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.

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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.

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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.  

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