Freestyle took my virginity thank god

I was a shy kid. How shy? Remember the movie Rainman with Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman? Well, if you put Tom's outgoing salesman on the far right of the spectrum, and autistic savant Raymond (Dustin's character) on the far left of the personality scale, I would have been a little bit to the right of Raymond. In today's world if I were a kid, I would be diagnosed as having Asperger's Syndrome (pronounced ass-burgers), I would be put on crazy mood altering drugs, and I'd commit suicide by age 12 or so. Our society is killing off a lot of smart but dorky kids these days in that way.

Anyhow, I managed to make it through high school in Boise, Idaho, live in a trailer park with slutty trailer park girls, and get a year into the BMX freestyle industry as a virgin. I was 20 when a 25-year-old singer in a rock band named Amanda walked into the AFA looking for a job as a receptionist. I remember she stared me straight in the eyes the first time I saw her, and smiled seductively. I didn't realize it, but I was a gonner right then.

We worked together at the AFA for a couple months, and went out for beers a couple times, but I chickened out and things never progressed. She realized stronger measures were needed to break me in, so she brought up the idea of having a hotel party after the finals at the Velodrome that fall. She rented a room, made all the arrangements, and we "invited" a bunch of riders to come by and party. I think I was the only one who didn't realize that no one was supposed to come to the "party." So Amanda an me sat on the bed, waiting for people to arrive, and sipping a bottle of peach brandy she produced from nowhere.

No one showed up.

So she turned on Dirty Dancing, on HBO, and suggested we get more comfortable. How freakin' shy was I in those days, you ask? We laid there and watched the entire Dirty Dancing movie, in our underwear, and I didn't make a move because I wasn't sure she really wanted me to. Yeah. I was pretty much Rainman where women were concerned.

As the credits began to roll on the movie, she finally said, "God, somebody has to get this started, and just grabbed me." Game over. Well, almost. Even after a heavy makeout session, I was still too scared to get Mr.Happy up for the challenge. So we did just about everything else. Not what she had in mind, but it broke the ice.

About six am, I woke up ready for action. I grabbed her and woke her up... sort of... and FINALLY lost my virginity. Two pumps and a squirt. Really... really pathetic. And she wasn't too happy about that. But the ice had been broken, and I had become a man (if not a very good one) at the hands of an quite attractive, and much more experienced woman. Hell, she'd even had a photo of her in Penthouse in her modeling days.

Amanda wound up following me to Unreel Productions a few months later, and about six months in, she dumped me. I was crushed. That night I wrote a poem called "Journey of The White Bear." Five years later I self-published that poem in a zine, and Chris Moeller started making fun of me, calling me The White Bear. That's where my nickname/pen name came from. And it's all because BMX freestyle led me to a cougar, and she went to a lot of work to break me in. Thank God for aggressive women. And BMX freestyle. In that order.

She wound up getting pregnant while working at Unreel, and later married my best friend at the time, the video editor at Unreel. I even went to the wedding an almost caught her garter in the toss. How weird is that? we were all good friends somehow. I actually got an email from her a few months ago and blew her off. I'll probably get another one now. Oh... and just for the record, I got my endurance up to an hour before she dumped me, so that wasn't the reason. I just wasn't enough of a partier for a rocker chick in those days.

The 630 air

In my year at the AFA in 1987, part of what we did was a Southern California contest series. Obviously, in SoCal, just about anyone in the freestyle world of 1987 could show up at a local comp. But it was mostly a dedicated group of amateur riders. Dan Hubbard was consistently clean, almost annoyingly clean in his completely dialed runs. Jeff Cotter, Derek Oriee, Ron McCoy, Nathan Shimizu, and Ron Camero showed up at all those comps, representing the Lakewood area scene. Brad Warden from San Diego got big air on the ramps, and sometimes even managed to land on the ramps. He was a Dave Voelker protege' then. Eddie Roman, Brad Blanchard and the Dirt Brothers crew showed up most of the time.

I even met Vic Murphy at one of those comps. Some kid came up to me, said his friend was from Alaska, and asked if I wanted to see a "Summer Air." "What's a Summer Air" I asked. "That's where I hang-up both wheels on purpose," the Alaska kid replied. "Why the hell would you want to hang up both wheels on purpose?" I asked back. So the kid showed me the Summer Air. He did about three of them, intentionally tagging from and back wheels as he came in every time. It was scary to watch, but pretty freakin' amazing. That was Vic Murphy.

But the guy who stands out most in my memory is someone whose name I can't even remember. He was a black guy, about 6' 1", and a pretty solid guy. He liked to ride ramps, and could get four or five foot airs, which was good for an amateur in those local comps. He could do a few tricks. But the stand out was when he tried 540's. He tried two or three 540's every contest. And he never really made one actual 540 degree spin. Every single time he would pull away from the ramp, over-rotate, and slam on the bottom of the ramp. He was a good guy. We liked him, and we all pulled for him every time he rolled up to huck that 540. But contest after contest, he crashed.

Then, at a contest on the corner of PCH and Main, we had a contest in an empty lot where Huntington Surf & Sport now stands. When his run came around, the guy who always over-rotated his 540 attempts rolled up to try his 540. He over-rotated and slammed hard to the ground. We yelled in support of his attempt, and he got up and tried again. We could see the determination on his face. He rolled towards the ramp, up the quarterpipe, and he spun. He spun away from the ramp, pulling out like he always did. And his wheels came down, sideways, on the very bottom of the ramps. He landed with a huge thud. Sideways. But he was on the pedals, and he rode off. He finally landed a 540, after months of trying. In fact, he went over 540. I did a little math in my head and yelled, "He just did the world's first 630 air." We all laughed and slapped him on the back. From then on, he pulled his 630 degree (540 + 90), flatbottom landing air every contest.

Stuff like that is what I remember looking back at those AFA local contests from 25 years later. Fun times.

Ronin interviews John Salami

I'm jumping ahead about five years here... John Salami was a pro BMX racer in the 1980's and 1990's, and one of my roommates at the infamous P.O.W. BMX House in the early 1990's. P.O.W. stands for Pros of Westminster, a city inland of, and cheaper than, Huntington Beach, California.

The original text of this post has been removed by me at the request of John Salami.

Huntington Beach surf culture in the 1980s

I keep trying to find a You Tube video of a late 1980's BMX freestyle contest in Huntington Beach, but haven't found one. But this film student video from 1982 really sums up the surf culture of the Huntington Beach area in the 1980's. This was the world I walked into when I went to work for the American Freestyle Association in 1987.

Huntington Beach started in about 1905 at Pacific City, which was intended to be a small farming town of fine, upstanding, God-fearing folk by the sea. But not too many people were psyched on moving there in the early 1900's. When they built the original HB pier, in 1914, I believe, Hawaiian surfing revivalist George Freeth gave a surfboard riding demo. The ancient Hawaiian sport of surfing had been undergoing a revival for several years in Waikiki, and George Freeth and the younger Duke Kahanamoku both traveled to California to demonstrate their swimming, diving, and surfing skills. George was one of the earliest lifeguards, as was Duke. The surf culture began to take root along the Southern California coast way back then, much to the dismay of the respectable people of the area.

In 1920, they struck oil in Huntington Beach. I mean in Huntington Beach, in the downtown area of the city itself. Suddenly the sleepy little farming town became a bustling oil boomtown. With that oil and money came roughneck oil workers, making good money drilling all over downtown. With the oil workers came 1920's counter culture, bars, night clubs, and of course ladies of the evening. In my personal opinion, this is when Huntington Beach really set itself apart as a hub for counter culture. There are photos in old books of motorcycle races on the beach in the 1920's and 1930's. The Golden Bear nightclub, which was revived in the 1960's through the 1980's, began in those oil boom days. Huntington Beach became a haven for wild ones and a party city.

As the Southern California coast built up, suburbs formed around the little downtown area, but not to the level seen in other coastal cities. Surf clubs formed in the 1950's and 1960's, and the slacker surfers were seen as losers but most folk. Huntington Beach was the "dirty city" to the rich folk, who preferred Newport Beach just to the south, with it's natural harbor. The waves weren't great in HB, there was no epic point break or coral reefs, just eight miles of sandy beach breaks. But there were almost always some waves. And the rent was cheaper than other coastal cities because of the oil rigs all over downtown and the Bolsa Chica wetlands. More surfers congregated in Huntington Beach, seemingly for those reasons. The surf culture grew. The early 1960's Jan and Dean song "Surf City," was about Huntington Beach. Yet those 60's and 70's surfers were constantly in trouble with the Gestapo-like HB police, known for decades for wielding heavy handed "justice."

By the early 1980's, the surf culture was dominant among everyday people in Huntington Beach. With the surf culture were several early skateboarders. In the 1980's and 1990's came hardcore punk rockers,BMXers, BMX freestylers, street skaters, snowboarders, motocrossers, strippers, porn stars, MMA fighters, and then nu metal bands like Korn. Then came the damn yuppies, which like locusts, destroy everything in their path. So now Huntington Beach has trademarked the name "Surf City," there are hotels and pricey condos along the beach, and rich people from around the world consider it "edgy." Oh well, nothing gold can stay Ponyboy.

But the video above is a real good look at the Huntington Beach I moved into in 1987, where surf culture dominated, and the BMX freestyle and jumping was part of the weird world of alternative sports lifestyles. Those were good times.

BMX freestyle munchkins in 1987

This clip's from "Challenge of the Flatlanders." Never heard of it, but that doesn't mean much. Vintage footage, 1987, I believe, of Trevor Hernandez and Greg Macomber, and a lot of familiar faces. Most of this footage looks like it was taken from the AFA videos I produced, because it's shot by the Vision/Unreel Productions cameraman, who was out on the contest floor. I'm baffled, not sure where this footage appeared originally. Anyhow, it's some vintage AFA Freestyle Masters footage.

My start in video production

This is what a professional video camera looked like in 1987. This model is from 1991, but it's the closest I could find on You Tube. Vision Street Wear sent a cameraman from Unreel Productions to all the AFA Masters freestyle contests starting in 1987. These cameras weighed about 35 pounds with the battery, they didn't work in low light, and the camera cost about $50,000 new. These lenses alone cost around $16,000. Vision Street Wear sponsored the AFA Masters series in 1987, and for two or three more years. The footage that was shot from those contests was sitting in boxes in the tape library at Unreel Productions. they never got around to using any of the footage. Unreel was the Vision -owned video company with a separate office in Costa Mesa, not far from the Vision headquarters on Whittier Avenue.

So Bob Morales walked into the AFA office one day and asked me, "Hey Steve, you wanna make a TV commercial?"
"Uh... sure. How do I do that?"
Bob just found out he could by local cable TV spots on MTV in Austin, Texas to promote the Masters contest there. He told me to hop in the van, drive over to Unreel, and tell them I wanted to make a 30 second TV commercial. Bob was totally stoked on the idea of having a commercial for the AFA, and we went into a spontaneous brainstorming session. Then we called Unreel, and Bob talked to Don Hoffman, the head guy there. I hopped in the AFA van and drove to Costa Mesa. Don led me upstairs, past the receptionist desk, to a series of rooms with a few tech guys milling around. Then he took me into the edit bay. That was the room where they actually chopped the shows together. There was a pudgy, goofy looking young guy with long hair in a rollaround chair sitting in front of a wall of video screens. The always busy Don Hoffman said, "This is Dave, tell him what you want to do." The room literally looked like the bridge of the starship enterprise. I couldn't even imagine knowing how to work all that high tech stuff. It really blew my mind.

Dave was a real friendly guy, and I told him what we wanted to do. He led me into the tape library, a room kind of like a walk in closet. There were floor to ceiling shelves with shoebox sized boxes of betacam tapes. Most were poorly labeled, with something like "BMX Ohio," on the end of the box. Not much to go on. We grabbed a few boxes, and Dave led me back into the edit bay. He switched one of the VTR's (Video Tape Recorders- pro quality VCR's) on to manual control and showed me how to work it. The footage came up on a small monitor in front of me. I shuttled through tapes at high speed, looking for recent contests, both flatland and ramp footage. Meanwhile, Dave typed furiously at a weird keyboard and video footage went fast and slow on several different monitors. He was editing something.

When I had about ten tapes picked out, Dave introduced me to another guy named Dave, and said I needed window dubs of those tapes. The second Dave took the stack of tapes from me, and told me to come back the next day. I had no idea what a window dub was. It took me months to actually realize it, but I'd just become a video producer.

Back to the BMX freestyle

Like I said in the series of Interesting Times posts, I think the Occupy Wall Street movement signals a major shift in the mentality of our society, the Laborers beginning to rise up against a horribly corrupt power structure run by the corporate dominated Acquisitors, using P.R. Sarkar's theory. We're in for a wild ride in the next few years. But this blog is about BMX freestyle in its early days, and I left off in 1987, when Dennis McCoy was the dominate new pro in both flatland and ramps. Here's DMC busting flatland in Wayne, New Jersey in 1988.