Self Investment
by Patrick Kelly
Self-Investment
You've heard it before a thousand times in the form of a self-defeated attitude that comes from an individual who lives through social media, comparing themselves to the lives they could have.
“I wish I weren’t stuck in this lame-ass town.”
“When I get sponsored, I’ll be able to travel finally.”
“Too bad I’ll never get sponsored because I don’t have a filmer to make me an edit.”
This mindset is problematic for a few reasons. First, it presumes sponsorship is an entitlement and that one deserves free product, travel, and exposure. Second, this mindset removes any self empowerment to do any of the above mentioned things on your own. Of course you want to go on a road trip. Of course you want to put out an edit that gets 50 comments. We, as BMX riders in 2016, are bombarded with media showcasing our favorite pro bikers constantly standing outside an airport with their bike, making themselves look like jet setting rockstars, yet we need to remember that every pro rider has gone on dozens of self-funded trips and put the initiative into putting out quality media content.
This ain’t their first rodeo.
To get the point in a pro’s life where they can leisurely post a travel photo like that takes some hard work and hustle. Even with, presumably, “everything handed to them,” everyone who has walked onto the professional BMX stage has put their own dollars, time, and resources into travel and producing content. It is not something that happens to you, it is something you go out and actively chase. Inevitably, an aspiring AM has stumbled across interviews with pros and they come across the “If you could give advice to kids out there trying to be pro, what would it be?” and it’s always the same: “Just focus on riding your bike and the rest will happen on its own.” While focusing on improving your skills and striving to grind the bigger rail, or 3’ing the bigger jump is essential, there’s more to being desirable to a sponsor than solely riding.
Before any person or company will invest in someone, that rider must invest in themselves. BMXers in 2016 may have the misconception that being of a certain skill level or having a sponsor is why their favorite rider gets to travel or film a banger video part. This written piece serves to show how certain riders use a DIY attitude and their available resources to do all those things without a paying sponsor and why a rider should do all these things to become more desirable to a sponsor.
Travel
Before going further, I want to define what I qualify as “travel” in the BMX sense. To me it encompasses two parts: road trips and air travel. No matter who or how old you are, I hope you get to experience a road trip with your friends. Road trips span an enormous scale, from a weekend trip 2 hours south, to a summer on the road living out of a van. There is something raw, punk rock, and vitally BMX about road trips. The ability to escape your day-to-day routine and talk bullshit with your friends, get into mischief, and explore a new area makes for unforgettable times. Air travel for BMX, while a bit more of a hassle, is a whole new experience in itself. Traveling to an entirely new area of the world, or even a different part of the US is a thrill in itself (the romance of which is beyond the scope of this article), but traveling through the lens of “I’m going to ride entirely new terrain and connect with bike riders that speak a different language than me” is cool as hell. Both versions of travel certainly have their benefits and drawbacks. The first and possibly most daunting of which, cost, I’ll cover next.
Anything and everything you want in life is going to cost money; it’s a harsh reality of life. At some point in your life though, you learned that anything you want to buy is attainable given enough time and prioritization. You will never save up for a badass road trip if you keep on prioritizing racecar parts and vape mods over gas/food money for the trip. However, one of the awesome things about a BMX road trip is how many ways it can done inexpensively. Being part of the BMX community, a massive community of likeminded people, allows us to find free couches to stay on and tour guides in unfamiliar areas. Take a page out of the Brad Simms playbook and find out where you want to go, go on social media and figure out which riders live in that area, get in touch with them, and see how they feel about you coming out [1]. That’s not to say that just because they’ve got a bike in their profile picture you are entitled to a spot on their floor, but it can help get the conversation going. Plus, once you visit somewhere and get familiar with locals, the opportunities to come back or to visit somewhere near that scene multiply [2, 3].
If the idea of hitting up a total stranger just isn’t for you, there are cheaper ways of finding shelter than a $150/night hotel stay. Camping, hostels, 2 bed motel rooms split among 7 friends, or staying with non-BMX friends all make the road trip way more affordable (be careful bringing BMX riders to sorority houses…in my experience it ends poorly). The next big costs are gas and food, and BMX riders make notoriously bad decisions with both. Be fuel efficient and do some form of food planning, as opposed to $10 meals every meal, every day, and your money will stretch way longer. Go do your own research to see how to make these costs lower; there are plenty of general travel themed resources out there to help you out. The point is though, taking a weekend long or even week long road trip is the matter of saving up just a few hundred dollars between as many friends as you want. The more buddies you bring along, the more ways the total cost gets split and the cheaper it becomes for everybody.
Air travel is a different animal with other costs associated with it and those costs can pile up quickly. Again, there are plenty of resources for general travel advice, but specific to BMX there are not too many additional costs. First and foremost, if you want to do any air travel with a bike, GET A BIKE BAG. Brands like DK, Ogio, and Odyssey all make their version of a travel bag for the purpose of turning a bike (normally a $50-$200 charge at check-in) into a normal piece of baggage at check-in (anywhere from free on Southwest Airlines to $25 on American). Basically, as long as it’s less than 50 pounds (22kg for you non Americans) and you don’t say it’s a bicycle, it will fly as a regular checked bag [4]. I bought my bag 8 years ago and it has paid for itself at least 20 times over in saved check-in fees. That bike baggage fee is really the only additional cost to flying with your bike. Flying to Los Angeles for the purpose of riding your bike is almost exactly the same as going for the purpose of sight-seeing. Again, travel is not reserved for pros; you can absolutely do it yourself.
The point is that traveling for BMX does cost money, but it’s a matter of how bad you want it and how willing you are to sacrifice daily comforts to save for your trips. Yes, if you have high rent, an expensive car, kids to feed, etc. it will take you longer to save, but it is far from impossible. A hindrance that the average BMX rider has that prevents them from being able to afford travel is the mindset that a pro BMX rider has to barely scrape by and live a grimy life. How could a pro possibly have time in the day to wake up at 1pm, ride for 3 hours, AND have a career at the same time?
Enter the Ditch Matt method. “Ditch” Matt Nietschke is a lawyer and world traveler who lives in southern California. Every day he puts on a suit, goes to his law firm, practices law, and makes a living [5]. Outside the walls of his office, Matt is a damn good BMX rider that has shown up in his fair share of web videos throughout the years and even has clips in the DVD Mediocre at Best. Matt has funded his travel for many years, and has never been on a bike company’s pro team. He has been all over Europe, Asia, and the United States, just bought a house, and yet by a layperson’s standards he’s just a regular guy with a regular job.
There is a TON to learn from Matt’s example. Matt is a stellar demonstration that you do not need to be a pro bike rider to enjoy the lifestyle associated with it. BMX Pros do not make good money. Let me repeat myself because 16 year old kids ask me this all of the time, professional BMX riders do not make a lot of money. Obviously, everyone’s case is different; a Red Bull athlete makes a slightly different salary than an FBM rider; however, across the board if you measure hours invested in this job and what would be the hourly wage, it comes out to peanuts compared to what you could make working minimum wage.
This salary fact is surprising to a lot of riders, and it is a fact that is hard to accept. By virtue of being individuals with a passion for something, we grow up revering our heroes of BMX as superstars. Whether you are new school and see the Common Crew going to China and Barcelona for filming trips, or maybe more mid-school and grew up always wanting to go on a Road Fools, you have built an image of what a pro BMX rider’s lifestyle must be like. You relate to the friendships shown on camera and to the work the riders put into filming the clip. But what they leave off camera are the less glamorous scenes, the months of working a dish room, driving an Uber, or making pizzas to afford to go on that trip. When the Common Crew started filming their 2016 debut DVD, Monster Mash, back in 2011, nobody from their crew was getting a check. Those young men put the work in to make their video a reality and during the course of their filming process, bike companies noticed. That video is going to go down in history as one of the most progressive videos of this decade, and they did it all without corporate dollars. But as young BMX riders, people often equate the immense respect you have for your favorite rider with respect from a sponsor -- which theoretically should manifest itself as a paycheck.
This disconnect troubles a lot of people within our industry. BMX riders want to live the “pro lifestyle” or what they have built up in their mind as the “pro lifestyle” of free travel and free bikes, and then when they achieve the coveted title of Pro Bike Rider, they are disappointed with reality. They have to work really hard to progress their riding, film, and perform obligations for their sponsor for such a small paycheck. It is up for debate if BMX professionals deserve to make more money, but that is a topic for a future article. Regardless of what the future holds, if you want to pay the rent, a phone bill, and a car payment, living off of BMX sponsors alone, you will need some good luck. The alternative, and the route that I and multiple BMX pros have chosen, is to supplement their sponsor income with a job. Of course, there is a balance to this. I know guys that work 50/50 BMX and regular job, and others that spend 40 hours a week working, but go hard after work and on the weekends. Either way, they have removed the stress of having to stretch a meager BMX paycheck into a living and can still ride their hearts out. They make a livable wage from their normal job and still get to ride, travel, and be a pro bike rider. This comes back to my original point, and why I told Ditch Matt’s story: you do not have to be a pro BMX rider to enjoy the lifestyle of a pro BMX rider.
Now, if you aspire to be a professional BMX rider, self-funding your travel is an extremely necessary step in proving your worth to a company. Traveling on your own dime shows that you are really involved in BMX. A brand does not want a lazy person to be an ambassador for their brand. Absolutely zero people have gotten a plane ticket because they sat on the computer whining “I can’t wait to get out of this lame ass town” on Facebook. When you travel, you use your actions to say that you really give a shit about BMX and that you have invested in the sport. You have undoubtedly heard it before; it takes so much more than talent on a bicycle to become a professional bicycle rider. Traveling is one way to demonstrate that you go above and beyond riding your local park for fun, it demonstrates initiative, which is a highly desirable quality in the BMX community. Take the initiative, make an investment in fun.
Second, traveling shows you can adapt to discomfort. Traveling is quite literally the opposite of comfort. It takes you out of your day-to-day routine and forces you to constantly adapt to new surroundings, unfamiliar navigation, and new people. Even if you have beautiful accommodations, what’s your transportation situation in this new city? What are you going to ride? Where’s the local grocery store? Wait, what currency am I supposed to have? I’ve only got $11.26 for 3 more days?! When you are on a filming trip, you do not always get what you want and you’re going to become really annoying really quickly if you can’t handle what the team manager has in plan for the trip. Practice travel to practice adapting to discomfort.
Finally, it shows that you’re probably more interesting than the regular person. A lot of funny things can happen at your local skatepark, and you’ve probably got some awesome stories about afternoons you’ve spent there; but I promise you, the stories you can tell after spending a sleep-deprived weekend with your buddies riding bikes in a new city are better. Just like how having better stories makes you more interesting to girls at the bar or coworkers on a Monday, the same goes for the dude who has the potential to hook you up with wheels. BMX company owners and team managers were once young, active bike riders like yourself. You can relate to them and build a human connection if you have a captivating story to tell.
Filming
Let me start by saying there is nobody out there with a gun to your head forcing you to film or shoot photos of your bike riding. Some riders hate the feeling of being under pressure to land a hard trick or film an impressive clip. That is totally understandable and I recognize that even with outstanding talent, some people just don’t want to film. The reality of modern day BMX (and our culture at large) is that to make an impact on the landscape of BMX, you are going to have to produce some content. Without some kind of visual documentation of your tricks or ability, strangers on the internet don’t have much of a reason to care about you. The impetus and desire to film an edit, Instagram clips, or a webisode is there, yet aspiring pro riders come up empty handed. Riders who want to film a video but never do usually fall into two excuse categories: availability of a “good camera” and availability of a “real filmer”.
A section on the availability of a good camera would have looked immensely different 10-20 years ago. Audio/video technology has advanced so insanely far in the last few years that I am embarrassed to write about the excuse of “availability”. Between an iPhone and a GoPro, riders today have a better HD setup than Mike Manzoori did 10 years ago filming Etnies’s Grounded. Obviously it takes some level of knowledge to operate these devices, but the web is rich with filming tutorials and resources to help you. Look them up! And thank the skateboarding community for most of those, by the way. Riders in developing countries are making full edits that get onto TheComeUp using the resources they have available to them. They’re certainly not filming with HMCs and might not even be filming with an iPhone, but they make it work. Within photography, there is a saying that “the best camera is the one you have” and that rings true with BMX video production. Work with what you have and always work on improving.
The other excuse I hear riders use for not filming is “I don’t have anyone to film with” or “I don’t know how to edit.” Cue Dan Foley. When most riders hear Dan’s name, they instantly think of an amazing riding steeze and self-filmed videos, and with good cause. Dan is without a doubt one of the best self-filmers in the game. He is able to make really clean, well orchestrated edits with a simple camera setup (1 HMC and a GoPro if I’m not mistaken) and some forward thinking. Self filming is not easy to pull off well, and Dan went to school specifically for things like that, but what agitates me is when an up-and-coming rider does not try at all. From what I see, the majority of amateur self-filmed edits can be boring and uninteresting, but they serve the purpose of documenting the trick, and if you are hungry to get your pro-level riding out there for the world to see, that is all you need your edit to do.
Mike Mastroni is another example of how self-filming can bless you with a career if you aren’t afraid to work and wait. Mike grew up in Connecticut and spent his early days driving around New England, setting up a tripod, and putting in work to film a clip. Any older rider (read: older than 18 years old) knows exactly the situation too. After high school all your BMX friends fell off with girlfriend obligations, work, cars, or the BMX flame just extinguished. Mike was 19 and still just as pumped on BMX as ever so he took the duty of filming into his own hands. The work he put in contributed to an overall style and vibe of his early videos, which clearly got better with time as you can see from his progression in his early videos, OSS Football (2009), and The Finer Things (2014). These days, you cannot separate Mastroni’s name from creative filming and creative bike tricks, and you likely never would have heard of him had he not loved setting up the tripod and pointing it at himself. [6]
It may seem obvious why sponsors want to see constant content production from a rider, yet when I ask that question to the young riders in my scene, they stumble for an answer: “That’s just how BMX works” or “more videos get you more followers” is what I often hear. There is so much more to it than just maintaining the status quo or boosting your personal following.
Different sponsors want content for different purposes, but in general these reasons apply. As riders in a previous era, your sponsor wants you to be part of the overall progression of BMX and to document your efforts. The content you produce contributes to what BMX in this day and age looks like (Just like our fashion choices in high school, I’m sure we’ll all look back on 2016 someday and say “Gosh, can you remember that year we all decided to make vlogs?”). But that has always been what’s cool about BMX. As long as BMX has been around, the participants of our culture have been obsessed with documenting it. When you make your video, you are contributing a small piece to the overall progression of BMX, whether it’s a new trick, a unique style, or a new spot. I personally love watching a video from a crew of dudes in a place I didn’t previously know had BMX riders. I want to see how BMX riders adapt to the terrain in Vienna, Austria, Sudan, or Kuala Lumpur. I also love seeing how scenes across the country have adapted to their environments. For example, I love the efforts of Brant Moore and the Lip Lords out of Ohio, for showing that a 4ft quarter pipe (the best feature at their local prefab park) has endless lip trick possibilities limited only by one’s imagination. Brant’s crew might not be super well known, but his videos are expanding the lip trip vocabulary for the rest of BMX to learn
Filming as a pro bike rider also serves to provide content for social media and a presence in the current landscape of BMX. It is what core riders do not want to admit being a pro is: work.
A BMX rider in 2016 won’t buy from a company that doesn’t have a solid team. Through the riders they sponsor, a brand helps build its identity, and the videos produced by those riders give the individual rider an identity. When a rider releases an edit and brands it with their sponsor’s logo, uses their sponsor’s parts, or wears their t-shirt, that rider is advertising for that company. They have become a salesperson, and they are selling their sponsor’s image. A brand can have stylish, unbreakable products, but it doesn’t matter if the consumer isn’t down with the riders that brand supports. When a brand posts an Instaclip of one of their team riders, they are advertising that rider’s trust in the product and, bonus, if the rider is doing something progressive, that new trick was made possible by ____ Bike Co.
Be Financially Responsible, The Call to Action
Obviously traveling isn’t cheap, and camera equipment racks up costs quickly. So how is one expected to do these things if they want to get attention? First off, where there is a will, there is a way. Your big trip to Barcelona is the matter of you saving maybe $2,000, getting a passport, and taking 2 weeks off work. The goal when specified in detail, is not incredibly daunting. Remove self doubt and plan it out.
Second, quit spending money on stupid shit. This should not be news, but short term money is a finite resource. You cannot expect to spend hundreds of dollars per month on your 240, your vape mod, that good weed, nights drinking, shitty fast food, and have enough money saved at the end of the month for a plane ticket. This isn’t a financial management lecture, but ask yourself what you want more, enough gas money to get you to a different state, or $50 worth of dabs that week?
Third, take a look at your environment and look at structures in your life that make you spend money the way you do. Some areas of the world are expensive. As I write this, I’m sitting in the Silicon Valley in California, one of the most expensive regions in the US. There are not currently a ton of active riders here because BMX is predominantly a middle class sport, and to be middle class in the Silicon Valley, you need to work 80 hours per week. That’s not a lot of leeway to take 2 weeks off for a road trip when you could be making money. Contrast that with the other end of the spectrum in Phoenix, Arizona where I lived for 2 years of grad school. In Phoenix, it was easy to afford a 3-bedroom apartment with roommates while I was only working 20 hours per week. Some scenes are better at supporting the BMX lifestyle than others. Low cost of living locales like Albuquerque, central Florida, or Salt Lake City all have a wide variety of local riders due in part to cheaper rent. That’s not to say you should ditch your hometown and head to a low cost of living area, but instead you should recognize that a scene is a product of the location and the members of the community that work to make it what it is. That may mean taking initiative to throw jams, become the local filmer, or buy a van that can fit your crew.
This draws back to my main point for this article. Before anyone or any company will invest in you as a professional bike rider, you need to invest in yourself. Your actions need to speak louder than your words and demonstrate that you live the lifestyle of a pro instead of complaining how you do not. You need to give back to BMX before it gives you anything. If that means molding your career, house, relationships, food choices, or whatever else around your love of BMX, more power to you. Just remember that you began this activity because you love it. We owe BMX everything, and it owes us nothing.
- Patrick Kelly, August 2016
You've heard it before a thousand times in the form of a self-defeated attitude that comes from an individual who lives through social media, comparing themselves to the lives they could have.
“I wish I weren’t stuck in this lame-ass town.”
“When I get sponsored, I’ll be able to travel finally.”
“Too bad I’ll never get sponsored because I don’t have a filmer to make me an edit.”
This mindset is problematic for a few reasons. First, it presumes sponsorship is an entitlement and that one deserves free product, travel, and exposure. Second, this mindset removes any self empowerment to do any of the above mentioned things on your own. Of course you want to go on a road trip. Of course you want to put out an edit that gets 50 comments. We, as BMX riders in 2016, are bombarded with media showcasing our favorite pro bikers constantly standing outside an airport with their bike, making themselves look like jet setting rockstars, yet we need to remember that every pro rider has gone on dozens of self-funded trips and put the initiative into putting out quality media content.
This ain’t their first rodeo.
To get the point in a pro’s life where they can leisurely post a travel photo like that takes some hard work and hustle. Even with, presumably, “everything handed to them,” everyone who has walked onto the professional BMX stage has put their own dollars, time, and resources into travel and producing content. It is not something that happens to you, it is something you go out and actively chase. Inevitably, an aspiring AM has stumbled across interviews with pros and they come across the “If you could give advice to kids out there trying to be pro, what would it be?” and it’s always the same: “Just focus on riding your bike and the rest will happen on its own.” While focusing on improving your skills and striving to grind the bigger rail, or 3’ing the bigger jump is essential, there’s more to being desirable to a sponsor than solely riding.
Before any person or company will invest in someone, that rider must invest in themselves. BMXers in 2016 may have the misconception that being of a certain skill level or having a sponsor is why their favorite rider gets to travel or film a banger video part. This written piece serves to show how certain riders use a DIY attitude and their available resources to do all those things without a paying sponsor and why a rider should do all these things to become more desirable to a sponsor.
Travel
Before going further, I want to define what I qualify as “travel” in the BMX sense. To me it encompasses two parts: road trips and air travel. No matter who or how old you are, I hope you get to experience a road trip with your friends. Road trips span an enormous scale, from a weekend trip 2 hours south, to a summer on the road living out of a van. There is something raw, punk rock, and vitally BMX about road trips. The ability to escape your day-to-day routine and talk bullshit with your friends, get into mischief, and explore a new area makes for unforgettable times. Air travel for BMX, while a bit more of a hassle, is a whole new experience in itself. Traveling to an entirely new area of the world, or even a different part of the US is a thrill in itself (the romance of which is beyond the scope of this article), but traveling through the lens of “I’m going to ride entirely new terrain and connect with bike riders that speak a different language than me” is cool as hell. Both versions of travel certainly have their benefits and drawbacks. The first and possibly most daunting of which, cost, I’ll cover next.
Anything and everything you want in life is going to cost money; it’s a harsh reality of life. At some point in your life though, you learned that anything you want to buy is attainable given enough time and prioritization. You will never save up for a badass road trip if you keep on prioritizing racecar parts and vape mods over gas/food money for the trip. However, one of the awesome things about a BMX road trip is how many ways it can done inexpensively. Being part of the BMX community, a massive community of likeminded people, allows us to find free couches to stay on and tour guides in unfamiliar areas. Take a page out of the Brad Simms playbook and find out where you want to go, go on social media and figure out which riders live in that area, get in touch with them, and see how they feel about you coming out [1]. That’s not to say that just because they’ve got a bike in their profile picture you are entitled to a spot on their floor, but it can help get the conversation going. Plus, once you visit somewhere and get familiar with locals, the opportunities to come back or to visit somewhere near that scene multiply [2, 3].
If the idea of hitting up a total stranger just isn’t for you, there are cheaper ways of finding shelter than a $150/night hotel stay. Camping, hostels, 2 bed motel rooms split among 7 friends, or staying with non-BMX friends all make the road trip way more affordable (be careful bringing BMX riders to sorority houses…in my experience it ends poorly). The next big costs are gas and food, and BMX riders make notoriously bad decisions with both. Be fuel efficient and do some form of food planning, as opposed to $10 meals every meal, every day, and your money will stretch way longer. Go do your own research to see how to make these costs lower; there are plenty of general travel themed resources out there to help you out. The point is though, taking a weekend long or even week long road trip is the matter of saving up just a few hundred dollars between as many friends as you want. The more buddies you bring along, the more ways the total cost gets split and the cheaper it becomes for everybody.
Air travel is a different animal with other costs associated with it and those costs can pile up quickly. Again, there are plenty of resources for general travel advice, but specific to BMX there are not too many additional costs. First and foremost, if you want to do any air travel with a bike, GET A BIKE BAG. Brands like DK, Ogio, and Odyssey all make their version of a travel bag for the purpose of turning a bike (normally a $50-$200 charge at check-in) into a normal piece of baggage at check-in (anywhere from free on Southwest Airlines to $25 on American). Basically, as long as it’s less than 50 pounds (22kg for you non Americans) and you don’t say it’s a bicycle, it will fly as a regular checked bag [4]. I bought my bag 8 years ago and it has paid for itself at least 20 times over in saved check-in fees. That bike baggage fee is really the only additional cost to flying with your bike. Flying to Los Angeles for the purpose of riding your bike is almost exactly the same as going for the purpose of sight-seeing. Again, travel is not reserved for pros; you can absolutely do it yourself.
The point is that traveling for BMX does cost money, but it’s a matter of how bad you want it and how willing you are to sacrifice daily comforts to save for your trips. Yes, if you have high rent, an expensive car, kids to feed, etc. it will take you longer to save, but it is far from impossible. A hindrance that the average BMX rider has that prevents them from being able to afford travel is the mindset that a pro BMX rider has to barely scrape by and live a grimy life. How could a pro possibly have time in the day to wake up at 1pm, ride for 3 hours, AND have a career at the same time?
Enter the Ditch Matt method. “Ditch” Matt Nietschke is a lawyer and world traveler who lives in southern California. Every day he puts on a suit, goes to his law firm, practices law, and makes a living [5]. Outside the walls of his office, Matt is a damn good BMX rider that has shown up in his fair share of web videos throughout the years and even has clips in the DVD Mediocre at Best. Matt has funded his travel for many years, and has never been on a bike company’s pro team. He has been all over Europe, Asia, and the United States, just bought a house, and yet by a layperson’s standards he’s just a regular guy with a regular job.
There is a TON to learn from Matt’s example. Matt is a stellar demonstration that you do not need to be a pro bike rider to enjoy the lifestyle associated with it. BMX Pros do not make good money. Let me repeat myself because 16 year old kids ask me this all of the time, professional BMX riders do not make a lot of money. Obviously, everyone’s case is different; a Red Bull athlete makes a slightly different salary than an FBM rider; however, across the board if you measure hours invested in this job and what would be the hourly wage, it comes out to peanuts compared to what you could make working minimum wage.
This salary fact is surprising to a lot of riders, and it is a fact that is hard to accept. By virtue of being individuals with a passion for something, we grow up revering our heroes of BMX as superstars. Whether you are new school and see the Common Crew going to China and Barcelona for filming trips, or maybe more mid-school and grew up always wanting to go on a Road Fools, you have built an image of what a pro BMX rider’s lifestyle must be like. You relate to the friendships shown on camera and to the work the riders put into filming the clip. But what they leave off camera are the less glamorous scenes, the months of working a dish room, driving an Uber, or making pizzas to afford to go on that trip. When the Common Crew started filming their 2016 debut DVD, Monster Mash, back in 2011, nobody from their crew was getting a check. Those young men put the work in to make their video a reality and during the course of their filming process, bike companies noticed. That video is going to go down in history as one of the most progressive videos of this decade, and they did it all without corporate dollars. But as young BMX riders, people often equate the immense respect you have for your favorite rider with respect from a sponsor -- which theoretically should manifest itself as a paycheck.
This disconnect troubles a lot of people within our industry. BMX riders want to live the “pro lifestyle” or what they have built up in their mind as the “pro lifestyle” of free travel and free bikes, and then when they achieve the coveted title of Pro Bike Rider, they are disappointed with reality. They have to work really hard to progress their riding, film, and perform obligations for their sponsor for such a small paycheck. It is up for debate if BMX professionals deserve to make more money, but that is a topic for a future article. Regardless of what the future holds, if you want to pay the rent, a phone bill, and a car payment, living off of BMX sponsors alone, you will need some good luck. The alternative, and the route that I and multiple BMX pros have chosen, is to supplement their sponsor income with a job. Of course, there is a balance to this. I know guys that work 50/50 BMX and regular job, and others that spend 40 hours a week working, but go hard after work and on the weekends. Either way, they have removed the stress of having to stretch a meager BMX paycheck into a living and can still ride their hearts out. They make a livable wage from their normal job and still get to ride, travel, and be a pro bike rider. This comes back to my original point, and why I told Ditch Matt’s story: you do not have to be a pro BMX rider to enjoy the lifestyle of a pro BMX rider.
Now, if you aspire to be a professional BMX rider, self-funding your travel is an extremely necessary step in proving your worth to a company. Traveling on your own dime shows that you are really involved in BMX. A brand does not want a lazy person to be an ambassador for their brand. Absolutely zero people have gotten a plane ticket because they sat on the computer whining “I can’t wait to get out of this lame ass town” on Facebook. When you travel, you use your actions to say that you really give a shit about BMX and that you have invested in the sport. You have undoubtedly heard it before; it takes so much more than talent on a bicycle to become a professional bicycle rider. Traveling is one way to demonstrate that you go above and beyond riding your local park for fun, it demonstrates initiative, which is a highly desirable quality in the BMX community. Take the initiative, make an investment in fun.
Second, traveling shows you can adapt to discomfort. Traveling is quite literally the opposite of comfort. It takes you out of your day-to-day routine and forces you to constantly adapt to new surroundings, unfamiliar navigation, and new people. Even if you have beautiful accommodations, what’s your transportation situation in this new city? What are you going to ride? Where’s the local grocery store? Wait, what currency am I supposed to have? I’ve only got $11.26 for 3 more days?! When you are on a filming trip, you do not always get what you want and you’re going to become really annoying really quickly if you can’t handle what the team manager has in plan for the trip. Practice travel to practice adapting to discomfort.
Finally, it shows that you’re probably more interesting than the regular person. A lot of funny things can happen at your local skatepark, and you’ve probably got some awesome stories about afternoons you’ve spent there; but I promise you, the stories you can tell after spending a sleep-deprived weekend with your buddies riding bikes in a new city are better. Just like how having better stories makes you more interesting to girls at the bar or coworkers on a Monday, the same goes for the dude who has the potential to hook you up with wheels. BMX company owners and team managers were once young, active bike riders like yourself. You can relate to them and build a human connection if you have a captivating story to tell.
Filming
Let me start by saying there is nobody out there with a gun to your head forcing you to film or shoot photos of your bike riding. Some riders hate the feeling of being under pressure to land a hard trick or film an impressive clip. That is totally understandable and I recognize that even with outstanding talent, some people just don’t want to film. The reality of modern day BMX (and our culture at large) is that to make an impact on the landscape of BMX, you are going to have to produce some content. Without some kind of visual documentation of your tricks or ability, strangers on the internet don’t have much of a reason to care about you. The impetus and desire to film an edit, Instagram clips, or a webisode is there, yet aspiring pro riders come up empty handed. Riders who want to film a video but never do usually fall into two excuse categories: availability of a “good camera” and availability of a “real filmer”.
A section on the availability of a good camera would have looked immensely different 10-20 years ago. Audio/video technology has advanced so insanely far in the last few years that I am embarrassed to write about the excuse of “availability”. Between an iPhone and a GoPro, riders today have a better HD setup than Mike Manzoori did 10 years ago filming Etnies’s Grounded. Obviously it takes some level of knowledge to operate these devices, but the web is rich with filming tutorials and resources to help you. Look them up! And thank the skateboarding community for most of those, by the way. Riders in developing countries are making full edits that get onto TheComeUp using the resources they have available to them. They’re certainly not filming with HMCs and might not even be filming with an iPhone, but they make it work. Within photography, there is a saying that “the best camera is the one you have” and that rings true with BMX video production. Work with what you have and always work on improving.
The other excuse I hear riders use for not filming is “I don’t have anyone to film with” or “I don’t know how to edit.” Cue Dan Foley. When most riders hear Dan’s name, they instantly think of an amazing riding steeze and self-filmed videos, and with good cause. Dan is without a doubt one of the best self-filmers in the game. He is able to make really clean, well orchestrated edits with a simple camera setup (1 HMC and a GoPro if I’m not mistaken) and some forward thinking. Self filming is not easy to pull off well, and Dan went to school specifically for things like that, but what agitates me is when an up-and-coming rider does not try at all. From what I see, the majority of amateur self-filmed edits can be boring and uninteresting, but they serve the purpose of documenting the trick, and if you are hungry to get your pro-level riding out there for the world to see, that is all you need your edit to do.
Mike Mastroni is another example of how self-filming can bless you with a career if you aren’t afraid to work and wait. Mike grew up in Connecticut and spent his early days driving around New England, setting up a tripod, and putting in work to film a clip. Any older rider (read: older than 18 years old) knows exactly the situation too. After high school all your BMX friends fell off with girlfriend obligations, work, cars, or the BMX flame just extinguished. Mike was 19 and still just as pumped on BMX as ever so he took the duty of filming into his own hands. The work he put in contributed to an overall style and vibe of his early videos, which clearly got better with time as you can see from his progression in his early videos, OSS Football (2009), and The Finer Things (2014). These days, you cannot separate Mastroni’s name from creative filming and creative bike tricks, and you likely never would have heard of him had he not loved setting up the tripod and pointing it at himself. [6]
It may seem obvious why sponsors want to see constant content production from a rider, yet when I ask that question to the young riders in my scene, they stumble for an answer: “That’s just how BMX works” or “more videos get you more followers” is what I often hear. There is so much more to it than just maintaining the status quo or boosting your personal following.
Different sponsors want content for different purposes, but in general these reasons apply. As riders in a previous era, your sponsor wants you to be part of the overall progression of BMX and to document your efforts. The content you produce contributes to what BMX in this day and age looks like (Just like our fashion choices in high school, I’m sure we’ll all look back on 2016 someday and say “Gosh, can you remember that year we all decided to make vlogs?”). But that has always been what’s cool about BMX. As long as BMX has been around, the participants of our culture have been obsessed with documenting it. When you make your video, you are contributing a small piece to the overall progression of BMX, whether it’s a new trick, a unique style, or a new spot. I personally love watching a video from a crew of dudes in a place I didn’t previously know had BMX riders. I want to see how BMX riders adapt to the terrain in Vienna, Austria, Sudan, or Kuala Lumpur. I also love seeing how scenes across the country have adapted to their environments. For example, I love the efforts of Brant Moore and the Lip Lords out of Ohio, for showing that a 4ft quarter pipe (the best feature at their local prefab park) has endless lip trick possibilities limited only by one’s imagination. Brant’s crew might not be super well known, but his videos are expanding the lip trip vocabulary for the rest of BMX to learn
Filming as a pro bike rider also serves to provide content for social media and a presence in the current landscape of BMX. It is what core riders do not want to admit being a pro is: work.
A BMX rider in 2016 won’t buy from a company that doesn’t have a solid team. Through the riders they sponsor, a brand helps build its identity, and the videos produced by those riders give the individual rider an identity. When a rider releases an edit and brands it with their sponsor’s logo, uses their sponsor’s parts, or wears their t-shirt, that rider is advertising for that company. They have become a salesperson, and they are selling their sponsor’s image. A brand can have stylish, unbreakable products, but it doesn’t matter if the consumer isn’t down with the riders that brand supports. When a brand posts an Instaclip of one of their team riders, they are advertising that rider’s trust in the product and, bonus, if the rider is doing something progressive, that new trick was made possible by ____ Bike Co.
Be Financially Responsible, The Call to Action
Obviously traveling isn’t cheap, and camera equipment racks up costs quickly. So how is one expected to do these things if they want to get attention? First off, where there is a will, there is a way. Your big trip to Barcelona is the matter of you saving maybe $2,000, getting a passport, and taking 2 weeks off work. The goal when specified in detail, is not incredibly daunting. Remove self doubt and plan it out.
Second, quit spending money on stupid shit. This should not be news, but short term money is a finite resource. You cannot expect to spend hundreds of dollars per month on your 240, your vape mod, that good weed, nights drinking, shitty fast food, and have enough money saved at the end of the month for a plane ticket. This isn’t a financial management lecture, but ask yourself what you want more, enough gas money to get you to a different state, or $50 worth of dabs that week?
Third, take a look at your environment and look at structures in your life that make you spend money the way you do. Some areas of the world are expensive. As I write this, I’m sitting in the Silicon Valley in California, one of the most expensive regions in the US. There are not currently a ton of active riders here because BMX is predominantly a middle class sport, and to be middle class in the Silicon Valley, you need to work 80 hours per week. That’s not a lot of leeway to take 2 weeks off for a road trip when you could be making money. Contrast that with the other end of the spectrum in Phoenix, Arizona where I lived for 2 years of grad school. In Phoenix, it was easy to afford a 3-bedroom apartment with roommates while I was only working 20 hours per week. Some scenes are better at supporting the BMX lifestyle than others. Low cost of living locales like Albuquerque, central Florida, or Salt Lake City all have a wide variety of local riders due in part to cheaper rent. That’s not to say you should ditch your hometown and head to a low cost of living area, but instead you should recognize that a scene is a product of the location and the members of the community that work to make it what it is. That may mean taking initiative to throw jams, become the local filmer, or buy a van that can fit your crew.
This draws back to my main point for this article. Before anyone or any company will invest in you as a professional bike rider, you need to invest in yourself. Your actions need to speak louder than your words and demonstrate that you live the lifestyle of a pro instead of complaining how you do not. You need to give back to BMX before it gives you anything. If that means molding your career, house, relationships, food choices, or whatever else around your love of BMX, more power to you. Just remember that you began this activity because you love it. We owe BMX everything, and it owes us nothing.
- Patrick Kelly, August 2016
- [1] Brad Simms TCU TV.
- [2] FBM Documentary (2008)
- [3] BACO 11: Bits of Baco (2014)
- [4] Brian Kachinsky travel tips by Vital BMX
- [5] Vicente Candel / Ditch Matt TCU TV
- [6] Mike Mastroni TCU TV pt1
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