Jeff Cotter Flatland run in 1988

I met Jeff Cotter in 1987, while working for the AFA.  He was part of the Lakewood posse that included Ron McCoy, Nathan Shimizu, Ron Camero, his little brother Tim Cotter, and Derek Oriee.  All of those guys were good riders, and always at the SoCal local AFA contests.  Jeff was sponsored by Ozone at one point, and by Vision Street Wear.  None of that crew became top pros, but they were always good, polished, flatland riders.  They often came down to the Huntington Beach Pier on the weekends where Mike Sarrail, myself, and a few of the Vision freestyle skaters would ride for the crowds. 

So why am I showing a clip of one of the hundreds of good flatlanders from the heyday of 1988?  Because Jeff went on to take a job riding in Ringling Bros. Circus not long after this.  He flew to Japan and was doing shows with Jose Yanez, the inventor of BMX backflips.  When Jeff came back to SoCal in 1990, I was shooting footage for my first self-produced bike video, The Ultimate Weekend.  Jeff told me he could do backflips into water, and I went to Long Beach to shoot footage of him.  While he was flipping into the lake, I asked him if he'd ever tried backflip variations.  He said he never really thought of it, so he gave it a shot.  He did a stretched one handed flip into the lake, and a real quick no hander, which made him the first actual freestyler to do any kind of backflip variations.  Mat Hoffman was doing backflip fakies and flairs on vert then.  But no one in the BMX freestyle world had done flip variations on video.  Jeff Cotter, Lakewood area flatlander, wound up being that guy. 

I shot the footage of Jeff flipping into the lake right as I was getting ready to edit my video.  Back in those days, I had to pay $25 an hour to rent the edit equipment, and I set a solid deadline to stop shooting footage.  Jeff called me a week after that deadline, and said he had learned flips ramp to ramp, making him the first freestyler to do so.  But I was just getting ready to edit, and I didn't go shoot footage of him for the video.  That was my mistake. 

Jose Yanez was a rider from Arizona who learned flips and then double backflips into water, back when everyone thought that was impossible.  But Jose wasn't a serious racer or freestyler.  Jeff, the flatlander from Lakewood, became the first freestyler to do flips ramp to ramp, and to try one handers and no handers.  In the weird world of BMX riding progression, you never know who will break new ground with the tricks that change everything.  Jose did it first.  Mat Hoffman took flips to halfpipes first.  And Jeff Cotter brought flips into the mainstream freestyle world. 

At 44:11 in this clip, you can see Jeff flipping into a lake in 1990.

I've got four new blogs now:

The Big Freakin' Transition- about the future and economics

Crazy California 43- weird and cool locations in California

Full Circle- about writing and the writer's life

 And a fiction blog...

Stench: Homeless Superhero

The State of BMX Videos in 1990

Eddie Roman's Aggroman (Mat Hoffman clip above), was like a movie and it was awesome when it came out.  But after a couple views, we treated it like a porno, fast forward through all the sketchy acting to get to the good stuff.  This was the best known rider-made video when I released The Ultimate Weekend in 1990.  Mark Eaton's original Dorkin' In York came out around then, too.

At an AFA Velodrome contest in 1986, I was hanging in my hotel room with the rest of the Off The Wall factory team.  Off The Wall was a really crappy bike made by some Taiwanese company.  It's a long story, but it eventually turned into the Air/Uni and then the Ozone, which were good bikes.  Anyhow, Eddie Roman walked into our room with a VHS tape in his hand, and said he had something to show us.  It was a video, I think he made it for a class in school, and it was called "Aggro Riding and Kung Fu Fighting."  It was funny and had some good riding in it, but the technical quality wasn't very good.  But we didn't care.  It was a video made by an actual BMX freestyler, and not just any freestyler, Eddie Roman, Skway factory guy and street riding legend.  THAT was the beginning of the rider-made video movement.  But we didn't know that at the time.  After Eddie showed us the video, he ran out to some other room full of riders to show it off again.

The next year, 1987, I produced six videos for the American Freestyle Association.  They were real simple, and all contest footage.  In 1988, Ron Wilkerson called on me to edit the 2-Hip season video, which you can now find online as 2-Hip BHIP.  I was working at Unreel Productions by that time, the video company owned by Vision Skateboards/Vision Street Wear.  Eddie Roman got a job at a local video production company around the same time.  Meanwhile, across the U.S. in Pennsylvania, Plywood Hood Mark Eaton (we called him Lungmustard then) started making VHS videos of himself, Kevin Jones, and the rest of the Hoods.  All of these videos were pretty sketchy technically, but they had great riding.  That's what riders around the country, and around the world wanted to see.  There was no internet then, we only had magazines to learn about freestyle, and the occasional, completely over-produced BMX Plus!  or Vision video, where everyone was wearing leathers and helmets, even riding flatland. 

That was the environment when I decided to completely self-produce my own video in 1990, which, of course, was The Ultimate Weekend.  None of us considered rider-made videos a movement yet, we just wanted something that showed "real riding."  Nobody was making videos like that.  Our punk rock, D.I.Y. influence led Eddie, Mark, and I to make our own videos.  Little did we know, it was the start of a revolution, not only in BMX, but in all action sports.