This is the first documented BMX street contest, Ron Wilkerson's 2-Hip Meet the Street in Santee, California, in the spring of 1988. Curb Dog Dave Vanderspek actually held a street contest in NorCal earlier, that most of us SoCal riders never heard about. But Santee was the first BMX street event to show up in the magazines, and be documented on video. This is my edit of the contest, part of the 2-Hip BHIP video of the 1988 2-Hip contest season. This was the first contest where BMX wall rides happened. The first wall ride of the video is by Skyway rider Eddie Roman.
For the few months that I worked at Wizard Publications in 1986, I was roommates with two of my co-workers, Craig "Gork" Barrette, the editor of BMX Action, and Mark "Lew" Lewman, the assitant editor of FREESTYLIN'. I moved to Redondo Beach from San Jose, landing in LAX with my Skyway T/A bike, a suitcase, $80. At first I slept on the couch of their apartment, but after a couple of months, we got a three bedroom place , just across the city line in Hermosa Beach. In the late summer and fall of 1986, if there wasn't a contest to go to, my Saturdays and Sundays usually began by cooking a huge plate of pancakes, which I would eat while watching Lew's copy of Powell Peralta's Bones Brigade II video, Future Primitive. My favorite part was the Tommy Guerrero section, with that great Craig Stecyk quote at the beginning, "200 years of American technology has unwittingly created a massive cement playground. It took the minds of 12-year-olds to realize its potential." Street skating was just beginning to turn into a thing then, with photos, and the early video parts by Mark Gonzales, Tommy Guerrero, and Natas Kaupas, in particular.
At FREESTYLIN', editor Andy Jenkins was an artist who had raced BMX, and a skater, heavily influenced by skateboarding and punk culture, which he brought to the amazing style and art direction that set FREESTYLIN' magazine apart from the other BMX mags. So street skating was something we talked about at work on a regular basis. In addition, freestyle skater Rodney Mullen practiced at The Spot, where we rode every night, when he was in California. So as I rode and worked, despite being at a company publishing two BMX magazines, there was a big skateboard influence all around. So after my huge plate of pancakes while watching Future Primitive on the weekends, I would grab my bike, and go ride solo all morning, and usually much of the afternoon. I wandered around the Redondo Beach, Hermosa Beach, and Torrance area, just looking for cool stuff to ride, and sessioning alone. This was something I really started doing a year before, after I moved from Boise, to San Jose. Again I had a huge, unknown, urban area around me to explore on my bike. I ranged all over the region, even riding over ten miles up to Venice Beach two or three times.
On one photo shoot for the magazines, driving photographer Windy Osborn and pro freestyler Ron Wilkerson, I drove us to a bike shop on Pacific Coast Highway (PCH), in Redondo. They had a quarterpipe out back, where Ron did a brand trick he invented, the abubaca. I took a wrong turn, trying to find the right alley, and caught a glimpse of this asphalt bank on the back of a store. The little parking lot sloped down, and the bank went from nothing, to a steep, six foot high bank on the far end. That logged into the back of my brain, and I drove on to find the bike shop. A couple of weeks later, I remembered that bank, and spent a Saturday morning looking for it. I forgot exactly where it was, but had a rough idea, wandered around, and finally found it.
Within minutes, I realized that the steep end of the bank was a great place to launch up, and do a topside footplant on the stucco wall above. After a half hour or so of sessioning, I snapped a pedal, and had to "scooter" my bike back home, pushing while standing on one pedal. I tweaked my ankle a bit as well. I told Gork and Lew about the bank, and they had both heard skaters talk of a cool bank in that area, but had never sought it out. The next trip to ride it, I cracked my fork drop out, and had to replace my forks. The third trip to it, Lew came along to see this spot I said was so amazing. We had a good little session, but Lew wound up tweaking his ankle, a pretty good sprain. He said something like, "Man, this bank is a jinx." With that, The Jinx Bank got its name.
I just found it on Google Maps, while writing this post, it's located on the back of the building at 1312 PCH in Redondo Beach, now a restaurant and bar. Many years ago, someone built an asphalt curb below the bank, making it pretty much unskatable and unrideable. You could throw a board over the curb, but it just wasn't the same. I last sessioned it in the 1990's, I think. So that's part one of this story, how The Jinx Bank was refound by me, and got its name from Lew. R.L. Osborn, who had his office Wizard, told me he'd heard of the bank from skaters, but Larry's Donuts Bank was a better place to ride at the time, when kickturns were the main trick that he, Bob Haro, and Mike Buff were working on.
Keith Treanor with a huge wall ride fakie, in 1990, in Garden Grove, California. There was a four foot high ramp below him.
I first saw a wall ride on a BMX bike in the fall of 1986. One of my jobs at Wizard Publications was to drive Windy, our photographer, to photo shoots. We did a shoot that fall with Dave Curry in Huntington Beach. Dave was a really innovative rider from the U.K., and directed us around to several spots in H.B.. As dusk was setting in, he directed me down an alley, not far from Huntington High school. There was a tiny bank, about a foot high, next to a wall. We got out, and Dave hit the bank like a little jump, and slapped both tires on the wall, about a foot up. It blew my mind, and I told Windy we needed to get photos of it. Being a veteran BMX photographer, she wasn't so impressed. While he did the first wall ride I had seen or heard of, it was only about a foot up, and more of a tire slide. Plus the light was terrible, and Windy had plans that evening, and we were already running pretty late. Looking back, while it was innovative, the photo wouldn't have been near as cool as the one Eddie Roman got months later. But I had to give Dave Curry props, because that was the first BMX wall ride I ever saw or heard of.
Being the uptight dork that I was, I got laid off from Wizard Publications at the end of 1986, and went on to work at the AFA, editing their newsletter and doing other work. Wizard hired a 17-year-old East Coast BMX/skater kid, Spike Jonze, which was a much better fit for the magazines. As everyone knows, that worked out well, and he's been ridiculously successful since.
Meanwhile, A couple of street riding articles in FREESTYLIN' got riders everywhere looking around at their urban environment, and riding what they found. The NorCal guys from San Francisco were always very street oriented riders, led by Dave Vanderspek, Maurice Meyer, and the other Curb Dogs. Skater Tommy Guerrero, and his brother Tony, were members of the Curb Dogs, as well. So street riding and skating was always a thing in the Bay Area. At the other end of California, several San Diego riders were also really pushing street riding progression. The main riders in 1986-1987 street riding there were Eddie Roman, Pete Agustin, and the Dirt Brothers, like Vic Murphy, Brad Blanchard, Ronnie Farmer, along with GT all around rider Dave Voelker, among others.
Back then riders just went riding, shooting video wasn't a thing yet, though the rider-made video movement was just around the corner. So there isn't any good video of these guys readily available from 1985-1987. But you can see some of Eddie Roman's BMX freestyle innovation in this video from 1990, and in Ride On, starting at 3:47, a video Eddie produced in 1992. In the mid to late 1980's, footplants, sprocket grinds, and doing 180's to fakie on or off obstacles were key parts of street riding. Peg grinds had not been invented yet. While BMXers had been jumping curbs and bunnyhopping things since the early 1970's, BMX street began to evolve, with more elaborate tricks using urban obstacles being invented day after day. Riders looked at curbs, banks, ledges, and wondered, "What can I do with this urban object on my bike?"
This is my Sharpie Scribble Style drawing of Windy Osborn's photo of Eddie Roman, doing the first wall ride to appear in a BMX magazine, in 1987.
The photo of Eddie Roman doing the first wall ride was shot at the Jinx Bank, The story I heard years ago was that Eddie Roman was up in Torrance to do a photo shoot, and Lew suggested they go to the Jinx Bank, the best bank to wall in that area. The result was a great photo of Eddie taking off the middle part of the bank, and riding on the wall, over the sketchy pieces of rebar sticking out. Across the world, BMXers opened that issue of FREESTYLIN', and said, "Holy shit! He's riding on the wall!" Or something close to that. That photo changed bike riding forever, in an instant, suddenly walls were in play, and everyone started looking for banks to walls to learn wall rides.
When I first wrote this post, I skipped the wall ride fakie aspect. Months after the photo above of Eddie, Craig Grasso added to the progression with the first fakie wall ride post. He's in the video above of the Santee contest. In early 1989, the Godfather of BMX, Scot Breithaupt had sold a bicycle sports TV series to ESPN. In typical Scot fashion, he didn't have all the shows planned out, and he happened to be editing the shows at night at Unreel Productions, where I worked. I got paid to hang out and make sure he didn't "borrow" too much of our video footage, or anything else. One night he said he needed an idea for the next show. It took 20 minutes, but I talked him into doing a street riding show, which was the new thing then. We held the contest the next Saturday, and 9 days later the show was edited, and aired on ESPN. That's about 15 days from idea to finished TV show on TV. If you've ever worked in TV production, you knows that's a ridiculous time schedule. In that show, which became the first made-for-BMX street show ever, Craig Grasso and Pete Augustin were the only guys busting huge wall rides. You can see them at 8:30 in this show. This was about a year and a half after the Eddie Roman photo appeared, and six years before the X-Games debuted. This show got the best ratings, by far, of all of the bike shows in Scot's series. Kids across the country knew something cool when they saw it, and told their friends to tune in.
Eddie Roman had a huge innovative influence on BMX freestyle in the 1980's and early 1990's, both as a rider and as a video producer/editor. But this photo of the first wall ride in a magazine was one of his biggest contributions. That influence can easily be seen in the video embedded above, of the Santee contest in 1988, where nearly everyone was doing wall rides. In less than a year after that first wall ride photo, fakie wall rides were invented, but no photo in any magazine showed a wall ride more than two feet high. The 2-Hip Meet the Street at Santee in 1988 was the first time most of the top emerging street riders came together, at a street location with huge dirt banks to a wall and other obstacles, to see what everyone else could do. The Santee contest also changed BMX freestyle forever. Dave Voelker was doing 8-9 foot high wall rides at that spot, guys tried one footers and can-can's, and Todd Anderson did those cool fakie wall footplants. Then English rider Craig Campbell raised the bar even higher, doing the first wallride to 360., blowing everyone's mind. All that happened with in a year of the first wall ride photo. BMXers have continued to push the level of wall rides ever since, now 35 years out from the Eddie Roman photo at the Jinx Bank.
Here's a great compilation of BMX wall rides from the last 15-20 years, thank you Baskett Case, whoever you are, for taking the time to put all these into one video.
In the few years since this video was posted, there are even more huge and technical wall rides have happened. Two standouts in my mind are Dakota Roche, for both burly and technical wall rides in Native Land IV, and Sebastian Keep, going huge, with insane gaps to wall rides in Walls, and other videos.
I started this post with the story of me finding the Jinx Bank to remind all riders out there that you may not be the guy or gal who does 15 foot gaps to wall rides, but that anyone can find cool new spots to ride. I just happened to be the mediocre rider that rediscovered an old skaters bank in the BMX footplant era. Riding was evolving, and I had many great sessions, doing fooplants on the Jinx Bank wall. I moved on, but the bank was then in play, Lew, Gork, Craig Grasso, and other Redondo area locals knew it was there. That just happened to be the wall they took Eddie Roman to for the first wall ride photo. So even if you're not a Josh Stricker or Dakota Roche or a Sebastian Keep, you can still go exploring and find places that may wind up helping the sport evolve somewhere down the line. Most of the great street spots in all the videos we watch were not found by top pros. Regular riders are finding new spots to ride or skate all the time, and bringing them into play in the action sports world Anyone can help BMX freestyle, and other action sports evolve and progress. So that's my story behind the very first wall ride photo, a picture that changed bike riding forever, and continues to be built upon by today's riders.
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