This past Monday, Memorial Day, was also the 40th anniversary of the opening of Pipeline Skatepark in Upland, California. It opened with the namesake full pipe attached to a bowl that was amazing for BMX bikes. Pipeline wasn't far from the already legendary Baldy Pipe, which had already been skated for a while. Baldy was a 16 foot diameter pipe, Pipeline's was 20 feet.
Here's Eddie Fiola, the original King of the Skateparks, being interviewed by Don Hoffman. Don's parents, Stan and Jean, owned Pipeline, which took both skating and BMX vert to a whole different level. Eddie is rocking the MF jersey, which stood for Morales (as in Bob) and Fiola.
A Kickstarter campaign for a Pipeline/Badlands documentary is getting going. More on all that later. I'm moving this week, so I'll be adding more posts in 2 or 3 days.
This clip is sketchy, old, Super 8 footage of a BMX Action Trick Team show in 1984. These days it's hard to explain how new and amazing freestyle seemed in those days. Although I later worked and rode with R.L. Osborn, I never actually saw a BMX Action Trick Team show with R.L. and Mike Buff.
In the spring of 1984 I was a dork in my senior year at Boise High School in Boise, Idaho. My passion was BMX, and at that time I was a mediocre racer, track designer, jumper, and interested in trick riding. On a trip to Bob's Bikes (and Lawnmower Repair) I saw a flyer that changed the course of my life. Bob showed me a flyer for a trick show that was happening in the nearby town of Meridian. I wrote the date on my calendar and counted down the days. I couldn't believe it, there was actually a trick team in Idaho!
On the appointed Saturday, I drove to the bike shop parking lot in Meridian and watched as a couple of freestylers, along with their parents set up a quaterpipe and wedge ramp. The ramp looked HUGE. It stood six feet tall and eight feet wide. What was funny was that the ramp broke into two, four foot wide sections, and they stacked the two sections on the back of a pick-up truck to transport the ramp to the show. On the way, they hit a bump and the top section of the ramp bounced off of the truck and into the road. It got scraped up, but wasn't seriously damaged. They laughed about the accident, and set up the ramps.
The riders that day were Justin "Jay" Bickel, who was about 14 then, and Wayne Moore, who was 17. The first show started and I was blown away. They did a bunch of flatland tricks that I had only seen in the magazines, and then kick turns on the wedge ramp, and finally airs on the quarterpipe. I was so stoked. They were getting two or three feet out of the ramp, doing variations, and that blew my mind.
After the first show ended, I started talking to Jay's mom, and showed her a trick I had just learned, which happened to be a trick Jay did in the show. She was psyched, and walked me over and introduced me to Jay and Wayne. We talked about BMX and trick riding for quite a while, until it was time for the next show. I watched that show, and then got Jay's number. His mom, Cindy, said I should come over and ride with Jay and Wayne sometime. From then on I started losing interest in racing, and I became a BMX freestyler. I made the trip over to Jay's house to ride the ramps every chance I could. That changed the whole course of my life. I owe a great debt to Jay, and his parents, Dwight and Cindy. They became my "freestyle parents," and I joined the trick team a couple months later when Wayne "retired" from riding, at the ripe old age of 17. Like so many other riders in the early and mid 1980's, it was seeing a trick team perform live that really got me into freestyle.
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.
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.
