My BMX Racing Career

On one hand, this McDonald's commercial from the early 80's is ridiculous.  On the other hand, it sums up my early days of racing pretty well... except that I couldn't afford to eat at McDonald's when I raced.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I went to my first BMX race in Boise, Idaho in the fall of 1982.  That race, I watched my friends compete.  The next week, I raced myself and I think I got a third.  I started racing in Boise, Idaho, and I never made it out of the 17 Novice class.  When you stop laughing, you can read the rest of this post.

All of us BMXers from Blue Valley Trailer Park raced that last race of 1982, and then we had to wait all winter to race again in the spring.  We made snow jumps.  We cleared off a section of the frozen pond in the trailer park and did flat track-type slides across the ice.  In the spring, before our jumps dried up enough to ride, we made ramp to ramp jumps out of plywood and cinder blocks to practice on in the street.  By the time spring came, a few of the guys had lost interest.  The remaining few raced once every two or three weeks, as much as we could afford to. 

In the early summer of 1983, my family bought a house in town, and I left the trailer park scene.  Those guys got more into cars and girls.  None of them kept racing.  I kept riding every day and racing when I could.  Because the racing scene wasn't that big in Boise, I rarely got to race as a 17 novice.  I usually got bumped up to either the intermediate or the expert class.  The funny thing was, I usually got second or third no matter who I raced.  I won motos on a regular basis, but never won a single main.  If I raced four novices, I would usually get second.  If I raced two novices and two intermediates, I would get second or third.  If I raced three intermediates and two experts, I would get second or third.  I had some kind of mental block about winning, I guess.  But I routinely beat riders in the intermediate and expert classes. 

I raced through the summer of 1983.  Late in the year, the track officials announced that they wanted to redesign the Fort Boise track, and they would hold a contest to come up with a new track design.  As luck would have it, my dad was a design engineer, and we had a drafting board at home.  In those days, designs for products were actually hand drawn on paper.  Having grown up seeing my dad's drawings, and with some tutoring from him, I was a pretty decent high school draftsman.  So I put a lot of thought into the track design, I asked lots of riders what they did and didn't like about the track, and I asked the top riders what they liked about the tracks at triple pointers and nationals they raced.  Then I drew a big professional drawing of my new track design.  I also drew a second drawing which had a side view of each of the new jumps.  Most of the other design ideas in the contest were hand drawn by kids ages 8 to 12.  My drawings blew all of the others out of the water.  Why did I spend so much time on the track design?  For one, I wanted a better track to ride.  The second reason was that the winner of the contest got to race free the entire next year.  For a broke racer like me, that was a big incentive. 

When all was said and done, I won half of the prize, something like 22 free races for 1984.  Three younger guys who had some pretty good ideas, but did not have the drawing skills I had, split the rest of the prize, 6 or 7 free races each.  After the last race, we went to town rebuilding the track, and it was much better afterwards.  I'd gone from being a old, novice racer to being part of the organizing staff of the Fort Boise scene.  That felt pretty good, and was a faint hint of my future in the BMX industry

That winter I raced in nearby Caldwell, Idaho.  At first, the races were in a cow barn at the fairgrounds, and had wooden jumps.  There was no actual jumping in those races, it was all about speed jumping the clunky wooden jumps as fast as possible.  I continued to get seconds and thirds, usually racing intermediates and experts.  The other older riders usually talked me into riding 17 Open as well, so they had enough people to have a class. 

Later in the winter season, they brought in a tractor and actually built a new track each race in the cow barn.  After each race, the track was leveled, and a new design was thought up for the next race.  That was better than the wooden jumps, but it meant mostly tiny jumps and flat turns. 

When the spring of 1984 finally came, I started racing my free races at Fort Boise.  Around the same time, the organizers decided to build another track in Boise, so the points chasers could race seven days a week in that area.  I was tapped to design the new track, which I did.  The thing everyone hated about Fort Boise was that it was basically a race to the first turn.  It was hard to pass on the narrow Fort Boise track.  On the new track I designed a wide, fast, nearly flat first turn.  That led into a huge "step double" jump.  I combined the idea of a step jump, with a double jump.  Any jump with a deep gap scared me, so I came up with a cross between a step up and a double jump, which didn't scare me.  I know that's lame, but it worked.  I also designed the track with two berms back to back, which basically formed a dirt spine jump.  I wanted to learn 360's, and that berm jump was the perfect place to do it.  Before mid season, I was doing 360's in my motos, and still qualifying for the main.  I'd read that Eddie Fiola did 360's in races, and I wanted to emulate him.

Just as I was settling into the 1984 racing season on the two Boise tracks, the track operators decided to stop giving away trophies.  They wanted to cut expenses to favor the points chasing racers.  I didn't have the money to travel and race every day, so I was mostly in it for the trophies.  Around that same time, BMX freestyle entered the picture, and I faded out of racing even though I had six or seven free races left that season.  From then on, I was a BMX freestyler.  After a year and a half, my BMX racing career ended.

The Blue Valley Posse invades Fort Boise Track

In the last post, I wrote about the first time I went to a BMX race in late 1982 in Boise, Idaho.  The four of us who went to the race were psyched when we got back to the trailer park, and we told the other guys all about it.  The three guys who raced showed off their trophies.  By the end of that night, we all wanted to race.

There was one race left in the season, and we all planned to be there.  Problem number one was how to get us all there.  We were all in high school or junior high and none of us had our own car.  It was a trailer park after all, and we were broke.  As luck would have it, my dad drove a full size Ford van at the time, and he agreed to let me take it, and everyone who wanted to go, to the race.  Then we all had to come up with money to race.  I think it was three dollars or something then, so we each scraped up the money, plus a little for the van's gas tank.  Then we rode our asses off that week.  We did standing starts with each other.  We practiced speed jumping our jumps.  We carved our little berms as fast as we could.  We did soda can slaloms on the street and slaloms on the dirt to practice our flat turns.  We jumped our cheesy little jumps to flat and hit the tiny double jump we had.  Finally Saturday morning came and we were ready.  We piled bikes and bodies into the van at my house, and headed to the track in near downtown Boise.  We were about the first ones to arrive, that's how excited we all were to race.  We were determined that Blue Valley Trailer Park would make its presence known at the track.  We practiced as much as we could at the track, and coached each other on how to take the turns and jumps.  We practiced our gate starts... ON A REAL GATE.  Holy crap!  We couldn't believe how cool it was that there were actually BMX races in Boise.

Then came the races.  Since only three guys raced the weekend before, we were all novices.  But we soon learned that if there wasn't enough for a novice class, that we got thrown in with intermediates.  The races started, and one thing soon became clear.  Even with our piece of crap bikes, we were as fast as most of the experienced racers in our classes.  Our posse started winning and getting seconds in most of our motos.  I think nearly all of us made it to our mains.  I can't remember exactly how everyone placed, but almost all of us took trophies home.  What I do remember is that there were seven shop teams at that race.  We figured out that if us guys from the trailer park had been an official team, we would have got second.  Oh yeah, Blue Valley kicked some butt at that race.

The local racers kept asking each other where these fast guys on completely lame bikes came from.  Those local racers weren't used to getting beat by guys in jeans with paper plate number plates.  A lot of the locals got pissed off because we messed up their points in so many classes.  Points?  Racers get points?  We had no idea.  None of us had seen an ABA paper at that point.  We were new and we were in it for the trophies.  We had a blast.  We won a bunch of trophies.  Then we sessioned the tabletop jump for a about an hour after the race with all the locals.  We drove home to the trailer park stoked at how we had done, and bummed out that there were no more races until Spring.  We unloaded the van at my house, and everybody headed home to show off their trophies.  We weren't just dirty kids in a trailer park anymore... we were BMX racers. 

My First BMX Race

It's amazing that this is on You Tube, but this is what the Fort Boise BMX track was like in the fall of 1982 when I went to my first race.  I think this clip is actually from 1983, not 1984 like it says, because we rebuilt the track in late 1983 and it had better jumps.

There was a good size crew of BMXers in the Blue Valley Trailer Park outside Boise in the summer of 1982.  There was one family which had Mike, Steve, Greg, Brian and Andy, two families of divorcee parents that remarried, kind of like an all male Brady Bunch.  Then there was Scott, Rocky, Buzzard, Shane, James, and myself.  Yes, I actually knew a kid known as "Buzzard."  He had a real name, but nobody remembered what it was.  I was going to be a sophomore in High school, and most of the guys were a year or two younger than me.  In any case, we rode our jumps nearly every night through the summer and into the fall of 1982.  Then, somehow, someone learned that there was a BMX track at the north end of Boise, an area called Fort Boise.  This was long before the internet as we know it today, so we couldn't just look stuff up like we do now.  Our whole group rode together for months not knowing there was a BMX track in town, and several more in surrounding towns. 

It was the second to last race of the season when we packed four guys and three bikes into Scott's mom's Ford Pinto.  For those of you who remember Pintos, this wasn't even a hatchback.  The two of us crammed into the back seat had a bike (minus the front wheel) across our laps.  It was Scott, James, Brian, and me that went to that first race.  Scott had lived in California, and had been to a couple of tracks before, so he was the only one that had any idea what to expect.  We pulled upto the track, which we later found out was built in a former sewer pond.  Seriously.  The first thing that struck me was that there were forty or fifty other BMXers.  I had no idea that ANYBODY else in Boise rode BMX besides us.  That's how small the sport was then.  It NEVER got on TV in those days, and many people had never even heard of BMX.

We piled out of the Pinto and checked out the track.  It just seemed so cool that there was actually a place MADE for BMX.  The other three guys put their front wheels back on, and went to sign up for the race.  I was just watching that first race.  We only had room in the car for three bikes, so I decided to be a spectator.

The track had a six person, hand-held gate on the hill leading into the old sewer pond.  That meant that the starter actually held a pole attached to the gate that held the gate up.  He would yell the start signals."Riders ready, pedals ready, GO!" and then let go of the pole so the gate would drop.  The track was a backwards "M" design.  The first hill led down to a rounded tabletop jump, into a tight first turn to the left, then through some moguls, over a roller jump, and into the big second turn to the right.  Coming out of the second jump the track operators would actually make a mud hole in the third straight most of the time.  Then there was a tiny, one foot high berm in the third turn to the left, and a small double jump that most riders just speed jumped before the finish line.

My trailer park friends started practicing while I watched the lines other riders took, and then we all discussed how best to ride the track.  Before long, the race started.  I don't remember exactly how the guys did, but they all got trophies to bring home.  Despite never racing before, they were all right in the mix with the experienced racers.  Our competitive nature in the trailer park had honed our skills fairly well.

After the race was over came something I hadn't expected.  There was a lip built on one side of the backside of the tabletop jump.  Riders lined up on top of the first berm, which was built into the side of the hill, and they started taking turns jumping off that lip for style.  It was my first real jumping jam, and at that point I was totally bummed I didn't have my bike.  Tabletops, X-ups, and kick out cross-ups were the main jumps being thrown at that time.  I watched as my friends sessioned  the jump.  Then we piled into the Pinto again for the ride home.  All we knew is that there was one more race left in the season, and we were going to be there.  BMX racing was our thing.    

My Start in BMX

I'm going to go back to the beginning of my BMX life, and write a few posts about the early days.  I covered all this in the original incarnation of Freestyle BMX Tales, but I took all those posts down when I got real depressed shortly after my dad died in 2012. 

For me it started in the small town of Willard, Ohio, which is in the farm country of northwest Ohio.  One of the hillbilly kids in junior high told me that he competed in a BMX race where they had a water jump filled with goldfish that they had to jump over.  That was in about 1978.  Unfortunately, the kid had a reputation as a liar, and nobody believed a word he said.  So we all thought BMX was dumb because of him.

A couple years later, my dad's company was having trouble, and he went looking for another job.  He found one in Carlsbad, New Mexico.  We moved there that summer, and it was a total culture shock for me.  The city was about 70% Latino, and as a smart, pudgy white kid, I was a minority of a minority.  I took two years of Spanish in Ohio, but I still didn't understand the names they were calling me in New Mexico.  It was a tough year for me in many ways.  But the best part of that year was time I spent out wandering the desert with my dad and his friends.  I experienced four wheel drive off roading for the first time.  It was amazing.  There was an area called The Flume near our house that had tons of Jeep and motorcycle trails going every which way.  Once in a while I'd ride my ten speed over there and ride the trails.  After a while, I decided I needed a BMX bike to do it right.  I bought one from my friend Mike for $5.00.  It was a Sentinal Exploder GX.  Never heard of it?  Neither has anyone else.  It was a "K-Mart special" bike.  A double diamond hardtail frame, a single gooseneck, six spoke aluminum mag wheels that weighed more than Mongoose Motomags, and knobby tires.  Oh, and it had a coaster brake that didn't  work right.  Sometimes the pedals would go around twice before it would catch and spin the back wheel.  It was a piece of shit.  But it was my piece of shit. 

As luck would have it, we moved to Boise, Idaho the week after I bought it, so I never road it out to The Flume trails.  We moved into a nice, suburban subdivision in Boise, and my BMX bike sat in the garage for a year.  Then we moved outside of town to a trailer park.  My parents wanted to to save money for a year and then buy a house.  Suddenly, I lived miles from town, surrounded by "desert."  It's technically not desert, I think it's actually called steppe, which is miles and miles of waste high sagebrush as far as the eye can see.  There were some little jumps in the desert at the edge of the trailer park.  Every night, the boys of the trailer park would gather when the temperature cooled down, and we'd play wiffle ball or football or basket ball.  Or we'd hit the jumps on our crappy BMX bikes.  That was June of 1982. 

As the summer progressed, we rode our bikes more and more.  When we broke parts, we'd save up our money and buy better parts.  Every night we'd hit the jumps, trying to out-do the other guys.  BMX became our thing.  The summer days turned into a routine.  We'd watch TV during the hot afternoons, then we'd meet up and ride our little jumps in the evenings.  Then we'd occasionally sneak out of our houses at night and try to wake up other people and wander around, or maybe make out with one of the girls of the trailer park.  There wasn't much else to do.

Our riding improved little by little.  When somebody had a couple dollars, they'd buy a copy of BMX Plus!, the only BMX magazine on the newsstands in Boise.  We would all take turns looking through the magazines, and then try to do the jumps we saw pictures of.  I saved up my babysitting money, and finally bought a set of Z-rims.  They were never quite true, but they were so much better than those awful mags. 

In the fall of 1982, someone heard that there was a BMX track in Boise.  In the next post, I'll talk about my first couple of races.

Memories of Scot Breithaupt Part 4

This clip is a bunch of still shots of Scot Breithaupt and friends from the early days of BMX racing, and his company SE Racing.

It was those nights watching Scot edit his ESPN shows at Unreel Productions that I really got to know the Old Man of BMX.  He was on yet another comeback, and his outrageous enthusiasm was flowing heavy.  While his editor pieced together his TV shows, Scot told us tales of his life in the early days of BMX, and some of his crazy tales from outside BMX.  The story that stuck in my mind was Scot telling me that once, at one of the early downhill tracks, he actually passed another rider by jumping right over the guy's head and landing in front of him.  By that point, I knew to take everything Scot said with a grain of salt, and sometimes half a salt shaker.  He did lots of crazy stuff in his life, but he also was prone to exaggeration. 

I think it was early 1989, when Scot approached me and said he needed a cameraman to shoot video at a race for the weekend.  He agreed to pay me $200 and rent a car for me to drive to Reno with all the equipment after I finished work on Friday.  The race was the Reno Nationals, and I picked up the car and camera equipment and headed north from Costa Mesa, California.  I'd been to Reno once before, in the summer, and planned to take the same route.  I'd head north to Sacremento, then head west over the mountains into Reno.  Somebody, I don't remember who, said it was a lot shorter to take route 395 through the mountains.  I didn't know any better, so I took that route... in January.  I hit Bishop, the last town before Mammoth and June Lake, and I was told I needed to buy chains for the car because of the snow up ahead.  Now I grew up in Ohio and Idaho as a kid, so I was used to driving in snow and it didn't bother me much.  But I drove right into a snow storm.  When it got bad, I pulled over to put the chains on.  I put the first chain on the back wheel when a driver from another car walked up to me.  "Uh... do you know that car is front wheel drive?" he asked.  It was a rental, and I had no idea.  So I took the chain off and put them on the front wheels.  I plugged along slowly, not realizing how far it was from Bishop to Reno.  I tool off the chains and put them back on a couple of more times.  In all, it was a frustrating 11 hour trip through a blizzard to get to Reno.  But I finally made it. 

I was exhausted, and got my key at the front desk and headed to my room.  There was Scot, watching TV, next to a king size bed.  I just wanted to sleep, and I asked Scot why the hell there was only one bed.  He said that was the only room available.  I'll be honest, I was worried.  I knew Scot liked women, but I wasn't sure if his tastes went any farther than that.  He assured me it the king size bed was an mix up, and I went to sleep.  Scot didn't bother me in any way, and we got up early the next morning and headed to the track. 

For the first time, I saw Scot Breithaupt in his world, the world of BMX racing.  He knew everyone, and everyone knew him.  I went out on the track and shot video for an hour or two, and then I'd touch bases with Scot, to see who he wanted me to focus on in the upcoming races.  At one point, Scot was hanging with a bunch of older guys between motos.  They all had raced with him in the 70's, and were sharing stories from those days.  I realized I was watching BMX history and I just hung out and listened.  Then one of the guys said, "Hey Scot, do you remember that time you jumped right over my head at Corona?"  They all laughed about it and shared their memories of  that race.  I thought, "Holy crap!  It actually happened.  Scot literally jumped right over this guy's head in a race and passed him."  Then another guy chimed in, "Hey, you jumped over my head, too, at another track."  Scot himself had forgotten all about that one.  My mind was blown.  Here I was shooting video for one of the best BMX racers ever, a guy who was one of the main promoters of the whole sport in the early days.  My skepticism of Scot's stories went down dramatically that afternoon. 

After that day's racing, we put the camera gear in the room and headed downstairs for dinner.  Scot led me to a blackjack table, bought some chips, and handed me a few $2 chips.  He said to just bet one chip per hand and have some fun while he won us dinner money.  I shook my head.  In the next 20 minutes, Scot won about $50 at blackjack, then said, "OK, let's go eat."  After dinner, we switched to a room with two queen beds, and I plopped down on my bed, exhausted."  Scot wanted to go to the bar and check out the ladies.  I just shook my head.  "Man, I'm still tired from yesterday.  Wake me up in the morning."  He took off to go have some fun, and I crashed out.

The next day he raced and hung out with the old timers, and I shot video.  We packed up the rental car after the race, and headed back to Southern California... the right way.  The whole trip back he told me stories about BMX and all the crazy stuff he'd done in the early days.  He also told me some of his plans for producing TV shows.  On one hand, I was stoked at the opportunity to hear all those crazy tales from a legend in the sport.  On the other hand, I was wondering if he was actually going to pay me for working that weekend.  As we got into L.A., Scot said he was a little short on cash, and he gave me $30 of the $200 we agreed upon.  He said he'd pay me the rest in a couple of weeks. That was Scot in action.  He would amaze you with his ability to get things done, like sell a bike TV series to ESPN, and produce shows on a shoestring, and then he would wind up short on cash, and he'd end up owing you.  The crazy thing is that I didn't mind that much.  I had a fun time that weekend shooting video and listening to legendary BMX racers talk about the good ol' days.  I never did get that other $170, and at this point I couldn't care less.  I was one of the many people who got to know Scot Breithaupt personally, and I have my tales to tell about this guy who, more than any other single person, made BMX what it is today.  Ride in Peace, Scot.  C-ya!  

Memories of Scot Breithaupt part 3

This You Tube clip shows various incarnations of Scot Breithaupt as a TV announcer in the late 1980's.  That was the time I worked closely with Scot on a few projects.  The other on-camera guys are veteran alternative sports announcer Dave Stanfield, and BMX freestyle promoter Ron Stebenne.

I crossed paths with Scot Breithaupt again in 1988.  I forget exactly how he came back into the picture, because two things were happening at once.  I was working at Unreel Productions, which was the video company owned by Vision.  At the time, several companies were under the Vision banner. Vision, Sims, and Schmitt Stix skateboards, Sims snowboards, and Vision Street Wear clothing were all part of the Vision  family.  Don Hoffman, a former surfer and skateboarder, was into video work, and put together Unreel to do all the video work for Vision's companies, as well as trying to make TV shows about alternative sports.  Vision was growing in leaps and bounds at that time, and put a lot of money into Unreel.  They built a half million dollar edit bay in a nice office unit in Costa Mesa, California and hired about eight people to staff it.  Unreel produced a skateboard halfpipe contest called Holiday Havoc, and made a TV show out of it which they pretty much gave to ESPN to try to get their foot in the door with the young sports network.  In 1988, Unreel was producing high quality TV shows about skateboarding, BMX racing, BMX freestyle, snowboarding, and body boarding, which they planned to sell to ESPN.  But ESPN wasn't interested in those sports at that time.  So Unreel was having trouble selling the shows.  ESPN didn't think there was a large enough TV audience to justify airing action sports. 

Unreel hired Scot Breithaupt as an announcer for the 1987 Socko AFA Masters finals TV show.  I was just a production assistant at Unreel, so I don't know exactly what the deal was, but they hired Scot to try to sell Unreel's shows to ESPN.  Scot saw an opportunity, and wound up selling ESPN a TV series of his own.  He found a video editor, found some events to cover in the bicycling world, and approached Unreel to rent their edit bay to edit his shows.  The heads of Unreel didn't totally trust Scot, but he was paying good money to rent the edit bay, so they let him and his editor come in at night to edit his shows.  I got the job of staying there with Scot and his editor to keep an eye on him.  It was totally easy.  I would do some of my dubbing work, and when I ran out of my work, I sat around down stairs watching surf videos.  When that got old, I'd sit in the back of the edit bay and watch Scot and his editor put the shows together.  Scot called his production company L.M. Productions, which stood for "last minute."  His logo was a clock with the hands set at two minutes til midnight. That summed up his production practice.

Scot's shows were hurriedly put together, and didn't have near the quality of the TV shows Unreel was making.  The difference was that Scot actually sold his shows because of his incredible ability as a salesman and promoter.  I think Scot was a salesman and promoter first and foremost, and then a BMXer.  I'm not trying to put him down, but he was such an enthusiastic guy by nature, that he blended that with his love of BMX and was a main force in building BMX racing in the 70's.  In the late 80's, he put that same enthusiasm into producing TV shows.  That's how one particular show came about.

Scot was editing his show on a Sunday night, and asked me if I had any ideas for the next show.  He needed to shoot video of some kind of bicycling event and make a TV show in two weeks, which is unheard of in the TV world.  He had already covered cycling, mountain biking, trials riding, and GPV's and skateboard luges.  He wasn't sure what to do next.  At the time, BMX street riding was just starting to take off.  Ron Wilkerson at 2-Hip held the first major bike street contest earlier that year. Dave Vanderspek actually held the very first bike street contest in northern California, but it didn't get any magazine coverage.  Ron's contest in Santee (near San Diego) really sparked freestylers to take to the streets en mass and ride the world like it was one giant skatepark.  So I replied to Scot, "How about street riding?"  His first question was something like, "What, just riding around the street?  BMXers had always done that, jumping curbs and riding off loading docks.  I explained to Scot that street riding was becoming its own thing, just as dirt jumping was beginning to do at the time.  I told him we were doing wall rides, box jumps, wall fakies, footplants, and all kinds of other tricks in urban environments.  I can't remember specifically, but I probably pulled out some of the footage of the 2-Hip Meet the Street contest to show him.  I do remember that it took me about 20 or 30 minutes to talk Scot into the idea.  It sounded weird to him, but he needed a show, and he agreed on a street contest.  Then came the interesting part, where Scot's amazing ability to make stuff happen came into play.  We started planning the contest.  Scot decided he would get the "stonehenge" ramp from GT, a junked car, and a few other obstacles.  He would find a place to hold the contest.  My job was to get word out and make sure a lot of good riders showed up.  By the time we were done talking, his enthusiasm had transferred to me.  I was totally stoked, we were going to put on a BMX street contest, and it was going to be on TV.  Holy crap.

Scot and I worked out details each night while his editor was working on that week's show.  Somehow, Scot made his promoting magic happen.  He got the parking lot of the old surf theater in downtown Huntington Beach, which was right behind Wimpi's burgers, for any of you old school HB locals.  By that next Saturday, we had GT's stonhenge jump ramp, a wrecked car, some oil drums, and some wall ride ramps.  My work alerting the riding community panned out as well, and we had about 50 riders show up.  Craig Grosso and Pete Augustin were doing huge (for the time) wall rides, Rich Bartlett, Randy Lawrence, and many others launched over the jump ramp, and the Huntington Beach Street Scene was a rousing success.

Scot and co-announcer Dave Stanfield met myself, Randy Lawrence, and a few other flatlanders at the Taco Bell at Bolsa Chica and Heil in Huntington Beach, and we shot the introduction to the show in about half an hour.  Everything was totally low budget and on the fly.  Then Scot and his editor showed up the next Sunday night to start editing the show.  To put this into perspective, Unreel spent several months working on each TV show it produced.  Scot and I agreed on the idea on a Sunday night, had the contest the next Saturday, and the show aired on ESPN eight days after that.  It was insane, but a lot of fun.  The Huntington Beach Street Scene wound up getting the best ratings of any of Scot's shows, by far.  It also was the first made-for-TV BMX street contest ever, seven years before the X-Games began.  I'd love to show you all the show, but it's not online.  The master tape is probably in a box somewhere with the rest of Scot's footage.  As I learned over and over again in the BMX world, amazing things happen when you wind up in the right place at the right time.  What started as a boring job for me, staying up all night while Scot edited, turned into something really cool.  I got to see Scot's promoting ability in action that week, and it reminded me how we can all make cool things happen if we focus our energies on an idea.  That couple of weeks are my best memories of Scot Breithaupt, the Old Man of BMX.     

Memories of Scot Breithaupt part 2

This is a You Tube clip showing the legendary SE Racing bus that toured the U.S. in 1977.  Along with Scot, I know Perry Kramer, Stu Thomsen, and Bob Haro were on that tour, I'm not sure who the rest of the guys were.  The turret on top of the bus in some of the photos housed a tennis ball cannon.  When one of the SE riders won a race, they'd shoot tennis balls over the pit area.  The turret got torn off by a low overhang once, as did all the bikes stacked on top of the bus. 

It was either late 1984 or early 1985 that my Boise riding buddy and trick teammate Justin Bickel called me up.  "I got co-sponsored by SE!" he yelled over the phone.  Jay, as we usually called him, soon got his SE Quadangle, put a coaster brake on it, and a standing platform so he could do framestands.  He was the soul freestyler in Idaho that was sponsored, and that was the coolest thing in the world then.

In the summer of 1985, Jay's parents, who had become my "freestyle parents" at that point, offered to take me to the AFA contest being held in Venice Beach, California.  I paid them some nominal amount that didn't come near to covering the cost of my trip, and we were off in their Mercedes station wagon.  Jay's dad was a lawyer, so we stayed in a stylish hotel in Marina Del Ray, just up the bike path from Venice.  It was my first trip to Southern California, and I was amazed by the endless suburbs, insane traffic, and the best freestyle riders in the world at the contest. 

On our first full day in SoCal, we went to the SE factory.  It was a big shock to me.  I had taken field trips to the local factories on Career Day in 8th grade in Ohio, and I thought every factory was a huge building with dozens, if not hundreds of workers toiling away.  When we got to SE, I knew almost nothing about the company, it's history, or Scot Breithaupt.  We were greeted by Scot as we walked in.  Perry Kramer was also in the office that day, as was Mike Devitt (I may have misspelled his name), he was the business guy at SE, who kept the operations running.  After we all talked for a while, Scot took us on a tour of the operation.  On one side of the warehouse was the  shipping area, with the typical heavy duty shelving units stacked with products.  They had a shopping cart there they used to pull orders, and it had handlebars welded on to it, and a number plate that said, "Shipper Ripper."  I thought that was the coolest thing.  What struck me as weird is that there was nobody working in the shipping area. 

Scot led us back to the back of the shipping area, and there were two big quarterpipes, eight feet high and eight feet wide, facing each other.  At that time, most kids who had quarterpipes built them six feet tall, so the SE ramps seemed huge.  They were built so SE's ramp rider, Todd Anderson, could practice when in the area. 

After showing us the ramps, Scot led us to the manufacturing side of the building.  There was one welder, just one, working in his booth welding frames.  I learned that Scot had dropped out of the scene for several years in the early 80's due to his bad habits.  When I visited the factory in 1985, they had just been getting the company going again for several months.  SE Racing was on an upswing again, this time incorporating the emerging sport of freestyle into the mix along with racing.  I couldn't believe that this major bike company only had about four people working at it.  It really put the tiny little BMX industry, which seemed huge to me as a kid reading the magazines, in perspective. 

Once the tour was over, Scot told Jay and I to grab our bikes and session the ramps, so we did.  At that time, I could air just about at coping on a six foot ramp, and Jay could get two or three feet out.  I was airing under coping on the eight foot ramps, and Jay got out a little, I think.  At one point, we were taking a breather, when we heard an engine rev in the front of the building.  Next thing we know, Scot came screaming around the shelving units on an 80cc dirtbike.  He passed us with a big smile, and dove down another aisle.  He raced a few laps around the warehouse, passing by us each time.  Then he handed the bike over to Perry, who took a few laps, trying to go faster than Scot.  Then Scot took a few more laps, then Perry again.  Jay and I just shook our heads.  "These crazy guys run one of the best companies in BMX?"  we asked ourselves. 

After a good session on the ramps, Jay and I got some water, then we all wound up in the shipping area, listening to Scot and Perry tell us stories about the SE Racing bus and the crazy nationwide tour they went on in 1977.  He talked about the magazine photos on the wall, and gave us each an old Oakley poster, which was already a classic in 1985.  It was a group shot of about 20 top BMXers from around 1980, and the caption said, "Oakley:  Our R&D team works weekends."  It would be really cool to have that poster today.  We all thanked Scot and Perry for their hospitality, and headed over to ACS, which gave Jay and I each a brand new thing called the ACS Rotor.  We had to put our bars up about an inch for the Rotor to fit, which made our bikes feel kind of weird.  We went back to the hotel and practiced the rest of the night, getting used to the feel of our bikes with higher bars. 

The next day, when we both competed in flatland, Scot was on hand to encourage us.  IN addition, we hung out with Todd Anderson, Craig Grosso, and I think Fred Blood was on SE by then.  Steve Broderson, another Camarillo Ramp rider who rode a cruisier, was also part of the group we hung with.  I was blown away by the riding that weekend, there were so many amazing riders and everyone had a different style back in those days.  I went back to Idaho with a lot more passion about riding, having tasted the national scene for the first time.  Meeting Scot and Perry Kramer, the "P.K." in P.K. Ripper, was one of the highlights of the trip.