Jim Bauer’s Plate
I had a fun last day out in LA. Went out to the Santa Ana Civic center and rode the banks there for a bit. The young guys were filming, but us old guys were just chilling and rolling around. Nice and mellow.

Mike Suftin’s Plate.
After that I went to the Nike Lighting Bolts Art show. That was pretty fun. We watched the Nike BMX video on the big screen and mostly just pinballed around from person to person saying hello and catching up with old friends. I mostly just carried my camera around looking stupid all night, but I took a few…

Brian Blyther.
So honored to meet and know this guy! LEGEND!!!! And one of the all time best BMX riders ever!
I don’t know if this is true, but someone told me that while on duty as a police officer Brian Blyther had to shoot someone in the leg because they were trying to rob a train with a bow and arrow? WTF?

Jay Miron and Dave Mavro

I haven’t seen Jay Miron in years! Do you know that when I was 17 Jay invited me on a GT tour to fill in for Dave Voelker? GT gave me a bike to ride in the shows which I promptly broke in less then 2 hours. Albe’s warrantied it for me and got me an S&M Holmes. At a show inside 12 Oaks mall near my home town in Michigan Miron did the first ever back flip over a spine. It was crazy. The day before at Scrap Skatepark Jay did the first ever tailwhip 360. Wild times.

Dave Mavro is a film maker working on this:

Got to sign an old plate right under Bob Haro!

My plate is for auction right now here… nice and cheap for the right person….http://www.mycharitablelife.com/auction_details.php?auction_id=100392

No rhyme or reason today. 

Finally got my plate sent off for the Lighting Bolts Art show/ auction thing. I scrapped the ‘zine idea and went for a more rabbits-revolting kind of thing. 

I guess the art show is December 10th- 14th at the Montalban Theatre in Los Angleles. I don’t really know any other details, but hopefully my plate will help raise some money for the ARF charity. 

Did you guys see the Nike lighting bolt art show?

They held the show in China prior to BMX racing?s introduction to the Olympics and to help introduce Nike?s presentation of the Freestylin? retrospective book. 

They have another show scheduled for December in LA and this time they are inviting a lot more people to submit pieces. I got a plate a couple weeks ago and I?ve been carrying it around on some travels trying to visualize what should go on to it. I think I have a plan finally; to make the plate into a zine but not really sure how its going to work out, or what its going to be about.

Holding the number plate and the book I get a strange feeling of nostalgia for a time I really wasn?t part of. During the time that Freestylin? Magazine was around I was only just getting into BMX racing. The amazing writing, art, and photos of the magazine were lost on my adolescent self. I viewed ?Freestyling? as this corny thing where dudes hopped and bounced around on their back pegs with way too much neon and goggles. To be fair, BMX racing wasn?t much different looking, but at least there was dirt jumps. In those days of being a strictly bicycle powered kid ramps were impossible to find. It wasn?t until Freestylin? Magazine was dead that I actually got into ?Freestyle? riding. Speaking of all this, have you seen Catfish?s interview from Defgrip? 

His interview is brilliant if you ask me (and so is the sites newest interview with Corey Nastazio). I am so impressed with the candid feel of these video interviews and I think they capture the personality of these fine gentlemen. Catfish has a lot of insightful things to say and at one point he talks about how what we call BMX used to be called Freestyle and saying BMX referred to BMX Racing. In the interview he wonders why its not called Freestyle anymore and feels that calling it BMX takes away some of riding?s unlimited potential. The funny part is, dropping ?freestyle? is at least partly my fault. In the very dead days of BMX at the brink of some of the first TV coverage Mat Hoffman, Jay Miron and myself were talking about the name. It was decided that if TV was getting involved we needed to agree on a name for what we were doing. Of course Mat and his often questionable sense of humor wanted to call it Bicycle Stunt Riding. Ha! I think Miron voted for BMX Freestyle or plain Freestyle. I made a strong argument for just simplifying it as much as possible and calling it BMX. Those early days of Freestyle (think Rad the movie) had such a goofy connotation to them. Freestyle was hot pink checkerboard racing leathers and mags and front wheel hops on flip down fork standers. I wanted to keep the name Freestyle out of the equation for the exact same reason Catfish wishes it was still part of it. To free the riders from the preconceived expectations, and to allow the new era of riding to be free to grow into what it would (without association to what Freestyle used to be). I realize all of those things from the 80?s are all kind of recycled and cool again, but in the early 90?s we wanted to distance ourselves as far as possible from those things. Hence, these were the days of dreadlocks and spray painting my entire bike flat black (set your trend calendars for the return of these things soon). In either case, no matter how you look at it or what you call it, BMX Freestyle bike riding IS, and should always be whatever YOU want it to be. The fads and trends are going to continue to zip by and those things are never going to define what riding really is. The boundaries of riding are just daring you to scribble out of the lines.

Flat black spray painted bike, bright yellow Airwalk NTS shoes, 1990.

And speaking of blank canvas? here I am still looking at a blank number plate. A design I know so well from my BMX racing days and one that is straight from the hands of the father of Freestyle. I briefly met Bob Haro a couple times. Once at an early Rampage contest back when I was just starting to ride ramps. To tie some of this together, I got one of my first pictures in a magazine at that Rampage contest in the last ever issue of Freestylin? Mag?s short lived off shoot ?Go Magazine?. I was the only kid there on a race bike and I had never used pegs before. I was 16 or 17 and I just gotten a co-sponsor deal with Airwalk through Albe?s. At the time (1989 or 1990) Airwalk was pretty much the only shoe sponsor in Freestyle. Van?s helped out some BMX racers, but there was just no money in Freestyle and there was also next to no sponsors. It is so strange that the return address on this number plate is to Nike. WTF! Nike?!? I still hold a bit of disdain for that company from those old days. Back then they wanted nothing to do with BMX. It wasn?t until later when the extreme sports landslide started to hit TV that they made a half hearted effort to get into skateboarding and BMX. They just didn?t seem to understand the market they were getting into and they quickly faded out. But now, they are back and doing way better. The Nike 6.0 stuff seems to be a bit more on the right track, they sponsor cool riders and somehow now they are doing an artshow based on a number plate that represents the roots of Freestyle BMX. I probably sound bitter, but let me be clear that I?m not. Just marveling at how much things change. 

In my early days on Airwalk the BMX community was so small and tight knit that I felt like I knew every rider in the Midwest (all 10 of them!  ). The few and far between companies that supported BMX were so important to the riding community that we made a concentrated effort to support those companies in return. It was a conscious decision of buying from companies that cared about BMX rather then companies that maintained no involvement. Its what led to companies like S&M, Homeless, Standard, and Hoffman. Rather then buying bikes from companies that really didn?t understand, riders started their own companies to create what they wanted… but no one really thought they could start a shoe company. I rode for Airwalk for 9 years and over time they slowly started to decline in popularity and quality. At least they would make me custom vegetarian shoes, and they were paying me decently for the time. At the very end of Airwalk Mat Hoffman tried to get me to ride for the short lived Boks line (Rebok?s ill fated extreme sports line), but instead I accepted an offer from Etnies which was just starting to get into BMX. Looking back it seems strange to be so excited to ride for a skateboard shoe company, but you have to remember there were no BMX shoe companies back then. Etnies made really good shoes too. The technical quality of the shoes were way ahead of other companies involved with BMX. They were (maybe ironically) getting close to what Nike had been doing all along. Air pockets and actual support in the shoes, but designed for skateboarding and BMX. They quickly started on a signature series of shoes by BMX riders and we really got to make shoes how we wanted them. Etnies was more then fair about these things too. From the beginning they insisted on paying us the salaries of a skateboarder?s signature shoe, even though there was no way we would ever sell as many shoes as a skateboarder. In the end, after my 4^th signature shoe through Etnies got cancelled before production, that reality had finally caught up. You just couldn?t sell as many BMX shoes as skateboard shoes???yet. Hopefully someday.

Mat Hoffman drinking a 40 of Ol’ E and me with a dreadlocked soo-lop pony tail. 1992.

The problem was in the selling of the shoes. Where do you sell them? BMX shops are so few and far between. Half of bicycle shops don?t even carry BMX, let alone a full line of BMX specific shoes. Skateboard shops won?t touch anything with the name BMX on it, and what sales rep wants to carry a line of shoes into a mom and pop bike shop and sell 3 pair of BMX shoes to the shop employees when he could sell 100 pair of skate shoes to the local skateshop. The BMX rider owned bike shops that are beginning to pop up around the country are such a crucial part in the growth of BMX. I?m glad to see them.

And so, that brings me to the end of Etnies. After the end of this year my 11 year career with Etnies will be over. Budget constraints are the issue and so the team had to be slimmed down. I?m sure the introduction of the BMX shoe brands has had an impact on Etnies? already slim BMX shoe market. Also, (maybe ironically again) Nike 6.0?s impact has been felt by the whole skate shoe Market. Their sweeping success in skateboarding and BMX is amazing, but the old standard skate shoe companies have felt the impact hard. I don?t know how to feel about it. I can?t say that one is necessarily better then the other. Of course I have strong allegiances to Etnies. I personally know a lot of amazing people over there, and I think that as a company they have done a lot of amazing things (and a lot of amazing things for BMX). On the other hand, I know some really cool people over at Nike 6.0, including some of the very founders of BMX Freestyle.

Changing times I guess. And the number plate is still blank by the way. There?s just so much buried in it for me. I?m going to try and concentrate on the fact that the number plates are going to be auctioned off to benefit the Athlete Recovery Fund. A charity that wants to help riders like Mike Aitken, Stephen Murray, and others who have suffered severe injuries.

Just mentioning Mikey?s name makes me forget all about the business side of BMX and all my over thought back-and-forth moral indecision. None of that matters. My advice to any rider who is entering the world of sponsors and BMX business is to keep your head on when dealing with that stuff. In just the same way you don?t want the name of riding to define what it is that you do, also don?t let the concerns of sponsors and competition define what you do either. The beautiful thing about BMX, Freestyle, Stunt Riding or whatever you call it is that it?s yours to do what you want with. There is no definition.  Don?t loose the magic of riding for the sake of a fad, a trend or a pay check. If Aitken, LeVan, Steven, Jeff Crawn or countless others can get hurt so badly, then any of us can. So, run a few checks on your conscience and make sure you are ok with what you are doing and why since you just never know what?s around the corner. And then, with that out of the way, smile and enjoy the ride!