The Ride of My Life (10 page)

This was at Bercy Stadium in Paris, France, for the KOV. I had amnesia on this trip, so I can’t tell you much about it.

Skyway wanted me to turn pro. At first they just dropped the hint, but then they dropped a couple of their longtime squad members, including Drob and first-generation vert vet Hugo Gonzales. I was asked to fill the top slot on the team, but I wasn’t so sure I wanted to reclassify as a pro. I was starting to hit my stride as an amateur. I was still contemplating Skyway’s proposal when I broke my leg practicing 540s on my ramp. My first question to the doctor in the ER was, “How soon before I’m riding again?” He chuckled and said I would be lucky if I ever walked again without complications. I walked all right—straight out of the hospital and into the office of the best sports medicine practitioner in Oklahoma City, Dr. Carlan Yates. It would be the start of a long and bloody partnership. I got a titanium plate and ten screws bolted into my broken leg, and I was riding again in six weeks. While I was out of commission I had missed a couple of AFA and KOV contests, including a trip to France for an invitational. As I was healing, there were some interesting developments swirling about in the freestyle industry.

Rhino had resigned as the Skyway team manager and was going back to work for Haro, his brother Bob’s company. For years, I’d wanted to ride for Haro—the first company to create a freestyle bike, run by the guy who
invented
the sport. It was a pure respect thing. Adding to the appeal, Haro’s roster of sponsored riders was the coolest in the world: Ron Wilkerson, Brian Blyther, Dave Nourie, Joe Johnson, Dennis McCoy… it was the dream team.

Around this time, a shady lady had entered the bike scene with high hopes of turning bike riders into Michael-Jordan-level megabrands. Despite having little clue as to what bike riding was even about, she began handling the careers of a few riders—including Joe Johnson and Dennis McCoy. Whispers of big-buck sponsorships convinced McCoy and Johnson to quit the Haro team, which left gaps in Haro’s am and pro ranks and loosened up quite a bit of cash in their team rider budget. It took months for the drama to unfold, but their manager almost “managed” to torpedo their careers. It was unsettling to see two of the best riders in the sport paying their own way to contests, wearing Adidas track suits and doing demos at Chrysler dealerships, just to make a little extra money until that bazillion dollar Pepsi/Huffy deal kicked in (which, of course, never did).

But Dennis and Joe’s lapse in judgment was my gain—I made a phone call to Rhino and secured a spot on the Haro team. I would remain classified as an am for at least the rest of the year, but I got a pay increase and was making about $50,000 in annual salary—approximately ten times what I earned with Skyway. A day after I signed my Haro contract, I flew out to an American Bicycle Association (ABA) contest held in California, at the Velodrome. The stands were eerily empty, with only about two hundred spectators (chalk that one up to the ABA, a BMX racing organization, attempting to get into the freestyle game). But people freaked out when I debuted in Haro gear riding alloys instead of Skyway’s trademark mags. My bike felt light as a feather, and I took home my first win for my new team, jamming my run full of my best stunts. I nailed bar hop airs, one-handed cross-legged can-cans (also known as the Indian Air Classic), nothing fakies, decade drop-ins, and a slew of tricks spanning across an eight-foot-wide gap that was between a pair of quarterpipes. As long as I live, I’ll never forget Mike Dominguez’s pro run. He’d given up everything he had—the high 540s over the channel, a couple fakies in the seven-foot range—everybody knew he’d won. With a few seconds left ticking on the clock, Mike charged across the arena and whipped off a 900 from about five feet out. He spun past the 720 mark but slammed on the way back around. It was unbelievably close, and totally inspiring. Mike had attempted 900s before at KOV contests, but now he was getting real close. Just by trying it, Mike got every serious vert rider’s brain working overtime.

Eddie Roman, my old Skyway teammate, had a home video camera, some nunchakus, and a vision. He wanted to make a movie, an epic riding adventure, filmed on location in the Secret Ninja Ramp and in areas around Edmond. It was a no-budget underground production, and the plot changed from corny comedy, to random riding drama, to flubbed-overdub laden kung fu action several times in the span of forty minutes. Probably the best part of making Aggro Riding and Kung Fu Fighting was that it quickly led to a sequel, Aggroman, in which I played a golden-suited superhero who battled ninjas. I love ninjas. Hence, the name of my indoor ramp.

The Secret Ninja Ramp was a curved slab of nirvana. The joists were solid, and I even sanded the transitions to make it smooth as glass. The thing was twenty feet wide, which sometimes wasn’t wide enough. When coming down off a thirteen-foot air into the ramp, you were going fast. We quickly learned [the hard way) that the roof’s support posts at the edges of the ramp needed foam padding.

The ramp was ten feet tall, and we were hitting the ceiling with our airs, so the roof had to be raised to thirty-six feet. This turned the room into a big metal cave that stayed ice cold in the winter and hot in the summer.

The warehouse became our clubhouse. We added a few custom touches to give it a little homeboy charm. The sanitary white walls were begging for creative expression, so with a few cans of Krylon and some ladders we threw up aerosol slogans, creatures, skulls, and slang words on the interior walls. We built a catwalk from one deck to the opposite side, for photographers, deck monkeys, and coping loafers. Beneath one transition I kept a graveyard of broken bike parts—the price of progress was extracted in smashed rims, fractured Haro frames, or exploded forks, at least once a week. I kept a stockpile of brand-new replacement gear on hand as well.

There was a thrift store couch under one of the transitions that had miraculous properties. We dubbed it the Healing Couch, and after a bad slam, a fifteen-minute rest on H.C.’s nappy tweed cushions could mend aching flesh better than any pain reliever. A megawatt sound system was needed to bring the noise, so we lugged huge Peavey speaker cabinets right up onto the decks for maximum sonic enjoyment. Steve, Travis, our riding friends, and I rode the Secret Ninja Ramp day and night. A steady rotation of out-of-town guests stopped in to session, too. Dennis McCoy and Joe Johnson were frequent flyers.

A lot of history went down on that ramp. I stood on the deck and watched Joe pull the first tailwhip airs. Another casual session between Joe, Dennis, and I yielded a whole new style of lip tricks. We were just dorking around and I came up with icepicks (rear peg coping stalls), while Joe invented toothpicks (front peg coping stalls). Serendipity was flowing that day.

Rocking it at Rockville BMX on the Haro Tour.

The Secret Ninja Ramp began to get pretty famous, so I don’t know how long the “Secret” part lasted. In the beginning, on Friday and Saturday nights, five or eight people was about as crowded as it got. Then word got out. Skaters skated, riders rode, and hangers-on hung out. When I was out of town it was Steve’s job to keep the peace; there would be twenty or thirty people we vaguely knew, wandering around the warehouse.

Eventually, we had to make up some rules. Rule number one: No Earlin’. Earl was a dude we knew from the wrong side of the tracks, and when I met him he seemed cool. He rode. As it turns out, Earl was also hanging around so he could pull an inside job. One evening, he and a small crew of local dirtballs broke in and made off with ten complete bikes, helmets, the sound system, and our entire CD collection—the grand total was $18,000. I found out through the grapevine who’d ripped us off and drove over to pay Earl a visit, blaring my N.W.A. CD. My blood was pounding in my temples in sync with the drumbeats. I had a broken wrist, but I was pissed enough to use my cast as a blunt instrument should the need arise. We pulled up and caught Earl rolling my bike out his front door. Busted. Earl ratted out his accomplices, and we stopped at two more houses and caught the conspirators with other bikes. Cops were called, and in the end, insurance paid for most of the gear. I’d always been raised to trust people and believe in friends. Getting Earled made me a little more cynical, a little wiser, and brought about a new era of tighter security at the Ninja Ramp compound.

The building of the Secret Ninja ramp.

The first time I hung out with Rick Thorne, he’d just gotten his ass kicked. The beatdown was courtesy of a group of skinhead U. S. Marines who’d taken an instant disliking to Rick’s smart mouth, his passion for hardcore music, and riding bikes. Rick bore his welts and bruises like a badge of honor. He was from Kansas City, and a charter member of the BMX Brigade. The BMX Brigade was a salty assortment of riders who ripped. They sometimes referred to themselves as “rogues” because they cut a path of destruction through whatever environment they chose to session. Dennis McCoy was the lead rogue, and Rick was his sidekick.

Steve Swope and I took a trip up to Kansas City to go riding with Dennis and Rick. We hit some local ramps but quickly found out they were way into street riding. The reason was chases. They lived for getting chased—by the cops, security guards, gangsters, or irate hicks. Sometimes, if it was a slow night, they would call the cops on
themselves.
The BMX Brigade guys were different from Steve and me—we were innocent, naïve,
very Leave It to Beaver
compared with the rogues. The guys from Kansas City were all tight friends, but they expressed it by constantly cracking on one another, trying to cause as much havoc as possible. This was epitomized when Steve and I got introduced to “Swap Rock,” a Brigade-created hybrid sport that’s like hockey, or war, on bikes. Using the front wheel as the hockey stick, the puck is anything found in the street—a rock, a hunk of asphalt, an old champagne bottle, a dirty diaper, and so forth. The object was to “swap” the “rock” toward your opponents and try to take them out with a kill shot. If you get hit hard enough to fall over, you’re out. If your foot touches the ground, you’re out. Swap Rock was a fast-paced game, and the rogues were ruthless at it. “Doof the innocent!” was their battle cry, the doof being the sound of a rock connecting with a target. Steve and I foolishly let these sharks talk us into a game, and within seconds Dennis had masterfully sent a rock into the spokes of Steve’s brand-new, high-dollar, hard-to-come-by, graphite Tuff Wheels. Steve was aghast at the outcome—a ruined front wheel. Dennis just shrugged his shoulders and suggested to Steve he get a little faster on the defense. The more we rode with those guys, the more Rick and Dennis opened our eyes up to a slightly more evil, deviant style of friendship. We began making regular trips up to ride with the Kansas City crew.

If there’s a major negative of the current popularity of the sport of bike riding, it’s that we’re accepted by society. Now you ride down the street, and people want to see you do a trick. They want to see something like on the X Games. But back in 1988, the most common response when people saw bike riders out after eleven at night was, “Isn’t it past your bedtime?”