Rob Dodds is the one name I remember, though I ran into other Canadians I met on that trip in later years.

Much to our surprise and delight, the GT/Brittania summer tour rig rolled up the second day we were there.  Out of the RV popped Eddie Fiola, the original King of the Skateparks himself, and East Coast pro Chris Lashua.  They had a few days off while doing shows at the World Expo (or whatever) happening in nearby Vancouver.  That night, with no ramps set up, we got the typical flatland jam circle going.  Much to everyone's surprise, Eddie Fiola rode out and busted out a bunch of flatland we didn't know he could do.  He wasn't known as a flatlander at all to us kids who relied on FREESTYLIN' magazine as our lifeline to the sport. OK, I think he got a cover doing a gut lever once, but that was all we'd seen.  But having done shows for several years already, he had a smooth and very well dialed bag of tricks.  The one that blew us away at first was his rolling moonwalk.  We'd never seen that.  We all started yelling when he busted that out.   We all looked at each other, "Fiola rips on flatland?  Really?"  His tricks weren't super hard for the most part, but he did everything smooth and with his characteristic style.

There is one flatland move of Eddie Fiola's that always blew me away, though.  He would either rollback off a quaterpipe or snap a front wheel 180, then he'd roll backwards standing on the back pegs, and then go up into a backwards, 1 foot nosewheelie.  And he would always get nearly upside down on those things, and he could ride them quite a ways.  No one did that trick like Eddie Fiola, and I never even came close to learning it, though I tried for a while.

The few days we all had both riding and just hanging out with Eddie and Chris Lashua were epic memories for our weird, mostly unknown, group of riders from the Northwest.  I wasn't part of the industry then, I wasn't that great of a rider at all, but Jay and I had a blast hanging with that Pacific Northwest and GT/Brittania posse.  Even with all the cool stuff that came after, that's still one of my best riding memories.

My main blog now is about building creative scenes, check it out:
The White Bear's Making a Scene

The S&M Bikes BS20 Neon

I had another story from the 90's in mind for today.  But Rich Bartlett had a post on Facebook with a pic of him testing the single blade Kastan forks back in about '89.  That photo instantly took me back to one of those epic nights in the tiny, one bedroom apartment we called the Winnebago.  In about 1991, Chris Moeller, founder of the fledgling bike company S&M Bikes, lived in a tiny apartment on Alabama Street in Huntington Beach, California.  An enterprising apartment owner had taken 8 feet off the back of a few garages and made it into a long, narrow, completely unpermitted apartment.  The whole thing would have fit into a semi trailer.  First you had to walk through a gate into a private backyard, and then to a door that shouldn't have been there.  The door led to the tiny living room, which led to the tiny kitchen, a hallway passed a tiny bathroom on one side, then the small single bedroom.  A door out the other end of the bedroom led to a single car garage.  That garage was the home of S&M Bikes in 1990-91.

Chris Moeller, pro racer, amazing jumper, BMX Action/Go test rider, entrepreneur, and certifiable weirdo, lived in the bedroom.  After getting fired from my job at a video duplication company while working on the first S&M Bikes video (Feel My Leg Muscles, I'm a Racer), I wound up sleeping on the floor of the living room.  Shaggy, an East Coast transplant who looked like a real life Shaggy from the Scooby-Doo cartoons, slept on the two cushion couch, with his legs hanging off the end.  The weird apartment had the dimensions of the inside of a motorhome, hence the name, The Winnebago.  We could literally lay on the living room floor and touch our hands to one wall and feet to the opposite wall.

For those of you who remember 1991, it was a time of national recession, and a full on depression for the BMX world.  At the bike trade show in early 1989, a mantra was repeated by the whole bike industry, "BMX is dead, mountain bikes are the future."  Unfortunately, no one asked us BMX racers and freestylers if we minded if they killed our sport.  The corporate money pulled out of BMX, many pros lost sponsors, and only us hardcore riders were left.  We struggled along, making our own videos, starting our own little companies, and promoting our own contests, and getting really good at making multiple types of meals out of ramen.

In those years of the late 1980's and early 90's, a few new ideas hit the BMX world.  Linn Kastan, the guy who gave us tubular forks, Redline V Bars, and Redline Bikes, became enamored with the single sided landing gear on small airplanes.  He decided that by making single sided BMX forks, riders could get rid extra weight on their bikes.  Hey, it worked for airplanes weighing a couple thousand pounds, why not a BMX bike?  Well, BMXers quickly answered, "small airplanes don't do tabletops, Leary's, and 360's."  Kastan got a few racers to try the crazy forks, but it didn't last that long.

Around the same time, my old bosses Todd Huffman and Bob Morales came up with the Auburn BMX bike, which had a bolt-on, replaceable back end.  The idea was that you could quickly change to a longer or shorter back end of your bike depending on riding conditions.  Unfortunately, they never made any alternative back ends.  Hey, I rode an Auburn for a couple years, as a freestyler, and I liked the bike.  But the whole bolt-on back end idea didn't go anywhere.

So one night, Moeller, Shaggy and me were sitting in the tiny living room, probably eating spaghetti or ramen, and drinking 40's of Mickey's.  Chris started going off about all these crazy bike ideas people had come up with.  Then the magic happened.  "We should make the most ridiculous bike possible and see if kids would actually order it."  I think this was around the time that Steve Rocco and crew at Big Brother magazine came out with the Big Brother Brick.  They put an ad in the magazine for a normal brick with a Big Brother sticker on it, and charged $400 (+ shipping & handling, of course).  The word was that they'd actually sold three or four of them.

Anyhow, Chris grabbed an old pair of forks, a hacksaw, and cut one leg off.  We were off to the races, literally rolling on the floor laughing half the time.  A couple hours later we had the prototype for the S&M Bikes BS 20 Neon.  The single bladed fork came with front wheel drive, a bolt-on front end (your choice of the Weak Link or Missing Link versions), a single bladed rear end (I think) and the high weight/low strength S&M Herbal Tea handlebars.  Once we had the pile of junk bolted together, we opened more beers and the next step was obvious, we needed to make an ad for it.  The ad above actually ran in some magazine.  Maybe more than one, I really don't remember.

My stomach hurt from laughing so hard.  I think Chris and Shaggy's did, too.  But that wasn't the last laugh.  We actually got three or four orders from really stupid kids when the ad came out.  What can I say?  I (kinda) love the 90's.  We did send really sarcastic letters to the kids to tell them it was a joke.  At least one kid was totally heart-broken.  Sigh.

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

History Lesson

Oddly, I can't find a video clip with BMX Action magazine in it.  But here's a bunch of classic BMX Action photos of R.L. Osborn and Mike Buff in the early BMX Action Trick Team days.  In true Gork fashion, it's all set to Metallica.  Off to never, never land...

On the last day in July in 1986, I got on a plane in San Jose, California with much of my bike in an odd-sized box, a suitcase (with my wheels in it so I wouldn't have to pay the airline bike fee) and $80.  I was so nervous about taking the job at Wizard Publications, that I had developed a serious case of the hives.  Not knowing any better, I laid out in the sun one day, making the hives even worse.  I wore a long sleeve, button-up shirt for the fist two weeks at the job.  The whole time my arms, chest, and legs were in red blotches.  On one hand I was stoked at the amazing opportunity of working at the magazines.  On the other hand, I had more hang-ups than Kim Kardashian's closet, more issues than the National Geographic magazine warehouse, and I was afraid I'd screw up the job somehow.

I made the short flight to LAX, where I was met by Andy Jenkins, Mark "Lew" Lewman, and Gork.  We threw my stuff into Gork's van, and instead of heading to the apartment I'd be sharing with Lew and Gork, we headed straight to the Wizard Publications office for an evening session at work.  By some weird quirk of fate, the BMX Action magazine 10 year anniversary party was that weekend.  So while Andy and Lew went to their offices to work on FREESTYLIN' magazine, Gork asked me to help him out.  Following his lead, I climbed up on the warehouse shelves, and we started digging through a bike box full of old slides.  Back then, in the olden days, the color photos for magazines were printed as slides.  Each roll of film (remember film?) ended up as a little yellow box with of slides of each photo.  Gork and I had the job of going through this huge box of slides and finding the best ones for a slide show that would play at the anniversary party.

The crazy thing was, I only got into racing in 1982, and hadn't seen a single copy of BMX Action until late 1983.  Only BMX Plus was on the newsstands in Boise, Idaho back then.  It was only when I started hanging out at Bob's Bike Shop (and Lawnmower Repair) did I see my first issue of BMX Action.  So I was clueless about the history of BMX.  Gork, as I quickly found out, wasn't.  He'd been racing since the late 70's, I think.  So as I checked out slides, I'd show him the interesting ones, and he'd fill me in on who the riders were, what their story was, and where they fit in the BMX history.

I seriously couldn't have had a better introduction to working at the home of BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines.  In a few hours that first night, I got an overview of the history of BMX, something I didn't know anything about.  Of all the slides, the standouts in my mind were early skatepark rider (and later MTB hero) Tinker Juarez.  He was blasting big jumps out of early bowls that blew my mind.  The other one I remember most was Trash Can Morgan.  This kid was testing bikes, jumping them while riding old school leather combat boots, and doing these crazy kicked out cross-ups three-four-five feet off the ground, which was huge then.  He earned the nickname "Trash Can" because that's where most of the bikes ended up after he was done with them.

Like all kids who came out of obscure places, (Boise, Idaho is where I got into BMX), I thought I was a better rider than I actually was, and I thought I knew a lot about BMX.  Gork's informal history lesson that first night really opened up the early years of the sport to me.  In the weeks that followed, I didn't have a lot to do at first, so I just started digging out old issues of BMX Action and reading article after article... and getting paid to do it.  Jealous?  You should be.

Each one of us plays a little role in a bigger timeline, and that first night at Wizard really made that clear to me.  Thanks Gork.

Freestyle BMX Tales: The Book

This is Freestyle BMX Tales: The Book, part 1.  That big square up top is all the pages of part 1, (20 full size pages) laid out.  I'm calling this "the coffee table book of BMX zines."  It's either one of my greatest ideas... or one of my worst.  I'm never sure.

Here's a few excerpts:

"On another street, I followed Rick Thorne between two big rig trucks, both of which were moving slowly.  Unfortunately for us, they were moving closer to each other.  We both hit the gas, cranking hard to get past them.  Rick pulled up his front wheel and turned the bars to squeak through the narrowing gap.  I did the same thing right behind him, yelling in excitement as I cleared the trucks."

"The sound wound up, and with a yell, Scot came screaming around the corner of the warehouse racks on an 80cc dirtbike.  Jay and I looked at each other, wondering if that was a normal thing in the SE warehouse."

"A few weeks later, completely out of nowhere, Andy (Jenkins, editor of FREESTYLIN') called me up at home, in San Jose, one afternoon.  He asked me if I was planning to go to the next AFA Masters comp in Tulsa, Oklahoma.  I told him I was.  'Would you like to cover it for us?'  I grabbed a putty knife to scrape my bottom jaw off the floor.  'Uh...yeah.' I muttered somehow."

"This punk kid sailed 25 or 30 feet down the hill, head high, blasting a huge no footer.  Nobody jumped like that back then.  Those were the first photos I saw of Chris Moeller..."

"'Uh-boo-buh-kuh,' Andy told me, I don't know what the trick is or how you spell it.  He's coming here in an hour and you'll be driving Windy and Ron to the photo shoot.'"

I got into BMX in a trailer park outside Boise, Idaho in the summer of 1982.  I saw my first local freestyle show in the spring of 1984.  BMX freestyle became my thing, and I dreamed of being a pro rider someday, getting free bikes, and touring the country.  I never did become a pro, but I did get some free bikes and managed one skateboard tour.  I didn't have the guts or charisma to start my own company in the 80's or 90's, so I became a kind of wandering sidekick, the right hand man to some of the top people building freestyle.  I became part of the Golden Gate Park scene in 1985, getting to know Dave Vanderspek, Maurice Meyer, Robert Peterson and the rest up there.  My zine landed me a job at Wizard Publications, where I worked with Andy J., Lew, Gork, and Windy.  I went on to work for AFA owner Bob Morales, the guy who turned trick riding into the sport of BMX freestyle.  That led to video work, and I worked for Don Hoffman at Unreel Productions, the Vision Skateboards/Vision Street Wear video company.  A lot of BMXers don't know Don, but he made several of the first freestyle videos, and his parents owned the legendary Pipeline Skatepark.  I went on to self-produce a video called The Ultimate Weekend, in 1990.  The next year, young Chris Moeller, who ran S&M Bikes out of the garage of a one bedroom apartment at the time, called me up to make their first video.  I became his sidekick/roommate for quite a while, and also lived in the P.O.W. House during the early 90's, rooming with guys like Dave Clymer, Todd Lyons, John Paul Rogers, Alan and Brian Foster, and a bunch more.

I have a lot of stories.  I'm putting the best ones into a weird book of sorts.  It's a handmade thing, a D-Ring binder, filled with 20 pages to start, all hand laid out by me, zine style.  It comes with a few custom stickers and a couple of 11" X 17" copies of my drawings.  Each book is signed and numbered, and I'm hand numbering the pages of every copy.  Part 1 of Freestyle BMX Tales:The Book is out now, and costs $20.  Every 4 to 6 weeks, I'll have another 20 pages (and some goodies) for $10.  I've got a lot of stories of those old school days of BMX freestyle.  I'll keep putting some on the blog for everyone to read.  But the best collection of my stories, thoughts, and lessons from those days will be in the book.  You can order yours today at my Go Fund Me page.  The books are numbered as the orders come in.  #3 is up for grabs as I write this (11/262016).  Order yours today.