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.
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