Brett Downs birthday is today. Here's his compilation video from the last year of riding. There were a few "WTF did he just do?" moments in this for me. Thanks for the inspiration to ride, Brett.
Since about the time I turned 50, 5 years ago, I've been telling friends: At age 50 we stop aging, from now on we Level Up, like in a video game. Welcome to Level 50, extra man (or woman) added, rage accordingly. Brett live what I say. Props man!
Saul Hudson was born in July, 1965. He's a year older than myself, or Dennis McCoy, to put him in a BMX perspective. But he's known to all of us as Slash the legendary guitar player. About 4:00 minutes into this 131 minute documentary he talks about his time as a BMXer.
Yes, he was a BMXer, and he could JUMP. He got seriously into it around ages 12-13, while living in the Laurel Canyon area of L.A., between Hollywood and The Valley. Both of his parents were involved in the music industry, so he grew up around known musicians and industry people. There's one photo of Slash jumping in the documentary above that I've never seen before. You'll have to watch it to see it.
In the documentary above, he gets into his BMX riding about 4:00 minutes in, right after a bit by Alice Cooper. It's a short bit, but he talks about how BMX was his thing until he got into guitars. There was an old BMX industry urban legend in the late 1980's that Slash and Duff (or someone) met while riding BMX bikes at a bank. It turns out that, Like many legends, there's some truth to that.
Slash was a BMXer, and Steven Adler was a skater at his junior high. Later in this doc they talk about Steven eating shit on his skateboard, and everyone ignoring him. Slash thought he might actually have been hurt, and walked over and said something like, "Dude, you OK?" That struck up a friendship, and they started hanging out. It was Steven who later showed him a guitar, which changed the direction of Slash's young life around age 14-15. Nearly a decade after meeting on bike and board, Slash was the lead guitarist, and Steven was the original drummer for Guns n' Roses. This doc also explains where the nickname Slash came from. Welcome to the jungle...
I watched this documentary last night, and while there's very little actual playing in it, it's really interesting if you're into Guns N' Roses, Slash's later bands, or music and guitars. Check it out if those things are up your alley.
Free meme for making it to this blog. Share all you want.
My name is Steve Emig, if you don't know, and I'm the guy who publishes this blog. Like many kids of Generation X, I learned to ride a bike at age 5 1/2, in 1971, it was a Schwinn Scrambler clone that my dad pieced together from garage sale bought parts. In today's world, we'd call it a rat bike. My first new bike was a red, white and blue banana seat bike, which cost $50. That was the first bike I jumped, brick and piece of wood jumps. Then I had a 26 inch ten speed, as we called road bikes back then, I jumped that bike, too, on little vacant lot jumps.
When the bike thing changed for me was in the summer of 1982, when my family moved to a trailer park outside Boise, Idaho. There wasn't much to do there, several miles outside of town, out in the desert. So us teenage boys got more and more into jumping our BMX bikes. Jumping turned into BMX racing, and then into the brand new, emerging sport of BMX freestyle. That became the driving force in my life for the next 20 years. BMX freestyle gave me a place to focus my energy, and my creativity, which shaped my whole life.
As pathetic as it sounds, I've been fighting to just get back to where I can go out and ride a little daily, for several years now. Life's been really weird for a long time, but I'll get there eventually. Here's most of the few photos I have of me riding over the last 35 years.
What's it like at a Boozer Jam? This video by pro skater/rapper Chris Gentry, from Boozer Jam 2014, will give you an idea. OK, the T&A is from downtown Huntington Beach, but the rest is all Sheep Hills. You can see Mike "Boozer" Brown in his wheelchair at :52, real quick, at that event. Boozer Jam 2021 was held on Saturday, May 29th, 2021, at Sheep Hills.
"Boozer" Mike Brown was a lifelong BMX racer, and a Sheep Hills local rider and jump builder from the earliest days of the 1990's. He was paralyzed in a racing accident in 2012. The Boozer Jam was put on as a fun day of real BMX, and a fundraiser to help out Mike and his mom, Cathy, who lived on a real tight budget. Mike died in 2019, and that year's jam turned into the Boozer Mike Memorial Jam, held in his honor since. A raffle at the end of the day helps out Cathy Brown, originally with funeral expenses in 2019, and just in general ever since. This year some money also went to help get bikes for underprivileged kids, as well.
Here's Mike in his heyday, doing his favorite trick, the bowlegged X-up. Photo loaned to me by Jason "Dogger" German, who is the driving force behind Boozer Jam each year.
Boozer Jam is a jam, so the vibe is much different from a major contest. It's a day for 300 or 400 people to all show up at Sheep Hills at once, ride the trails, talk to old friends, make some new ones, and just have a good time. Jason "Dogger" German does the leg work, putting the event together, and he kicked ass as usual. Mike's mom Cathy comes out, and hangs out all day. A bunch of T-shirts and stickers are sold, and a ton of BMX product is donated and raffled off to help Cathy out, and it's also helping underprivileged kids as well.
Tucker Smith (@tuckersmithbmx on Instagram) stretches a double seat grab Superman.
There are a load of guys in black T-shirts. There's a huge S&M and Fit Bikes presence, since Sheep Hills has been S&M Bikes country since it was built in 1990. But us geezers from the early 90's are old now, and most have families. So Boozer Jams are family events for many. Sometimes the parents watch the kids ride. Sometimes the kids watch dad ride. Sometimes the whole family rides.
Mike "Hucker" Clark with his trademarked corked out 360. In addition to these, Mike threw tailwhip flips, and was trying to jump this huge step-up and land in a hang-5, at one point. That's not physically possible, but he damn near did it anyway.
Yes, I said "us" geezers above. I was a freestyler in the 80's, doing tricks for crowds at the Huntington Beach Pier, while the racers were chasing points at races. I actually worked on the edge of the Costa Mesa mesa, a few hundred yards from Sheep Hills, from late '87 to early '90. I rode the jumps that used to be off of 19th street, where the condos above Sheep Hills are now. Some people called those jumps Hollywood, because former pro racer, and Vision Street Wear BMX team manager, "Hollywood" Mike Miranda rode there a lot. He's the one who showed me those jumps, a big hip and a ditch jump, at a Vision photo shoot.
I also rode Sheep some the first couple of years, in the era of the three berms. Then the racer jumpers built everything bigger, and I sucked to much to clear the jumps. But I rode by and hung out now and then, through the early 90's. I even helped with shovel some dirt on occasion. Being roommates with Chris Moeller around '93-'94, the young bucks of the day often came to our apartment to play video games. I'd be watching a rock climbing video, and Timmy Ball would come in, followed by Barspinner, Chulo, Stricker, and the Popes, and kick me off the TV so they could play video games. So while I never could jump a decent set of doubles, I was around those guys some in the early days.
It's always cool to go hang at Sheep, see some old friends, and shoot photos, until I can get my shit together and get a bike again. On my end, it was cool to talk to Dogger, Randy Russell and his wife, Sean Duncan, Ricky Rat, Timmy Ball, and Brooks Manbeck, from the P.O.W. House days. I also met Facebook friend Molly Opps for the first time in person. It was just a fun day all around.
Cathy Brown, Mike's mom, hanging out at Boozer Jam 2021.
While these events are largely just a big jumping jam, there's a little bit of order to the chaos. Dogger leads the pack through a skid contest, for distance and style, and a bowlegged X-up contest, Mike's favorite trick, on the Boozer line he built almost 30 years ago. The highlight of the day is the best trick contest, which was won by Cory Nastazio this year, with a corked out 720, or 360 flip, whatever you want to call it.
Tailwhip flip attempt. This rider kind of came out of nowhere. Some people said he was from Phoenix. He said he lives near Temecula now, but moved there recently, I think. He was hucking some serious moves. I think his name is Topal, or something like that. #steveemigphotos
The weather started hazy, with June gloom all morning. But the marine layer burned off, and it was a beautiful sunny day, and not too hot, perfect for the jam. Riders from ages 5 or 6, up to riders in their mid 50's were riding hard all day. Others hung and watched, and most shot photos and selfies with friends throughout the day.
Dogger, handed the mike over to longtime Sheep Hills local, and current Hawaiian aquaman, Barspinner Ryan Brennan, and he kept the vibe going. He called out Chris Hughes, offering $100 bill if Chris could land a clean body varial. He tried a bunch of them, eating shit on several. Chris rode away, dragging a foot, on two or three. There were tons of nac-nacs, and no handers, plenty of 360's, and a handful of guys doing flips. Tailwhip flips and 720's were happening, and Hucker hucked a front flip that rattled him, but kept riding, of course. It was just a solid, fun day of real BMX with friends and family.
Check out all my photos on my Pinterest board.
I also have a post about Sheep Hills itself on my new blog: Crazy California 43
I'm glad this 1986 news clip featuring Maurice Meyer is one of the videos still around 35 years later. Maurice, aka, Drob, is one of the coolest people from the 80's BMX freestyle world. He's the NorCal pro I actually talked to the most in my time up there, along with Robert Peterson. This video was shot at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, in the summer of 1986, and it's the only video of me riding in the 80's. To be clear, I was never a Curb Dog or part of the Ground Control team, but I hung out and rode with these guys on the weekends in 1985-1986. Along with Maurice, you can see Chris and Karl Rothe, Mark McKee, Tim Traecy (doing a backyard a year before the trick got popular), and Darcy Langlois. I'm the dork chasing my bike at 5:07, a trick I did in parades while living in Idaho. As far as I know, I was nicknameless for that year. It's about the only time I didn't have some nickname going.
When you're a dorky kid, you usually get tagged with a nickname, and not a very good one. I was a chubby, unathletic kid growing up, moving from town to town around rural Ohio. I changed schools nearly every year, and I never told the new kids the nicknames I got tagged with at the previous school. But my last name is an unusual, short, German background name, Emig. Teachers almost always mispronounced it EE-mig, with a long E sound. Then I'd correct the teacher (never a great way to start in a new school), and say "No, it's Em-ig, like the letter "M," then "ig." And the teacher would still call me EEE-mig, for the first couple of weeks.
I was kind of fat, so at school after school, I got tagged with Empig, by the other kids. I'm not sure why, but in Ohio in the 1970's, we rarely called each other by our first names, we called each other by our last names, and those often got turned into nicknames. Empig was a pretty easy one to figure out, and school after school, that became my nickname, after the first few days. At Willard Junior High, in Willard, Ohio (Go Flashes!), Emicrud was another variation someone came up with.
I played football poorly in 8th grade at Willard. I was always really short for my age, but chubby. Since I wasn't really into team sports, but I wanted to not suck at one, I signed up for football. I played right guard, though after practice I probably smelled more like a left sock. One day while practicing blocking, the coaches split up the little guys and the big guys. I was short like the little scrawny guys, so I practiced against them at first. They were small and wiry, and bounced off me. For some reason, one of the coaches, said something like, "Hey, Steve's kind of stocky, let's try him against the big guys." So I got in the line to practice blocking the bigger, athletic guys, the ones who scared the shit out of me every day in the hallways.
Being short, there was no way I could stop them with standard blocking techniques (forearms and elbows, no grabbing in those days). So when I lined up against one of our team's good running backs, I reverted to my backyard football style. When the whistle blew, I dove sideways at his knees and he fell over me onto the ground. This amused the coaches, who had me pegged as the unathletic pussy that I really was. But I knew it was easy to knock big guys down by just taking them out at the knees. So I did it over and over that day. By the end of the practice, the coaches were calling me The Mighty Midget. That was the first cool nickname I ever had.
In our next game, with my newfound nickname and unorthodox blocking style, I got more time playing. I kept taking out a big linebacker, just long enough so our backs could get out of the pocket. The coaches and guys loved it, and were rooting for me on the sidelines. So the other team double teamed me. Then I took both defenders out, put them on the ground the same way. Although I was deathly afraid of physical pain as a kid, with all the football pads, it didn't really hurt to dive into guys knees, and have them fall over me onto the ground. Eventually the other coach triple teamed me, and I took all three guys out with my sideways dive. I got pulled out after that, and patted on the back on the sidelines, with guys yelling, "The Mighty Midget!" For a kid who sucked at all sports, that moment was pretty cool.
Then all the other small kids learned to dive and block big guys, and by the end of the season, everyone small got called the Mighty Midget at some point. I gave up on football, and went back to just being Empig or Emicrud.
In Boise I got into BMX, jumping, then racing, then freestyle, which was just turning into its own sport in 1983-84. To my high school friends, I was usually just Emig, no nickname. My family moved to San Jose, California, in 1985, the year after I graduated high school. I went from having a couple of good freestylers to ride with in Boise, to having about a dozen really good riders, they guys in the video above, plus the rest of the NorCal crew, from September 1985 through July 1986. I improved a lot, and I made a zine about the NorCal freestyle scene. As I'm written many times before, that zine, San Jose Stylin', landed me a job at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines, beginning August 1986. I moved into my new co-workers apartment, with Craig "Gork" Barrette, and Mark "Lew" Lewman. Though we were all dorks by normal standards, I was the dorkiest dork of the bunch. FREESTYLIN' editor Andy Jenkins started giving me little nicknames in the magazine by lines, like "written by E. Mig or M.Ig.
Then one night, we had a party at our apartment. In typical dork fashion, I drank too much beer, too early, in order to gain beer muscles and hopefully (finally) get laid. I was still a virgin at 20, much to my dismay. Instead, I got sick. I jumped up off the couch, and ran to the bathroom door, trying not to puke. The door was locked, someone was in there. In desperation, I ran into my bedroom, slid open the window (there was no screen), and puked out my window, down the stucco wall. Our neighbor's kitchen window was straight across from that wall, about five feet away, but lower, since beach apartment buildings take up as much land as possible, and are really close together in California. So when they looked out their kitchen window the next morning, they saw an 8 foot long puke stain on the wall below my bedroom window.
As I lay hungover in bed, they told Gork and Lew, "hey, looks like your roommate drank a bit too much last night." I had to wash off the wall after my head cleared, and Gork promptly tagged me with the nickname Heevin' Steven. It turned out there was a Garbage Pail kid card with that name, which someone found soon after, which was funny. But Heevin' Steven has way too many syllables for daily use, so Gork just started calling me Heave. I'm pretty sure there's a by line "by Heave Emig" somewhere in one or two of those BMX Action issues (November 1986- April 1987).
I got laid off at the magazines, mostly because I didn't like the band Skinny Puppy, and I was a dork in general. I went to work writing and shooting photos for the AFA newsletter, and doing a bit of everything working for Bob Morales. Bob later hired a young woman to be our receptionist, and she and I hit it off. She was 25, and she broke me in, got me past the 21-year-old virgin plague, and we dated for several months. She was also a singer in a local rock band, and I started trying to write some hit song lyrics for her. In December of 1987, I got a job at Unreel Productions, the Vision Skateboard video company, and she followed, becoming the receptionist there for a while. She was a few years older than me, and liked to party way more than me, so I was doomed. When she eventually slept with one of my good friends, and then later dumped me, I was crushed. I wrote a poem that night called "Journey of The White Bear."
Three different girlfriends had said I kind of reminded them of a bear, I had a bear-like nose or something. So in the poem, I used the metaphor The White Bear for me, and she was The Black Leopard. She wasn't black, it was never a racial thing. I thought of being naive as like new fallen snow, pure and white, and then once you mix it up, and get involved with people, you dig into the dark side of life (partying, sex, drugs, whatever). You lose that naivety, you're never "pure white" and ignorant again, you've been "stained" with the heartache and dark side of relationships, and we're all some mix of black and white from then on. That was the idea in the poem. "Nothing's right or wrong, in our world today, nothing's black or white, it's all shades of gray," was the refrain. I've lost all copies of that poem, and almost all of the other 400 or 500 poems I've written. Anyhow, it turned into a pretty good poem. But only dork's wrote poetry, in my mind, so I wrote that poem in 1988, and it sat in notebooks in my closet, with about 200 other poems, for about 4 years.
While at Unreel Productions, my main job was making dubs, making copies of one video or another, on all kinds of formats, for everyone in the Vision empire that needed a video for something. One day, someone visiting asked what my job was, and I said, "I'm the Dub Guy." That became my unofficial title around Unreel, from 1988 through 1990.
During that time, Vision closed down Unreel Productions, and I moved into the main Vision office, and didn't have much to do. I eventually quit, and blew a bunch of money, and ran up my credit cards self-producing my own freestyle video, The Ultimate Weekend, in 1990. I worked a while for a surf video distributor, then got on the crew of the Supercross and Monster truck TV shows in early 1991. I got that job because Laura, a woman I worked with at Unreel, got on the crew there, in the production office. They needed someone to log footage for a day, and she knew I was a good worker, so she called me. I drove up to a building on Cahuenga, right across the freeway from Universal Studios, and spent ten hours watching interviews and footage of monster truck and mud racer drivers, and taking notes. We called that "logging footage" back in those days. I'd write down which of the three mini-interview takes was the best, and any funny lines they might say. They asked me to come back the next day, and the next. After about a month, I was officially a "production assistant." mostly working in the office, 5 days a week. But I did work on four supercross events in Anaheim, San Diego, and Las Vegas, that year.
On the first one, I ran errands around Anaheim stadium all day, for several hours before the actual supercross event in the evening. When it came time for the actual race, John, the producer told me I'd be working with the cameramen, "pulling cable." Yes, that sounds dirty, but it really means just coiling up the long cable behind the camerman, as he moved around the side of the track. Think Supercorss races are fun to watch live? You should see one from the edge of the whoops, five feet from the riders, it's epic. Anyhow, John said, "The camera crew is eating dinner, right now, so go eat, and then work with them during the race." I headed to the meal room, where they were having lasagna. I'd been working my ass off all day, and I was starving, so gorged myself two big plates of lasagna, salad, and garlic bread.
Then I met the cameraman I was working with, and he showed me what I needed to do. I was out on the field, and as he moved around, I coiled and uncoiled the cable, to keep other people from tripping over it, or whatever. Unfortunately, I ate too much lasagna, it was a physical job, and I really needed to go take a dump. But there was no time, so I had a seriously upset stomach, and a seriously bad look on my face all night. John walked by me at one point, and asked why I was mad. I didn't tell him the truth, since I had only worked there a couple of weeks. After seeing me with a mean look on my face, he joked and called me "Smilin' Steve." When the race was over 3 1/2 hours later, I told the cameraman, and he told me to run and hit the restroom.
After a much needed dump, I felt 100 times better, and helped pick up all the cables and camera equipment. The cameraman joked, after I told him how much lasagna I ate. He said, "Yeah, if I wasn't running around with a camera all night, I would have had a second helping, too. But when you work on our crew, you need to eat light." Lesson learned. I became, "Smilin' Steve" at the office from then on. John actually felt bad,when I told him I was sick that whole first race, and that's why I looked so mean. He was actually one of the coolest bosses I ever worked for.
One of my other jobs at the monster truck/supercross production office became labeling every video tape that came in, and organizing them in our "tape library," a big closet. I was in charge of keeping track of every single tape, as they went out to edit or get copies made. Laura knew I did this to the 3,000 poorly labels tapes at Unreel, and totally organized the place, so I got the job. My overly uptight attitude worked well for keeping track of the various tapes coming in and out. For those who don't know, video tapes, VHS, betamax, 3/4", betacam, whatever, are big cassettes with reals of plastic "tape," and that tape is coated in iron oxide, which is a basically a cool form of rust. That's what the electric signals on video tape are recorded on, in the oxide on the tape.
One day, Craig, a very loud, borderline arrogant, and funny producer, came to me to get tapes for his next edit session. He walked into the office I was in and said, "Oh Gatekeeper of All That Is Oxide, I need a tape." For a couple of weeks, I was nicknamed "The Gatekeeper," because I was the gatekeeper to get tapes, and kept good track of them, so they didn't get lost. When your office produces two TV shows a week, losing footage can be a real bad thing.
I wound up living in a flop house in North Hollywood, in late 1991, working second shift at a video duplicator, and going street riding alone every day, around the San Fernando Valley. At that time, about 50 miles away, back in Huntington Beach, BMX racer/jumper/entrepreneur, Chris Moeller bought out his original partner, Greg Scott (The "S" in S&M Bikes, Scott & Moeller), and was running the tiny bike company from his garage. Chris decided it was time to make an official video for S&M Bikes. The year before I had self-produced a bike video called The Ultimate Weekend, and Chris, and a few of the S&M riders and P.O.W. House guys were in it. He found my phone number somewhere, and called me up in North Hollywood. Chris had this crazy idea for the first S&M Bikes video, and it sounded fun. He started coming up and hauling me down to H.B. on the weekends, to hang out at his apartment, and shoot video footage, since I didn't have a car. The result was the video, Feel My Leg Muscles... I'm a Racer. I shot the footage on my RCA S-VHS camera, and Chris bought a prosumer S-VHS VCR to edit it. Not counting the VCR, the total budget to make Leg Muscles was about $250, mostly beer money.
As things worked out, I got fired from my job as a result of making Leg Muscles, which is a long story of its own. That story became a BMX industry urban legend for years, getting crazier with each retelling. I'll save that for another day. Anyhow, I wound up sleeping on the floor of Chris' tiny, "Winnebago" apartment in Huntington Beach. He called it the Winnebago because the whole apartment was 8 feet wide, with almost no windows. So it felt like we were living in a motorhome. A guy named Shaggy had the small couch in the living room, I slept on the floor, Chris had the one bedroom, and S&M Bikes was run out of the garage. It was a weird scene, with lots of punk rock on cassette, ramen noodles, slices of pizza at Papa Joe's, cheap beer, and riding in the afternoons and nights.
One morning in 1992, Chris walked out of his room, talking about this cool book he just got of Henry Rollins' poetry. One poem in particular, was about Rollins doing what single guys do when alone, while looking in the bathroom mirror. I'd never polished the old rocket while standing at the bathroom sink, looking in the mirror, but Rollins said in the poem, "I look in the mirror, and see Superman... sort of." When Chris finished the book, called Black Coffee Blues, I believe, he loaned it to me. I read Rollins' poems. Henry Rollins is a smart guy, and the poetry was real raw and cool. Suddenly, being a "poet" seemed much less lame. Knowing I had a couple hundred poems hidden away in notebooks, I said, "I could write a poem book like this. Hell, I already have written more poems than this."
I got my notebooks out of storage, along with my typewriter, and edited and typed up a huge zine of nearly 100 of my poems. The zine was so thick, I had to bind it with duct tape, staples wouldn't go through it all, it had like 60 or 70 zine pages. It took over a month to get it all together and published. The zine of poetry was called "We're on the Same Mental Plane... and it's Crashing." I drew a bad picture of a brain riding on top of a 747 airplane while it crashed for the cover.
I gave the first copy to Chris Moeller, pretty sure he would find a lot to make fun of me with in it. Much to my surprise he came out his room the next morning and said it really surprised him, it was so honest and kind of raw. Not as cool as Henry Rollins' poems, but better than he expected. That was the first day. I think it was the next day, he started giving me a hard time, saying "I am The White Bear and she is the tigress." I said, "No she's the black leopard, it's a metaphor." The word cougar to describe a woman dating younger guys hadn't become a thing yet, but that girlfriend definitely had that feline quality. Anyhow, day after day, Chris kept calling me The White Bear. Then people in our group of friends started calling me The White Bear. It was always THE White Bear, not just White Bear.
When Chris Moeller tags you with a nickname, he keeps pushing it until it sticks. Ask Belt Buckle Barry, Porta John, or Child Molester Gary. So I became The White Bear to the BMX world of the 1990's. Chris' girlfriend at the time, Shelly, would come out in the mornings when she slept over, heading off to work, and have to step over me in my sleeping bag,since the living room walkway was so small. Every morning she'd say, "Morning The White Bear," and I'd look up, "Morning Shelly." as she stepped over me.
At some point in 1992, I can't remember why, I moved into the P.O.W. House, the Pros of Westminster. The house then was Dave Clymer, Alan Foster, John Paul Rogers, Lawan Cunningham, Chris Sales, Jay Lonergan, Scotty, Bill Naggy, John Salamne, and probably someone I'm forgetting. I think Todd Lyons had just moved out, but he hung out there almost every night. Most of the time I lived there, I worked as furniture mover part time. So while everyone else slept in hung over, I'd get up kind of early, go out to the nasty brown Lazy Boy recliner in the back yard, and read books in the morning sun. When I was at the house, I'd just sit in one place reading a lot. At some point, someone started calling me Sluggo. apparently because I just sat there like a slug, I guess. But nobody told me that they called me Sluggo behind my back.
I moved out, and then back a few months later, after working the summer on the American Gladiators crew. Alan's little brother, Brian Foster was living in the house then, as well. Keith Treanor never lived there, but hung out most nights, and went riding with all of us daily. One day we were heading out to ride somewhere, and Keith said, "Hey Sluggo, you coming?" The other guys looked weird for a minute. "Nobody knows we call him Sluggo," someone said. "Keith was like, "Really?" He looked at me and laughed, "Damn, we've been calling you Sluggo for almost a year now." I laughed it off. After all the other nicknames, it didn't phase me. When I'd practice with my nunchucks at the house after that, I told them I was practicing Sluggitsu, the Way of the Slug, you look so pathetic no one wants to fuck with you. That got a few laughs.
So in most of the BMX world, to this day, I get called The White Bear. If I run into Todd Lyons, Alan Foster, or Brian Foster, they'll still call me Sluggo. Since The White Bear actually sounded kind of cool, I took it as my pen name when I published poetry, and some zines. As the old saying goes, I don't really care what people call me, just don't call me late for dinner.
Stealing's bad. We all know that. But nearly everyone has stolen something at some point. Mine is pretty much limited to free refills at fast food joints in desperate times, but stealing is stealing (unless you're Wall Street, then it's cool). I'm against stealing bikes bike parts, but I've had one or two stolen parts on my bike back in the early days, so I can't pretend I've always been above it. Besides, this is a great song by Jane's Addiction.
As I've written several times, I got into BMX riding in a trailer park we called Blue Valley, outside of Boise Idaho. It was the summer of 1982, there were about a dozen of us teenage guys in the park, and not a lot to do. We all had cheap BMX bikes, and a little "track" on the edge of the park. It had two berms, roosted by a motorcycle rider couple years earlier, and 4 small jumps. We just started spending more and more time in the evenings riding our bikes, and less playing football, basketball or throwing rocks at each other.
As we got more into BMX riding, we started breaking bike parts. Goosenecks, as we called stems back then, were often the first to go. When we broke something, like a gooseneck or a pedal, or bent a sprocket, that created the problem of replacing it. For things like pedals, we could often find somebody who had a rubber-style pedal off an old ten speed or kid's bike, to buy for $2 or something. But the more expensive parts, like the goosenecks, forks, handlebars, and rims, cost $40 or more. That meant we had to come up with a fair amount of actual money.
There were three main ways to make money as a teen, in a trailer park, outside of town in 1982. Mowing lawns, babysitting, or selling drugs. The drugs were mostly sold by the older guys (20-somethings) in the trailer park, or by kids at school. None of us were really into drugs then, a few kids smoked a bit of weed, but that was mostly it. It was a trailer park, in the desert, where the grass was dry, yellow, and grew really slow. Blue Valley was mostly lower middle class working people, with some poor trailer park-stereotype White Trash people mixed in. Nearly everyone mowed their own lawns. Sometimes you could mow lawns for one of the older couples and make $5 a lawn. But getting more than 2 or 3 lawn mowing jobs a week was the best anyone could manage, and that was only if one of us was trying to make money that week. None of us had our own cars, and we were 7 or 8 miles outside of Boise itself. Getting a "real job" for $3.35 an hour wasn't a viable option for most of us.
So that left babysitting. The standard pay for babysitting kids at Blue Valley in 1982 was $1 an hour and all the government cheese you could eat, no matter how many kids. Seriously, that's what we made. I only liked cheese on pizza, and the government wasn't giving out free mozzarella. The whole government cheese program was to help struggling dairy farmers. Anyhow, the couples who went out usually were gone for 2-3 hours. So it took a lot of babysitting jobs that paid $3 and a chunk of cheddar, to buy a new set of handlebars or even a sprocket. Like broke kids everywhere, we improvised.
At first we bought many of our bike parts at Payless. That was a drug store, similar to a Walgreens, CVS, or Rite Aid today, but they had a little more everyday merchandise. There was a toy aisle that had really cheap bike parts at one end. There were also no security cameras in those days. I was way to scared to steal bike parts, I was always afraid of getting into any kind of trouble. I was in enough trouble from my mom day after day for normal teenage stuff, like forgetting to take out the garbage. But a couple of the guys at the trailer park didn't mind snagging free stuff, like in the Jane's Addiction song above. I honestly forget who stole what, but a cheap gooseneck or two, and quite a few inner tubes and patch kits got snagged from the Payless our families all shopped at.
One kid realized that you could take a 26 inch, thorn proof inner tube out of the box in the store, and pack about 12 normal, 20 inch tubes in the box. The 20 inch tubes were $1.99 or something, and the thorn proof tube was $3.99, I think. So a couple of the kids would pack the big, thorn proof boxes, and get twelve $2 inner tubes for $4, saving $20. Those guys quickly became the inner tube suppliers for all of us.
I think every one of us from Blue Valley had parts from Payless drug store on our bikes at some , most of them bought, in 1982. When we went to our first race, as a group, at the local Fort Boise BMX track, some local rider asked where we came from. Suddenly there we were, this sketchy group of 9 or 10 young guys, in Levi's, T-shirts, and with paper plate number plates. But we were all pretty fast for new riders. One of our crew told the Fort Boise locals, "We're Team Payless." The funniest part is that a few kids actually believed that we were sponsored by a drug store.
As we kept breaking cheap Payless parts, we upgraded to what became our local bike shop, Bob's Bikes (and lawnmower repair), on Overland Road in Boise. A big trend in BMX components at the time was "anodized" aluminum parts. This was colored aluminum sprockets and chain rings, pedals, hubs, and stems. Anodized parts came primarily in red, blue, black, and gold. In this Old School BMX bike clip, you can see anodized parts on bikes #1, 2, 6, 7, 8, and 10. Red and blue anodized parts were the most popular, and black was a bit less popular then. But nobody (who actually had money) wanted gold anodized parts. So one of the guys from Blue Valley went to Bob's to get a sprocket. He came back and told us he got $3 off on the disc (inner part of the sprocket, that you bolted the chain ring to), because it was gold anodized. Immediately, gold anodized components became a theme at the Blue Valley jumps. We bought the ugly gold parts nobody else wanted, usually for 10% to 30% off. I had my gold anodized Diamondback gooseneck for 2 or 3 years. My dad later took it to the shop where he worked, and had it bead blasted, which left it a raw, silverish, aluminum color, which looked cool, way better than anodized gold. A couple riders asked me about it at the track, I old them it was a rare, silver, limited edition stem or something. But it was the same gooseneck I had the week before, just with the gold color blasted off.
The sketchiest cheap bike part story from Blue Valley came when a new family that moved in. They bought the trailer right next to the basketball court, where we all met up to go ride, after supper each evening. Summer days were hot in Boise, so we watched TV or played video games all day, and ventured outside in the late afternoon or evening.
The new couple had two young boys, about 6 and 7 years old. Both kids had brand new, K-Mart bought, BMX bikes. So we spent a few days riding out at our jumps, all with cheap bike parts on our crappy bikes, while the two new little kids rode in front of new mobile home on brand new bikes. In typical trailer park fashion, one or two of our crew got jealous, those bike got stolen out of their unlocked shed one night. Two nights later, their dad came out to talk to us teen guys, while we were riding our bikes around the basketball court.
We all came together, sitting on our bikes, as he told us that his kids' bikes just got stolen a couple nights earlier. "Man, that sucks!" one of our group replied. We talked about having bike parts stolen, from time to time. We told him he should lock the shed, and we thought high school kids from in town came out to steal stuff every once in a while. None of our bikes had the bright chrome frames his boys' bikes had, so he said he knew we didn't steal them. But he asked us to keep an eye out for their bikes, and let him know if we heard any rumors about who stole them. Obviously, they guy thought one o fus had stolen the bikes, and someone else would soon rat them out.
We assured the guy we would keep an eye out for the bikes, and he thanked us and walked back into his trailer. Every single one of us had parts of those stolen bikes on our bikes as he was talking to us. I had one of the pairs of pedals. Honestly, I felt really bad about that one. But he bought his kids new bikes about a week later, the guy had a good job. I don't actually know which guys in our group stole the bikes, but the parts were sold by 3 or 4 guys the next couple of days. The frames for those two bikes are still at the bottom of the Blue Valley pond, covered in muck and duck poop, as far as I know.
By the time spring melt happened in 1983, and we could ride our jumps again, we all still had cheap frames, but they were built up with decent quality components. One day Rocky and Scott decided to ride all the way into Boise to check out a new video arcade. It was about an 8 mile ride each way. They made it back after dark, and told us about it the next day. They told us it was a really cool arcade. They also told us they met a couple of guys there with brand new, name brand BMX bikes. They asked the guys how they made enough money to buy such expensive bikes. Buying a $400 bike with the typical, $3.35 an hour job would take a long time. Those kids, who lived in a poor neighborhood, told our guys that their old bikes got stolen. Because their parents had renter's insurance, they got a check to replace their old bikes, and were able to buy brand new bikesmore expensive than the first ones. That was the first time I heard about trailer park economics, I think.
Not surprisingly, looking back, Scott and Rocky got their bikes "stolen" at the arcade a couple weeks later. In those couple of weeks, they just happened to have listed all the parts on their bikes (with a few serious upgrades), and found out that their parents also had renter's insurance. Sure enough not long after, the insurance bought Scott a Panda with Araya 7X rims, Redline Flight Cranks, and other top name parts. I never could figure out why Scott bought a Panda frame, of all things. But it was a good bike. Rocky went totally first class, getting a brand new Diamondback Harry Leary Turbo, the coolest race bike out, as far as we knew. Here's Harry Leary doing his his thing on his Diamondback in the UK, coming in 3rd behind Tommy Brackens.
After seeing, and riding Scott and Rocky's bikes, several guys talked about getting their bikes "stolen" for a while, but no one did. Scott and Rocky always swore their bikes actually got stolen, but that arcade was right by the Boise River. None of knew for sure what happened. But those bikes may have wound up in the river, so they'd never be recovered. None of us ever knew for sure, except those two, and they kept to their story.
At the time, the idea of scamming insurance to get a free bike didn't seem like a big deal. In the many years since, I've seen how prevalent scamming of all kinds is in poor communities (and wealthy ones, too), and that's why many insurance premiums are so high. It'd be cool if nearly everyone could make a decent living, and this type of scamming would largely die out. But I'm writing this during the Covid-19 pandemic, when tens of millions of Americans are simply struggling to survive, pay rent, and eat, and most major corporations are alive today because of record setting bailouts last year, and in 2008-2009. About 30% of the American public get some kind of help form the government at the moment, myself included.
My parents moved back into Boise in early summer of 1983, and I was able to mow a few lawns, and do odd jobs, to keep my bike running from then on. I wound up buying my Skyway T/A frame and fork set with my high school graduation money, in the spring of 1984. But in the summer of 1983, the Blue Valley guys quickly faded from the BMX racing scene, and I rode largely by myself day to day that year, and started getting more into the emerging thing called BMX freestyle.
I just wrote a 250+ page ebook about getting into BMX in the trailer park, all the way up to when I stumbled into the BMX industry in 1986. I got a job at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines, which changed the direction of my entire life, for the better.
This story of struggling to get parts to keep our bikes running that first year is one of the chapters I left out of the ebook. I know nearly everyone had their struggles to buy bikes and parts in those early years. I wrote this post, reminding us all of those early sketchy days when most of us got a bit shady to keep riding, from time to time. Hopefully most of you have moved past that shadiness, and left it to the guys offering1985 Redline Flight Cranks for $7,000 a set on eBay now.
You can learn more about my Freestyle BMX Tales ebook, including how to order one, at this link:
This video came out in early spring of 1989, and was the 7th BMX freestyle video I directed or edited.
When it came time to put the first official 2-Hip contest season video together for the 1988 season, Ron Wilkerson called me up and asked me if I wanted to edit the video. Yeah, that surprised me, too. But to put it in context, this happened in early 1989. Eddie Roman, who I credit with really starting the rider-made video movement in BMX freestyle, was still working on Aggroman at the time, so he wasn't really known as a video producer yet. I had been working at Unreel Productions, Vision's video company, for over a year. I just got tapped as the Unreel cameraman that spring, after our old cameraman, Pat Wallace, moved on to a better job. Pat's the guy who shot all the contest footage in this video.
I had produced six videos for the AFA in 1987, and then got hired at Unreel. So from Ron's point of view, I was a rider and a video guy who could do the job, and work cheap. Cheap was $500 for logging hours and hours of footage, picking the best shots, and then editing it all together on Unreel's S-VHS system and getting a duplication master tape made. My bosses at Unreel were cool with loaning me the S-VHS edit system to do a side project, which was way cool of them. I think it took 3 or 4weeks of working nights, after working at Unreel during the day, to get this done. Ron got music from Bob Haro and the The Bohemians to use in the video. When I ran out of that music, I recorded myself drumming beats on a phone book and a little metal can full of thumb tacks. Hey, it was a low budget video, I was on a deadline, and it worked.
The intro part with Kevin Martin calling Ron, and then carrying the ramp pieces, was their idea, and the 2-Hip crew shot all those parts, and gave me the footage. I didn't really like the idea, but they did, and it was their video. The biggest thing to explain about making a low budget BMX freestyle video in 1989 was that nobody had really done it yet. Mark Eaton had made Dorkin' in York, which was really sketchy VHS footage of incredible riding by Kevin Jones, Mark, and the York crew. The riding was insane but the video quality sucked. Like all of us, Mark was working with no budget, and in his case, two VCR's to edit it. I hadn't see that video at the time I made this one. Eddie Roman was working on Aggroman, which was like a super low budget BMX and Kung Fu movie, shot on video. That came out soon after this video. The "real" freestyle videos of that era were the BMX company sponsored videos, which cost tens of thousands of dollars to make. The main ones were the BMX Plus videos, and GT Bikes video GT-V. Those were all shot and edited on pro level equipment, but by people who were industrial video producers, not freestylers. They had great technical quality, and good riding, but they also had guys wearing leathers and helmets to ride flatland.
There was no playbook for us low budget guys at the time. There was no standard way to make a low budget freestyle video then. This was one of the first rider-made videos ever. So it it kinda sucked in a lot of ways, but the riding was great for the time period. AND, this video had the first 2-Hip Meet the Street contest in Santee, California in it. Street riding competitions were brand new when that footage was shot, and a lot of freestylers watched that section over and over, and then headed out to street ride in their towns.
Unlike the AFA videos I directed, which sold about 25 or 30 copies each, this video sold a few hundred that first year, I think. Also, it was watched by most of the freestylers around at the time. Originally we called it 2-Hip: The '88 Adventure, but it got tagged 2-Hip BHIP sometime later, and 2-Hip just kept selling copies of this video for years, when people ordered T-shirts or other things. Then, for the 1989 contest series video, Ron Wilkerson asked Eddie Roman to make the video. Eddie was his normal weird, creative self, and made an awesome video called Ride like a Man, in early 1990. That's when the low-budget, rider-made freestyle movement really got going.
When I finished this video, I got Ron Wilkerson the master tape, and a duplication master (so he wouldn't wear out the original when he got copies made, and he gave me a check for $500. My little sister was heading off to college soon after that. So, being the good (and stupid) brother that I was, I got a money order for $500, and sent it all to her. She's been a teacher in North Carolina for many years now. Here are the remaining segments of the video, except the street part, I'm going to do another blog post about that.
My online store, WPOS Kreative, is being rebuilt, and will open for business soon. Check it out...
Brett Downs birthday is today. Here's his compilation video from the last year of riding. There were a few "WTF did he just do?...
