A Voice From Pre-History:
An Alternative Origin Story for Freestyle BMX
By Sean Garrison
April 22, 2020
April 22, 2020
Looking at a BMX short film today (a Sunday production with Julian Arteaga), you would never even suspect that the BMX “golden age” of 1977-82 ever even existed. What you see now is what you saw from about 1967-77—a buncha incorrigible obsessives doing shit on the street that responsible, sane adults wish they would do somewhere else. This writer finds that really, really interesting. I think I understand how this happened.
If you were born in the mid-late 1960’s you simply could not escape motorcycles and what is now called Kustom Kulture—it was a part of pop-culture Americana that spread throughout almost every demographic; it was literally inescapable. The roots of it can be traced back to the dawn of the gasoline engine, but if you really want to understand why freestyle BMX happened, you have to understand why the masses of kids who loved riding BMX bikes bailed on BMX racing.
It’s not particularly difficult to grasp once you understand that BMX existed for years before organized BMX racing spread across the United States; bikes with 20” wheels that were built for doing balls-out dangerous shit were being marketed for many years before the first Webco and Mongoose completes started showing up in high-end bike shops. And to understand why the whole freestyle thing caught fire you have to understand the cultural roots of why a customizable bicycle was appealing in the first place.
Of course, the Schwinn Sting-Ray was the bike of choice for most batshit kids who wanted to imitate motocross stars and the God of redneck America; Evel Knievel, but 1975 was the year of the most-often forgotten bike that changed the entire game; The Schwinn Scrambler. You see, the Scrambler was the first widely-available bike that you could get almost anywhere that you could convince your parents to buy because, supposedly, it would “NOT REQUIRE UPGRADES.” This was, of course, total horseshit because the first thing you tried to do was put a “ten speed” seat on the fucking thing.
Most kids were doing dangerous, potentially deadly nonsense on their bikes in the street, on concrete, for at least six or seven years before BMX tracks started popping up across the country, and almost entirely because of Evel, who by 1971 was a national pop-culture icon. The average kid did not know who Roger DeCoster was—they wanted to be Evel fucking Knievel.
Trying any trick that you could possibly devise was attempted on concrete. Wooden ramps were built, heads were split open, and bones were broken. Garbage cans were jumped, suicidal hills were bombed, and coaster brakes were melted. And of course, parents got incredibly pissed off—they did not want to pay for emergency room visits or bike parts. It was for this reason—and not because of the documentary On Any Sunday— that most kids into the 20” bike stopped doing crazy shit in the street and moved into vacant dirt lots and wooded areas. The average American kid did NOT see a documentary film about motorcycle sports in a movie theater and I don’t give a fucking shit how many people say otherwise. Parents desperately wanted us to stop doing crazy shit in the street—that’s why we were all receptive to the idea of racing on dirt (That and because by the time the Schwinn Scrambler hit the department stores a lot of kids were already doing proto-mountain biking.). Look at early BMX racing footage from California; those were brutal enduro races having ZERO resemblance to modern BMX racing. On top of that all, it was not until around 1979 or so that most kids lived anywhere near a BMX track that was associated with a sanctioning body.
Now, there was another hidden factor that led many bike freaks to try organized racing. They were in love not only with riding, jumping, and all the shit associated with it, but they also were deeply, deeply attached to their bikes because each BMX bike was unique—always “Kustomized” to some degree. Upgrading and improving your bike for performance reasons was only part of it. The bikes became incredibly expensive pieces of eye-candy not unlike the way art motorcycles are seen today. For many, many kids the idea of doing anything risky on the streets became unthinkable not because anyone worried about getting hurt but rather, because they knew their bike was a lot less likely to get damaged on dirt. So, before most kids tried organized racing they had been riding trails—sometimes for years. And the parents getting pissed if you fucked up your bike was a big factor; but the final impetus was the magazines.
Ah, the magazines; BMX Plus and BMX Action were available at almost every corner convenience store in the country by 1977 and these magazines were what changed everything in the years immediately preceding the freestyle revolution. Within a year, the average bike-obsessed kid had forgotten all about Evel and was suddenly trying to be Stu Thomsen, Harry Leary, or Perry Kramer. Now, we see the real seeds for why freestyle BMX happened being planted; you see, the steaming bullshit that the magazines were pushing that we, as kids, did not understand was a marketing scam. The horrible truth was that you had about as much chance of being like Stu as a kid on an inner-city basketball court in 1985 had of growing up to be Michael Jordan, or a modern kid playing soccer has of being like Neymar. Pick your era— the gulf between the Dreamer and the Natural-Born Killer has always been the same. Fuck, before YouTube and Instagram—or even DVD or VHS—you stared at a picture in a BMX or skateboarding magazine and you found out ZERO practical knowledge about how to do what these fuckers were doing. The magazines were glorified bike catalogs—period. Go back and look through the mags from 1977-83 or so when the initial tower of bullshit started to collapse. I’ll wait.
How many articles about how the fact that BMX racing was an athletic sport did you find? How many articles did you read that equated BMX racing with other types of competitive cycling did you find? Not fucking many, dude. What you did find was one unified, screaming message; with a better bike you would finally win a trophy! Ha! Horse-fucking-shit!
I’ll tell you my own often-repeated story of the moment that clarity and reality rudely-barged into my BMX-soaked brain in 1981, but first a bit of background about my relationship with the two-wheeled vehicle.
I don’t know what set me off—whether I saw a neighborhood kid on a mini-bike or whether I was taken for a ride on a motorcycle by an adult, or what the fuck happened to me, but I was absolutely boner over motorcycles and mini-bikes from as early as I can remember. To my four-year-old brain there was only a handful of things worth being: a pirate, a knight, a bank-robbing cowboy type, or a guy on a motorcycle—every other thing a guy could be? Fuck those things—I wanted a motorcycle. I eventually got one, but it was many years later.
I had the same emotional experience with bicycling that many kids had back then—first taste of freedom blah-blah-blah and I really liked riding, but when I inherited my older brother’s Sting Ray I could suddenly (and I mean instantly) ride a wheelie. That is what does you in and fucks up your brain forever—suddenly, on your bike, you feel cool. You’re not just having fun flying down the street— you feel cool, and feeling cool is how almost everything questionable in life starts.
On that Sting Ray I could do tricks and feel cool. I could jump ramps and feel cool. I could ride dirt paths in the woods and feel cool. Then, like I said earlier, you started seeing bikes in department stores designed for more radical riding—the Scrambler was the first one that I remember seeing that dispensed with a fake gas tank and other motorcycle-esque features that you would eventually break. I remember seeing ads for the early BMX racing sanctioning body in comic books and the kids in the accompanying picture? They were on Sting Ray type bikes. Then, in kid-world you started hearing about this new brand of bike called a Mongoose, and that was in 1976.
This was the first bike that, according to the word on the street, you simply could not destroy. Finally a bike that, if somehow acquired, you would never have to worry about (or upgrade) again. The repeated blib-blab was that you could jump anything. An-y-thing. If you could stick the landing, so went the myth, the bike would survive.
I did not see one with my own eyes until a kid in a nearby neighborhood came to visit one of his pals who lived three houses down from me on his Mongoose Motomag. Suddenly and miraculously, motorcycles and minibikes seemed less cool. How could a bicycle be sexier and more appealing than a motorcycle? No money needed for gas. No tinkering with the engine. No burning the skin off your leg on the exhaust pipe. No more asking a Dad for help. It was surreal, magical, and bizarre—a bicycle had been created that was the sexiest fucking thing I had ever seen in my life. Brain blown. Seed planted. Delusion accepted.
In 1976 my stepfather (who had once been a motorcycle scramble racer) and my mom took me to the only place on our side of town where this new type of bike could be had, and of course, I did not leave with a Mongoose—I left with a Webco. I was livid.
So, from 1976-80 my feverish brain thought of nothing but BMX, rock music, destroying shit, killing my idiotic family, and girls (in that order.) By 1981, this kid (Kelly) who was riding the first Mongoose I ever saw would occasionally race and we would see him at the local trails. When he was 14 or 15 he got an even nicer bike (a Redline) and one day he showed up at the trails closest to my house with another kid with him. This kid (we’ll call him Bill because I can’t remember his name) was riding Kelly’s original Mongoose Motomag. By this time I was riding a Torker and that Motomag was considered a tank, an antique. Not only that, this kid Bill who was on it was a total nerdball Melvin. He was skinny, small for his age (like me), zit-faced, dorky, awkward, goofy, and absurdly happy. He was so repulsive, positive, and dressed so dorkily that it was off-putting, even for me. Then, we all started riding together.
This motherfucking living pimple blew our doors off. He was some type of genetic freak—he was so much faster than everyone else in our crew and area that it was shocking and jaw-dropping. In three-man motos in the woods? He won every time. Sprints in the street? He won every time. You showed him any technique once. Once. He could hop higher than any of us at the end of that first afternoon. Fearless and disgustingly positive, he could jump as well as any of us from the start.
Then, he showed up at the legit track which was on the other side of the county. He. Fucking. SLAYED. He crushed. He killed. He destroyed—all with that half-wit smile on his disgusting face. He was unstoppable. How could this be? He was a natural. He had legs. He had something that nobody in my whole part of town had, and you could not explain it. Again, I was livid. All at once, my bubble popped. Turns out, this happened to thousands upon thousands of kids over the course of about two years as the realization that BMX was an “athletic” contest started to dawn upon all the dopes like me who had been brainwashed by the magazines. It was not the bike—it was the legs pedaling the fucking bike that mattered when racing. That’s why they called it racing—who knew? Brain blown. Plant burned beyond recognition.
Delusion revealed.
Ouchie!
Strangely, Bill The Slayer appeared at the same exact moment that freestyle articles started showing up in the BMX magazines. Wow! What a fucking coincidence! Even if you did not encounter Bill The Slayer in the same way that me and the guys in my neighborhood did, by 1980 even the most committed and religious BMX kids all over the country found out that it was the same 1% of riders in every class that won practically everything. First it was Stu and then you were forced to look at that smug motherfucker Greg Hill in every goddamn magazine for years! Jason Jensen? He never lost! Enter freestyle. Enter the foofy hair-bear bunch. Enter Bob Haro.
By the time Bob Haro and his slightly less-repulsive twin R.L. Osborn became fixtures, most kids realized that the magazines did not give a flying fuck about the average rider. They pushed only the most expensive gear, tried to make you believe that genetic freaks who trained like Olympians simply wanted it more than you, while never openly admitting that BMX racing was essentially a fucking rich-kid sport. Then, when everyone but the most delusional and talented gave up on racing, they started a whole new marketing era, telling you that you could feel cool again if you now bought a freestyle bike and did little tricks with your “team” at the local shopping mall. Are you fucking kidding me?
In this way was a guy like Jimmy Levan slowly transformed from average racer who just wanted to jump shit into a maniacal punk rock deathfuck that just refused to give up his bike. That took YEARS and if you look at the magazines before 1982 they did not give two shakes of a ferret dick about the kid who rode trails and had to be satisfied with whatever hand-me-down piece of shit bike they could get their hands on.
For most of us, by 1980 we were fucking done. The guys who did not give up became the pioneers of what you call Street— most of them simply did not have the athletic gifts to constantly win at bicycle racing. Some had no real interest in that type of competition. Some could not behave the way the large bike companies expected or live on the tiny paychecks. But freestyle happened because BMX racing was revealed to be no different than any other competitive sport and the average Joe-Kid on a Mongoose had zero chance of getting anywhere. Most bailed out and never looked back.
If you were born in the mid-late 1960’s you simply could not escape motorcycles and what is now called Kustom Kulture—it was a part of pop-culture Americana that spread throughout almost every demographic; it was literally inescapable. The roots of it can be traced back to the dawn of the gasoline engine, but if you really want to understand why freestyle BMX happened, you have to understand why the masses of kids who loved riding BMX bikes bailed on BMX racing.
It’s not particularly difficult to grasp once you understand that BMX existed for years before organized BMX racing spread across the United States; bikes with 20” wheels that were built for doing balls-out dangerous shit were being marketed for many years before the first Webco and Mongoose completes started showing up in high-end bike shops. And to understand why the whole freestyle thing caught fire you have to understand the cultural roots of why a customizable bicycle was appealing in the first place.
Of course, the Schwinn Sting-Ray was the bike of choice for most batshit kids who wanted to imitate motocross stars and the God of redneck America; Evel Knievel, but 1975 was the year of the most-often forgotten bike that changed the entire game; The Schwinn Scrambler. You see, the Scrambler was the first widely-available bike that you could get almost anywhere that you could convince your parents to buy because, supposedly, it would “NOT REQUIRE UPGRADES.” This was, of course, total horseshit because the first thing you tried to do was put a “ten speed” seat on the fucking thing.
Most kids were doing dangerous, potentially deadly nonsense on their bikes in the street, on concrete, for at least six or seven years before BMX tracks started popping up across the country, and almost entirely because of Evel, who by 1971 was a national pop-culture icon. The average kid did not know who Roger DeCoster was—they wanted to be Evel fucking Knievel.
Trying any trick that you could possibly devise was attempted on concrete. Wooden ramps were built, heads were split open, and bones were broken. Garbage cans were jumped, suicidal hills were bombed, and coaster brakes were melted. And of course, parents got incredibly pissed off—they did not want to pay for emergency room visits or bike parts. It was for this reason—and not because of the documentary On Any Sunday— that most kids into the 20” bike stopped doing crazy shit in the street and moved into vacant dirt lots and wooded areas. The average American kid did NOT see a documentary film about motorcycle sports in a movie theater and I don’t give a fucking shit how many people say otherwise. Parents desperately wanted us to stop doing crazy shit in the street—that’s why we were all receptive to the idea of racing on dirt (That and because by the time the Schwinn Scrambler hit the department stores a lot of kids were already doing proto-mountain biking.). Look at early BMX racing footage from California; those were brutal enduro races having ZERO resemblance to modern BMX racing. On top of that all, it was not until around 1979 or so that most kids lived anywhere near a BMX track that was associated with a sanctioning body.
Now, there was another hidden factor that led many bike freaks to try organized racing. They were in love not only with riding, jumping, and all the shit associated with it, but they also were deeply, deeply attached to their bikes because each BMX bike was unique—always “Kustomized” to some degree. Upgrading and improving your bike for performance reasons was only part of it. The bikes became incredibly expensive pieces of eye-candy not unlike the way art motorcycles are seen today. For many, many kids the idea of doing anything risky on the streets became unthinkable not because anyone worried about getting hurt but rather, because they knew their bike was a lot less likely to get damaged on dirt. So, before most kids tried organized racing they had been riding trails—sometimes for years. And the parents getting pissed if you fucked up your bike was a big factor; but the final impetus was the magazines.
Ah, the magazines; BMX Plus and BMX Action were available at almost every corner convenience store in the country by 1977 and these magazines were what changed everything in the years immediately preceding the freestyle revolution. Within a year, the average bike-obsessed kid had forgotten all about Evel and was suddenly trying to be Stu Thomsen, Harry Leary, or Perry Kramer. Now, we see the real seeds for why freestyle BMX happened being planted; you see, the steaming bullshit that the magazines were pushing that we, as kids, did not understand was a marketing scam. The horrible truth was that you had about as much chance of being like Stu as a kid on an inner-city basketball court in 1985 had of growing up to be Michael Jordan, or a modern kid playing soccer has of being like Neymar. Pick your era— the gulf between the Dreamer and the Natural-Born Killer has always been the same. Fuck, before YouTube and Instagram—or even DVD or VHS—you stared at a picture in a BMX or skateboarding magazine and you found out ZERO practical knowledge about how to do what these fuckers were doing. The magazines were glorified bike catalogs—period. Go back and look through the mags from 1977-83 or so when the initial tower of bullshit started to collapse. I’ll wait.
How many articles about how the fact that BMX racing was an athletic sport did you find? How many articles did you read that equated BMX racing with other types of competitive cycling did you find? Not fucking many, dude. What you did find was one unified, screaming message; with a better bike you would finally win a trophy! Ha! Horse-fucking-shit!
I’ll tell you my own often-repeated story of the moment that clarity and reality rudely-barged into my BMX-soaked brain in 1981, but first a bit of background about my relationship with the two-wheeled vehicle.
I don’t know what set me off—whether I saw a neighborhood kid on a mini-bike or whether I was taken for a ride on a motorcycle by an adult, or what the fuck happened to me, but I was absolutely boner over motorcycles and mini-bikes from as early as I can remember. To my four-year-old brain there was only a handful of things worth being: a pirate, a knight, a bank-robbing cowboy type, or a guy on a motorcycle—every other thing a guy could be? Fuck those things—I wanted a motorcycle. I eventually got one, but it was many years later.
I had the same emotional experience with bicycling that many kids had back then—first taste of freedom blah-blah-blah and I really liked riding, but when I inherited my older brother’s Sting Ray I could suddenly (and I mean instantly) ride a wheelie. That is what does you in and fucks up your brain forever—suddenly, on your bike, you feel cool. You’re not just having fun flying down the street— you feel cool, and feeling cool is how almost everything questionable in life starts.
On that Sting Ray I could do tricks and feel cool. I could jump ramps and feel cool. I could ride dirt paths in the woods and feel cool. Then, like I said earlier, you started seeing bikes in department stores designed for more radical riding—the Scrambler was the first one that I remember seeing that dispensed with a fake gas tank and other motorcycle-esque features that you would eventually break. I remember seeing ads for the early BMX racing sanctioning body in comic books and the kids in the accompanying picture? They were on Sting Ray type bikes. Then, in kid-world you started hearing about this new brand of bike called a Mongoose, and that was in 1976.
This was the first bike that, according to the word on the street, you simply could not destroy. Finally a bike that, if somehow acquired, you would never have to worry about (or upgrade) again. The repeated blib-blab was that you could jump anything. An-y-thing. If you could stick the landing, so went the myth, the bike would survive.
I did not see one with my own eyes until a kid in a nearby neighborhood came to visit one of his pals who lived three houses down from me on his Mongoose Motomag. Suddenly and miraculously, motorcycles and minibikes seemed less cool. How could a bicycle be sexier and more appealing than a motorcycle? No money needed for gas. No tinkering with the engine. No burning the skin off your leg on the exhaust pipe. No more asking a Dad for help. It was surreal, magical, and bizarre—a bicycle had been created that was the sexiest fucking thing I had ever seen in my life. Brain blown. Seed planted. Delusion accepted.
In 1976 my stepfather (who had once been a motorcycle scramble racer) and my mom took me to the only place on our side of town where this new type of bike could be had, and of course, I did not leave with a Mongoose—I left with a Webco. I was livid.
So, from 1976-80 my feverish brain thought of nothing but BMX, rock music, destroying shit, killing my idiotic family, and girls (in that order.) By 1981, this kid (Kelly) who was riding the first Mongoose I ever saw would occasionally race and we would see him at the local trails. When he was 14 or 15 he got an even nicer bike (a Redline) and one day he showed up at the trails closest to my house with another kid with him. This kid (we’ll call him Bill because I can’t remember his name) was riding Kelly’s original Mongoose Motomag. By this time I was riding a Torker and that Motomag was considered a tank, an antique. Not only that, this kid Bill who was on it was a total nerdball Melvin. He was skinny, small for his age (like me), zit-faced, dorky, awkward, goofy, and absurdly happy. He was so repulsive, positive, and dressed so dorkily that it was off-putting, even for me. Then, we all started riding together.
This motherfucking living pimple blew our doors off. He was some type of genetic freak—he was so much faster than everyone else in our crew and area that it was shocking and jaw-dropping. In three-man motos in the woods? He won every time. Sprints in the street? He won every time. You showed him any technique once. Once. He could hop higher than any of us at the end of that first afternoon. Fearless and disgustingly positive, he could jump as well as any of us from the start.
Then, he showed up at the legit track which was on the other side of the county. He. Fucking. SLAYED. He crushed. He killed. He destroyed—all with that half-wit smile on his disgusting face. He was unstoppable. How could this be? He was a natural. He had legs. He had something that nobody in my whole part of town had, and you could not explain it. Again, I was livid. All at once, my bubble popped. Turns out, this happened to thousands upon thousands of kids over the course of about two years as the realization that BMX was an “athletic” contest started to dawn upon all the dopes like me who had been brainwashed by the magazines. It was not the bike—it was the legs pedaling the fucking bike that mattered when racing. That’s why they called it racing—who knew? Brain blown. Plant burned beyond recognition.
Delusion revealed.
Ouchie!
Strangely, Bill The Slayer appeared at the same exact moment that freestyle articles started showing up in the BMX magazines. Wow! What a fucking coincidence! Even if you did not encounter Bill The Slayer in the same way that me and the guys in my neighborhood did, by 1980 even the most committed and religious BMX kids all over the country found out that it was the same 1% of riders in every class that won practically everything. First it was Stu and then you were forced to look at that smug motherfucker Greg Hill in every goddamn magazine for years! Jason Jensen? He never lost! Enter freestyle. Enter the foofy hair-bear bunch. Enter Bob Haro.
By the time Bob Haro and his slightly less-repulsive twin R.L. Osborn became fixtures, most kids realized that the magazines did not give a flying fuck about the average rider. They pushed only the most expensive gear, tried to make you believe that genetic freaks who trained like Olympians simply wanted it more than you, while never openly admitting that BMX racing was essentially a fucking rich-kid sport. Then, when everyone but the most delusional and talented gave up on racing, they started a whole new marketing era, telling you that you could feel cool again if you now bought a freestyle bike and did little tricks with your “team” at the local shopping mall. Are you fucking kidding me?
In this way was a guy like Jimmy Levan slowly transformed from average racer who just wanted to jump shit into a maniacal punk rock deathfuck that just refused to give up his bike. That took YEARS and if you look at the magazines before 1982 they did not give two shakes of a ferret dick about the kid who rode trails and had to be satisfied with whatever hand-me-down piece of shit bike they could get their hands on.
For most of us, by 1980 we were fucking done. The guys who did not give up became the pioneers of what you call Street— most of them simply did not have the athletic gifts to constantly win at bicycle racing. Some had no real interest in that type of competition. Some could not behave the way the large bike companies expected or live on the tiny paychecks. But freestyle happened because BMX racing was revealed to be no different than any other competitive sport and the average Joe-Kid on a Mongoose had zero chance of getting anywhere. Most bailed out and never looked back.
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