Freestylers Dirt Jumping in 1990

Like Hannibal from The A-Team used to say, "I love it when a plan comes together."  I'm continuing on with my 25th anniversary look back at my 1990 bike video, The Ultimate Weekend.  As luck would have it, the Boozer Jam 360 is happening tomorrow at Sheep Hills in Costa Mesa, California.  Dirt jumping has evolved incredibly over the years, as the old schoolers looking back at this, then watching the riders tomorrow can attest.  Today's clip starts at 23:15 in the video above.

Before the jumping, though, is a quick shot of me.  There's a quick triple shot of me doing 50/50 grinds (aka double peg) on a little painted ledge at a shopping center on Beach Boulevard in H.B.  At the time I shot this, double peg grinds on street were pretty new.  I kept myself out of this video for the most part because I knew the guys I rode with were better riders than me, and the weird tricks I was learning then weren't very popular.  At the time I shot this video, I was doing 7 or 8 foot half Cabs, full cabs (rollback 360 bunnyhops), lookback half Cabs (which I've STILL never seen anyone else do), 8 or 9 foot rollback bunnyhops, and I'd been trying bunnyhop tailwhips for nearly three years, but never landed one clean.  Looking back, I really wish I would have put those tricks in the video.  But I didn't.  What I did put in was these 50/50 grinds.  I learned them at about 3 am somewhere in the middle of Texas on a skateboard tour with Mark Oblow.  We stopped for gas, we were both delirious from long hours on the road, and Mark found a little ledge on the back of the gas station.  He started ollying up to 50/50 grinds, which gave me the idea.  After a few tries I did a double peg stall.  Then I kept going at it faster until the stalls turned into little grinds.  The next day we picked up am vert skaters Mike Crum and Chris Gentry, and later met up with Buck Smith and did three weeks worth of demos across the South.  Just for the record, the grinds in the video I did with knurled, screw on pegs that were tiny by today's standards.

And then comes Oceanview, one of the coolest flyout jumps ever.  I first got to know Keith Treanor and John Povah at that jump one day, and we started riding together a lot.  This video came out the year before Sheep Hills was built, just to put it into perspective.  In the late 80's, there were two distinct kinds of jumpers.  There were freestylers who liked flyout jumps and doing crazy and usually unstylish tricks.  Then there were the racer jumpers, who jumped double jumps mostly, rarely did 360's, and jumped with more style but less crazy variations.  At the first King of Dirt Jam in 1987 that Gork from BMX Action and Rich Bartlett put on, the split in styles was obvious.  But as street riding contests started happening soon after, the styles started to merge.  Racers started doing crazier variations, and freestylers (some of them, anyhow) learned how  to pedal and started jumping farther and with more style.

This segment at Oceanview includes Keith Treanor (black T-shirt), John Povah (blue tank top), flatland legend Woody Itson (turquoise shorts), vert superstar Josh White (white T-shirt/shorts), and the most surprising to me at the time, H.B. local flatlander Andy Mucahy (jeans).  Now this jump, on the corner of Warner and Gothard, is the only flyout jump I've ever seen with a concrete runway up to a seven foot high jump... to flat.  Early in this clip you see Keith blast the jump for height, going an honest nine or ten feet off the deck.  I've seen Keith go a full two feet higher off that jump, but never caught it on video.  He had this crazy habit of showing up somewhere and going way bigger on his first hit then ever again.  It got to the point where I would actually turn the camera on in the car and point it at Keith because he did that everywhere we went.  The cover of the video was a photo Mike Sarrail shot and I made high contrast of Keith jumping over John's outstretched hand, like he does in this segment. 

This segment  backed by The Stain's "Flashing Red" song, one of my favorites in the video.  The riders go through the gambit of freestyle jumps at the time.  360's, one hand 360's, no footers, no handers, tailwhip attempts, and a decade attempt by John Povah.  The air they're getting seems tiny today, but this was serious freestyler jumping at the time. 

Near the end you see Josh White almost land a tailwhip.  There's a story there.  In '88 or '89 (I can't remember exactly), there were some jumps where the condos above Sheep Hills now sit.  I learned about them when Mike Miranda took Rich Bartlett there to shoot photos for a Vision ad, and I shot video of the photo shoot.  There was a good sized (for the time) hip jump, a couple small doubles, and a ditch jump.  Since the spot was literally only a few blocks from where I worked at Unreel Productions, I started riding over and jumping during my lunch break and after work.  I loved me a good ditch jump. 

One day I rode over and ran into Josh White.  As good a rider as Josh was, he hadn't learned tailwhips off jumps, and that's what he was trying that day.  I was also trying to learn them then, so we took turns missing tailwhips until my chain broke as I rode down into the ditch.  Big, painful faceplant slide, and I scootered my bike back to work, half of me covered in dirt and blood.  I didn't run into Josh for a year or so after that.  When I did run into him, he was at Oceanview one evening... trying again to learn tailwhips.  He'd still never landed one.  I had my camera, so I started shooting video as he got closer and closer to nailing that trick.  The one you see in this clip where he almost makes it and then runs off the bike was the second to last one I shot.  The next try, Josh White landed his first tailwhip over a jump... and my camera battery went dead while he was in the air.  I shit you not.  I missed it.  Josh was so bummed.  I was so bummed. So Josh's first tailwhip was one of the things that didn't make it in the video.  Sometimes things work out, and sometimes they don't.  It still really bums me out that the freakin' camera battery picked that exact instant to die.  But that's life.

Brian Foster Documentary

I'm way out of the loop of the BMX scene these days.  But I saw a Facebook post about a Brian Foster documentary called BF-it the other day.  I was a roommate to both Alan and Brian Foster at the P.O.W. BMX House in the early 90's, so I was anxious to check it out.  I followed the link to watch it.  Unfortunately, I have Fred Flintstone's old laptop, and my computer froze up sixteen minutes and 47 seconds into the video.  Crap.  Tonight I managed to watch the whole thing, and I dig it. 

Oddly, the first memory of Brian that popped into my head wasn't riding.  One night we were sitting around the P.O.W. House living room.  The guys who had some money all had $5 pizzas from What-a-Lotta-Pizza.  Those of us who didn't have much money that night were eating ramen or microwave burritos.  Brian finished his pizza, but left the crusts.  He held his box up and said, "Pizza bones!" offering the leftovers to us human roaches.  I grabbed the box and scarfed down the crusts.  It was a treat in those ramen days. 

Then the other memories popped into my head.  Riding the backyard ramps with Brian.  Watching him tear it up at Sheep Hills and other local trails.  The craziest memory I have of Brian from those days was shooting video of several riders jumping the insane gap jump at Dover.  Years later, doing a magazine interview, I asked Brian what the craziest thing he ever jumped was, and he said it was that jump at Dover.  I don't know what nutcase had the idea to build that jump, but it would still be big by today's standards.  The riders would sprint across the field, and drop in a near vertical roll-in at first straight speed.  It went down about fifteen feet, then curved up in to a seven foot high kicker.  I actually stepped off and measured the gap, and it was 25 feet, though it looked much bigger.  The insane part was that it was a flat landing... eight feet higher than the takeoff.  Mid jump, riders were about 30 feet above a brush filled ravine.  As luck would have it, one of my shots of Brian jumping there is in this documentary. 

I didn't see Brian much after about '95, so a lot of what's included in the video is new to me.  For whatever reason, Brian had that timeless style when I first met him in the early 90's, and he has built upon that style in the many years since.  He's one of the great BMX riders of all time.  If you haven't seen BF-it, follow this link and check it out.

The First Mega Ramp

This is footage I shot at the 2-Hip King of Dirt in spring of 1991.  The footage was edited and used in the first official S&M Bikes video, Feel My Leg Muscles... I'm A Racer.  That video title was a line Dave Clymer used to pick up his girlfriend at the time. 

OK, for this second post on the new version of Freestyle BMX Tales, I'm jumping forward a bit to 1991.  To set the mood, BMX and freestyle had nearly died in 1989.  At the bike trade show in early 1989 I heard one thing over and over, "BMX is dead, mountain bikes are the new thing."  After that trade show, nearly every company either dropped completely or seriously cut back their BMX and freestyle programs.  At the same time, street riding was becoming its own genre, and the AFA's flatland and quarterpipe contests were fading in popularity.  Veteran Haro pro Ron Wilkerson became the main promoter of contests, putting on halfpipe, street, and dirt contests.  At this time, the fledgling indy company S&M Bikes, headed by racer/jumper Chris Moeller, was being run out of a tiny one bedroom apartment.  There were a whole bunch of hardcore riders still, but the industry just plain gave up on us.  Those were some of the best days of BMX, when pros traded ramen recipes and slept on whatever motel floor was available at contests.  Pro purses were small but the tricks kept getting bigger.  Into this world came the word that Ron Wilkerson was going to hold a dirt contest at the legendary Mission Trails jumps near San Diego.  Mission Trails was home to Death Jump, a steep roll in to a three foot kicker that launched riders over 25 feet of flat and then to a steep down hill landing that was hardpack covered by sandy dirt.  Wiping out was like landing on sandpaper.  We were seriously worried someone might die at that contest. 

There was a crowd of 150 or so people that day, nearly all hitting the jumps one after another.  In those days there were many more people riding than taking photos or shooting video.  I went there with the S&M Bikes/P.O.W. House crew including Chris Moeller, Dave Clymer, Keith Treanor, and others.  Tim "Fuzzy" Hall was there, and boosted a killer archibald over the table top jump.  Mike "Crazy Red" Carlson did a decade over the same jump, which was a pretty new variation at the time.  Mike Kranaich (I never could spell his last name) was coming close to landing double tailwhips on that same jump, the first time any of us had seen that trick tried.  Then the contest moved up to the double jump.  Vic Murphy was doing textbook caliber tabletops.  Chris Moeller is seen in the clip above trying 360's over that jump.  But the real mind blowing came when Mat Hoffman tried a backflip over the jump, the first time anyone had seen that tried on dirt.  He under-rotated and crashed.  But hell, he's Mat Hoffman, so he tried it again, and didn't make it that time either.  But Mat let the genie out of the bottle, he came close enough to show everyone that backflips on double jumps were possible, and several people learned them in the next couple of years.  Mat was a vert rider in all our minds, nobody really expected him to try something unheard of on dirt. 

Then came the part of the contest that excited and scared everyone: Death Jump.  Secretly we were all hoping it wouldn't live up to its name that day.  Now keep in mind, this was just a big group of hardcore riders out in the desert.  There were no TV cameras or crew people.  There were no paramedics.  It was as core as could be.  Just a bunch of the world's best riders trying the biggest jump anyone had ever seen up to that point.  In the clip above you see Bill Nitschke endo on death jump.  It was a gnarly crash, but amazing because Bill was best known as a flatlander.  Keith Treanor ejected off his bike and did a painful one hand, two feet slide down the landing.  One of the locals jumped it shirtless, kicking into a half tabletop.  Dave Clymer is the guy in the clip who does the eject to back slide, saved by his mailman short shorts.  Chris Moeller was definitely one of the favorites of the day, he'd earned a big reputation as one of the world's craziest jumpers.  He easily cleared the big jump a few times, then managed a big no hander.  You can hear Ron Wilkerson on the mike going,"Yeeeaaah!" after that one.  Mat was still riding, despite his hard backflip crashes, and hucked a no footer to no footed can-can to no footer over Death Jump.  Dang!  Also in the mix was all-around riding legend Dennis McCoy.  He hucked a backflip  attempt, and then a 720 attempt, crashing hard both times. 

But the crashes of the day belonged to the relatively unknown Mike "Crazy Red" Carlson.  He had several huge bails that day, but the climax was his 360 attempt into the crowd where he hits another bike which flips up and hits him in the head.  Somehow, everyone walked away from that contest... well a few were limping.  There was plenty of road rash from the hard, sandpaper-like landings.  Eddie Roman and I got video footage, and we both used it in videos later that year. 

The biggest thing about the 2-Hip King of Dirt contest at Mission Trails was that it completely changed everyone's perspective about what was possible on dirt jumps.  This was four years before the first X-Games.  BMX was "dead."  But a handful of guys changed the way we all looked at our bikes forever.  Suddenly backflips were on the table.  Twenty five foot jumps were on the table.  Double tailwhips were on the table.  In one crazy, thristy afternoon, BMX riding changed forever.  In my typical way, I was wondering about the future.  Death Jump reminded me of the freestyle skiing jumps where people did triple backflips.  Watching Death Jump that day, I predicted someone would eventually do a double backflip on a bike, as crazy as it seemed at the time.  It took several years, but it eventually did happen.  Now as I write this 24 years later, both a BMXer and a MX rider have done triple backflips.  How far will it progress?   That's up to today's young huckers.