It's up to us Old School riders to teach younger riders BMX history

Here's the trailer for Joe Kid on a Stingray, Mark Eaton's 2005 documentary that's our BMX version of skateboarding's Dogtown and Z-Boys documentary.  This is the best overall history of BMX and BMX freestyle there is, but there are tons more old school videos showing different riders, scenes, and time periods.

Yesterday, I had lunch with Rich, the owner here at Block Bikes, and Dakota Bratt, who I didn't really know anything about.  Halfway through his football sized wet burrito (OK, not quite that big), he showed me this clip.   What?  Manual across a skatepark, to backflip, back to an extended manual?  Freakin' amazing.  It would take me a month to learn how to do that trick in a video game.  So, Dakota's got mad skills.

Over the course of lunch, Rich and I, both in our 50's now, were talking about riding back in our early days, the 1980's, and how things have changed so much.  We talked about the absurd amounts of money in the BMX world, compared to the days of $200 pro purses.  We talked about the X-Games, and competition riding compared to video segment based riding, and just riding for fun.  We talked about how old many of the basic tricks are, yet the young guys today combine them, and take them to huge levels, and to different street obstacles.  We talked the idea I threw out a couple of blog posts ago, of having contest where a rider/video person team would have a 6 hour video shoot, a single day of editing, and what kind of rider and video person would do well in that scenario.  I explained the 5 categories of getting a trick dialed in (from that same post), compared to today's one-and-done video shoot tricks.  All in all, it was a really interesting conversation.

But time after time, Rich or I would start talking about something, and we'd have to ask Dakota if knew about this rider, or about that trick, or something else that happened long ago.  Many of the things were huge events in our day, but are simply not even known to Dakota's generation.  He's 25, I think he said, he's not a 13-year-old Woodward camper.  He's been riding for several years. This continual stopping to ask Dakota if he knew about this rider or that event led our conversation to the Old School Versus New School thing.  We weren't dissing him, but more exploring his view from his years and riding, and sort of wondering if today's riders even care about the history of BMX and freestyle.

In one sense, I noticed a kind of bias in Rich and myself, that a rider should want to know the history.  Personally, I think it would be cool to see younger riders exposed to a bunch of the old school history, riders, and tricks that fell by the wayside.  There are a lot of of tricks, that with a proper introduction to the younger riders, might add new ideas and fresh style to the New School lexicon, and give them some new avenues to explore as riders.  As I thought about it, I realized that Rich and I knew BMX and freestyle history because we lived through most of it.  And since we were both involved in the industry, we wound up meeting riders that came before us, and learning their stories, and later watching many of the home videos that now populate YouTube and other sites.

The whole thing reminded me of something else.  I got into BMX riding in Boise in 1982, started buying magazines in late '82, raced through 1983 into 1984, and then focused on freestyle, the new thing that became a sport that year.  So when I got a job a BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines in 1986, I was only four years into the whole thing.  But the first night working at the magazine, we went into the office, working overtime, because the BMX Action 10th anniversary party was that weekend.  Gork (gOrk at US BMX these days) and I dug through a bike box full of ten years worth of color slides, looking for the best 100 photos to put in a slide show.  It was an old school BMX event... in 1986.

It turned into about the best thing that could have happened for me.  I didn't know hardly anything about the history of BMX, or even the early days of freestyle.  And I was suddenly working at two of the magazines.  I would find cool slides, having no idea who most of the people were, and I'd show Gork a slide, and he'd tell me all about it.  I got a great, and really interesting, overview of BMX history, on night one of working at Wizard Publications.  It was just a weird bit of timing that I got hired, primarily for FREESTYLIN' magazine, at that particular time.  With Gork being so cool, and taking the time to explain all these riders to me (photos of Tinker Juarez, and "Trash Can" Morgan stand out in my memory), learning the history of this sport I was so psyched about was fun, and interesting.  But today's riders don't get a cool introduction to BMX history like I had that night.  Yes, there are videos online they can find, but there are thousands of videos from their own era to watch, let alone everything else they have access to these days.

I realized that younger riders have no obligation to go look at old riding videos and learn the history.  It's a progression-based sport, they're looking forwards, not backwards.  If all of us Old School riders think there's something worthwhile about younger riders learning our collective BMX history, then it's our obligation to find a way to show it to them.  And it's our obligation to make it interesting for them, to give them a proper introduction to what they missed, simply by being born at a later date.

As I thought about this, I remember when Stacy Peralta's skateboarding documentary, Dogtown and Z-Boys, came out in 2001.  I lived near the Van's Skatepark at a mall called The Block, in Orange, California.  After winning several awards at film festivals, the movie actually played at the theater at The Block, and everyone at the skatepark was talking about it.  The moves in the documentary were largely basic by 2001 standards, but the Z-Boys had incredible style.  Within a few weeks, I started seeing kids, young kids, at the skatepark mimicing the guys in the movie.  Kids 6-8-10 years old were doing stylish carves on the banks, and even wearing a fedora in one case, like Jay Adams in the movie.  The documentary was widely watched by all ages of skateboarders,  and brought a whole new flavor and great style to a couple of new generations of skaters.  I think it's possible to do something similar in BMX from time to time.  I think Old School tricks, style, and ideas can add some fresh blood into today's, and tommorow's BMX riding.  

How could this be done? If you own a bike shop, skatepark, or just have a house with a good ramp where kids ride, you could have an Old School video night.  Get some younger riders and some older ones together, and watch "Joe Kid on a Stingray," or one or two other classic old school videos, and then answer whatever the questions the kids may have.  You know, important questions, like "why did guys where really short shorts in the 80's?"  (Yeah, I'm guilty). 

Another idea at a local skatepark or riding spot would be to have an Old School vs. New School Game of BIKE contest.  If you or some friends can still ride fairly well, put your trick bag on the line against some young riders, and make sure somebody's shooting video.  A recent Scotty Cranmer video where Trey Jones and Big Boy tried to do tricks from an 80's "101 BMX Freestyle Tricks" book was hilarious.  They actually gave some props to us old farts, after trying 5 tricks each. 

If you like this general idea, I'm sure there are plenty of other ways to show younger riders some of our collective history in a fun and interesting way.  Oh, and if you go up against Dakota Bratt in a game of BIKE, and he says he's got a "manual trick" for you, just take the dang letter. 

The Five Levels of Doing a Bike Trick

Above we have pro rider Mykell Larrin, blasting a big downside whip, in a vert contest, in San Diego, last weekend.  Yes, he landed it clean and smooth.  That's Level 5, landing a trick clean in a contest.  The guy watching in the red and white striped shirt is Koji Kraft, who I'll mention in the post below.  (Emig photo- thanks to the guy who told me Mykell Larrin's name on Facebook, I didn't catch it at the comp.)

I've always had a tendency to overthink things.  My dad was an draftsman/engineer, and I grew up watching him think to solve mechanical problems.  I learned to think my way through things.  My dad wasn't an athlete, and I wound up sucking at every sport (except dodgeball) as a kid, and into my teen years.  When I got into BMX, I finally found something I liked doing enough, and was driven enough, to get halfway good at.  But I still would overthink every trick I tried to learn.  A big part of my personal learning process and progression in riding was learning to stop thinking intellectually, and learn to let my body awareness and subconscious take over.

One place where my overthinking did come in handy was writing about riding.  It was during my short stint as a magazine guy at Wizard Publications, riding at The Spot in Redondo Beach every night, that I classified the various levels of learning a trick.  Today's BMX is largely a world of video-based riding, where landing a crazy trick, or combo once, and getting that make on video, is much different than competition based riding.  Yes, there are also competition based riders, but the pros there are a tiny minority or total riders these days.  I thought it would be interesting to write my 5 classifications down, and put them back out into the BMX/bike world, and see what people thought.  So here we go.

Category 1- You land trick or move for the first time.  After a period of trying, maybe a couple of hours, maybe ten years, you land a trick, new to you, for the first time.  This does one major thing, you now know it's possible for you to do it.  You may not land it again for several days, or even months.  You may not land it again, ever.  But you did it, and if there's video or reliable witnesses, you can prove you did it.

Here's the controversial part about Category 1.  If a rider lands a huge, scary, gnarly trick or line for a video part, they're still only at Category 1, if they only do it that one time.  No matter how hard or gnarly the situation is, it's still Category 1.

Category 1 Plus- Originality- When you land a completely new trick for the first time.  By landing it, you prove to yourself, and to everyone (if caught on video or seen live) that it CAN be done.  That's the creative side of progression, the originality part.  In today's world, this almost never happens anymore.  Yes, I know, us first generation freestylers had that era.  Most basic tricks have been invented, and as good as today's riders are, the focus is on taking "standard" tricks, and doing them bigger, or on different terrain.  That's another form of progression, but even if you a tailwhip across a 13 story roof gap, it's still a tailwhip.  The gnarliness has progressed, but it's not a new trick.  I think there are still entirely new things to be invented.  Bike flips in the air and the end over end bike flip things are an example of entirely new things in the last decade or so.
 
Category 2- You learn to do a trick most of the time.  If you try a trick 10 times in a row, and pull it at least six, you can do the trick.  You can't do it every time, you may miss it in a contest, a demo, or the first three times while shooting video.  But you can do it most of the time.

Category 3- You can do a trick nearly every time.  You've got it "dialed" as we said in the 1980's.  If you tried the trick, move, or line 100 times in  a row, one right after another, you'd land the trick, without touching down, at least 95 times.  You may miss it once in a great while.  But you've got it, it's solidly in your trick bag now.  You'd pull it out in a game of BIKE (we played "FREESTYLE" BITD), to give someone a letter.

Category 4- You OWN a trick.  You can land it 100 times out of 100.  You STOMP it almost every time you do it.  It's just a matter of how much style you put into it at this point. It's like walking, you don't even have to think about it, it's just there when you need it.

Category 5- You can land the trick solid in a contest or high pressure situation.  You've got one shot, all or nothing, and you land it solid.  You've got the trick dialed, maybe you own it.  But even in a high pressure situation, you STILL land it.  that's Category 5.

The double backflip on a BMX bike is a really crazy trick, even today.  But that trick is over 20 years old.  It's the trick that incredible rider Stephen Murray was doing when he crashed and got paralyzed from the neck down.  It's a high conseqence trick.  And he did that trick on a regular basis before that.

Jay Miron first landed a double backflip on Canadian TV in 1997.  Dave Mirra landed one at a CFB contest in early 2000, I believe, and then at the 2000 X-Games.  That's where most people thought the double back was invented, because that was where it first got worldwide media coverage.  But no one had that trick consistently.  No one wanted to do it on a regular basis for years after that.  Yet, before Mirra, Miron, Cory Nastazio (trying it here in early 2000), or anyone tried it and landed it consistently, there was a guy who quietly took that trick to Category 3, maybe even 4.

No hype, no fanfare, no widespread video parts.  Koji Kraft, the guy in the red and white shirt in the photo above, was that guy.  This clip, from about 2009, is the best I could find on YouTube.  This is from 6-8 years after I saw him land two or three doubles in person.  (Yes, I got video of one or two of them, that was in the video footage I lost in 2008.)

The first time I saw anyone land a double backflip, in person, was Koji in Huntington Beach, in (I think) 2001.  There was a big box jump with an extended kicker, the perfect set-up.  I saw Koji do 2 or 3 of them that day, all in between the main demos and competitions.  He was practicing a trick that scared the crap out of the very best jumpers in the world at the time.  My point here is that no matter how crazy a trick is or how burly street line seems, it will, most of the time, be makeable on a regular basis at some point.  Not always.  900's on vert are 30 years old, and no one has them on lock, as far as I know.  But most tricks, no matter how burly, someone will have dialed later one.

With this idea in mind, do you know what I think would be a really interesting idea?  Have a BMX (or MTB) video contest, kinda like X-Games Real BMX or Real Street, but give the team six hours to shoot the footage, and one day to edit  a clip, say 90 seconds, or maybe even 3 minutes, if you want to make it real interesting.  You know what that would do?  I'm pretty sure a whole new group of riders (and video people) would rise to the top.  As much as I think Dakota Roche's latest edit is just pain insane, I wouldn't pick him if I was the video guy in this type of competition.  I'd pick Koji, or Bill Nitschke, or Rick Moliterno.  Anyhow, this is just and idea I'm tossing out there...

Back in our competition-based days in the early years of "BMX freestyle," as we called it then, this was where we wanted to be.  Getting sponsored, doing a photo shoot (when actual film was involved), or putting on demos, people wanted to see what we could actually do consistently.  Most people now don't realize, BMX freestyle didn't begin as a sport.  It began as demos, and then trick shows.  Riding skateparks was recreation before that.  There were no competitions for several years, and there were no videos for years.

People outside your immediate group only knew you could do a trick if you could land it the one time they saw you ride in a contest. When you went to a magazine photo shoot back then, the photographer would have you do the trick 3 or 4 times, before they bothered to snap the first photo.  Film cost money, and there was no need to waste money if you sucked.  Then, once they did start taking photos, they'd shoot a whole roll of film of that one trick.  A roll of film had 36 photos, and you could usually squeeze one or two more on it.  It was, "That was great... now do 36 more."

Imagine any top video rider today, and saying, "OK, let me see you pull this crazy move 4 times before I turn the video camera on.  When you do that, then I will shoot video of you doing it 37 MORE times.  That was STANDARD back in the 1980's.  Yes, tricks are bigger and burlier now, there's more danger of life threatening injury much of the time, but most of today's riders can't to 90% of the tricks done back then, let alone to that level.  Most freestyle tricks are long forgotten.

So that's it, that was my 5 categories of tricks I developed, and wrote about (in the AFA Newsletter, American Freestyle, I believe), back in 1986, and 1987.  If any of you have thoughts or comments, let them fly my way on Facebook or wherever.

-Steve Emig: The White Bear

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Bob Haro Master Class: The beginning of BMX freestyle

Masterclass Bob Haro - Paris 2012 from Seb Satoorne on Vimeo.
 If you're an old school BMX freestyler, have you ever wished you could sit down and have Bob Haro, himself, tell you how freestyle began?  I know I have. 

I was working in the BMX and skateboard industries in Southern California from 1986 to 1990, and then Chris Moeller's roommate/video guy from 1991-1995.  I was in the mix quite a while, and I only met Bob Haro once.  So for all of us who got into freestyle in the 80's, and wondered just what the early history was, here's Bob Haro telling it, in his own words... for an hour.  This video is EPIC.

From Seb Ronjon and Franck Belliot in France, who I really got Facebook chatting with a couple days ago, comes another epic video.  They put together the truly first class BMX/skateboard/scooter culture exhibition Beton Hurlant, in 2011-2012 in France.  They invited Bob Haro over to check out the exhibit and narrate it on video.  But they also had an old school event they called the "Bob Haro Master Class."  Bob gives a slide presentation to a group of old school BMX freestylers from Europe, and spends an hour telling his side of the story, which is where it all began.  I found this absolutely fascinating.  I'm pretty sure many of you will, too.  It's an hour, so watch it when you have some time.  This video hasn't had any exposure outside of France, until now.  So I want to give a huge thank you to Seb and Franck for sharing it with me and all of you.  

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Bob Haro narrates a French bike/skate/scooter culture exhibit in 2011

Bob Haro / Béton Hurlant from Seb Satoorne on Vimeo.

Going through all the comments from people at the book signing last Saturday, I wound up finding a post on a French old school BMX facebook group I belong to.  I took a couple moments to add the names I knew to some of the line-up photos he had on there.  I posted my blog post as well, and wound up in a cross-ocean Facebook chat with Seb Ronjon.  As much as I have trouble learning new technology, I love that fact that, in today's world, it's possible to stumble into a conversation with a like minded person 5,000 miles away.  Amazing.

He turned me on to this video, from the Beton Hurlant exhibit in 2011, I believe, which never really got shared outside of France.  Seb and friend Franck put on this amazing museum exhibit about BMX/freestyle, skateboard, and scooter culture in France, and then flew Bob Haro over to walk through and share his thoughts and insight on the exhibit.

This is 17 minutes, but definitely worth the watch, if you're an old school BMX racer, freestyler, or skateboarder.  The exhibit is absolutely first class, very well set up and displayed, and Bob Haro's thoughts as he walks through and comments are great.  Thank you Seb for sharing, and I'm glad to be able to show the U.S. bike world this video and exhibit.  Great stuff.

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The Birth of the Freestyle Movement- 2nd Edition signing party- Part 2

A stack of the books for sale.  There were various packages with T-shirts, stickers, and other goodies to buy.  Since I'm just making a come back from being really down and out, I had to hold off on getting one for now. I'm DEFINITELY going to buy one of these when I can.  Dominic Phipps did specifically come over to me, introduce himself, and tell me I either have a line or two in the book, or a credit.  Because I write so many blog posts about the old days, he contacted me a while ago and I told him about the Vision Street Wear days.  If you rode in the 80's, or are younger and want to know learn about your history, you NEED to get this book.  This event was held at 10 Barrel Brewing Company in San Diego, CA, on May 25, 2019.

 This is one of the big photos that was displayed at the book signing party.  It's Dave Voelker blasting ten feet out in a attempt to set the official, Guiness World Records highest air, at an event at the Olympic Velodrome in 1987.  I believe Brian Blyther edged out this air of Dave's and got the record with a 10' 2" air.  That's off the 8 foot high, 8 foot wide, "rickety, AFA/Socko wooden quarterpipe, by the way.  I'm pretty sure that this event was the first world record BMX air event recognized by Guiness.  I was working for the AFA at the time, and helped Bob Morales set up this event.

 For any of you that read my old school stories on my personal blog, you I know I think of myself as a mediocre rider from the 80's, and mostly an industry guy who "just happened to be standing nearby" when a lot of cool BMX moments happened.  This is a close-up of the Voelker photo above, and that's me in the background, in the light blue T-shirt, behind the ladder, shooting photos for the AFA newsletter.  My life in the 80's freestyle world, encapsulated in a single photo.  Dave Voelker blasting epic air, and I'm ten feet away doing my industry guy thing, watching history happen. 

 The table of books up for sale, and three donated bikes that were raffled off later in the evening.  Mike Dominguez and John Povah bought so many raffle tickets that their names got pulled out 5 or 6 times each.  They waved off most of the prizes, but each took a little prize pack home.

 NorCal and Skyway represent.  L to R: unknown, unknown, Marc McKee, Mat Hoffman, Mike Golden, Maurice Meyer.  If anyone can fill in the unknowns (Drob?), let me know.

 Dean Palacios on the left talking.  I think he was a Pipeline Skatepark local back in the day.  If I'm wrong, let me know.

I think these are all Skyway riders, same line-up as above, with more added.  L to R: Hugo Gonzales, unknown, unknown, Mark McKee, Mat Hoffman, Robert Peterson, Mike Golden, Maurice Meyer, Scott(y) Freeman.  Yeah, he's 40-something now, but I still want to call him "Scotty," since he was 13 when he burst on the national scene.  Old habits die hard.  Again, if anyone can fill in the blanks, let me know.

Scotty Cranmer gets Trey Jones and Big Boy to try 80's tricks

I don't watch Scotty Cramner's channel on a regular basis, but I know he has some great stuff on it.  This gem from a couple of months ago got shared by old school flatlander Mike Sarrail on Facebook yesterday, and I thought it was awesome.  Someone gave Scotty an old "101 craziest freestyle tricks" book from the 80's, about 1988, I'd guess by the tricks, and he decided to have Trey Jones and Big Boy try some.  They pick random numbers, then go to that page and try each trick. 

OK, I lived and rode through the 1980's, and I could only do two of those tricks in my prime, and those weren't consistent.  But this video is hilarious if you're an old school rider.  See, our tricks were hard, some of them, anyhow.  And there were lots of them, HUNDREDS of tricks that fell by the wayside over the years.  Maybe some of the youngsters will dust a few of those tricks off and revamp them.  This one is well worth the watch in my book. 

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