The Albion Issue 7, UK Edition.

16 Phil Dolan Discusses the Nose Manual

68 Chasing Some Kind of Little Thrill Garrett Reynolds

20 An Elephant In The Room BMX Big Air

86 Rolling With The Punches Geoff Slattery

26 Jimmy Levan Church Gaps and Broken Femurs

102 At Ease Scott Ditchburn

30 Colts: Torey Kish

118 Strays Photos With No Real Home

38 Diary Of A Madman Van Homan

128 Quitters James Brooks

54 Haro Remastered Bob Haro

134 Dwelling Portably Within The FBM Anti-Social Network

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Johnny ‘The Hot Spot’ Elia

Editor Daniel Benson benson@thealbion.cc

Associate Editor George Marshall george@thealbion.cc

Publisher Tim March tim@thealbion.cc

Associate Editor Steve Bancroft banners@thealbion.cc

Art Director Robert Loeber rob@thealbion.cc

Contributors Rhys Coren, Scott Marceau, Steve Crandall, Johann Chan, Tim Ryan and Adam Grandmaison.

Thanks Paul Heys, Ty Morrow, Tony Ennis, JJ Palmere, Stew Johnson, Uncle Matt, Chris Moeller, Jason Phelan, Amy Silvester, Uncle Micheal, Crumpet, Dub Jack, Mark Losey, Owain Clegg, Bob Scerbo, Steve Crandall, Eric Hennessey, Eric Venditti, Mark Noble, The Legion Of Zoom, Jordan and Dave in Savannah, Rose, Ruel Smith, Martin Luther King, Kenny Horton, Lattine, The Piss Buckets, Johnny ‘The Hot Spot’ Elia, Rob Ridge, James Cox, Rick-o-chet, Ian Morris, John Povah, The Sickness Cup and The Guy Who Punched Geoff.

Cover Artwork by Tim Ryan

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The Albion BMX Magazine is avalible at all good bikes shops in the UK. See thealbion.cc for more details. Logo and icons designed by Ross Teperek. This issue is typeset using the Plantin font family, designed by Frank Hinman Pierpont in 1913. Albion Grotesk was designed exclusively for this publication by Robert Loeber. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted in any form without premisson from the publisher. The publisher cannot accept responibilty for errors in articles, advertisments or unsolicated manuscripts. The opinions and words of authors do not necessarily represent those of the publisher.

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Artwork by Tim Ryan

Once Around the Sun

When I was in school, I remember learning briefly about Christopher Columbus and how he ‘found’ the Americas. Strange, I thought, considering people were already there when he turned up, with his boat full of disease ridden sailors and Catholic ways.

Columbus had in fact been looking for somewhere totally different and like a man of poor sight groping around in the dark for his glasses, he came upon those palatial shores much by chance. It’s one of those lessons in history that never quite washed with me. ‘He didn’t ‘find’ America!’ I thought, ‘Imagine if I walked into Russia and claimed to have ‘found’ a new land, renaming St. Petersburg as Liverpool and making the standard code of dress not a nice mink hat, but a tracksuit with the socks tucked in?!’ It’s just not cricket.

‘What the hell does this have to do with a BMX magazine,’ I hear the less imaginative of you say. Well, I guess the point I’m trying to make is that issue seven, the first of our second volume, will be the first one to travel across the ocean and be available in North America, much like it is here in the UK, via shops and subscribers. ‘But what does this mean for the magazine?!’ I hear the faithful cry. Not very much, as far as editorial goes. We never went out to ‘find’ America and in turn we don’t intend to change because of it.

The truth is, we’ve always been in America, from issue one onwards. Whilst our roots might rest firmly in English soil, our aspirations on what we wanted the magazine to be flew this little island right from the start, out into a world of interesting and thought provoking happenings within BMX and beyond.

There’s been a lot of talk about us going overseas, between ourselves and others, ‘will The Albion get to America?’ In retrospect, I suppose it can be put down to a figure of speech. ‘We’re already there! The Albion spends half its bloody life there!’ I think what people are really getting at is the availability, and that’s something - the only thing - that we’re changing drastically. It’s been a year since we started this, once around the sun we’ve been together.

This was always our goal, to grow and make our magazine - the finest one out there - available to the widest possible audience and as always, free of charge.

The Albion has always been about looking through the superficiality of the present age, about opening people’s eyes and offering a fresh perspective. Over the course of our first volume we’ve caused controversy and faced criticism: that has never been our intention, but at the same time it’s not been out of the blue either, after all, you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. It’s not that we’re anti-system, it’s the system that’s anti-us.

With his luck and blind ambition, I suppose you can draw comparisons between ourselves and Mr Columbus. We set out with a goal in mind, but that doesn’t mean we really know where we’re going. Where you’re going is determined by what you see, and what you see is determined by what you know. When that changes, everything changes. We’re learning all the time, and so our charts get updated all the time. Sailing out into unfamiliar waters? Not quite. We’re growing, taking off our water wings and embracing a country that we’re rarely out of whilst never forgetting where our anchor keeps us firmly grounded. - The Albion

Fascinating! Semmi, look at this! America is great indeed.

Imagine a country so free, one can throw glass on the streets!

— Eddie Murphy in Coming to America.

STOLENBMX.COM

photo: Bertie Buck

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PHIL DOLAN The Nose Manual Words by JOHANN CHAN Photography by DANIEL BENSON

I

remember when rolling a brakeless nose manual for a substantial distance was considered impossible. The limited re-correction position combined with the handlebar obscured bail option leaves little leaway. The sheer number of times someone would slam over the bars, before even coming close to mastering the balance point, left the trick almost completely outside consideration.

Previously, riders who performed nose manuals used a frontbrake to keep the back wheel up, a method which of course would eventually slow the rider to a stop. Those who rode brakeless were never able to maintain the balance point for long enough, a fact that kept the trick out of their reach for sometime.

Then, in 2001, English flatland maestro Phil Dolan somehow found a balance point for the brakeless front wheel manual.

Phil’s version was different from the early offerings, he somehow managed to roll for as long as he pleased without the aid of a brake, and in doing so added a trick which many had previously believed impossible into not only his own riding vocabulary, but into the collective psyche of all BMXers eager for a new challenge.

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Being responsible for an abundance of them within his riding career, Phil is no stranger to ‘game changer’ moments.

He first made a name for himself in the early ‘90s, riding with a fluency that would uniquely distinguish him from the other pros of that era. The speed of his switches and spinning tricks was remarkable: the Chainsaw and Phil’s version of the spinning Hitchhiker for example, would remain unmatched and untouched for many years.

Ask him about it now and he’ll argue it was all down to practice, never talent or natural ability, but of course there were many flatland pros who were well practiced at the time… Phil also invented the much copied Hitchhiker variation ‘Round The World’ and far too many switch variations to mention here. His artistry wasn’t free from recognition either, as he was the top UK contender in the X Games for many years, and also managed to notch up a European Championship win, on top of winning the coveted World Championships three times.

It took a bit of persuasion, but we managed to talk Phil into answering some questions on one of today’s most sought after tricks.

Phil Dolan

When did you first realise the brakeless nose manual was possible?

I knew it was possible because it was effectively a front wheel manual, and if it was possible on the back wheel, I knew it was possible on the front wheel. Once I learnt the pedal hang five, I knew that had to be the next step.

You must have thought you hit the jackpot when you got it - being the first person to do it.

I was pleased with it because it was progression.

I don’t know if I was the only person to do them.

Albert Retey did amazing nose manuals, I’ve seen him do three or four basketball courts, he had brakes but he got to a point where he was feathering so lightly he was rolling almost freely. Jay Miron did some amazing nose manuals with brakes up and down things, but Jerry Galley was the first person I saw doing a brakeless nose wheelie in the mid 90s, along a block at Southbank. It was way before I ever did it: he nose bonked a big block and pretty much nose wheeled it, it wasn’t a locked, recorrect your balance nose manual, but the premise was there and he pulled it. Jerry Galley was way ahead of his time.

Talk us through the sequence of events leading up to it?

I’d learnt brakeless pedal hang fives with James White, and then I learnt to pop into pedal hang fives brakeless with Ed Nussbaum in Los Angeles at the Long Beach parking lot. Once I learnt the pedal hang five, I knew the nose manual had to be the next step. I went back to London and learnt them on the roughest spot. It was so rough, Simon O’Brien, Aaron Benke and Nathan Penonzek refused to ride there.

What do you think about the nose manual being a fashionable trick amongst street riders today?

I think it’s great. BMX is about progression, and taking it to the streets was the next level. I’ve seen some great nose manuals from French street riders like Denes Katona, and George Manos has done nice backwards nose manuals. I’ve seen people doing way better nose manuals (referring to ledge nose manuals of Jan Heinin), where he bunnyhops and fucking nose manuals round the corner, it’s amazing. I fucking love it, the whole beauty of coming up with a new way of doing something, eventually it gets absorbed and taken to the next level. The first backflips were done, and then years later people are doing triple backflips and tailwhip backflips. There’s an incessant move for people to push BMX forward. If it stops progressing it might as well die.

A lot of people were hoping the nose manual would bridge the gap between flat and street.

It’s all BMX at the end of the day, the tailwhip hop and the tailwhip as a trick developed hand in hand, Joe Johnson’s double tailwhip airs, Bill Nitchz, they’re all roughly around the same sort of time.

You can turn round and say flatland and street are worlds apart, but at the end of the day they’re look-

ing at each other and you can see a lot of flatland tricks done in street and vice versa. I saw a guy doing no handed foot jams on street and I stuck that into my flatland. All the various disciplines of BMX can feed off each other.

You mentioned earlier that you and Jerry etc all used to ride together and do everything, ride ramps, flatland... Do you think it’s a shame how segregated the scenes are now?

I don’t think it’s as segregated as people think, the beauty of BMX is you have your polarized specialties; Moto Sasaki, Dominik Nekolny doing amazing flatland, then your street riders doing amazing street on all sorts of levels, but we’re doing the same sort of stuff, Hiro just dropped a mega spin tailwhip, landed straight on the peg without touching the tyre, and then people are doing hop whips on street, and others are doing new tailwhips on jumps, BMX is more specialized but there are still similar tricks and movements.

1.

Backwards Nose Manual, North London

“You can turn round and say flatland and street are worlds apart, but at the end of the day they’re always looking at each other” Do you think it’s a shame the bikes are different now, specific for different disciplines?

No, you don’t want to jump a double with a 18/19 inch top tube with your toes buzzing the front tyre.

I remember borrowing John Paul Rogers’ bike and going through a set of dirt jumps – it feels good to ride dirt on a longer bike, it feels better to ride flat on a rock hard, rigid bike, etc.

You dropped the nose manual in 2001, were you surprised it has taken so long for people to catch up?

Bill Nitschke did the tailwhip bunnyhop in 1990, it took at least another ten years before you started seeing people trying them regularly. It wasn’t until late 2000s that they became mainstream in BMX and now it’s insane. It takes time for tricks to filter through.

What tips would you give to people doing nose manuals?

Find your own balance point: I’ve seen lots of people do it in their own unique ways. Learn how The Nose Manual

17

to bail it by jumping over the front and letting the bike go in between your legs. I always try and have my head over the front axle, and do a very smooth movement up into the position. Try and keep the two wheels into the one wheel a smooth transition without jerkiness.

Your edit alongside Viki Gomez shows you doing a huge backwards nose manual standing on the rear pegs. Is it much harder on the pegs than on the pedals?

A lot harder. I was never happy with that nose manual, I was never satisfied with that one, not good enough, it needs to be at least 20–30 feet to be substantial.

“I saw a guy doing no handed foot jams on street and I stuck that into my flatland”

What’s the longest you’ve held a nose manual for?

26 parking spaces, in New Jersey, that’s a hell of a long nose wheelie, especially in America where the parking spaces are obese.

standing on the pegs), the ET (forwards nose manual, pedaling backwards), G-turns both ways (forwards nose manuals to backwards nose manuals, clockwise and anti-cockwise) as well as sticking them in the middle of long links which no one else can currently do.

A natural conclusion to this article would be to talk about where Phil could take the nose manual next. But, having conquered the trick a decade ago, he’s already covered many possibilities. Phil’s variants already include the long backwards (fakie nose manuals), the backwards rocket (fakie nose manuals

Phil may be humble about his involvement in making the nose manual a common trick, not only in flatland, but in street riding too, but as Phil mentioned earlier, flatland and street riding will continue to look at each other and things will always cross over. It’s all BMX, after all.

18

Phil Dolan

2.

Switch One Footed Nose Manual, North London

AN ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM The stagnant world of BMX Big Air

Words by STEVE BANCROFT 20

Painting by STEVE CRANDALL BMX Big Air

T

here’s an elephant in the room and someone needs to have a word with it. BMX Big Air is making us bike riders look like a bunch of fools and it’s about time we did something about it.

If you’re fortunate enough to be unfamiliar with the spectacle that is BMX Big Air then allow me to explain the basic concept: Take one fully developed male, add an energy drink logo or two, a full face helmet, body armour and a neck brace, hoist him high up into the sky, roll him down a precariously narrow roll-in and watch him get slung low and fast over a 50ft gap, then – whether he’s been lucky enough to land on his wheels or whether he’s now sliding along winded on his back – he has a 27ft vertical wall of Skatelite to negotiate.

If that description has conjured an image inline with something awesome like Evel Knievel: then try again, it’s nothing cool like that at all. Think more along the lines of a giant version of the children’s boardgame Mouse Trap crossed with a NASA Astronaut crossed with a bottle rocket.

I’m 31 years old, 6’4 tall and have a full beard; riding a BMX bike around the streets is hard enough for me already without the public’s perception of the sport based on ‘grown men in space suits stood waving on top of a tower-block-high launch pad before doing comedic crashes over a TV camera filled chasm’.

And it’s not just me who suffers from the negative consequences of Big Air being in the X Games and on TV; it’s BMX as a whole.

Last summer I had the misfortune of witnessing BMX Big Air at X Games 17 in Los Angeles. A tiny privileged elite represented BMX in what was nothing short of a slapstick pantomime. Over two thirds of all drop-ins resulted in a crash and no runs showed even an inkling of progression. In my opinion the event showcased BMX – to a global audience of millions – in a light that wasn’t particularly flattering. In fact, it illuminated us in a fashion that made us look like total wankers.

Joe public likes to see someone make a fool out of themselves, so to the couch potatoes who live in the 52 countries it was broadcast to, it probably went down really well. As humans, when we witness people failing we feel better about ourselves, it’s called the social comparison theory, and it’s why programmes like You’ve Been Framed and Jerry Springer and World’s Funniest Home Videos are amongst the most popular on television, and it’s most likely the only reason why anyone enjoys watching Big Air. The X Games is under no contracted obligation to show BMX in the best possible light or to ensure its progression and future. However, from the riders, to the viewers, to the TV companies and the advertisers: surely that goal is in the best possible interests of all parties?

In my eyes, it would pay for everyone if events like X Games

encouraged kids to build thriving scenes and progress the sport rather than promoting such a stagnant and elitist event.

Just like the big death defying jumps of FMX and the high speeds of Rally, X Games likes the spectacle of Big Air for how easy it is (in principal) to commercialise, but the irony of it is, at no point in the 2011 Big Air finals did any rider air any higher above the coping than Jamie Bestwick did on the regular vert ramp at the same event. If they really have to keep running the event, then they should at least change the name to the more accurate ‘Big Ramp’ rather than ‘Big Air’.

The farcical event of Big Air is only in the X Games for its ‘Death Factor Value’ or DFV as I refer to it in conversation when propped up against the fruity down the pub. Dirt didn’t last in the X Games because, to a typical TV viewer, it was made to look like child’s play when held in the same arena as FMX (the DFV of our jumps was dwarfed by that of the 80ft+ motorbike jumps) so some bright spark figured that if they could propel a pushbike over a similar sized jump, that would match the DFV of FMX and subsequently legitimise this new awkward form of BMX jumping being in the X Games.

Using a 20” wheeled bicycle to compete with a 250cc twostroke motocross bike is a ludicrous notion. The petrolpowered machines weigh 250lb and make over 30ft-pound of torque and 50 horsepower on the back wheel, this makes jumping gaps of 90ft+ feasible even with a severely limited run up. The men on these machines throw down crazy runs all day long, the gaps are bigger, the riders are more consistent and the coveted ‘X Games Death Factor Value’ is higher. A BMX on the other hand needs a roll-in roughly as tall as the jump is long to muster up the momentum to clear the gap, the mellow take off sends the rider forward rather than up and the relatively fickle stability of a 25lb bike makes for a sketchy white knuckle ride. The rider then has to be loaded onto a golf cart before being hoisted to the top of the roll-in by in a lift. It’s just not cricket.

And even when – by some stroke of sheer luck – one of the astronauts actually lands rubber side down, more often that not it’s just a bigger version of a trick that’s been done thousands of times before on regular sized ramps. Apart from double front flips there has been virtually zero progression in Mega Ramp over the six years it has been running.

To outline the geologically slow rate of progression in Big Air, here are the runs and results of the most prominent and decorated Big Air advocates, Chad Kagy and Kevin Robinson, since the event was introduced. As you can see, Chad did a flipwhip to flairwhip six years ago and at the latest X Games he placed 3rd with the same run, then he crashed and broke his leg trying the exact same run again. These results go beyond merely highlighting the lack of progression in Big Air, in real terms, they actually constitute a regression in the discipline.

An Elephant In The Room

21

Chad Year

Gap

Quarter Pipe

Position

2006

Flip double whip

Double whip

2nd

2008

Flipwhip

Flairwhip

1st

2009

Flipwhip

Flair

2nd

2010

Flipwhip

Flairwhip

1st

2011

Flipwhip

Flairwhip

3rd

And when we look at Mr Robinson’s results, the findings really drive home just how void of progression the Big Air event has been. Woooooooowww! BMX Big Air, keeping BMX stagnant since 2006! How Xtreme.

Kevin Year

Gap

Quarter Pipe

2006

No handed flip

No handed flair

1st

2007

No handed flip

No handed flair

1st

2008

No handed 360

No handed 540

3rd

2009

No handed flip

No handed flair

1st

This elitist event is stuck in a warp of time and progression with no sign of breaking out of it anytime soon. With their impossible extravagance and exclusivity, events like Big Air put up barriers where there needn’t be any. If the resulting show were worthwhile I’d have no problem. If the show was so jaw-dropping and the progress so unbridled, then I’d be all for it. But it’s not, the show is depressing and boring and embarrassing: a big depressing, boring, embarrassing barrier slap bang in front of BMX. Dirt jumping is a fundamental building block at the very foundation of our sport, and to see such an integral part of BMX’s heritage omitted from the most high profile and far-reaching event involving the sport is nothing short of a travesty. And it’s an injustice amplified by the joke that has seemingly replaced it. (It wasn’t a direct replacement as for one year, 2006, Big Air and Dirt both ran, but the next year Dirt was dropped and Big Air remained, so it’s as good as.)

Building and riding dirt jumps is accessible to anyone with a bike and a spade, whilst riding a Mega Ramp is reserved for an exclusive few who have access to the necessary extravagant resources. If the people involved really care for the future of our sport, then neglecting to promote such an important aspect of BMX is a major error of judgment.

If Dirt is not risky enough or enough of a spectacle when held in the same arena as FMX, then run BMX Dirt in a different arena! Don’t fucking construct a monstrosity of scaffolding and Skatelite and pretend that it’s a viable solution. To construct an event reliant on a lowest common denominator factor like ‘Social Comparison’ and ‘Potential Of Death’ is an insult to BMX’s fortes. Flow, style, versatility and creativity are some of BMX’s strongest virtues – all of which can be showcased on a well-considered course, and if you’re stuck

22

Position

for ideas, just look at Red Bull events like Empire of Dirt and Dirt Pipe, both awesome and both based around dirt.

I would like to see the people at X Games come to their senses and scrap Big Air and reintroduce dirt riding. Promoting Dirt to the masses will encourage BMX to grow in a positive direction. It will help galvanise dirt and trails to a young global audience as the credible and historic discipline that it is. It would motivate talented individuals to push themselves and inspire a new generation of Mike Aitkens, Brian Fosters and Chris Doyles. It would expose dependable and proven BMX brands to a wider audience (not just speaker companies and energy drinks and Harley Davidson motorcycles), in turn keeping money within the sport and opening the door to yet more opportunities.

And from my perspective, most importantly, it would mean there are more people digging, maintaining and riding trails around the world... more people getting outside and engaging with their hands, friends and environments. More people riding bikes, not more people sat on the couch watching people fall over on TV. I know X Games only exists to make money, I understand fully that what is best for BMX isn’t always what’s going to make the most money for the suits behind it, and I grasp in their entirety the self interested reasons why the current participants lobby to keep Big Air in the games. But what I don’t understand is how anyone in their right mind could have watched Big Air in Los Angeles last summer and deemed it to be positive for our sport.

There is an elephant in our room and it’s about time we showed it the door.

BMX Big Air

JIMMY LEVAN Words by RHYS COREN

On one rainy Saturday, with a planned day of riding on hold, I remember showing my friends Road Fools One for the first time.

I was around 15 or so and had borrowed it from some older BMXers in my town. With laundry under one arm, my mum came into the living room and pointed at the television. On it was a man about to fire himself down a giant rail in a leopard print shirt.

“He looks like trouble,” she said. Jimmy Levan is trouble, she was right. But, that is why he became an instant hero in my eyes.

With one of the greatest, most seminal gaps in BMX history under his belt, an ability to come back from injury in a similar way to Detroit Police Officer Alex James Murphy, a silver tongue, a saucy wardrobe, his own bike company and a penchant for rock ‘n’ roll, there’s no escaping the fact he was going to be a legend.

The Albion: Yo… Jimmy: Yo... Wait a sec... I am on my laptop in a god-damned coffee shop and I feel stupid talking into it. Let me go outside...

That sounds better than my weekend.

Yeah, it was good.

Okay.

There we go. How’s that?

It looks sunny.

It is. Oh man... I’m an old man... I’m more pens and paper. I don’t get this Skype shit.

You need to master the Skype, dude... after this you’ll know how to lure young girls to come online and get naked!

Shit! Yeah, this Canadian chick was telling me all about that.

It’s what Skype is really for. So, how’s it going?

All good. Just hobbling around. Been back walking this last week so i’m really happy.

So what’s been happening?

Well the weekend just gone was Paddy’s Day. Went to go and see Head Cat, Lemmy’s other band – that was fucking rad – and then went out to the Rainbow Bar in Hollywood to meet Caleb Ruecker who was in town doing some modeling.

Yeah?

Yeah man, and he was with this chick, and me and [Ryan] Metro were all like, “Yeah, he’s got some hot older chick who 26

runs a clothing company or something...” and it turned out to be the tall super hot chick from Nashville Pussy.

So what happened to your hip? How come you’re hobbling about?

I was working on one of those Built to Shred shows and they had this big wave ramp thing. I had it fine the first time and did this X-up 360 over it. Then they were like, “The cameras weren’t ready, dude... do it again!” So I did it again, but cased a little bit, which made me slip the pedal a little bit. So they wanted me to do it one more time. Then the wind picked up, I overshot the whole thing on that last go and fell about 12 feet right to my hip and broke my fucking ass.

Oh fuck...

I know, I broke my ass in half dude! Right where the cup is, where the femur goes up into the hip, I broke all of that.

What’s it like when you take a shit? [laughs] I kind of lean to the left!

[Laughs] How much did it hurt compared to other slams you’ve had?

It was worse than when I got ran over by a car and lost my femur. That got shattered into eight pieces and shot out the side of my leg. I felt this pain more than I felt that one.

Jimmy Levan

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What sort of pain-killers were you on?

They were giving me hydrocodone and shit like that.

Opiates! Shit! So how old are you now? And you’re still doing stupid stuff like this that can hurt so much!?

I’m an old man now. I hit 38 a few weeks ago. I’m getting up there. That’s only two fucking years away from being 40, dude! BUT, I go riding with Ron Wilkerson and he’s 46 and still shredding. Ten foot airs on vert!

"Once I came back to life, I had lost my sense of smell completely" It’s all relative then? Just make sure you hang out with older riders?

Yeah, exactly, that shit’s inspiring, you know?

So, I sound a bit like a broken record... banging on about 1998 and Road Fools, but did you have any idea what was going on at the time? How seminal it would be, or what new extremes you would push street riding?

We were just a group of friends going out on a road trip.

Some of us knew each other well, some of us were new friends. It was one of my first times hanging with Sandy Carson and that trip turned us into tight friends for sure. I think seeing a group of people doing something new... and a road trip film with footage other than just riding... and everyone having a blast is the main standard set. We were just going to go on a trip, just a few of us, then more and more people decided to join...

It was quite spontaneous? Just friends?

Exactly.

How bad were Sandy’s farts on that first trip? [laughs] How come our vegan and vegetarian friends tell us how gross our diet is, but their farts are the worst? I can hang out with my vegan friends more these days due to my last big head injury / coma in the Fall of 2007. Once I came back to life, I had lost my sense of smell completely!

I always tell chicks not to play a trick on me and make me give them oral sex the day the period is over!... I wouldn’t know any better! [laughs] Shit! Actually, which Road Fools was best for picking up chicks?

Well I was on Road Fools one and two... and... you know... it’s kind of like Vegas, man. What goes on in Road Fools stays in Road Fools. But there was this tall, hot, curvy chick named Colette from Road Fools One. She’s a real cool chick and we’re still friends. I still hang out with her from time to time.

Are there any parts of Road Fools you just can’t remember because you were just too drunk?

Only from about two in the morning until about five in the morning.

28

[laughs] Man, Road Fools was part of my education into riding. It was about a fun time, getting drunk together, sessioning stuff...

Yeah, we’d just hang out, see stuff, stop the van, have a few beers. It’s like that whenever I have gone to film stuff. We went on a lot of trips for Huffy when I rode for them, me and Leland [Thurman] and stuff. Or when I rode for S&M. We’d just load up a car and drive. I was trying to explain this to [Chris] Rye and took him and Leland to South Carolina, he was just sat in the back seat on his laptop with his headphones on. Me and Leland were like, “What the fuck!?

We’re on a road trip together!” So we just bought a big carton of cigarettes, rolled the windows up and just started pissing him off by filling the car with smoke. We were on a road trip, motherfucker, C’MON! What about your wardrobe for Road Fools One? Well, yeah, that’s just all my own shit. Actually, I still get shit for that all the time. It was just what was in my backpack at the time. I was out a couple of nights back and someone called me out and realised I had the long sleeve leopard print shirt on from Road Fools! They were like, “Is that the shirt!!??”

[Laughs] It is still alive? You should auction that off!

Yeah, maybe help pay my damned hospital bills.

Leopard print or tiger print?

Leopard print... or zebra on almost anything!

I bet BMX has landed you in quite a few strange scenarios when you’ve been drunk? [laughs] Too many to name, but seeing as The Albion interviews are always a bit more filthy than other BMX mags, I’ll spit a funny one out. I met these chicks in Seattle a handful of years back... They came over, flirting with me and I was just like... ‘okay, cool.’ The three of us started hooking up more times and it became a little once a week thing for a while. I later found out they were a lil’ lesbian couple and they had a rule for themselves... neither of them was allowed to hook up with me solo... only threesomes. No complaints here!

None! Okay, so have any of your slams stood out above the others? You’ve had some BIG crashes.

Yeah, the brick transition bank gap in Germany on an Odyssey trip, years back. I had already done it straight that day and already done a turndown over it a year before and was just doing it again to warm up, but then I clipped the rail with my back wheel and got tossed to my head on the bricks, way far down the bank. I woke up in a hospital with doctors looking at me speaking German and me not knowing shit.

Scheisse!! But you pulled the Church Gap. Did you have your own poster of you doing that? Is that allowed?

I had the two page spread and framed it. I’m so stoked on that spot, and that time... and making it happen. I don’t care if it makes me seem uncool, I never claimed to be.

I think you’re cool. I’d have multiple copies of it blown up and framed all over the house. Did you get a boner part way through that gap, though?

I was stoked as shit once I realised I wasn’t going to case... so I guess yeah, I got a mental boner! Seriously though, since then, Austin has been like a second home to me. Thanks to Tina and Tom for all the money they raised for me during my medical bills.

Jimmy Levan

COLTS

Words by SCOTT MARCEAU and ADAM GRANDMAISON Photography by SCOTT MARCEAU

It’s understandable if you’ve never heard of Torey Kish. He isn’t putting out monthly web videos, he’s not entering contests and he’s not necessarily pushing the boundaries of the sport. He is, on the other hand, filming extraordinary DVD parts (ALYK Still Here) with a solid and modern style. He doesn’t care much for competition and has a strong distaste for BMX politics. He rides for the joy of it, with or without a camera present. Torey is always down just to pedal in search of some new adventure, even when there is no apparent destination. He recognises that nothing comes for free and hard work pays off. Nationally ranked fifth in the NBL at age twelve, Torey embodies the perseverance required in this industry to stay afloat. If fame and fortune were what he is after, he would have quit a decade ago. Even if, for some reason, these are the last photographs of Torey to be published, don’t think for a second that he has stopped riding. Just know he’s still out there on his bike having a good time.

— SCOTT MARCEAU

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1.

Wallride, The Bronx.

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You probably have varying states of facial hair. Sometimes you’ll be clean-shaven. Then a few days later you’ll have a millimeter or so of stubble poking up. A week or so later you’ll have something resembling what they call a ‘beard’. Regardless of how often you shave, your facial hair is probably in a constant state of flux. I’m convinced this isn’t the case with Torey. He has had the exact same amount of facial hair for the entire time I’ve known him. I’m not sure how he maintains this pristine standard of beardom, but he does. What he’s hiding behind that beard, we may never know.

You have a Facebook. Torey doesn’t. He doesn’t have a Twitter, an Instagram, a Myspace or a blog either. Despite what his facial hair would have you think, he doesn’t have a Tumblr. He has a BMX Board account (with a 2001 join date), if that counts for anything. I don’t think I ever got the whole story on why he abstains from all forms of social networking, choosing to leave almost no online footprint aside from his seldom-updated Toreykish.com. Over 50% of Americans have Facebook, and I’m sure that 50% skews heavily towards people under the age of 30. But despite the fact that all his friends have Facebook, Torey Kish doesn’t.

You talk about sex with your friends. At least a little bit. We all do. Well at least everyone I know. If you hook up with a girl, chances are within the next 24 hours you’re going to end up giving your friend a vivid description of the night’s events. Not Torey. He won’t tell you shit. He will listen to his friends talk about their exploits and he’ll even occasionally offer his own insights, but only in a very general sense, careful to keep all details obscured. Torey is the kind of guy you want banging your sister. Like Chris Doyle with a freecoaster and a face full of chin-pubes.

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Torey Kish

2.

Ice To Smith To Hard 180, Brooklyn.

3.

Pegs To Hop over, The Bronx.

Colts

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4.

Rail hop, The Bronx.

Despite these profound differences between you and Torey, you probably have some things in common with him. For example, if you’re reading this you probably ride BMX bikes. Torey does that too. His riding is distinctly ‘less is more’. His Still Here section is the kind of blue-collar street-riding that could have come out five years ago or five years in the future and it would be equally as adored as it is today.

The emphasis on spots combined with Torey’s naturally flawless style make the actual tricks Torey does the least important part of the equation when describing why his riding is so compelling. I like to think that you can tell a lot about a person based on their riding and I can’t think of a rider who better exemplifies this than Torey and his riding; simple, strong, honest and well composed.

— ADAM GRANDMAISON

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Torey Kish

WELCOME TO THE TEAM DYLAN STARK UK: WWW.CYCLINGSPORTSGROUP.CO.UK | US: WWW.SEATTLEBIKESUPPLY.COM |

FACEBOOK.COM/WETHEPEOPLEBIKECO | WWW.WETHEPEOPLEBMX.DE

RIDER: DYLAN STARK | PHOTO: JEREMY PAVIA

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Five months and a mere handful of emails later, I’m flying 30,000ft above a frozen East Coast of America on my way to meet John Vandever Homan III, aka Van Homan, the man who revolutionised street riding at the age of 19, an icon of BMX, a decade long idol of mine, but also a complete stranger. I think back to Stew’s description and to the man I’ll be spending the next two weeks with. I know very few riders who are even married, let alone any that have just gone through a divorce compounded by a severe brain injury.

I was in unknown territory. I began to doubt this as ‘the perfect time.’

John Vandever Homan III

“Now’s the perfect time,” filmer Stew Johnson told me from his editing chair in October last year. “He’s just coming out of a divorce and finally getting over his head injury. The guy’s 32 and the stuff he’s doing right now is as big if not bigger than he’s ever done.

He’s got shit to say as well.”

I begin to feel anxious as questions rattle my jet-lagged mind. Will the Van Homan I’m about to meet be the same lighthearted laughing joker I’d seen on Props Road Fools videos?

Or was I going to get to know one of my lifelong idols at their lowest point? What was it that made the boy from a small town in the state of New Jersey into Van Homan? What is it in him, even to this day at the age of 32, that drives him to risk a rendezvous with the grim reaper for the sake of a six-second video clip or a single photograph? What happened to Little Devil? Where’s Garrett Byrnes? Will he mention his falling out with Robbie Morales? And if so, will Robbie issue a reward for my head after we go to print?

"The true test of a man is how he handles hard times"

Words and Photography by GEORGE MARSHALL

39

I

land, heave my bike from the carrousel and questions continue to roll. “Van fucking Homan,” I say quietly shaking my head as I sit shivering alone in the arrivals hall of Philadelphia airport. It’s 2am on a cold Saturday night in February. A freezing wind blows on the other side of the automatic doors I’m staring at expectantly. Alone, I wait to be picked up by the man himself, like a nervous footballer on Cup Final day, knowingly on the verge of an opportunity that I’ll always look back on with judgment.

I wait riddled with uncertainty and smugness.

1.

No Foot Cancan, Austin TX.

“Albion?… Albion magazine?” An unfamiliar voice calls from the terminal entrance. I raise my hand to a pint sized man with stubble, a backwards cap and a black leather jacket. “Hey I’m Cody, Van’s with the truck outside.” He says smiling in husky voice, his breath ridden with stale booze.

Cody helps me with my bags to the bitter cold outside. There Van stands in a plain zip-up hoody at the back of a long pickup truck with a cab on the back, tightening up a pair of mole grips to secure a broken support for the tailgate. I chuck my bags into the back of the truck, the carpet floor matted with dog hair. Our greeting is brief, just a shake and nod. I climb into the back of the passenger cab of the 2004 Chevy, its wheel arches covered in frozen mud and dried white salt. Veteran rider Leigh Ramsdell is sitting in the opposing corner on the dark rear seats in a huddled ball of clothing in a futile attempt to keep warm. “Sorry it’s cold, damn heaters ain’t working, are you tired?” Van shouts back.

We pull up at a Wawa’s gas station for Cody to buy cigarettes. As we wait Van leans forward from the driver’s seat and unapologetically passes wind loudly. “Holy shit!” exclaims Leigh in disgust, still shivering and unappreciative of Van’s hot air. Cody returns, the opening of the passenger door and a cold draft is a sure relief from Van’s flatulence for Leigh and I. It stank, but it cemented my early impression of Van as a no-nonsense, down to earth guy who wears a beanie and zip up hoody on a Saturday night out to play poker with old friends, has a short low maintenance hair cut and drives a rugged truck – at face value you’d say he’s a man’s man.

A Blue Collar Town I awake the next morning in a large living room on a vintage couch to the sound of Van and Leigh laughing outside by the window. The two old friends sit side by side on rusting white metal rocking chairs, aiming air guns towards the snow-covered garden.

A line up of Natural Ice beer cans ripped apart from straight shots stand on a picnic bench barely 15ft away. I go to join them.

“Here – take a go, she’s loaded and ready, aim high.”

Leigh says, handing me a rifle. After the last beer can is on the ground we drive to a diner before dropping off Leigh at the airport. “I only came for a short trip to see Van, I haven’t seen him in a while and my wife told me I should check up on him,” Leigh explains to me. From the truck window I get my first look in daylight of Van’s Pennsville home in New Jersey, a small working community on the banks of the

40

industrialised Delaware River. Vast container ships and oil tankers roll past the town and under the vast iron structure that is the Delaware Memorial Bridge, it dominates the skyline beside water towers, smoking chimneys of factories and oil refineries in the distance. Pennsville is little more than a single main road with some local businesses surrounded by boggy wetlands. Few buildings are over two floors tall, a faded video shop is open doing business, the cinema has closed down, Fornaro’s liquor store’s historic neon sign disappointingly doesn’t work… Pennsville has character.

“It’s a blue-collar town – it was built to house the workers in the factories. The next town along is Salem. The industry there has declined and is not thriving like it once was – it’s like the American dream failed in Salem.” Van tells me as we drive to his favourite diner down a road in Salem that looks like it was once a grand street of brick and wooden buildings, but is now partly derelict with many grand houses abandoned, boarded up and left to rot.

The restaurant is an original classic American chrome diner, imitated the world over. The food is cheap, the jukebox is out of order and the clientele have grey hair. “I had this plan to fuck with you while you here. I was going to only drink and eat my cereal from NORA Cups,” Van admits as we wait for our food. “Joking aside, you’ve come at an interesting point in my life. I’m at a bit of a crossroads right now, after I got divorced last year.You’ve come at a shit time for the weather though. Until it clears up, you’ll get to know my home life I suppose.”

The Piss Heart Van owns a respectable house that he shares with his large dog Hazel and rider and old friend Cody Jennings who moved in two months ago. The house is set back from the main road in a quiet neighbourhood where few lock their doors. His home is clean and organised. Tasteful Danish vintage furniture fills the large living room and in the entrance hall rests a grand pool table. A cluster of X Games medals look discarded on the side and there is a wall of 12 framed magazine covers by the kitchen.

The teak coffee table, a newly fitted contemporary bathroom and no dishes in the sink all suggest a respectable domestic household. However I wouldn’t describe Van’s life as ‘settled down’ just yet. Each morning, a new mystery would gently unfold. A full roll of toilet paper submerged in a toilet, the disappearance of batteries for the TV remote would all be later explained as Cody woke up. He admitted the toilet paper incident but couldn’t explain it, and the batteries had been taken to operate a dildo in the early hours. The morning after Valentine’s Day was no exception. Van awoke to find Cody with a girl, also named Cody, necking shots of Tequila at 10am, both completely naked in his kitchen.

“I found her on Facebook. I’ve always wanted to date another Cody. I told her I’m a professional metal detector and that I bought this house with the shit I found. But I pissed the bed and blamed it

John Vandever Homan III

Diary Of A Madman

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42

John Vandever Homan III

2.

Access Barspin To Dog Kennel Manual, Austin TX.

Diary Of A Madman

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3.

Curved Wall Ride To Down Side Tailwhip, Austin TX.

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John Vandever Homan III

on her. She didn’t mind, we just slept in it – she’s a real Cody,” Cody tells me unashamedly and thankfully now dressed, he then leads me to his bedroom to show me his fine work, a piss stain in the perfect shape of a love heart on a single mattress on the floor.

“I pissed a loved heart for her man. How fucking romantic is that? She’s the one,” Cody boasted to me.

The Gambler On one of the evenings during my stay, Van took me to witness the source of Cody’s drinking. “I rarely go to this bar, it’s not part of my normal routine or anything. I just want you to experience the place – it’s true Pennsville,” he tells me in earnest as we drive to this bar he seems keen to disassociate himself from.

My curiosity is now peaking. We park up in unkempt gravel car park outside what looks like a small temporary building, little more than a wooden bungalow with very few windows. We pass some smokers by the doorway who greet Van, who acknowledges the doorman and we enter.

A welcoming warm smell of liquor blows from within. With one foot still outside a DJ beside the door looks up at us, “It’s Van, The Man, Hoooooman!”

Announces the DJ over the speakers as if to be announcing the entry of a boxer to a home crowd.

“Hey Van, I’ll get your song right up,” he shouts into Van’s ear over the music with his hand covering the microphone. “Yeah, I suppose I do come here a fair bit,” Van admits to me and to himself.

The bar is small and dark, lit up only by glowing neon lights promoting cheap American beer hanging from the walls and low ceiling. The Christmas decorations are still up. The booze is cheap. Everyone is drunk. Tonight is karaoke night and Van is next up to sing ‘his song’ – Kenny Roger’s 1978 country classic, The Gambler.

After his number’s up we sit at the bar, take in the scene and discuss daily life in Pennsville. Working men wearing baseball caps and Dickies outdoor coats sit round the square bar wiping their thick moustaches between sips of weak beer catching an eyeful of the fiery barmaid. It’s not busy, but from the amount of yelling and necking of shots it feels like New Year’s Eve 1999, or ’89 for what it’s worth.

Only the brown leather mobile phone holsters on everyone’s belts remind me that Reagan is no longer president. It’s a straight up honest dive bar. “It sounds bad to say, but it’s amazing having this part of my life, but I wouldn’t want this to be my life.”

Van says discretely before we’re interrupted.

“Hey English boy! Can the girls back home do this?” The barmaid shouts and winks at me through her provocative secretary specs and flexes each of her breasts up and down in time to a painful performance of Dolly Parton’s classic Jolene, each breast larger than my mildly embarrassed head. “Gotta love big women,” a big, salt of the earth looking man says to me out of the blue. “Shade in the summer, warmth in the winter and you know they can cook from the size of them,” he continues in a thick New Jersey accent. “I’d like to introduce you to my uncle Matt,” Van says, and the man shakes my hand with

a firm grip. Van and his uncle go into a long conversation, I cannot hear and my jet lag takes hold.

I sit back on the bar stool, open my mouth with my shoulders back and yawn. Still yawning with my eyes shut, I feel a large coarse skinned finger repeatedly jab at my tongue. “We’ll have no yawning in this bar son,” Van’s uncle says to me removing his finger from my mouth. He orders two whiskeys, one for himself and one to wake me up. I tell him why I’m here and we get talking about Van as he leaves the bar to sing a duet with Cody.

"If Van said, ‘Dad I want to ride my bike off this cliff because I think I can make it to the other side’, his dad would have took him there"

“Van Homan would not be the man he is today without the support of his father,” Van’s uncle tells me nodding his head in admiration. “His father would drive him 3,000 miles for a race or jump contest. He supported him in everything in did and the kid had talent. His dad took him everywhere and that’s the truth. If Van said, ‘Dad I want to ride my bike off this cliff because I think I can make it to the other side’, his dad would have took him there.

Van looks at stuff where you could get killed and thinks ‘I can do that.’ I’ve got a picture of Van when he was at Salem Community College jumping from one building to another. If you eat it you’re gonna die. If someone offered me $10,000 dollars to jump the gap I’d say ‘Fuuuuck you’. One time we were driving on the freeway in my buddy’s old Ford station wagon and we ran out of beer. I crawled out onto the luggage rack and jumped into the back of a moving pick up truck driving next to us because they had the beer. I threw the beer over and climbed back through the window. I’ve done crazy shit like that, but I wouldn’t try the shit Van does. Having skill and talent is a big part, but it’s all about balls and Van Homan has balls the size of grapefruit,” Van’s uncle tells me, and orders another round of shots.

The night ends with 51-year-old uncle Matt moshing to Rage Against The Machine, igniting the room into a drunken frenzy, the heavyset barmaid leaps up on top of the bar gyrating and wobbling as Cody stuffs her low cut top with one dollar bills. Van sits back laughing, still sober and enjoying the moment.

I now understood Pennsville.

John Vandever Junior Over the coming days the weather clears and during one of our journeys over the river to Philadelphia I mention his uncle’s words regarding the support of his father, John Vandever Junior. “My parents were very supportive of BMX. So many people like to paint the picture of being an underdog, but for me it wasn’t like that. In high school I didn’t have friends or enemies. My Dad got behind BMX and he took me to all the races. He was a good wrestler and a football player. I chose to ride bikes and he Diary Of A Madman

45

4.

Rail Manual To Barspin, Pennsville NJ.

46

John Vandever Homan III

supported that. I think a lot people see that support as a jock mentality, but he taught me a lot of life lessons through riding. He taught me to work hard, to pedal through the finish line at a race, and that it’s okay to lose but it’s not okay to not give it your all. Those lessons have helped me in life in general.”

Hearing his words I think back to a very early home movie of Van as a child running with his bike to the finish line after his chain had fallen off during a race. It was a determined display of fire in his heart that would surface again later in his videos. During his formative years traveling to races with his father, Van had a second person at his side, a rider often described as one the most stylish of all time and a prerequisite to the likes of Mike Aitken and Chase Hawk – that man was Garrett Byrnes. “In the evenings I rode alone, and at weekends I would travel to ride with Garrett. We rode everything, ramp, street and we dug trails. Slowly I began get into dirt jumping more.”

Looking up to the likes of East Coast trails legends Kris Bennett and Brian Foster it wasn’t long until Van began to look on beyond racing. “At first I was known as a dirt contest kid. My first comp was the 1998 Christmas Classic, I came fifth and afterwards I was asked to ride for Schwinn. I like to think my racing and trails background has influenced my street riding. I’m not afraid to pedal and jump stuff when the situation arises. I’m not afraid of speed, and I like to think that comes from my racing background. I love riding trails and parks just as much as street, but street is where I push myself the hardest and the video parts reflect that.”

The Devil At 19 it was time for Van to leave his childhood home of Pennsville and step out on his own from his parents’ support. “The summer after that first Christmas Classic contest I moved to Chester, PA. I lived with Derek Adams, Trey Lampe and Mike Clark. There were always people like Josh Stricker and Kris Bennett coming and going. That was during the era we filmed Criminal Mischief with Derek – it was our baby.”

Surrounded by an ever-changing band of likeminded peers, Van was a centrepiece of a progressive East Coast BMX scene. It was an unruly community bound by a collective identity – the DIY t-shirt company Little Devil. It was a time that was documented on film perfectly by the Little Devil masterpiece, Criminal Mischief. With his father no longer at his side encouraging him to pedal through the finish line, the values of hard work traveled with him, as Stew Johnson explains, “Criminal Mischief was the first BMX video where people really went out and purposely filmed, before people didn’t take it so seriously. Van worked, worked and worked to make that the best video part possible. He didn’t want to put out anything less than 100% of what he was capable of.”

The hard work paid off. Criminal Mischief set a new benchmark for BMX videos, significantly raising Diary Of A Madman

the quality of riding in videos and none more so than Van’s section. Never has a video part been so progressive, ahead of the time and influential. The section is well rounded with trails, ramp and pool riding, but it was the street riding that inspired, shocked and downright scared people into a pattern of rewinding over and over. Taking inspiration from Taj Mihelich and Joe Rich, Van took street riding into new and dangerous territory. Never had anyone put their neck on the line to that extent before. That level of physical danger and 100% commitment was unseen before and is rarely seen to this day, over a decade on.

“I definitely wanted to make the best video part I could. That was a conscious effort. I didn’t realise the impact it would have. I think it’s going to be difficult for something to have that big of an impact again, and not because of what I did, but because the way BMX media is now as a whole, it’s different. There’s so much media out there it’s flooded, it’ll be hard for anyone’s section to have such an impact again.”

The Monster Criminal Mischief resonated with riders across the world. It made Van Homan a symbol of inspiration for a generation, just as the Sex Pistols had been my father’s. Built largely on the appeal of Van and Garrett Byrnes, Little Devil – the small time DIY company drenched in beer and firework burns – was about to transform into one of the popular brands of the early 2000s. At owner Derek Adam’s side, Van witnessed first hand how Little Devil became a big monster.

“Once Criminal Mischief came out everything was starting to blow up with Little Devil. But Derek was a bike rider not a businessman. Little Devil grew into this monster he wasn’t ready for. We were kids trying to help Derek run a global business. Instead of organizing the business we were building ramps and living the dream. The business kept growing and Derek set everything up in a way that anticipated continued growth. The bigger the monster got, the more money came in and more money went out. There were huge overheads and employees that were counting on Derek. Suddenly it was spending more than it was making. Derek couldn’t change the infrastructure overnight. It was sad to see the Devil die, but it’s good to see Derek come through all of that and now he’s got his life and business back into a manageable place where he’s finally happy. Bigger is not always better.”

Red Carpet Van’s part in Criminal Mischief earned him applause not only from BMX community but also from America’s surgically enhanced, celebrity elite.

Life for the young man from a blue-collar town on the banks of the Delaware river was about to change.

“The year after Criminal Mischief came out I earned almost a hundred grand. Everything in my life started going crazy. I was nominated for the ESPN Action Sports and Music Awards, for BMX Freestyler Of The Year 2002. The nominees were me, Dave 47

Mirra, Ryan Nyquist and Stephen Murray. The brochure listed everyone’s accomplishments. Stephen had won the Gravity Games and X Games that year and Mirra and Nyquist had long lists of contest wins. Mine was short and said ‘held in high regard for his video parts in Criminal Mischief and Ride Parts’.

I ended up winning and getting an award presented by DMC and Lil’ Kim. It was a high point in my life. I was 22, walking down red carpets, sitting next to The Red Hot Chili Peppers and behind Carmen Electra. I was getting laid for the first time in my life and I’d just had a call from Airwalk saying they were sending me a $12,000 royalty cheque from sales for my signature shoe. I was living the high life. The next day after the awards I was shoveling crap out of an abandoned pool. That’s the great thing about being a street rider, no matter what you accomplish, you’re still going to want to ride a rail that’s in the hood or a pool at an abandoned house.You’re always grounded because of that.

“The money I made that year set me up for life, it allowed me to buy a house. The other years have just been good.

People in Pennsville think I’m rich because they saw me 48

on the cover of a BMX magazine. I tell them, ‘I just make an honest living.’ My dad went to Dupont’s chemical plant everyday for 40 years and made an honest living. I’m just lucky I get to travel the world and ride my bike. I’m not rich and I’m not poor.”

In his hometown Van is a mini celebrity, but to the riders there, and to many around the world, he holds a God-like status.

During my time with him one local rider admitted to making love to his girlfriend whilst playing Van’s part in Criminal Mischief in pursuit of grinding euphoria. Twenty minutes after we landed in Austin to spend a week with Stew Johnson, a stranger who worked at a sandwich shop subtly handed Van a moderate sized bag of weed as a gift, “Thanks man, I don’t smoke, but I know someone who does” Van replied thinking of Pat King who was fiending for a smoke after his flight. In a bar I witnessed a group of traveling French riders shower him in praise and worship. Despite this level of attention, winning four NORA Cups, a handful of X Games medals, red carpet events and five-figure monthly royalty cheques, he’s kept his feet firmly on the ground. During the week in Austin

John Vandever Homan III

with Stew, Van shared the floors, sofas and old mattresses of the house with around ten other guys in what could only be described as a BMX orphanage. He’s a man who is content with the simple things, undemanding of hotels or luxuries.

There is no flash car or dip-coated gold leaf frame. As I got to know him my impression of Van as a straight up, down to earth man only grew. Despite being ‘Van The Man Hoooman’ he never showed any signs of possessing an inflated ego, instead he remained constantly humble and generous.

The Podium Guy Van won his first NORA Cup for his part in Darryl Nau’s Seek and Destroy, and as he sees it, his other three for Criminal Mischief. “I won my first NORA Cup at twenty. I went on stage wasted as hell with a beer in my hand. As soon as I got off the stage I got thrown out, I think I pissed in or on the cup as well.

The second was for Criminal Mischief. It was a huge honour to win four times but in my opinion Ruben deserved to win the third NORA Cup I have and Edwin deserves the fourth.

According to Bob Scerbo, such admirable personality traits are nothing new for Van. “I’m from North Jersey, Van’s from South Jersey. He thought what I did was silly and I thought he was insane, so we instantly became friends. In the neighbourhood I grew up in, no-one considers riding hard work. Riding was different for Van, he had a work ethic. I knew that as soon as I met him. He had stuff going on and I didn’t. I had no money. He would buy me food or buy a hotel room and let me sleep on the floor. I would not be where I’m at if Van had not helped me out when I was younger. He made money, but the money never made him.”

“As you get older you appreciate accomplishments more. I never thought I’d win an X Games medal. When I was younger I pretended I didn’t care so much in Dirt and Park, I was never a podium guy. I was a bit older when street came into the X Games, and I was like, ‘fuck yeah – I have a chance to win an X Games medal and I want one.’ Winning medals is not what I live for, but I was ecstatic to come away from LA with an X Games silver medal, as taboo as that sounds.

“I remember in X Games Dirt in 1999, it was really windy and people struggled to do their big tricks. On my last run all

Diary Of A Madman

49

I needed was a basic run to get the bronze. But there was a gap from the big roll in, over a rail and into a lower roll in. I did that and I over shot the first jump by a mile and I didn’t get a medal. In retrospect I’m glad I did the gap, because it sums me up more. People were excited that I did that. It reminds me of why I made the sponsorship choices I have. I may have been able to make more cash at times but you have to do what feels right. I’ve always followed my heart and hoped that leads to happiness regardless.”

"The Robbie saga has been overshadowed by bigger things in my life. The break up of my marriage put it into perspective"

[prev] 5.

Blind Roof Drop To Manual, Austin TX. 6.

One Handed Tabletop Transfer, FDR, Philadelphia NJ.

Big Brother It was this ethic that always made the corporate bike company Schwinn an unlikely sponsor. It was only time until he moved on. “Before the end of my Schwinn contract I’d been asked to ride for Fit. I phoned Schwinn to try and get out of my contract, and they said, ‘Hi Van, you’re the first person to know about this as you’re the only person who won’t be completely bummed out – Schwinn has filed for chapter 11 [bankruptcy], the whole program is done, you’re free to ride for Fit.’ It didn’t break my heart personally, I was looking to move on.”

At Fit, Van joined the ranks of one of the most dominant teams ever assembled in BMX history. Over the following years he became a central member of Fit and developed a close friendship with team manager Robbie Morales. It was a relationship that came to an end after Robbie left to start his company Cult, tearing the team of all-stars down the middle.

In BMX terms, The Beatles had split up. It was to be the first of a painful series of bad experiences Van has endured in recent years. Over the two weeks our conversations would often return to discussing the topic. Three years since the split the wounds obviously haven’t fully healed.

“The long and short of it is I looked up to Robbie Morales like a big brother, but our friendship wasn’t what I thought it was. I want people to understand that the tension between us comes from the breakdown of our friendship and not strictly his decision to leave Fit. His moving on wasn’t the problem, it’s not what you do, it’s how you do it. I’ve been really fortunate in life. I still have all four of my grandparents – knock on wood. My parents are happily married. At that time I’d never lost anyone close to me. When my friendship with Robbie deteriorated I took it very personally for a long time and maybe I still do to a certain degree, it was like losing a big brother.

“I feel the way I do about Robbie, but now it really is time for people to stop talking about it. It’s over. We’ve all been guilty of being childish. It’s time to grow the fuck up and get over it. It’s time to move on and let sleeping dogs lie. The Robbie saga has been overshadowed by bigger things in my life. The break up of my marriage put it into perspective. It seems silly to worry about it in comparison. Both the breakup of my marriage and the end of my friendship with Robbie has made me a bit cynical, it makes you doubt and distrust people closest to you. I’m not sure if you ever get over stuff like that, I think you just learn from it and move on.”

Bigger Things In 2010, Van suffered a serious accident whilst riding in practice at the X Games. It was the start of some hard times to come. “I was trying a transfer from one bowl to another. I bailed out mid air and wacked the back of my head on the tranny. I wasn’t wearing a helmet. I cracked my skull and my brain hit the front of my skull, damaging the frontal lobe of the brain, which is the area that processes your emotions.

Once out of hospital the doctors told me to avoid any stressful situations where I could become upset. My life at the time was far from that, I was fighting for my marriage. We’d been married for four years and together six years before that, and we were having problems. Those marital problems were magnified by the head injury. It was hard to separate the emotions that were caused by the injury and those caused by the marital problems. I would get really emotional about things, more than normal. After six months I felt normal, but there’s still lingering effects. In many cases head injuries permanently change people. I’ll never ride without my helmet again.

“My ex-wife didn’t want to work on solving our marrital problems and save our marriage. She wanted me to believe it was bad and to give up, but I never would.

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John Vandever Homan III

Diary Of A Madman

51

She had to be the one to quit. It’s good to know I gave it everything I had.

“We got divorced in November, she collected her piano just last week, it was the last of her belongings in the house, the final tie.

It’s still fresh in my mind and I’m getting used to my new life. I’m 32 years old. At this point in my life I wanted to be having a family. A few years ago I had a vision of settling down and starting my shop, 2×4. I thought my ex-wife wanted to settle down also and maybe she did at one point. At first I was the one who was scared of it – I wasn’t done with riding and I didn’t like the idea of changing my lifestyle. Overtime I began to embrace that domestic life and slow down, but ironically the more I embraced it the more the problems started.

“I always thought if you live your life right, be moral, live an honest life and be there for your wife it’s supposed to work out.

You think you can control your own life, but it doesn’t always work out as you planned. You realise you can’t control everything and that’s been a lesson for me. You never know what life will throw at you. The path I once had is now gone, but I’m learning that plan B is not something to be feared… the true test of a man is how he handles hard times.”

In the Blood Throughout my two weeks with Van, he was constantly happy, ending most sentences with a laugh or a sarcastic joke. He never looked for pity or seemed saddened by recent events.

He was focused on riding to the best of his abilities, dealing with the break-up of his marriage at the end of a rail and not the end of a bottle, facing his personal obstacles with the same courage as he does his riding.

When Stew first told me Van was doing stuff bigger than he’s ever done, I couldn’t help but feel slightly dubious. I was wrong.

Van Homan still has the same guts we all first saw in him as a fearless teenager. I witnessed it in his face of furious determination as he pedalled at gaps in FDR and as he calmly asked, “ready?” before he blindly rode off a roof to manual a rail below.

Possessing a unique insight as the man responsible of filming Van’s dead-man stunts, I ask Stew why he thinks Van continues to push himself into dangerous situations. “If he sees a set-up

52

he can’t pass it up. He doesn’t do it to keep his sponsors happy or for money. I’ve heard stories of him going out riding with buddies and he’d do a gap to rail and with no photographers or filmers to document it. He thrives on that challenge of being intimidated by something and overcoming it – it’s in his blood.”

For his part in Criminal Mischief Van rode to Ozzy Osbourne’s song Diary Of Madman. The epic nature of the song married the riding perfectly, but Van Homan is more than a madman.

A madman wildly hopes for the best and hangs on. Van is far braver and more calculated than that. He overcomes challenges with determination, not recklessness. It’s this show of guts that makes Van Homan one of most respected BMX riders of all time. That’s the reason Steve Crandall refers to him as ‘Van Hoffman’, regarding Van in the same elite category as the great legend Mat Hoffman, and deservedly so. His part in Criminal Mischief was so far ahead of its time it was nothing short of a revolution, akin to Hoffman’s big air.

The dominance of his part in Criminal Mischief as the undisputed greatest video part of all time is at the expense of Van’s other parts and career-long progression. In comparison, his other sections are neglected in their praise and overshadowed by their older satanic brother. Van has relentlessly pushed himself for over a decade, never putting out a bad video part, never giving anything less than 100%. A rider is not defined by a single video part. Van is defined by his ability to overcome challenges and that’s something everyone can relate to, whether it’s dropping in for the first time as a scared kid or overcoming personal tragedy.

Throughout his life Van has stood by the lessons taught to him by his father to always pedal through the finishing line and never give up no matter what. Combined with natural talent, they are values that have made him one of the most influential and groundbreaking riders in BMX history. It’s possible living a charmed life of winning silverware and praise, maybe Van never fully learnt his father’s second lesson till later in life, that lesson being it’s okay to lose and that life can be unfair. Ever pushing himself and yet to peak in his riding, Van Homan is a man at a crossroads, he stands there smiling with a newfound understanding of the harder lessons in life, that and a pair of balls the size of grapefruit.

John Vandever Homan III

S T E V I E

C H U R C H I L L

M Y S T E R Y

M A C H I N E

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54

I’m waiting for Bob Haro in a cafe in Cardiff by the Sea, a town resting on the Pacific Ocean just north of San Diego. I’m slightly hung-over from the time on the road, and I watch the ocean from the coffee maker. If I were able to keep driving west, I would be in Japan. And odds are I would like Japan. But California is good today, the surf and the sun and the gulls making passes over the water make the day calm, almost serene.

When I was contracted to write the Haro story for the American debut of The Albion, I thought that it would take me full circle in the BMX writing I’ve done since 2001.

Aside from Mat Hoffman, who I have always wanted to interview – and in all fairness, I couldn’t have done anywhere near the job George Marshall did; hands down one of the best articles in magazine history, if I can say so. But aside from this, I’ve had a good time writing about Kevin Jones, Dennis McCoy, Dave Mirra, Chad DeGroot, and various cities and scenes. But to sit here and write a full-on introduction to Bob Haro would be murder. Simply too much to say. If any rider reading this doesn’t know who Haro is, then I would say you need to take some time and pay attention to his career, his inventiveness and innovations, because odds are that you might not be riding the same without him. A lot of us might not have even gotten into ‘Freestyle’ back in the eighties if it weren’t for the Haro Master frame and fork. Come to think of it, nine out of the ten riders in every

neighborhood in my city rode one from ’85 to ’89, myself included. But it was the name, Haro.You rode Haro handlebars, you rode Haro tyres. It was the best quality and the best energy of all the BMX products out there. And you also knew that you were riding parts made by a rider who owned a company, which was rare at the time. Haro parts were held in high esteem, as well as the team. What Moeller and Moliterno are to contemporary companies now, Haro was that rider/owner back in the eighties, and the name still carries the same weight it ever has. Haro, 53, lives in Southern California with his wife, Deanne, and their daughter, Avalon. He continues to be an enigmatic force in BMX culture, and when he appears next to me in the café I shake his hand and we walk over to a coffee shop, load up and walk toward his office. The town is warm with roads that meet the beach, and down one I can see the shore lined with people. They’re swimming or running or taking in the sun beneath what is another perfect moment along the Southern California coastline. Haro points out parts of the town to me. He’s about to move shop in a couple of weeks. We step into his downstairs office, which is without windows, and I instantly gravitate toward a 1985 chrome Haro Master, completely vintage. Haro tells me a fan of his sent it to him from overseas. It’s nothing short of beautiful. I look around at the computer set-ups, while Haro tells me about his incessant creation of electronic music. He sits in a chair next to the couch where I am, and I hit record:

Words by JEFF STEWART

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Bob Haro

“Did you see any of this coming on when you were starting out?”

He looks around his office, then fixates on a bare space on the far wall, “I never thought of my story, or the Haro bike being anything more than what we did in real time. What I mean by that is, that we were living in the moment, you know – enjoying the various facets of being in BMX culture. I was doing business, I was enjoying the success of being a rider and the notoriety that came with that, and that fueled a different side of me to become a bit of a showman in a way, and go out and tour and do all that stuff, and kind of spreading the experience of BMX to others. Then on the business side, we were having success as a little company, and we made products that went to BMX riders. And that was kind of a byproduct of having fun, you know, being a rider that kind of understood that riders may need certain components. So as a rider and a designer, I could marry those two things, and I came up with a product line. But the Haro deal was just, you know, it was just something that kind of happened. And I think over the years and in time it probably seems more rich than what we thought it was at the time, because at the time it was just what we did. We never really had time or took time to reflect because we were all living in the moment.

We were all young people. I was the young owner of this brand that was a notable brand in the eighties, but you know, I was the older guy at about 26 or 27 years old, which is young. And then everybody else that worked with me were in their early twenties to mid-teens. I mean, we had guys, like [Mike] Dominguez, that were 14, and riders that were older, like maybe it was Ron [Wilkerson] who was probably 19 or 20. And then we had guys like Ron Wilton who was probably 22 or 21. So it was kids leading kids, we were having fun, and it was a crazy, great experience. But we never sat and said ‘Hey, we’re going to make this brand’ – or a legendary brand. I don’t think we really knew what was going on. It was just fun.”

“Tim March called you the Bucky Fuller of BMX.” Haro looks at the recorder and cocks his head, thinks for a second. I sense he’s waiting for me to ask him a question that he can’t bargain as rhetorical. It’s the first time that I notice something almost uncomfortable coming from him. It brings me back to talking with Kevin Jones about his mindset for flatland. Like Jones, there’s a humility to Haro, maybe the art of staying away from flattery, or rather taking a noticeable pause to filter it. Not that March’s comment is in any way over the top or inaccurate, just something that Haro never thinks about, because his mind is constantly drifting and searching. I punctuate the stall, “Why did you sell Haro?”

“I sold Haro…well, I got approached in ’86 or ’87, I got approached by a guy named Sid Dunofsky, who was the president of West Coast Cycles. And it’s funny for me, I remember two weeks prior to getting the phone call from Sid, I got one of the bicycle business journal magazines or whatever it was called, Dealer News or whatnot, and I remem-

ber seeing they had a report on all the presidents of various companies and my picture was in there with my high-top fade, and I was laughing at my picture, then I looked a couple of pages before or after I saw my picture and there was a picture of this guy, Sid. And Sid just looked like this really button-down, business suit guy. And he had this really straight face, and I remember poking fun at this photo, then two weeks later to get a phone call from him. I mean, he’s a man of few words, and we met on the phone, he asks how I’m doing and shortly after exchanging a little bit of niceties, he said, ‘Would you be interested in selling your company?’ I told him we could meet and we could talk about it, so that’s where things started.”

I look at him and he clears his throat, and waves what he’d said off, “But to go back to your question about why I sold my company; I sold my company, well, the business was growing, and it more of a business now.

The fun of the business was starting to go away because it was now becoming far more serious.

We had bigger lines of credit now, bicycles, and we’re dealing with Asian vendors; you know, commitment was just a lot bigger. Redline was doing things at the time, as well as GT, but they were mostly doing it all Stateside. But the business was changing, dynamically, the business was changing, the business was growing up. It was serious now.

And I was dealing with regional distributors, we had guys within the States that were carrying our products. We had Midwestern distributors, we had East Coast distributors, foreign importers, all these things going on. And the business is now a business. So, I remember it was difficult for me as a 26, 27-year-old guy that – first and foremost I’m a designer. I like to think of myself as a designer, an artist, then a creative. And then the riding and riders, of course. For me, selling the business was kind of a strategic move to take what I’ve built, leverage what I’ve built, and team up with a bigger company that had what we didn’t have. They had the resources, financially, and they had the resources of the company. So they had all the things that we really didn’t have. So we were a small company out of Carlsbad, and West Coast Cycles is a formidable brand in the bike business. They have Nishiki on the road bikes side, they have Cycle Pro on the youth side, and BMX is blowing up in the States and they realize that they need to have a plight. And for me and for Haro Bikes it was an opportunity to team up with a company that has distribution, financial ability, and they have 150 salesmen. They can sell your product.

So, I mean, that’s a lot of juice. When we did the deal with West Coast Cycles, within a one-year period the business doubled, or more than doubled.”

1.

Simple OneFoot X-Up On A Wedge Ramp.

“You were still very involved.”

“Definitely. I was part of the company, we were still independent. We were still the Haro brand, but we had an agreement for five years.”

“So you merged, you didn’t quite sell.”

“We merged. But after five years I was done. I was done with the deal and I was out of the business.”

Haro: Remastered

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2.

The Infamous Chase Scene From Steven Speilberg’s Classic Movie ET (Bob Is Second From The Left With The Ski Mask On).

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Bob Haro

Haro: Remastered

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"At the end of the day, at 53, I’m still known as a BMX rider, and a guy who contributed to BMX in its formative years.

All of that, I don’t take lightly. I take it with a lot of pride and a lot of respect"

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Bob Haro

“Was the money worth the walk?”

“The money at the time was, you know – I’ve never been focused on just money. I mean, I like money like all of us. It allows us to do things, but it wasn’t always the main objective. For me, I like to have enough money so that I can do things that I like to do and I want to do. But first and foremost is being able to be creative, come up with things that I like to do or create, and having little businesses is fun.

I enjoy that. I’m an entrepreneur, I think that’s one thing I really am, an entrepreneur. I like coming up with new things and new ideas, trying to capitalize on new opportunities.”

“Such as?”

“Since the Haro Bikes days, I’ve done several different ventures, some with greater success than others. When I got out of the bicycle business I had a non-compete, I couldn’t do anything in the bicycle business for a couple of years, and I set up my design company, Haro Designs, and I immediately entered into the motorcycle market. I started working with brands like Thor and many other brands within the motorcycle industry. I was designing motocross gear and apparel, and I started a company called Gear Box, and we were making racing gocarts. I bought a shifter cart, and a buddy of mine was into racing them. I went to the races with him, and I thought it was really cool, but that they were still pretty crude. I thought the sport was fun and exciting, but it was also down-market, so I thought about how we could improve it, and it began with apparel items, race suits; gloves, protective gear, boots, and then eventually I came out with a line of 125 shifter carts. I had the whole cart that we made, then worked with a vendor out of Italy, and we were buying motors from Yamaha and Honda. We were buying 125 shifter motors, and we’d put those in them and sell them. We made a really, really beautiful product, an $8,300 go-cart. It was awesome.”

“83-hundred. When was this?”

“This was in 1995. It was a rich guy’s toy. I entered into a micro-niche market. We made this really beautiful product but there wasn’t enough people there to really sustain it. And then the other side, in that market, everybody was happy doing the same boring things, and I was tapped out creatively concerning it, and I sold that little business, and went back to focusing on Haro Design and the design business and the clients that I had. So from 1993, basically, when I got out of the bike business, that’s been my world, the power sports market. Working with motorcycle clients, working in the hay-day of NASCAR, I had several NASCAR teams I was working with, doing everything from graphics for the teams to the team car graphics to doing things on the marketing side with their pieces for sponsorship dollars and merchandise, as well as things with Indy car teams, AMA Pro Racing, all the TV and print ads for superbike, outdoor motocross, super moto and dirt track, then we teamed up with the Laguna Seca Raceway in Monterey, and for six years Haro Design was the agency that did all their TV, radio, marketing pieces, event graphics. We did everything.”

I want to ask Haro if he remembers me from 2003, on a drunken night in Las Vegas during Interbike,

when I’d first met Tim March and the crew. We were all in a bar and the drinks came out of nowhere, in multiples. Riders everywhere, old and new. I remember Brian Blyther talking to me, when I see Haro walking past us. I’d never seen him in person, and I laugh at the suddenness of it, so I approach him and put my arm around him, “Haro.

You ruined my life. I don’t know whether I should shake your hand or punch you in the teeth.”

He laughed and we talked a few moments, and I was relieved then at the gentleness of Haro, better said the sincerity of him, something almost Buddhist, but not as annoying as a Buddhist. There’s a calm to him that’s infectious. Come to think of it, I’ve never heard anyone trash Haro, and that’s rare in BMX. My thoughts drift to that night, and I remember the summit of the drunkenness, walking into the bathroom of the bar while March pointed a finger and cracked jokes at a drunken, halffetal Mark Noble on the floor by the toilet, who March would subsequently end up carrying out of the door later. But I don’t remind Haro about that night, because odds are highly stacked in the favor of me being a drunken idiot in bad form. I segue out of power sports back into the realm of BMX, by asking him about his artwork. He nods to the recorder, “The cartooning and the illustration for me – I would say out of all the things I’ve done, I’m really proud of my contribution to the sport of BMX on the riding side, but I think that I’m most pleased as an artist that I was lucky enough to be a cartoonist and an illustrator that could kind of depict a period of time in BMX in which I was illustrating and cartooning and doing all these drawings. So I’m really happy about that. That was a good time in my life. I mean, it was always stressful, I was the last-minute guy. If the deadline was tomorrow, I’d be up against the wall, up all night tonight and I’d deliver it tomorrow morning. That was just kind of my style. I’d burn it all night just to get it done, and we’d get it done.”

“You like Sheffield electro music?”

“I was heavily influenced by a lot of UK bands.

I was starting to travel a lot. Australia, Europe, and I’d be somewhere and I’d hear something at a club or on the radio and I’d go to a music store and buy it, bring it home and make demo tapes for our shows. So we’d have these demo tapes that would have all this new wave or alternative music that people haven’t even heard, it hasn’t been played here in the states, and we’re playing it in our shows.”

“Music is important to me as a writer. Like when I’m writing, I usually always have to have it on.

How important is it for you?”

“Music has always been important. I mean, even as a super young kid. My dad bought me a drawing table, and in my bedroom I had my stereo and my headphones, learning how to cartoon. I was in junior high school, big into Mad Magazine at the time, because I liked the cartoon style, and I liked the satire, because I’m a bit of a smartass. So I would sit and draw out of Mad Magazine, which Haro: Remastered

61

3.

Ring-Of-Fire Jump, BMX Action TrickTeam Demo, Anaheim, California.

kind of taught me how to draw, and I’d have my headphones on and listen to music. My dad worked night crew, so he’d get up at three or four in the morning, and I’d still be up drawing, because no one bothered me, the house was dead quiet, everyone’s asleep, and my dad would tap me on the shoulder and tell me to go to bed, and he’d go off to work. Those are things I remember, and I would wake up in the morning, dead tired, and I would go to my drawing table and looked at what I’d worked on the night before to see how it looked. You know, we call it a fresh set of eyes. I’m sure you know all about it, you wake up the next day and think was it good or was it bad? Because sometimes it’s a throw away.”

“Has that changed with you? Because to this day, I’ll still wake up in the morning and go to my computer and read what I’ve written before I do anything else.”

“Same. I do the same. I think fundamentally I’m the same guy I remember being when I was a little kid in a lot of ways, or creatively. I still do a lot of the same type of things whether I work on music or designs. I mean, I could work at it late at night, then first thing in the morning, I want to check it out and see, how does it look?”

I nod to him, “Or how does it feel.”

“Right. How it feels. Definitely.”

We go into a few complexities about the nature of creating for a living, draw some parallels and even laugh at the ridiculousness of how it must seem to a person who doesn’t have to make things. The conversation goes back around to the eighties, to the Haro racing team, and all the time between then and now, and I drink my coffee while something occurs to me, “What was the deal with steroids and racing? Look at Pete Loncarevich. What the hell?”

“I think in the eighties, in BMX racing, unfortunately at that time steroid use was very prevalent, it was all over the place. I remember it being around, and fairly visible, though it was kind of that unspoken thing. You realized these young guys were really buff.”

I start laughing, and Haro smiles at me. I pull it together, “Sorry. Go on.”

“Well, BMX is so different than Freestyle. To me the analogy is BMX racing is a track and field event, where Freestyle is very skate-like and artistic. An individual sport.

But BMX racing is a sprint.

It’s gate starts, it’s working out in a gym. It’s a lot of repetitive things. I’m not saying it to discount BMX, it’s just different. It’s a different sport. So if you think about maybe what happened with steroids in BMX, I think it was riders or athletes, everybody’s looking for an advantage, then when

"It was good, friendly, playful rivalry… If we got a number one plate, we would send GT a cake"

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Bob Haro

one or two or several start doing it, and this is your profession, you know. Much like as in the Tour de France, you’re sucked into that. You didn’t want to go there, but if you want to stay within that space, you’ve got to do it, or it seems like it. Do I know if anyone did that, I don’t know, I never asked. It’s not my position. Like when I had Haro Bikes, Pete was on our team and we launched our program to be into BMX racing. We were tremendously successful in the Freestyle space, we had all of the best riders at that time. We had a powerhouse team. We hand selected all the guys, and it was very much an elite team that was on the Haro Freestyle Team. So I think in Freestyle, we were an aspirational brand that won as a company, and I think, absolutely, that the riders elevated Haro Bikes to that level. We made it kind of legendary with the mix of riders that we had. You know, experts in various riding disciplines, guys like McCoy who could ride ramps well, but was also tremendous at flatland, and then there were specialists like Dave Nourie who had his own signature tricks, and then you had guys that could kill it in parks and on ramps like Dominguez, who at like 14 or 15 years old were busting nine and ten plus foot airs out of a quarter pipe. Not to mention Rick Moliterno, Brian Blyther, and of course Mat Hoffman. But back to the racing side of it, when we decided to come out with a race bike, we wanted to be as strong as we were in the Freestyle category, we wanted to have this elite team.

We had Pete on the team, who at the time was one of the best guys out there, and we had Mikey King.

Then we went to the ABA Grand Nationals and we announced our program into BMX racing.”

“This was around 1987, right?”

“If I remember right, around ’87. Well, we basically unannounced it, meaning that we rolled up to the line with Pete in a Haro uniform pushing a Group 1, and here we go, we were in the ABA Grand Nationals. And we killed it.”

“Amidst what is now looked upon as a charming rivalry with GT.” He laughs, “Yes. The rivalry between us and GT was good. It was good, friendly, playful rivalry. I mean, we would have fun. If we got a number one plate, we would send GT a cake. We had fun with it. Our team, we’d hang out together, we’d party together. You spent more time with your team and the crew from the company than you did with anybody. They were your family.”

Haro leans back and smiles at the recorder, and tells me about his series of injuries, from shoulder to knee, which I can empathize with, having a knee in need of surgery. He also lets me know that because of the injuries and the growing business, his brother, Ron, and Bill Hawkins were managing the riders, and finding talent. He sips his coffee and looks at me, “I wasn’t smart enough to rehabilitate myself, and I kept re-injuring my knee, thinking if I just keep riding, it’ll get better. I had meniscus and cartilage surgery, but then I had ACL surgery and that was the end of it. Really simply, I was just practicing, I got out of shape, and I stuck my foot down and blew my knee out again. I just realized I was kind of done. I was

Haro: Remastered

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64

Bob Haro

maybe 26 or 27, and I was tired of getting hurt, but I didn’t want to be one of those riders that kept trying to come back. I thought, I’m going to wrap it up when hopefully people still have a good image of me.”

“What were some of the tricks you came up with?”

“Well, I don’t remember other people doing nose wheelies, I don’t remember other people doing fakies, besides my friend John Swaugen, who I grew up riding with, and I was doing kickturns and fakies. But he was my sister’s boyfriend, and he and I would ride together and push each other. So, back then when I was riding, it was kind of creating a lot of fundamentals that you see a lot of riders doing today, the rollbacks, 180 rollbacks, 540s, and so on. Like riding with RL Osborn as early as 1978, we worked for his dad’s magazine (BMX Action) and in the middle of the day we’d pull the ramps out because we got tired of sitting behind the desk and we’d go ride and do our tricks. It was constant.

He does a kickturn, you want to do a one-handed kickturn. Then you’re going to do a one-handed, one-foot. Then he’ll want to do a cross-up, and you just kept going. Then we tried to do other tricks. I remember personally, just riding a wedge ramp or a bank for five hours straight, trying to do the same trick over and over and over. And maybe you hit it one or two times out of a hundred, but you were so psyched you’d keep trying.”

“What was the last trick you learned?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Do you still keep up with the current state of BMX?” “Yeah, I do. I just got back from the BMX Masters.

I love all of it, all facets of it; dirt, park, the flatland that’s going on today is insane. All of it is on such a crazy level now that it’s just unbelievable to me to even imagine what you would have to learn to even be on the radar.”

“Do you ever think about your place in the culture, as in you basically starting BMX Freestyle? It has to play on your mind.”

“Well, I think I ponder it in the sense that I was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, with the right idea. And then, at the end of the day, you’ve got to work at it to make it into something. Because, like many kids, I could have just done it and let it die, but for me it just became all-encompassing of what I was all about. I did a lot of different sports, like many kids, I ran track and field, was on the swim team as a kid, raced motocross, I played football with all the neighborhood kids. I skateboarded, surfed… But out of all of those things, the BMX bike is what I gravitated toward. I stuck to that. And my style is, well, I’m fairly disciplined. If I wanted to learn a trick, I’d go out in front of my house and do it for hours until I figured it out, and it was the same with cartooning.”

“Do you think it’s important to know the history of your sport or art? I think it’s important.”

“I think it is as you get older. I think maybe history is what old people do. But partly with age, maybe it seems like anybody over 30 is old, and with the media side, of magazines or on-line, they probably don’t tell those stories enough. To me, surfing has done a great job, and some in moto

have done a good job in celebrating past heroes or contributors to the sport to give it that rich history of where the sport has come from. I think BMX has been very weak with that. I think that where that comes from is maybe on the editorial staff, you have young people that are writing the books, but to them that’s not that important, either. But I kind of see that changing here and there. This is another reason why I am coming out with a book, because I feel that it’s something I need to do. It’ll date stamp a period of time in BMX culture, and Freestyle culture that was really important, and it was the formative years of a new, emerging sport.

So, I think now that that audience was there firsthand during those years, that this book will mean a lot to them, like something to embrace and cherish as a part of their past, not just my past. Sharing a period of time.”

“And it could give new riders a chance to make their culture richer.”

“Exactly. And when I fast forward to today, BMX was and is the most important thing that was in my life. It was everything to me as a young person, and now that I’m an older guy, BMX is still as important. I don’t make my living from BMX anymore, but I am date-stamped in a way as a pioneer and a contributor in the sport of BMX and I’m honored to be there. I embrace it and protect it. I’ve been given a gift of being in the right place at the right time, like I said earlier, an idea, and put it all into motion. Whether it was riding flatland, ramps, and pool, or to formalize it into taking mini-ramps on tour. If I’d have thought about what we were doing in a more contrived way, it probably wouldn’t have happened as well. And same on the business side, you know, if I would have over-thought it, I probably wouldn’t have done a lot of things. It was all of these things happening and I was there, and happened to be cognizant enough to capitalize on these things in a good way. Even today, I feel a new responsibility, like talking about doing a book.

I think it’s payback time, it’s a time to create something for riders that are older and also younger, to be proud to have, to know the roots of the sport that they’re into.”

“What’s next?”

“For 2012, Nike asked me again to be part of their program for the Olympics, and I helped out with some of their graphic designs on the 2012 US rider gear, so that was cool. I was stoked to be a part of that” His phone chimes, he reads it and silences it, then nods at the recorder, “Look for more good things from me in BMX, because I’m still engaged, I still have contributions to make. This year, in July, marks the 30th anniversary of the Haro Freestyler. I want to make the 30th anniversary collector’s bike, complete.”

“Go on.”

“Well, it’s not just going to be a re-pop. It’s going to have heritage, and a serialized run of 540 bikes, but with modern geometry.”

“So you can actually ride it.”

“Yes, completely modern. It will be the starting point of my new brand, Ikonix.”

Haro: Remastered

4.

Kick-Turn On The Coping, Marina Del Rey Skatepark.

5.

Artwork From When Bob Was The Staff Artist At BMX Action Magazine.

6 & 7.

Carving An Air At A Bike Shop Demo In Bonita, California.

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8.

One Foot Kick-Turn, Datsun Corporate Parking Lot, Torrance, California, Circa 1979.

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I look at the monitor on the desk, and think about it. A drawing table in a bedroom, headphones, and a stereo. All of it waxing into the future, into the mouth of what would become an ocean of BMX pioneering, evolution, and information. I drain the coffee and look at him, “What does it all mean to you? Not to sound like that, but you know.”

“At the end of the day, at 53, I’m still known as a BMX rider, and a guy who contributed to BMX in its formative years. All of that, I don’t take lightly. I take it with a lot of pride and a lot of respect. All of that means a lot to me. And I like being in the mix with today’s riders and meeting new school riders. It’s exciting for me to meet them and see what they do. And I’m excited that most of them have been extremely respectful and polite to me, and a lot of the riders who

Bob Haro

did our old-school deal in Germany, they embraced us, which is awesome, because if you look at the style of tricks we did back then, it’s nothing compared to what they’re doing today, in terms of complexity or height or daring. The kids go way bigger.”

“But without that base there would be no apex.”

“Exactly. And my segue back into BMX will be artistic.”

“Just like your intro was.”

He starts to say something, then pauses, looks off to his monitor and keyboard and nods. I start to think of more, but I hit the stop button. Haro walks to his desk and turns on his screen. I open the office door, where the beach sits at the end of the road.

The sun is high and warm, and the water moves in perfect order.

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How do you quantify who is the ‘best rider’ in BMX? The term ‘freestyle’ seems archaic now, but its principles still ring true this year and those that will follow. The truth is, there isn’t a ‘best BMXer’, we’ll all have our favourites, guys who we look up to, become influenced by and even try and ride like. How can you argue The Gonz is the best, compared to someone who thinks Drew Bezanson is the greatest. It’s a moot point, something that can’t be quantified because of the variety of tastes and styles that will hopefully always keep BMX interesting, fresh and opinions personal.

I’ve always thought this and I’m sure most of you reading this will agree, there just can’t be a ‘best’ in BMX. For the past two weeks though, the opinion I’ve held without much need for questioning for the past 15 years came into doubt. I’ve just spent two weeks with Garrett Reynolds and as much as I know Garrett will hate me saying this, so I’ll apologise in advance, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more talented, committed, smart and downright freakishly good BMXer, ever. I think Garrett Reynolds, right now, might be the best BMXer around, and that’s something I thought I’d never say and almost don’t want to.

The whole trip was booked in an instant. I emailed Garrett and got a quick response back saying he was up for shooting an interview. One email back and we’d sorted dates that worked ideally for both of us, then another email and it was confirmed. It seemed too easy, although I’d find out on the last day that Garrett had

had a few friends and sponsors telling him that shooting an interview for The Albion was advised against. I think about the glowing report on Chris Doyle that appeared in the last issue and realise what bullshit people talk sometimes.

We’ve reported things as they’ve been told to us, and that’s created some controversy, but we’ve never been out to ‘get’ anyone, although Bancroft does have a vendetta to get Big Air out of the X Games, but you can read about that elsewhere in this issue. The reason why I wanted to interview Garrett, as well as him being such a talented BMXer, he seemed to be able to toe the line between riding for big companies and winning the world’s largest BMX events, whilst staying true to the DIY aesthetic that keeps BMX and himself grounded.

It’s a fine line and one that is filled with contradictions, but I think Garrett handles it well, it’s a testemant to his personality. He’s aware of how easy it would be for him to ‘whore’ – Garretts own words – himself out to countless drink, phone, candy and other bizarre companies that fancy a flutter in BMX, but instead sticks with Nike, his biggest benefactor and in turn he works on his own projects with friends, all of which we’ll come to later.

"As a BMXer, I think you’re always chasing some kind of little thrill"

Words and Photography

by DANIEL BENSON

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I

1.

Barspin To Backwards Crook Revert Out, San Diego.

t’s Wednesday evening when we pull up at Garrett’s house where he lives with Ty Morrow, JJ Palmere, Tony Ennis and, for the minute, Steve Croteau whose over on a long vacation from the East Coast. It’s not your typical BMX house. It sits on the end of a road that you’d have no reason to go down unless you lived there, overlooking two cuts, or shallow ravines, to the front and back. It’s quiet and peaceful, something I’d never thought I’d describe a BMX house as.

There’s a big house to the right, that sits empty and two neighbours reside to the front and back who seem fine with them living there, waving as they pull their car out of the garage or drive by.

Inside though, there’s all the usual trimmings of a BMX house, although nowhere near to the extent I’ve seen elsewhere. The bin’s overflowing and recycling has gone out the window but it’s comfortable and big enough to accommodate the residents and the transient people like myself who come and go. Garrett’s room sits at the end of the house, out the back. It’s the largest room in the house and probably because of this it serves as a kind of secondary living room. Most mornings, everyone would congregate in there, talking about the previous night, or plans for the day ahead. We’d perch on the end of the bed with Garrett still in it, half asleep, whilst Steve O provides some kind of comical quip that would keep us entertained. I wonder how I’d deal with this if I still lived with a bunch of BMXers? I’d probably tell them to get the fuck out, but I think Garrett probably has better manners than myself. He’d tell me later that growing up he’d always have people staying over.

“My mom was always super chilled about people staying over at my house, we’d do these Christmas trips with [filmer] Wade Young, he’d always bring people through, that’s how I met [Mike] Hoder and so many other people. She’s cool as shit, she knows how it works, I’d be staying at peoples houses all the time.”

I put his impeccable hospitality down to his family, I suppose he’s more than used to it. He washed the bedding I’d sleep in before I arrived – the first time that’s ever happened for me at a BMX house. I’m normally thrown a sleeping bag that people use to fix their bikes on. One time I was even given a handful of tea towels. I ask Garrett about growing up in Toms River, a place that sounds idyllic from my Yorkshireman’s perspective. I’m used to Grimesthorpe and Grimsby, Toms River sounds like a kid’s ride at Disneyland.

“I had a set of neighbourhood trails right across from my house, a bunch of kids would hang out there. Cory, who you met, was the first real bike rider I met. He got me into riding street, before that it was all trails. He was like ‘you gotta ride downtown Toms River, I’ll show you all the spots.’

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Garrett Reynolds

It’s maybe three city blocks, with a five stair, one hubba, a ten stair and a ledge. I remember thinking ‘damn, this is tight!’ I met a bunch of different people over the years, like Augie [Simoncini], Steve O and Ty and JJ. A lot of it was because I used to ride Scotty Cranmer’s skatepark so I’d make friends through there.”

I’m told by Steve O that Garrett has always been one step ahead of everyone. He did a pegless backwards rail to halfcab bars before he’d even ground a rail with pegs on. His riding has always turned heads.

“How come you moved out here? Was it out of necessity, being able to ride all the time?”

“Moving out here wasn’t really out of necessity, I’d been out of High School one year and that year was probably the year I did the least work out of any. The winter was real cold, I was riding the same stuff all the time and not really progressing. I’d been out here a few times and there’s too much stuff to ride and the weather is nice all the time, it just seemed real appealing to me at that age. I just had to convince some people to come out with me. That’s how Ty, JJ and Ennis came along. ” I check Toms River on the internet, it’s a little larger than I expected, not quite the chocolate box village I hoped for. At the bottom, amongst the notable residents, I spot Garrett’s name – ‘Garret (sic) Reynolds, professional BMX rider.’

With the spelling mistake, I doubt he went to the trouble of updating his name amongst dead baseball players and second-rate actors.

The two weeks I stayed are broken up into two halves. The first we spend in San Diego, making the most of the empty schools. Garrett has it all quietly planned out, he bides his time well. We visit a church on the first day of shooting and he does the ice up to 180 bars, not first go, far from it. It takes a couple of hours, with various distractions, like Pastors who are angry but scared to show it and a groundskeeper who flares up, starts shouting, then apologises for his behaviour, says we can ride, then leaves. Before I witness him pull anything, I’m impressed by the way he can talk around a situation. I think living in California makes you good like that but even so, he has a natural knack with it. It suits his personality, he’s a nice guy, polite and calm but also quick witted and sharp. On more than a few occasions I’ve heard him finish an already funny story with a few words that make it hilarious. So he talks around these distractions and pulls the trick. It’s really amazing to watch. Someone this good, at the top of their game, who fully understands their ability. I look around at the various friends filming and sitting off, when I catch their eye there’s often

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this same face, like a slight head shake, raised eyebrows and a tightening of the mouth into almost a smile. It doesn’t say anything, but I can tell it means ‘yep, he’s that good.’ Not in a smug way, but no matter how many times you see him ride there’s always a little something that’s so hard to quantify. It keeps him abreast of the game and you can’t help but be surprised by that. Garrett hates the spotlight from what I gather but even so, close friends can’t help but be amazed by his riding. It’s somewhat respectful, knowing that Garrett wouldn’t want people, his friends, running up to him and going ‘OH MAN, THAT WAS SO FUCKING GOOD, YOU’RE THE FUCKING BEST MAN, THE FUCKING BEST!’ Yet at the same time, you can’t help but quietly think exactly that when he rides.

We headed out to Arizona the following week.

Garrett hires a van and plays trip dad and pro rider with ease. Even at 21 he’s old hat with this stuff, it comes naturally to him. Listening to him order the van, I hear that same bolshy tone he uses when dealing with the general public and security. Garrett’s trying to locate a hire company shady enough to give a van to a 21 year old, he’s been on the phone for ages, I hear a voice on the other end rambling on and on about insurance and other boring shit, trying to put him off and make it clear that they’re doing him a favour by giving him a van. He sighs, holds the phone away from his ear, looks around then goes back to the receiver and says, quite deadpan ‘looks like I’m not gonna fuck with you’ and hangs up. A few calls later and the van is sorted elsewhere.

The crew is everyone from the house, plus Miles Rogoish, fresh back from a lengthy injury. There’s a rough plan to get some clips for the Deadline video, but there also seems to be an unspoken consensus that Garrett’s there to get stuff for this interview. I’m thankful for the fact that he’s taking it seriously. Everything he does and tries is new, cutting edge stuff. Scary stuff that isn’t easy and doesn’t come first go. He could’ve rested on his laurels and still put out an amazing interview, but that isn’t his style. How do I know? I’ve been lucky enough to see some of his footage from the Deadline video – a careers worth easily. This isn’t just hyperbole – much of what is said about Garrett could often be seen somewhat critically as this – but firsthand, I’d say what you’ve probably heard and expect is going to turn out to be true.

It’s Spring Break when we turn up to the college town of Tempe, Arizona. The seasons almost get flipped on their head here, there are girls in bikinis and standard college guys with bermuda

72

shorts, wrap around shades and a twelve pack of Natty Ice under their arm, wandering around town between pool parties. On Saturday night, we get down to business and spend eight hours at one rail, filling the generator up twice. The first time we set it up, there’s no extension cables, we hit Walmart and find ourselves pissing around on BMXs that have regressed back to having screw on pegs and Gyros that resemble Skyway Rotators.

“When I was a young kid, we used to come and hang out in Walmat to fuck around.” He says whilst throwing an American football over five isles to Tony. Tony’s return ball comes up short and bounces off in the direction of a young couple. We dip into the soft furnishings like a bunch of giggling kids then head back to the rail, but not before Garrett goes to Wendys’ and gets food for everyone whose been stood around whilst we’ve been abusing the lack of security in the Walmart.

“Ten five piece and ten hamburgers please,” says Garrett, like it’s a normal order. I like this act of chivalry, not least because I’m hungry. I don’t get the impression that Garrett’s short of cash, but never once to get the impression that he’s tight with it either.

The only achilles heel of the trip came in Arizona at a famous ledge spot outside of Phoenix. We visited it on the first day only for Garrett to call time on the trick he was trying as the light dropped too low. On the last day, when we were leaving, we hit it up again but the trick never came. On one occasion his bars moved and he threw his bike as he walked back to the van. “You don’t see that often.” Steve O remarked. There isn’t really a conclusion you can draw from this, for all the hot air I’ve blown about how good he is he’s only got to where he is through commitment and practice and sometimes, stuff just doesn’t work out. He’s just a normal BMXer, what did you expect?

We arrive back a day later than expected. I end up finally getting to sit down with Garrett on my final day, just a few hours left before I fly out.

“There’s still so much to ask him”, I think. “Everyone knows how fucking good he is, without me taking 2,500 words to say what could be said in a sentence.” We sit down on the balcony of the café at the local golf course, a short drive from Garrett’s house. There’s a slight breeze but it’s not uncomfortable sitting outside. The golf course rolls away beneath us, down towards the city skyline and the Pacific behind that, lit by yet another beautiful sunny afternoon.

“Who was your first sponsor?”

“At 14 I’d gotten on Etnies flow and a couple of smaller companies around us. Then when I was

Garrett Reynolds

2.

Nollie To Rail, San Diego.

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Garrett Reynolds

15, I got an offer from Nike. I was like ‘ok, well let’s try and do this then’ and it kinda kept going from there. It was weird from the start, like I was putting a lot into riding. Riding for a company on a flow hook up, you’re not really expected to do that much, like you’re just a flow dude. With the Nike deal, I was the first person they hooked up. I was a little worried that they were going to expect the world from me, but it wasn’t like that at all. What they wanted to do was hook up some younger riders and stay with them as they got older and progressed. That was the whole point of 6.0, they didn’t want to go in there and offer a shitload of money to some older pro dude, they wanted to invest a bit of time and money into some younger dudes.”

“I think that worked really well for you.”

“I think it worked well with everyone. Look at Dennis. He’s younger than me.”

The waitress arrives and recognises Garrett from previous visits. I order some French toast and Garrett orders a burger, which would sit largely untouched for the duration of the interview.

“Getting hooked up at such a young age, did it make you grow up fast. Like getting on the Nike pro team at 15, did you learn any important lessons about the industry?”

“At that age I knew nothing about the industry at all. In all honesty, I was kinda confused with it all, so I guess it did make me grow up fast. I was hanging out with Steve O and Augie… Basically all my friends are older than me, then I’d go on roadtrips with even older dudes, so yeah I had to grow up quick and learn how to look after myself, especially on roadtrips. For a while my dad would take me everywhere and sorted a lot of stuff out for me, then when I was 15 my dad died, so I had to start looking after myself real quick. There was a bunch of weird stuff I had to deal with growing up, but it wasn’t so bad.”

I can’t fathom how difficult going through something like that would be. I remember the picture in Garrett’s room of his mum and dad on their honeymoon. His Dad looks cool as fuck basically.

Steve O would tell me later that he didn’t just look it, he was. I think it goes some way to answer the question of just how determined and grown up Garrett is, but even at 15, it was clear that he was going places, regardless of family issues.

“Before I came over here a few people had said, not in a bad way, that you don’t take any bullshit, that you’ve got your head screwed on.”

Garrett starts laughing, “I can’t believe people said that!”

I backtrack a little, realising the comment probably does seem a little strange. “I guess what people were saying is that you’re this smart guy,

but when you were growing up, did you ever get anyone trying to get one over on you, just take advantage of you being young and give you some shady deal?”

“Oh hell yeah, BMX is a shady industry! If a company can get by doing some shady shit, they’ll do it.

I used to ride for Redline, I don’t even want to say that. They screwed me over on a bunch of shit. So I was like ‘fuck this.’ Then [Josh] Harrington got in touch to hook me up and said ‘Hey, do you wanna ride for Premium?’ In all honesty, I wasn’t too into Premium at the time, but I thought it’s better than Redline and I was really hyped on Harrington and there was talk of trips, so I said yeah. There was a pretty funny situation with that, the dude who was working for them at the time, Tony D, started tripping ‘I don’t think he’s marketable, he wears these tight pants.’ I remember Harrington telling me that and I thought it was hilarious. I mean, he wasn’t talking shit; he was genuinely concerned that I might have to change my image or something like that.”

“You’ve got an agent now, right?”

“Yeah, like I did everything on my own but after a while it got to a point where Dennis [Enarson] talked to me and said that getting one makes everything so much easier. I hate to say it, because I feel like getting an agent is so wack, but when you roll up to people and start asking for shit sometimes you’ll get ‘you’re just a rider, kid, you don’t deserve anything.’ You’re not greedy, but it can be hard to sort all that shit out.”

“It seems like as soon as people get agents, they get a load of sponsors, you’ve got three, four, excluding Fiend and Deadline? But I guess it’s Nike, really?”

“Yeah, it’s Nike. Cinema, Staff. Cinema’s a new one. I mean, I’ve had offers to ride for other companies, but it’s never been top priority for me to whore myself out to a load of sponsors.”

“Was it true that Gatorade wanted to hook you up, but you wouldn’t take a 666 sticker off your helmet so they wouldn’t sponsor you?”

“Yeah, it was real weird. I think Gatorade worked with Nike or something and seeing as I was the first dude on there they tried throwing me on there, I guess they were just looking out for me, thinking it could be good. But Gatorade were real concerned with my image, like I shouldn’t curse and I should take 666 off my helmet and if I do

3.

Barspin To Icepick To Hanger, Dana Point.

"I think all riders worry about living up to expectations to a certain extent. But I think the main concern for me, is living up to what I know I want to do"

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4.

Halfcab Whip, San Diego.

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Garrett Reynolds

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5.

Backwards Crook To Revert 180 Bars, Phoenix.

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Garrett Reynolds

interviews I should present myself a little better.

I mean, I don’t take myself too seriously, which I think to those guys can make me seem a little crazy at times, when I was 16, I had some weird shit with my mom, she was like ‘you’re really not gonna take this?!”

“Was it good money?”

“Yeah, it was pretty good money. But it didn’t seem right to change who I am for money. It went as deep as those guys checking my myspace.”

“What’s the strangest company you’ve had calling you up for sponsorship?”

“Sunny D”, Garrett says quickly, laughing as he does.

“Guessing that was a good deal too?”

“It was crazy, but I was like ‘I can’t do this’ I would’ve quit riding if I’d have done it.”

For some reason, I think back to a drunken argument I had with a girl I lived with at Uni. She loved The Beatles and although I didn’t fully believe it it was one of those times when you get in a discussion just to get a rise out of someone - I said The Beatles had sold out when Brian Epstein made them change their image from gay biker dudes (think the guy from The Village People) to the suit wearing, mop haired heartthrobs you think of today. If The Beatles hadn’t taken the carrot, do you think they would’ve been able to reach the level of musical genius that they did? Probably not. I think about Garrett’s situation, how Nike have allowed him to do so much from a young age and in turn, how they’ve almost invested in his talent. I’m sure there’s people saying ‘but he took the carrot.’

Maybe he did, but in this day and age, most riders will take all the carrots dangled in front of them.

Garrett took one and did it on his own terms and never bowed for anyone. I like that about him, I think he can smell bullshit from a mile away. I turn my attention to the interview…

“Do you think sometimes with the way you ride and the way you’ve been put on this pedestal of being one of the best riders out there, that it’s strange that riders try and differentiate between what you do and what other street riders do, like there’s now two types of street riding? Does that bother you, if you know what I mean?”

“No, I completely get what you’re saying. I’m a crossover rider. I started off riding ramps, I ride street. I ride both all the time now. I get that all the time, I think it’s funny. People will always hit on the new stuff. Surely though, if you’re doing it on a handrail in the street, then it’s street riding.

If it’s in a skatepark then yeah, fully understandable, but if you go to a real handrail, what is it, easier to ride because you can tailwhip a quarter?

I wouldn’t classify myself as a street rider, it’s just what I like riding the most. I love riding skateparks, I like airing. I hit up trials sometimes. I just like riding, I wouldn’t even say I’m a ramp rider. I don’t

consider myself anything. I love riding handrails, like the buzz of doing something, second guessing yourself and finally doing what you want to do, that’s a great feeling. I don’t know if it’s what I’ll always want to ride, but as a BMXer, I think you’re always chasing some kind of little thrill.” I like that I think to myself, ‘chasing some kind of little thrill.’ I think that’s a great analogy of BMX. “So people are always going to try and put you down if you’re on the top of your game?”

“No, even besides all that, that doesn’t matter. It’s just BMX. I quit playing football and basketball because I have all this energy and I don’t want a coach telling me what to do. It’s almost bringing BMX back into team sports, like ‘you can’t do this, you can’t do that. You can’t whip a stair set because that’s a trick you should do on a box.”

“Like if you whip a 20 stair it isn’t street riding?”

“Yeah, I mean, in a way, I can kinda see where people are coming from. If some dude who only rides park all the time comes out and does it. But at the same time, I’m always going to appreciate how hard that is, no matter who does it.”

“Tony said something interesting about you not wanting certain things in the Deadline video because you didn’t want kids doing it, or you didn’t think it looked good? Wasn’t it a 720 down a stair set?”

“I might use it, I might not… I wanted to do a seven down a stair set for so long. As soon as I fived a set I knew the seven was possible. I’d been calling it out for years, then one day I actually did it… I don’t know, it’s one of those things, you just can’t make it look good. I’ve got clips of me doing simple stuff that just looks nice. It’s just how it works, at different times you feel different things.”

“Did it look a bit… hoopty?”

“I mean, hell yeah it looked hoopty, it’s a seven down a set, how else is it gonna look?! I wanna use it because I got worked trying it and I am stoked I did it, but I don’t know…”

“Do you ever feel any pressure with riding, like to keep a to a certain level and live up to expectations?”

He answers quickly, like he was expecting this question. “I think all riders worry about living up to expectations to a certain extent. But I think the main concern for me, is living up to what I know I want to do. I think about riding all the time, you’ve seen me freak out a little on this trip with certain tricks and it’s just because I care so much about it, like it’s been such a big part of my life. Just doing the BMX thing, I wanna do some cool stuff with BMX and not to sound cocky or anything like that, but I hope that what the guys are doing now might influence BMX in the right way in the future, like you want to push BMX in the right direction.”

"I’m just like any other bike rider, I go through the same shit"

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6.

Icepick To 180 Barspin, San Diego.

[Next] 7.

Gap To Icepick, Tempe.

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Garrett Reynolds

“Is that one of the reasons why because, obviously you’re in quite an influential position and kids will look up to you, you’ve tried to keep it… I want to say real, with what you’re doing with Fiend and Deadline? With Fiend did you want to start it because you saw that with riding at your level, it can only be for so long and starting a company it’ll keep you involved in BMX way into the future, or was it more that you wanted to be in control of how you’re perceived with riders in general, instead of it being through another company, or both?”

“It’s weird how it all happened. At the time I was riding for Premium and I was breaking a lot of parts. I was trying to film for Deadline at the time and I was breaking stuff every time I went out. I thought ‘this can’t be good.’ I was getting a decent amount of messages from kids saying ‘I broke your frame, I broke your bars.’ I fully understand that stuff will always break, but I think the direction Premium wanted to go with was staying in trend, that just isn’t about what I wanted to do with Fiend. That’s why it worked out really well that I ended up doing this with Bob [at Staff Mailorder]. A whole bunch of other people were like ‘this isn’t going to work, it’s not going to work.”

“What do you mean, why wouldn’t it work?”

“Because they’re heavier. People think that a frame five pounds or above would be impossible to sell nowadays. But really it’s just safer for a kid to ride. I hate working on my bike as it is. It’s nice to know when I’m doing stuff I know it won’t break. Bob’s the perfect person to be doing this too. He’s been involved in this for 20 years, so we’ll go back and forth with what held up, what didn’t and why. It’s good to have his opinion as even though I’ve been riding ten years, I don’t know everything. I feel like BMX is such a big part of my life that I know it won’t last forever, there’ll be a point where I just want to ride bowls and air around and not do gnarly shit anymore. I thought if we can do this, we can support our friends, like give them jobs and then handpick guys to ride for the team who have the right attitude and keep BMX looking legit. I feel like there’s guys out there who really don’t care that much about BMX.You need to care about whose buying the products, the kids, the team, the guys promoting your stuff. I feel like the main thing with a company is having the right dudes.

If you’ve got that, you’re chillin’. It’s just about BMX, the whole thing.”

“It seems like you have it all worked out.”

“I didn’t really come from much money. Not like poor or some shit like that, but we went through stuff, shit here and there. We weren’t a rich family by any means, I was never money hungry when I was younger. Nike hooks me up and without those guys I wouldn’t be able to do anything I’m doing. With that, I’m chillin’. So I want to keep those guys happy and then keep doing what I’m doing.”

“How does it work with you and X Games? You’ve got to be in it to win it, right?”

“Erm… I mean, I’m not in it to win it, but at the same time I know I won’t be able to do Fiend without it... If there’s only guys going there with the wackiest sponsors and riders who really want to be the best and win, like just contest riders... I think it’s great that you can watch that stuff on TV and see people like Ty and Dakota [Roche] riding, like respected street riders riding the street course. I think that’s good for kids to see. I think they did a real good job with the course this year to be honest. But at the same time, think about all the times you see BMX through the public eye, you hate it. Honestly, when I see BMX through the TV, even though at times I’m sometimes involved in it, I’m biting my teeth, cringing thinking ‘this is not how it is.’ If you’re not involved in it, you’ll never understand it. I mean, I love my mom to bits, but she thinks I get excited about the contests and stuff like that, she’ll go ‘aren’t you excited about X Games?’ when it’s completely the opposite. I’ll go, ‘well, I guess, but that isn’t really what it’s about.”

“Surely the pressure must be on though. Like the money goes down quick from first, there must be that competitive side that goes ‘I can win this’.”

“Well, I’m not going to go out there and ride shitty. Like as stupid as it sounds, there’s TV cameras pointing at you, you don’t want to go out there and ride worse than you do every day. But in all honesty, I’m not gonna be like, ‘Oh my God, I placed there?!’ when I don’t win. It’s bike riding, sometimes you mess up.”

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“Getting into that frame of mind to do the stuff you do, I guess it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me that you go through the same processes as any other rider when getting ready for a trick, like you eye it up, take some bitch runs or whatever. When you get it though, there seems to be some next level of commitment that I can’t really describe. How do you get into the frame of mind to do some of that stuff, is it simply practice?”

“I think with me, it’s just knowing where you need to be.

Like that ice 180 bars, all the times I was doing it, I knew I wasn’t quite in the right position. I think it’s being at one with your bike. Like knowing exactly where you are at all times with it. Then when you feel the right one, you feel the right one. JJ, Ty and me will talk about it, like how it drives you crazy, then you feel the right one and pull it and it suddenly felt easy.”

“Do you think it’s understanding when that right one comes up then, and taking that chance?”

“Oh, hell yeah. When that one comes up. You’ve got to take it. If you don’t commit, you might end up getting hurt.

When I did the bars ice hanger, when I did the bars and got in the icepick just right, I knew, just knew that this one I had to go for the hanger. I thought I haven’t come all this way to not do this, so when I was in the position I needed to be in, I knew I was going for the hanger. BMX is totally mental. Like you can drive yourself insane doing it. I think it’s funny that you say I’m on some pedestal, but I’m just like any other bike rider, I go through the same shit.”

“What are you most proud of with BMX so far?”

“I think getting NORA cup. I don’t care if it sounds cliché to say it, but if I was 14 and if I knew that I would be winning that, I would’ve pissed myself [laughs]. I remember

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getting an invite to it when I was still in High School and I went and I ended up winning, it was such a surreal experience. I couldn’t drink and I remember [Chase] Dehart and Randy [Brown] buying me drinks, then I got called up on stage and I got Harrington to come up with me as I was so nervous. He poured a load of beer in the cup and I started drinking it and I almost got arrested because of that. I don’t know if I have some weird social anxiety thing, but I hate being in a room like that with all those people around me and having to talk to all these people.”

“Like working a crowd, talking to people?”

“Yeah, exactly. I can’t do that. I get real nervous, I really did at that age. It was just a crazy scene.”

The waitress comes out and gives us yet another coffee top up. She notices Garrett’s barely touched burger and goes and gets him a takeaway box. I think about the past week and all that happened. I’m not going to lie, the whole two weeks was a blast. I genuinely enjoyed every minute of being with Garrett and everyone else for that matter. When I decided to interview Garrett I was neither a critic or a fan, I just knew from a distance that he was an extremely talented bike rider and didn’t give anything else much of a thought. Now I know there’s so much more than that to him and also that he’s even better on a bike than I originally believed. Is he the best bike rider? Well, I think Garrett will be relieved to be taken off the pedestal, but no, I don’t think we can really say such a thing exists in BMX… But, if you pressed me for long enough, after meeting him, being so impressed with not only his skill on a bike, but by his humble personality and drive, then I might, just might cave in and say ‘yes, maybe he is the best bike rider around.’

Garrett Reynolds

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Geoff Slattery

“It’s been one of those weeks for me – you have those weeks where nothing goes right – where there’s nothing you can do but roll with the punches”

The look on Geoff’s face – when Rob Ridge drove around the corner with two soggy moss covered sheets of wood drooped over the bed of his pick-up – was a picture. His brow furrowed as deep as a ditch, his eyebrows went up pulling taught the skin around the bone on his eye sockets and his eyeballs pushed out on little stalks. The face said “Really?” “Have I really just flown half way around the fucking world and spent half my travel budget on this?”

He looked at me with that question on his face. I looked down and did that thing where your eyebrows also raise up and your lips pull in and the top one inflates a bit. The face said “Yes” at the same time the face said “Sorry.”

We then both turned to Rob whose shoulders rose and his palms turned upwards. His eyebrows went up as well and his whole body said “What!?”, “What were you expecting!?”

A month prior to this raised eyebrow convention, I had sent Geoff a speculative and hopefully positive email. The contents of that initial correspondence outlined an – what we now know to be – over ambitious and somewhat hair-brained scheme.The plan involved himself, a van, a country named Portugal and a ramp building technique pioneered by the ever-experimental Mr Rob Ridge, a man not known for much compromise in his life.

By gluing sheets of ply together and screwing them to an existing transition, Rob found that, once fully cured and unscrewed, the now single laminated sheet of wood retained the shape in which it was set. Essentially the technique produced transitioned sheets of ply that require no supporting structure, a result that gave me an idea.

That idea was to travel somewhere warm and throw these bent sheets of wood up against anything and everything we could find. On paper [or, in this case, on email] the infinitely versatile

transitions would make spots out of nothing, allow Geoff’s creativity to run wild and provide a unique platform on which to display his bicycle prowess.

Often things work in principal but not in reality. Capitalism is a good example of this: on paper capitalism creates a utopian world of equal opportunity and happiness, anyone can make it, but in practice, as history has shown us, it leads to a big mess and often lots of dead/extremely unhappy people who have been laid to waste on someone else’s trip to the top of the tree. These ramps were like capitalism. Great in theory, an unsustainable death-trap in reality… imagine…

When proposing this project the sketches I’d scanned and emailed over to Geoff depicted him with a big smile on his face performing a power-mower on the roof of a house, an ambitious pocket air between two skyscrapers and a foot-jam on the moon. In practice, it was however a very different and much more unhappy experience for all parties involved.

It’s true that a picture tells a thousand words, but there are countless thousands more that it neglects to mention. If you were to ignore these words, and only muse over the pretty photographs in this article, then you’d get the impression that this whole saga was one all-smiling all-laughing sun-kissed good time, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Behind the five riding photos was a 10-day emotional rollercoaster ride with euphoric highs involving cutting edge European fashion deftly countered by deep dark lows fuelled by lost hope, heartache and black eyes.

But, although the project was far from plain sailing, through the trials and tribulations of prising printable content out of this ill-considered idea, something completely unexpected popped up, a priceless bonus that rendered the ordeal an overwhelming success: the bare naked exposure of Geoff Slattery’s true character.

Words and Photography by STEVE BANCROFT 87

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Geoff Slattery

T

hinking back now, there was never any real need to worry: there was no way Geoff ‘The All American Hero’ Slattery would let a couple of sheets of ply get the better of him.

Geoff likes to win. He lives to win. His deep-seated competitive streak is wider than Butcher’s and Rat Boy’s jeans combined.

The ferry from Portsmouth in the UK to Bilbao in Spain takes 26 hours, and during those hours Geoff won many times. He won a round ton playing electronic black jack, he won pub quiz word games, and he won money off his fellow crewmates playing cards. Filmer and self-esteem yoyo James Cox, S&M’s newest numbskull Bambi and hairbrained idea conceiver myself all handed Geoff significant amounts of cash before ‘The Voyage’ was through. He’s a cool and calculated gambler, and very good at winning.

But, although he likes a flutter, he is no chancer.

During the ferry crossing, unlike the rest of us, he didn’t play bingo and doesn’t put any money in fruit machines. Gambles that rely on blind luck are of little interest to Geoff, a point that the events of the upcoming week would go on to underline: in both his riding and his social life, he enjoys activities that rely on well-considered strategy, measured skill and calculated risk.

After cleaning up on the ferry, Geoff’s competitive nature was still prevalent as we undertook an eight-hour drive through Spain to Portugal, this time it was the Sat Nav he entered into competition with and, even in an unfamiliar country ten thousand miles from home, he still won and we found Ruben’s supposedly ‘Lost Bowl’ without so much as a single U-turn.

When I ask about this competitive affliction, Geoff replies, “I hate losing. No matter what I do, I’m going to try to win. No matter what it is… a card game, a football match, fucking rock/paper/scissor – I’m going to try to win. I’m going to do my best at everything I do.” And when quizzed as to the origin of this attitude he then goes on to explain, “It goes back to growing up playing sports. My dad has always brought me up with like ‘If you’re not doing your best, then why do it? Why half ass something?’”

The words commitment and determination are synonymous with Geoff’s riding and they were both on show at the ‘Not So Hard To Find Bowl’.

Thanks to some clever camera angles and much media hype, the video of Ruben’s discovery of the place paints a picture akin to Amundsen discovering the South Pole, but in reality, away from the over-dramatisation of modern marketing, the public skatepark sits just off the motorway in a built up area of a moderately sized Portuguese town.

But however ‘unlost’ they are, overwhelmed by the mountainous concrete waves, most riders would still shy away from these bowls. Sunken deep into the earth they lay shrouded in a veil of insurmount-

able massiveness. Their surface clean and untouched, as if no one has even mustered the courage to drop in from pegs. Laying like a dormant giant the emotionless heaving grey concrete walls invite any would-be challenger with an air of smug confidence.

But with the slingshot replaced with a bike and his name changed to Geoff from David, the outcome is the same. Against all odds The Goliath was slain. Undaunted by the beast, flesh and bones took on the impossible monster and emerged victorious. He casually looped around the cavernous cradle like a stroll to the hot dog stand. And when he stamped a downside footplant way up on the back of the leviathan’s head, the battle was won.

Up until this point our group morale had been hovering around between the ‘very low’ to ‘potential self harmer’ mark. You see, the transitions idea was an uphill struggle from the very start. Coxie had been harbouring doubts since the ‘ridiculous idea’s’ inception and upon clapping his eyes on the springy slices of wood Geoff’s expectations had fallen like a man into a tennis court.

"That channel gap was madness, but it was madness in the presence of a healthy dose of method"

The issue at the heart of the dark cloud was, when Rob explained these ramps to me, my mind ran away with itself and chose to ignore one vital piece of information. As he described the versatility and seemingly limitless applications of these genius sheets of wood, my brain was so busy goading over thoughts of full-page photos and pull-out posters that I neglected to pay attention to the part where Rob stipulated that, for them to work, each of the four corners “must be securely screwed into the wall or floor.”

Thinking back now, I do remember him saying it, but, at the time, that information seemed trivial and, as it was potentially going to put a dampener on what was otherwise sure to be a glorious project; I pretended I didn’t hear it.

However, as it transpired, the information was far from trivial – it was in practical terms a fundamental necessity – Rob wasn’t lying. Without being fixed in place, the transitions flex inwards as a rider pumps up them only to spring straight back out as soon as the weight is relieved. This violent release of stress causes the wood to jump back from the wall and slide to the floor, and this happens when the unlucky rider is way up on the wall. So, although the photographer may not have chosen to accept it at the time, with the victim now ten foot up a wall and nothing but the ground underneath him, the information I had locked in my subconscious was far from trivial.

Rolling With The Punches

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MindYour-Head Wallride In A Room With A View.

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It was only after a van was procured, ferry tickets were booked and Geoff had flown across the Atlantic that this potentially damning information came to light. Let me take you back to day one where things were all rosy as we drove to Rob Ridge’s Ramp Cave in relatively high sprits to pick the transitions up. But when Geoff and Coxie clapped eyes on the spring-like sheets of wood a fog of scepticism descended on morale like piss on a bonfire.

2.

Solid Table Across A Rickety Pocket.

There was talk of calling the whole thing off: drilling holes in private property in a foreign country isn’t any sort of plan at all. Geoff’s initial thoughts were “Even if we could ride them, there’s no way they’ll even fit in the van.” And, a week later, on the ferry ride home James would confess that “The way it was sold to me, these transitions were good to go. I was under the impression that we could just slap ‘em up and bosh a table out the top… and when I saw them, I was like “Nah! This ain’t gonna work, this is fucked, I think we’ve blown it, I think this is a lot of money spent on a massive failure.

A fool’s errand.”

But, mysteriously, Geoff and Coxie refrained from calling the employer of them both, Ian Morris, to pull the plug on my gig and they reluctantly shimmied the questionable sheets into the back of the van. The transitions took up half the vehicle so there was no way to physically ignore them, but mentally the crew hid “those stupid fucking bits of wood” in the back of their minds, hoped for some decent concrete parks and tried to enjoy a trip to sunnier climes.

After we found our way to the unfindable bowls with Sat Nav Slatts, a new wind began to fill us, we forgot about the ugly sisters in the back of the van… Geoff stepped up to battle the beast and soared beautifully inverted high above that Himalayan bowl, and a gust of optimism blew away mostall of the doubts we’d all been silently harbouring.

After that display of awesome bicycle mastery we were all reassured. Up until that point we had been making judgements based on the assumption that Geoff was a typical bike rider, and that with these ramps, no typical bike rider could make this project a success. But he is no typical bike rider. He happens to be one of the most determined, competitive and capable bike riders that I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting.

That afternoon we left one of the world’s most intimidating pieces of concrete cowering in the wake of his destruction – there’s not a snowball in Hell’s chance that two springy sheets of wood were going to play him for a fool. So, fuelled with a 50:50 octane mix of new-found optimism and lingering scepticism, we continued onwards, to the coast.

We drove around for what felt like days, searching for spots to employ these ramps. Our group reckoning was that, if we could find a wall with a rough surface on equally as rough ground, we might be

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Geoff Slattery

able to wedge the transitions in place and calm their erratic jumping. But the hunt was fruitless.

The heads in the back couldn’t even see out the windows due to the laminated ply sheets and again sentiment began to sour.

The first semi-viable ‘spot’ we found was a telegraph pole on a cliff top with some rubble at its base. It was a remote location so we stuck a few screws in the wooden pole and Geoff tried a few fakie wallrides. He went up okay and both tyres made contact with the pole, but as he landed the screws snapped, the transition twisted around the pole and he cut himself all up as he slid across the coarse gravel floor on his back. When he stood up he looked at me with rage, a thousand daggers fired out at me from his demonic red eyes.

Geoff didn’t really talk for the rest of that day. He just sat there calmly, looking like he wanted to be at home beating people at sports and generally being the best. “Maybe not even the mighty all American-quarterback prom-king whiskey-drinking-girlslaying bowl-airing Geoff Slattery can save my bacon now” I thought to myself as we resumed the futile search for spots that met our unconventional criteria for a magazine feature.

We searched for two days straight in a place that is a bit (excuse the generalisation, but it suits) thirdworldly. If we had been searching for mangy stray dogs or all-hunched-over-witch-like-women then we’d have been quids in. But we weren’t, we were looking for usable spots and we were very much skint. These people had never seen an English van, let alone one with bikes on it and bent wood in it with Oi music blaring out of wound-down windows.

As we slowly drove through one dilapidated village, scouring the place for spots, an old woman put a curse on Coxie with her dark sunken eyes – she had a face that could sink a thousand ships.

We did find one potential spot, but it was written off as being too ambitious. It was a channel gap of around 30 feet at an old abandoned house not too far away from where we were staying. Geoff thought he could get the distance, but the run-up was thick deep grass and peppered with some fairsized potholes. He had a couple of feeler runs, but it wasn’t happening. He just couldn’t get the speed.

On his last effort he semi-committed, came up short and crashed pretty bad. He got up in silence, shot a thousand dagger stare at the bent wood, got back in the van and slammed the door behind him.

However much it pained us to acknowledge it, the metaphor of that closing door was undeniable.

All but given up, that night we went out and got drunk. We were staying in a coastal town 40 minutes north of Lisbon and, being winter, the place was as dead as our morale. We found a bar with a hand written sign in the window saying ‘Shots Gratis’ so we went in. A lot happened that night.

Some pent up frustrations were released and some,

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3.

Narrow Boardwalk Ariel Against The Sun And The Tide.

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Geoff Slattery

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Geoff Slattery

how do you say ‘Super Cool’ Europeans were befriended. It was as usual, given the circumstances, a very late night.

The next morning started with us all already fully clothed with very dry mouths. Food and water and fresh air work their alchemical magic and senses were slowly handed back. It’s now day four of the bent wood project; we have no riding photos, big hangovers and the star of our flunking show is nowhere to be seen. Geoff never made it back.

“Where the hell is he?” He could be anywhere.

He could have just fucked it off and gone to the airport. The horse was dead, and no one had the strength to flog any more.

A few hours drearily trudged passed before Geoff appeared at the doorway of our rented wooden cabin. For a second I felt a glimmer of hope rise selfishly in me as his return was acknowledged, but one look at his face chased that dim ray of light straight back out the open door from which it came. Apart from his severely swollen eye, his face was as white as a sheet. His eye was as black as a bin bag. The heroin chic panda traipsed past the three of us and fell onto its bed.

Resigned to the fact the project had failed, we packed up the van and headed to the skatepark to film some clips of Bambi for his welcome to the S&M team edit. This was now a salvage operation, a professional damage limitation exercise. Ian Morris had trusted my deluded vision and had generously agreed to fund the ridiculous debacle I had pitched to him, and I was not revelling in the thought of having to make That Call to let him know I had fucked up. For some reason Ian has this kind of undefined aura around him and it makes me feel very conscious of everything I am doing, and it makes me question whether what I’m doing is good or bad.

And this time, what I was doing was definitely bad and I had no upside to report. Ian’s knowledge is beyond the mere critical eye of a key advertiser – that I can handle – his takes the form of omnipresent sorcery. My hands sweat just writing him an email. I really didn’t want to make That Call. Some failures are considered keys to success – not this one. This was a stupid idea from the start. I play out the call in my head – “But please, Ian. I’m sorry. I’ll know for next time… I’ve learnt my lesson. Please… ” And he’ll hang up and that will be that, I’ll be destined to play out my remaining days on the street course at NASS and sending pleading emails to Risto trying to get a media pass for Simpel Session.

That nightmare scenario was looping in my aching head as we got back in the van after the mildly productive skatepark shoot with Bambi. Geoff was still inside laid face down asleep. There was silence. We didn’t know what to do. The Sat Nav said we were in the middle of Portugal, but I could be more accurate than that, as I knew precisely where we were: Wits End, The Middle Of Portugal.

In one last-ditch effort of desperation I ask, “Hey. You awake?” The incoherent gurgle from the back of the van told me that he was, but he was still very

fragile. “If we collect up some wood to try smooth out the run-up are you up for trying that channel gap again?” I tentatively poked back, half joking. I was expecting him to say “Fuck off!” but, with his voice coarse from cigarettes and his crimson eye puffed up and half closed, the pirate raised his head up off the seat and croaked “Yeah, fuck it. Let’s do it.”

And with that the trip did another U-turn and headed off on a new, far more positive course. Although cracked and broken, those words were a shining beacon of light to a ship long ago lost in the fog. They were believable, they were words of conviction. So after many broken conversations and a reverse visit to the local dump we went back to the channel spot, dragged the ramps out the van and fashioned a sketchy 1994 style run-up from broken old doors and fence panels.

Even with the wood, the run-up was still a joke.

But, undeterred, he paced out the gap, looked at it from all angles, smashed off some over-hanging roof tiles, took a couple of feeler jumps and simply said “Ready?” To get the speed he had to start off running with his bike before jumping on and negotiating the ramshackle wooden causeway. Right at that minute you could see it, clear as day. Maybe, just maybe. The set-up was as far away from ideal as Geoff was from New Jersey. The gap between the now despised flexible transitions was 30 feet.

Each transition measured only four feet wide. The margin for error was smaller than an elf’s ear, and on top of that he was hung-over and could only see out of one eye. Odin would have been proud.

On the first attempt he pulled out too far, making the distance but his weight was back. He looped out and both himself and the landing transition tumbled to the floor. Undeterred, he jumped up, dragged the ramp back into place and strolled back to his run-up spot.

4.

Straight Up, Straight Down Wallride.

"An old woman put a curse on Coxie with her dark sunken eyes – she had a face that could sink a thousand ships"

On the second attempt he didn’t make the distance, his sprocket casing hard into the edge of the landing ramp. On his third try he looped out again. But each time he’d pick up his bike and calmly retake his position at the start of the run-up. His determination was nothing short of steely, and his manner calm and collected.

We all knew this was a pivotal moment for the trip, but we were also all under the same blanket of optimistic confidence. The gap was massive, the run-up diabolical but, no matter how challenging the situation was, the look on Geoff’s face instilled an unwavering confidence in everyone present. He was now fully committed to the challenge at hand, and our thin wallets were a reminder of just how much Geoff likes to win when confronted with odds he feels comfortable with.

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Geoff ’s body was now being operated by his competitive streak, and nothing was going to stop him airing that gap.

It was no surprise that on his very next run he sailed effortlessly from one anorexic ramp to the other, all high and stylish over the obese gaping space. And at that moment, as he rode away perfectly, his true colours shone in the glorious sunlight.

Against all the odds that I had placed before him Geoff had come through victorious. The challenge was a severe test of his resiliency and character and, in the face of adversity, he had aced it. In this game the transitions were his sworn opponents and, as cool as a cucumber, he’d just kicked them to the ground and ashed his cigar on the felled buggers.

Jumping that channel was an astonishing feat of bicycle mastery. But, even with all the irregularities, although the gap was wide and the risks numerous, this was no huck. As treacherous as it may have seemed to a casual observer, this was not so much a dangerous gamble as a calculated operation.

Although it may have appeared that way, Geoff didn’t just roll up at this wonky spot, slap the transitions up and send the monstrous gap blind: there was a far more intelligent process at work that that. When he says “Fuck yeah, let’s do it!”, it may sound all blasé and like he doesn’t have a care in the world, but that’s because he’s a professional. This ain’t his first rodeo, there is a wealth of knowledge behind his call-outs and judgements. Don’t get me wrong, that channel gap was madness, but it was madness in the presence of a healthy dose of method.

After the dust had settled, when I ask him how he goes about approaching some of the seemingly deadman stuff he does, he replies, “With channels like that, I just think of it as a big quarter. If you simplify things – take it all the way back to just airing a quarterpipe – because that’s really all I was doing – it makes it much easier to picture in your head. I visualize myself doing it, and if I can’t see it then I know it’s not worth trying.”

I push a bit more to try to uncover his motivation behind the big moves he’s famous for. After his first proper attempt, although he crashed, it was obvious through his mannerisms that he had it in his head and he wasn’t leaving the spot until it was done or he was broken. I ask him how he stays motivated to try again after he’s crashed – “I play a lot of sports and when our team play, if we lose, then I want to play that team again.” Having witnessed this situation many times before, Coxie chips in and probes deeper still “But you’ve crashed it a couple of times, you’re all hungover… it doesn’t look fun… you’re not doing it for the camera, so who is it for?” Geoff takes a moment before replying, “It’s that self-satisfaction. I fell a shit load of times, if I try something and fall and don’t do it, it’ll bug me. I guess what you want me to say is: yes, it’s for self-satisfaction, for that feeling of me conquering something in my way. Winning my battle.”

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Geoff Slattery

5.

The 30 Foot+ Channel Gap That Changed The Game.

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The transitions were undoubtedly sketchy but Geoff grew up in New Jersey riding and building backyard set-ups, so the rickety sheets of ply weren’t completely alien to him, he’s been used to making something out of nothing. He fleshes my thoughts out by adding “Where I grew up, there were five people with backyard ramp set-ups within 15 minutes pedalling of each other. They were all homemade with found wood, nothing was perfect.”

As we were on the subject of his early days I ask him about his beginnings on a BMX; “I grew up riding bikes. As soon as I could ride one, I wanted to be on my bike jumping curbs and cruising around. When I wasn’t playing baseball or another sport, then I’d be on my bike. I guess what got me into it was when my neighbour took me to the local trails at Cloverhills. I remember my jaw dropping the first time I went there.

At the time I just rode around doing wheelies and the second I saw those guys jumping the trails, it was like ‘damn, this is on’. My parents hated it, they hated me going down to those trails because, in those days, bike riders were looked at like a bunch of scum bags.

People thought, ‘they’re all in the woods doing drugs’, but they weren’t really, they were digging trails and riding bikes. I specifically remember my mom asking me what we did down there, I told her, ‘Mom, we just ride bikes.’ When I was 12 all my friends went to baseball practise and I went to hang out with a load of 18 year old bike riders – I’d come home smelling of cigarettes.”

"Apart from his severely swollen eye, his face was as white as a sheet. His eye was as black as a bin bag"

I ask how he came to chose BMX when he had so much potential to pursue a career in a more traditional and accepted sport. His answer was too poetic to come from a jock; “There are those few seconds when you’re in the air, all sound is cancelled out, you can just hear your freewheel clicking, and you catch that landing and you feel that pump – that’s what did it for me. Back then I just wanted nothing to do with organised sport. You know that feeling when you’re just up in the air and you’re flying and you’re going fast on your bike and there’s no one telling you what to do – there’s no baseball coach telling you to swing this way or swing that way – you’re in the woods hanging out with your friends having a great time.” Heads all nod in agreement, his answer resonating with us completely.

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“All aboard! Tighten your shoe laces and keep your hands inside at all times!” The success of the channel gap saw our rollercoaster trip jump back up into the sky like a chinchilla on fireworks night.

The floodgates were blown open and – although none of the set-ups were any less hostile – we shot a photo a day for the next four days. Once he’d cut his teeth, Geoff’s determination and competitive streak embraced the task – and from then on, the outcome was a forgone conclusion. Although the pictures look all nice and sunny and clean and sharp, none of these set-ups were ‘nice’. None were easy to ride. They all involved moving, flexing ramps, cobbled walls, minefield run-ups, stray dogs and a thousand more haywire variables. If there are any ramp heroes reading this thinking ‘Those transitions look sweet, I could have blasted that set-up.’

No! No you could not.

During our arduous struggle to fashion a silk purse from a pig’s ear it became glaringly apparent as to why Geoff is a well paid, globe-trotting sponsored pro. He may not be the typical rail slaying street rider or even have the deepest bag of tricks, but when intelligent approach, self-confidence and a competitive nature blend with athletic ability, pro-active mindset and balls of pure 4130 – it creates one hell of a bike rider. These days there are so many good young riders who expect to be rewarded for their talents without having anything else to offer: they get capable on their bikes and then just sit there with their hands out waiting for a Kit Kat and a shoe sponsor. Geoff is at the polar opposite end of the BMX world. Where they are hands out, he is hands on, not expecting anything and not waiting for a second.

There’s no doubt in my mind that he saved my bacon on this trip. I conjured up a near impossible task and I firmly believe that only he could have made this project work. No other rider has the resolve, or determination or strength of character to pull an article out of this hair-brained idea. His creativity found the spots, his carpentry skills made the ramps less flexible and his awesome ability on a bike provided the spectacle. His agreeing to this project in the first place is in itself a testament to his character, and his making it happen in the face of adversity cements him as among the most capable and able men I’ve ever met.

Geoff is a Steve McQueen of a guy: the ultimate anti-hero. He’s anything you could want him to be: from a clean-cut cup-winning quarter back, to a cigarette smoking, whiskey drinking, bar fighting gambler – and every damn thing else in between.

We never did find out how he got that black eye, but I do know one thing: I’m glad I wasn’t the other bloke…

Words and Photography by GEORGE MARSHALL

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With Sco n o tt ti a Di c u d

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1.

Double Peg To Hard Way 360, Liverpool.

cott Ditchburn and I are two very different people. I’m a straightlaced 30-year-old workaholic who finds it deeply satisfying to organize a draw of socks, who gets frustrated by the poor use of grammar and my only daily chemical high is a mild caffeine hit from my chrome espresso machine, for which I took out an extended warranty. In comparison, Scott Ditchburn is the UK’s poster boy for smoking weed, who stows away on trips abroad without his passport and gets frustrated when police coordinate dawn raids across Liverpool, pushing up the street price of weed above £20 for an 1/8th. I collect Nectar loyalty points, Scott collects bongs. I have a pension, Scott has some seeds he bought off the internet. I like homemade, Scott likes homegrown. I grew up listening to the music that told me drugs were bad, Scott grew up listening to music that told him drugs were good. I don’t have a poster of Notorious B.I.G on my living room wall, Scott doesn’t have to spend his spare weekends going round antique shops to keep his girlfriend happy.

I ride through life with two fingers on the brake, Scott flies through life way up in the sky on a cloud of natural highs. Working on this feature I took a huge step out of my comfort zone, and embedded myself into the unruly world of Scott Ditchburn. It was to be a time for new experiences.

It was to be an education…

Before I took on the assignment of shooting this feature I had some idea what I was in for. The first time I shot a photo with Scott was at the 2010 Interbike Rail Jam in Las Vegas. Riding against the crème de la crème of the world’s street riders, and under the watchful eye of a judging panel that consisted of Van Homan, Edwin Delarosa, Leigh Ramsdell and Jimmy Levan, Scott was in the biggest contest of his life. Unnoticeable by the standard of his riding, he was also enduring the effects of a heavy night before, as Ben Lewis recalls – “I remember Ditchburn was on the deck asking me why the rail was moving… He told me he thought the rail was a massive yellow snake, ‘It’s a snake, it’s a snake’ he told me. He then dropped in and did a X-up Luc-E grind down it. Scott’s a beast.”

I knew full well I would not be photographing an athletic robot who’d schedule me into their packed calendar with a highlighter pen. I was going to be spending my time with a reckless spirit with tribal tattoos, an individual with real character on his own timetable. I knew getting to know Scott would lead me to new experiences, far beyond my regular routine of work > Sainsbury’s > dinner > bed. I thought I knew what I was getting myself in for, but little did I know what experiences lay ahead…

It must have been a strange or even suspicious sight for a dog walker or passerby. It wasn’t your average scene for a hillside on a rainy day in North Wales. Four lads hooded up, spread out across a field, combing the ground presumably searching for a set of lost keys possibly, or a wallet maybe.

“I can’t find any,” shouts Scott.

“I think it has to be a South facing field?” Suggests Dub Jack still staring at the ground.

“Which way is South then?” Replies Jambul.

“No idea. I swear someone told me they grow better on sheep fields. The sheep shit acts as fertilizer or something,” I shout across the wet field, trying to act like I knew what I was doing, but I didn’t.

We weren’t looking for keys, a wallet or anything of that common nature.

The object of our search was illegal. We were looking for natural psychedelic highs, we were looking to hallucinate and send our minds into orbit, we were looking for potent Welsh magic mushrooms.

“They always used to grow here,” Scott says, temporarily abandoning the search to skin up and take in the view of the Flintshire Bridge and Connah’s Quay power station in the distance. “Maybe it’s the wrong time of year or it hasn’t rained enough. ‘Shrooms need a lot of moisture to grow like,” he says knowingly, in his Northern accent that I find hard to pinpoint the source of, neither Scouse or Welsh, ending his sentences with typical ‘like’, pronounced ‘li-ak.’

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Scott Ditchburn

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2.

Long Icepick, Widnes.

The hillside looks down over Scott’s old hometown of Flint. From there we can see beyond the small town and across the River Dee, over the Welsh borders and into the Wirral Peninsula of England, towards Scott’s current home of Liverpool from where we’d driven a few hours before. The day’s plan of riding had been abandoned by the sight of rain in the morning. We were on Scott’s home turf. On our drive through Flint he’d pointed out a high long rail he’d broken his ankle on as a teenager, and a spot under some trees, hidden from his old college where he used smoke in secret from the teachers. He’d picked mushrooms in these fields before, but today it wasn’t to be. After a couple of hours of searching, trying different fields facing all four directions of the compass we’d found a total of zero mushrooms, magic or otherwise. We’d left the house in search of mind-bending euphoria, but all we got was walking round muddy sheep fields in the rain. It felt like I was living in a scene from the film Trainspotting bizarrely blended with the TV programme Country File.

“I grew up in Flint, it’s a homely shit-hole. To people not from there it’s just a shit-hole,” Scott tells me one morning in his kitchen, drinking coffee from a glass jar, all the other mugs either smashed or dirty. “My mum is from Flint and my dad’s from Bagilt which is the next town along. It’s mad be-

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cause they grew up just miles from each other, but they met in Portsmouth while my dad was stationed there, he’s in the Royal Navy you see. My dad has been in the Navy for over 20 years… he’s a sick guy,” he says proudly, obviously in admiration of his father, as I wonder what the relationship must have been like between a rebellious weed smoking son and a disciplined naval officer. “Whenever he spoke to me he taught me to stand ‘at ease’, with my back straight, legs apart and hands behind my back.

It’s better standing like that, it’s comfy. That’s why, if you noticed, I always stand up straight – it’s thanks to my dad.

“At school they called me ‘Plank’ because I stood so straight. I stand like it when I’m at contests and I’ll see people look at me thinking, ‘is he in the military like?’ Fuck no, I’m not in the military. I did all right in school, apart from in history where I wasn’t allowed in the classroom after I told the teacher I’d pay to see her on her deathbed. At 16 I left school with Cs, Bs and Ds in my GCSEs. My dad wanted me to go into the marines. I went along for the selection process and I did all the training and all that.

I passed all the physical stuff. For the last part of the selection I had to do a general knowledge quiz to test my intelligence. I was half way through the test thinking ‘fuck me, this test is easy like.’ A real dumbass could have passed that test, the military

will take anybody you know? I was thinking ‘fuck, I’ve only just got on my first sponsor Firm Bikes, why do I want to go into the Royal Marines?’

So I flunked the test. I got half way through and thought ‘fuck this, I don’t want to be in the military all my life, I want to ride bikes and do fun stuff’.

So I started putting all wrong answers. I failed on purpose. It’s the best decision I’ve ever made.”

Expecting him to tell me his dad was a man of discipline, I ask how his father dealt with having a son who rode a BMX and smoked. “My dad didn’t use too much discipline on me. He was always fair. He never hit me, or anything like that. He knows I smoke weed, or ‘wacky backy’ as he calls it. When I first got caught in school with a tiny bit of weed, he bollocked me for that.

After that he caught me smoking ciggies and I lied through my teeth to him that I didn’t smoke weed, as you do when you’re younger.

“I was young when I first smoked weed. That was in Flint, I’m not sure how old exactly… eleven or twelve maybe. When I lived there he knew I smoked and he was okay about me smoking, he just told me to not let my step-mum catch me smoking, because she had a problem with it like.

He knows how long I’ve smoked it for. He knows it hasn’t changed me, I’m the same old knobhead

I’ve always been. My mum doesn’t mind me smoking. I can smoke a joint in the back of her car and she’s sound about it. She’d pick one of her mates up with me sat in the back smoking and they would be like ‘he is smoking weed?’ She didn’t care, my mum’s cool.

“There’s a lot more worse things in the world than smoking weed, like alcohol. Drinking just makes me violent. That’s why I rarely drink. It would always get me in trouble and turn me into an angry dickhead. The world would be a better place if they legalized weed. It’s just smoking plants at the end of the day, it’s all natural.

“After I failed on purpose to get into the marines I didn’t completely fuck everything off for riding.

My dad said, ‘if you’re not going to go into the military you need a trade.’ So I went to college and got a trade to be a joiner. I’ve got qualifications in carpentry and joinery, NVQs motherfucker. I always think if riding fucks up I’ll fall back onto it. I’ve got all the qualifications for it, but I’d need to go back to college for another year just to relearn the ropes, it’s been a long time since I was taught that stuff. I enjoy getting hands on with things. I can do site joinery or bench joinery. I’d prefer to do site joinery, there’s more money in it. I love woodwork.

When in doubt get your hammer out.”

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3.

No Hander, Liverpool.

When not studying joinery Scott spent his days as a teenager at the local skatepark in Flint. It was here Scott would be first noticed, and later taken under the wing by a local BMX legend, Owain Clegg. “I used to do skatepark workshop sessions in Flint. We’d go down there and try and get the local kids into riding. I wasn’t talent-spotting or anything like that, but Scott stood out from the rest of the scally kids, he turned up on a more regular basis and he showed he was keen on riding. He was a classic ratty kid, definitely a trick ferret. He’d come down the skatepark on the rattiest bike I’d ever seen. His bearings would be creaking and he’d be pulling stuff all ropey, but he didn’t care. He’d be at that skatepark from morning till night. I think that riding really helped him. You see people who could be complete scallies, but they find something like riding and it changes their persona. I think Scott could have quite easily gone down the path of being a Scally, instead he grew into his riding and he got real good, real quick. I knew it wouldn’t be long before people would start taking notice and that he could do something with his riding,” Owain recalls.

“I remember years and years ago, around 2005 or 2006, there was a shaky video of Scott doing a rail to hard way 360. It was one of the first ones ever done and he skidded off because it was in the rain. People kicked off saying he didn’t pull it, regardless I remember thinking that’s pretty bloody impressive for some kid from a small town in North Wales. It was on a rail that no-one rode because it was horrible. That was back when the Sheffield scene dominated UK street riding and the news quickly got across the Pennines. Riders like Joe Cox were asking me who was this ratty kid from the middle of nowhere who could do rail to 360 hardways.

"He thought the rail was a massive yellow snake, ‘It’s a snake, it’s a snake’ he told me. He then dropped in and did a X-up Luc-E grind down it"

“Scott came into his own at the Battle Royale street jam in Liverpool. He stole the show that day. He was completely unknown and he was doing the biggest stuff like barspinning the tunnel gap. He was riding against the older generation of more established UK street riders like Jersey [Mike Taylor], Matt Wakefield and Cookie… it was a good scene back then, but it wasn’t like Dave Mirra vs. Scott Ditchburn. That’s what was so great about those Battle Royale jams, everyone was equal. If a kid was good enough they had a chance to shine against anyone. I think things began to change for Scott after that Battle Royale, I think that day showed him he could take riding further. He soon picked up some sponsors and began to get a bit of attention and became an inspiration to all the kids in Flint. He’s a local hero. Scott showed the younger lads like Josh [Roberts] you could come from a small town like Flint and make it as a professional UK rider,” Owain remembers, talking like a proud older brother of his protégé.

Scott left Flint at the age of 19 and moved in with long-term friend Dub Jack.

The pair’s first move to the city of Manchester came to an abrupt end after a house party left their rented house in ruins. With debt collectors in pursuit, Scott and Jack moved to the Kensington area of Liverpool, into a three bedroom flat that in time became known as the infamous Dub House. The house was the hotbox and hub for a new generation of Liverpool street riders collectively bound by their allegiance to Jack’s growing empire – Dub BMX. A combination of Dub’s close association with smoking, an infectious ‘Chillz Not Skillz’ message and a dream list of team riders that outweighs any professional bike team in the world, Dub was emerging from Jack’s bedroom as one of the most sought-after brands in the UK. It was a time when Liverpool was taking over the reigns from Sheffield as the UK’s most progressive street scene. At the forefront of that changing of the guard and Dub’s rise to popularity was Scott.

“Me and Scott started coming up to Liverpool from North Wales when we were as young as 15 or 16,” Jack tells me. “The Liverpool scene was always really good, but no-one paid attention, it never got any recognition. We moved here about five years ago when I was 19 and Scott would have been 20. As soon as I decided to start a brand, Scott was the first person I asked to be a rider. Having Scott on there it blew up quicker than I ever could have imagined.”

Over several weeks last summer I shared the floors of the Dub House in Kensington. It must be made clear now that the Kensington in Liverpool is not to be confused with the grand palaces, luxury shops and chic bars of Kensington in London. The two could not be further apart. Put bluntly, every morning I was pleasantly surprised to see that my van parked outside had not been broken into. Kensington, known locally as ‘Kenny’, is an area of Victorian terrace houses off a main road where the off-licenses are non self-service and have Perspex security cages to protect the staff. Teenage mums an inch deep in thick make-up march the streets in tracksuits and swear at their toddlers. Never have I stayed anywhere surrounded by so much crime and grim tales.

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4.

Rainbow Bridge Grind, Newport South Wales.

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5.

360 No Hander, Bradford.

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It was here in Kenny where Bruno Hoffmann came to stay and saw a young lad hang himself from scaffolding immediately opposite the Dub House. One morning the pavement of the main road was closed after an old man had died from a heart attack during a punch-up in a local betting shop – all before 10am. And another morning, the phone shop beneath Scott’s flat had been raided by the police for selling stolen goods. “It’s dodgy as fuck in that shop. All they sell is phones, laptops and PlayStations, you know, the shit people rob from houses. I went in there to sell some stuff. I took my passport in to prove I was legit and it wasn’t stolen gear. They laughed at my passport and asked if I was going on holiday. The police have closed it down now, everything’s been seized. It’s always kicking off round here. Some woman got stabbed on our doorstep a couple of weeks back and just the other night someone got glassed in the throat in the pub across the road. The matrix [police] were going insane like.”

In my time I’ve have the pleasure of staying in many riders’ homes, but none as extraordinary as The Dub House. For the past year or more since I first started occassionally sleeping on their sofa, every single two minutes in the Dub House is interrupted by a loud BLEEP from the fire alarm in crying need of a battery, but a battery has never come, the repititive torture now deaf to the resident’s ears. Shower time at The Dub House is like being in a ball-pool of empty shower gel bottles. Dinnertime is a hunt to track down a single fork. Although the bedrooms have a degree of cleanliness it’s the shared living room that returns me to feeling like I’m again reenacting a scene from Trainspotting, but this time I’m not watching it from my sofa, I’m climbing out of the toilet with Renton. The constant flow of visitors to the house are responsible for most of the mess. The living room being the jewel in the house’s crown of relaxed hygiene and ‘just do it tomorrow’ thinking. Behind the TV lies a box full of t-shirts and hoodies, decaying into mold. The floor is covered in an array of snack wrappers, rolling papers and copies of Ride, finished blunts and ash. A stash of Albion magazines sit beside the sofa, their covers ripped to shreds for making roaches. Any surface that is not combustible is an ashtray, a quarter full bottle of Pepsi is an ashtray, a piece of stale white toast is an ashtray, Josh Roberts’ bankcard is an ashtray.

Aside from the chaotic mess of the living room, Scott’s home life in The Dub House is one of a functional family unit. Over last summer Jack would be in his room editing videos to Doctor Green Thumb by Cypress Hill, most likely for the second day straight. Dan Lacey would be sleeping in the corridor nested on a pile of duvets and cardboard boxes that used to contain Dub stock. Then visitors and now full-time residents, Josh Roberts and Jambul, would be sleeping in the living room. Someone would always be making a round of teas for everyone or offering to go down the Tescos.

Despite the uncaring appearance of the flat, these guys look after each other.

A few days after our abandoned search for mushrooms on the Welsh hillside, Jack made some calls and arranged for a delivery. I arrived at the house one morning to find everyone but Scott in bed and a pan of boiled down mushrooms on the hob. I find a clean pan and, next to Jack’s brown concoction of mushrooms, cook myself some porridge to have with a cup of tea, taking care to scrub the mug like a leper had pissed in it, in an effort to avoid an unwelcome trip to Mars. “Jack made himself a mushroom brew at eight in the morning. That’s the first time I’ve seen him cook,” Scott says to me standing over the hob. A few days later I found some of the mushrooms wrapped up in some pages of newspaper in the glove box of my van, left there by accident – now dried and upgraded in the legal system to class-A status and carrying a jail term of seven years and a hefty fine.

The pattern of life in The Dub House would sometimes verge on nocturnal. Late into the night, the residents and visitors would stay up smoking, watching television or playing Xbox. It’s a pattern that some nights led me to retreat to the conventional household of Ben Lewis, Pete Sawyer and Jason Phelan in search of a good night’s sleep. During the time I did stay at The Dub House I watched more TV than I had done in years, my favourite programme being Sky Cops – a reality show that follows the daily life of a police helicopter crew chasing criminal scum. Sitting watching the getaway, I longed for the job of a sniper, picking off the undesirable members of society like ducks at the fairground. Sometime later, it did come to my surprise to find myself pedaling as fast as my legs would take me, trying to evade a police helicopter’s searchlight homing down on myself and a group of riders, scattering into the streets of Liverpool after an altercation with Liverpool University security staff. Now I was the bad guy fleeing into the night.

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6.

Up Rail Hard Way 180 Barspin, Warrington.

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Getting chased by a police helicopter was just another new experience I’d chalked up during my time with Scott Ditchburn. Over the weeks I stayed in Liverpool, Scott taught me a huge amount. He taught me what a ‘twenty bag’ was, how to make magic mushroom tea, that girl’s deodorant makes an effective air refresher for a bedroom plagued by damp. I also learnt that my van wasn’t up to the challenge of driving up mountains in Wales in first gear, and that a new gearbox and clutch costs £1,100.

Above all, I learnt that riding is everything to Scott Ditchburn, nothing means more to him than grinding a flatbar with his friends – the freshly inked Dub BMX tattoo on his forearm is a symbol of that loyalty. I learnt that he looks at Josh Roberts like a younger brother, akin to the manner in that Owain Clegg fostered Scott’s talent a generation before.

Scott Ditchburn

Even if I never learnt how to pick magic mushrooms, Ray Mears taught me the basics of survival in the arctic, I learnt how to build nuclear submarines, and about the dangers of driving huge trucks across the frozen lakes of Canada. These were all lessons I learnt while sat in the living room watching the Discovery Channel either late at night or in the long mornings waiting for Scott to wake up. But I didn’t mind waiting, I was gaining vital general knowledge, maybe I’d found the source of Scott’s vast knowledge and that’s why he found the military entry exam so easy. I for one am glad Scott decided to flunk that test. BMX would be a far more sober and dull entity without him. It’s reckless spirits like Scott that make BMX not mountain biking.

Everyone needs a bit of chaos in their lives, everyone needs a bit of Scott Ditchburn.

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QUITTERS James Brooks Words + Photography

by DANIEL BENSON

Was it the pressures of injuries or the pressures of the trails that made former S&M and Vans UK rider James Brooks quit?

The Chertsey trails talisman opens up on why he hung up his spurs.

Albion: Was there an official day that you quit?

James: I tried to stop once before, probably five years ago. My hand slipped off jumping one of the big jumps and I went down and took all the skin off this side of my face, it was all swollen, I had memory loss for a few days. That shook me up a lot, not being able to remember stuff, so I didn’t ride at all that summer. Then I realised I was missing doing it, because all your mates do it and all that. I thought, ‘if I don’t start riding again soon, I won’t ride again.’ With the jumps, you either jump them, or you don’t, so it was just getting my head around that.

You went on the Oakley Trails Tour a couple of summers ago, was that when you’d just started riding again?

I’d been riding a couple of summers by then, but I’d decided by that point that I was only going to ride down the trails because I could build the stuff, maintain it, tweak it and it was safe. But the Trails Tour, that was probably one of the most progressive weeks I’ve ridden, because I wasn’t used to riding other people’s jumps. I was there with Toby [Forte] and we’d both had head injuries, his much worse than mine, so we were in a similar frame of mind of wanting to ride things 128

on our terms, like if the conditions were right, which as you know they often weren’t. I gave in to the pressure and eventually started riding in conditions that I wouldn’t usually, but it turned out all right in the end. About a week after that, I was back at Chertsey, 360’d a jump, slightly over-rotated, jackknifed and stopped dead. I hit the ground and knocked myself out, even though I had a helmet on. Then it rained loads for the next couple of weeks and that was the end of that year’s trails. The following spring, I was getting married so I had a lot to sort out with that. I went to the trails a bit, but I knew as soon as the weather started getting good, I was gonna be busy with this wedding. Then I got married and… I never went ‘oh, I’ll go and get my bike.’

You just didn’t feel like it?

Yeah, like where I’d tried to stop before because of crashing and the head injuries, my life still revolved around BMX, so I always ended up back there. Now suddenly, it didn’t anymore. It had become a weekend activity at the end. I’d basically quit BMX about four years ago by this point other than a week on the Trails Tour, it was quitting the trails that was hard part. When I was away getting married, Ian who rode the trails was with us, he was out with his knee as well.

Quitters

I was saying to him ‘at this point, what am I waiting for that makes me stop riding?’ If I look around my friends, they’ve all had shitty crashes, one of us paralyzed their leg, it’s just taken people out for good. ‘Am I waiting for something like that to stop me?’ I also now live an hour from the trails and don’t really hang about with anyone who rides anymore, so I wasn’t getting people calling me up going ‘let’s go riding.’

You sound like you don’t miss it? Do you not miss it at all?

The other thing that’s in there is that having crashed bad and gone ‘I’m not going to push myself’ you just don’t enjoy riding to the same level. I mean, some people could, but for me the progression was always a big part of it. If you’re like “right, I’m only going to take it easy” and you’re riding a weekend here and there, you’re treading water, at best. You’re just retreading old footsteps.

Do you miss the building of the trails?

That was another element in the mix. Because you’re not pushing yourself jumping the big stuff, you want the jumps to be perfect, so you appreciate the details of it, so you become a lot more anal about keeping the place running smoothly. But because you’re only going there two days a week, the work you did all that weekend is ridden all week and when you go back it’s a mess again, so you’re always chasing this cycle around.

Was there any bad blood with the trails?

Erm, yeah [laughs]. For the past four or five years, since I’ve been injured, it opened the door for a load of dudes to come in.

Who you didn’t want there?

I was cool with whoever wanted to be there, but you’ve got to do some work. Originally, we had double the amount of people and everything was good because the trails worked.

Then every so many years, a load of work needs doing, everything needs repairing or you want to upgrade. That year came and a load of dudes started coming down and as soon as a dry day came, they just wanted to sweep lips and ride, not re-patch anything, not re-carve anything and totally ignore the dudes down the holes all day filling barrows and building stuff up. So there was some friction there, like building up this image like you’re a trail dude, but all you do is take pictures there. I didn’t give a shit too much, but we had it out one day and were like ‘it ain’t personal, but do some work’ – and none of them came back after that, that was about three years ago now.

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Do you feel like you’ve done all that work?

I dunno, it’s probably 15 years’ worth of digging. You’ve seen it, you know what it’s like… I guess at some point you’ve just got to let go of it.

It sounds like the tension at the trails was as much a reason for you to quit as the injuries were.

All those other things were going on, but the thing that stopped me was the thought of coming back from my wedding, going down the trails and walking into grief, all the trails being a mess.

Where did the grief come from?

Oh, if you’re only there on weekends, you’re just this old dude who shows up and moans at kids [laughs]. If it’s their first or second summer there, they don’t know anything about the place, how long the it’s been there. I can see how, growing up with trails on your doorstep, built and done, you’ll just turn up, do what they ask you to, and just ride all the time. But if you grow up with no trails, you learn that if you want to ride something, you’ve got to build it, and in turn keep it maintained and keep making the trails better.

“It’s probably 15 years’ worth of digging... I guess at some point you’ve got to let go of it.”

What about now you’re not there?

I’ve no idea.

Really? Do you have no contact with the trails now?

All the guys who started there have gone – it’s a much younger generation going down there now. They’ve pretty much walked into a skatepark, they’ll ride it if it’s rideable.

What do you miss about it?

I kinda see it as two chunks, like the first period, where I was traveling loads, riding new places and meeting new people, then the second half was a bit more hermit-like, but it was like going back to your roots, riding the same spot, just riding with your mates, not worrying about what’s happening outside of your scene.

So, you don’t think you’re gonna sneak down in a year or so to check out the jumps?

I think, since I’ve been gone, it’s opened the floodgates to whoever has been a dick in recent years to turn back up, so I’ve got no interest in turning up to see a bunch of dudes I told to fuck off riding the trails and telling me how great the trails are, when all they’ve done is built them up a bit.

Who’d you tell to fuck off?

I don’t think we need to name names…

Someone famous?

Someone you probably know… Nah, we don’t need to get into it, it’s done now. It’s a shame that it comes to this, with shit-talking at trails and not being 15 anymore [laughs]. But… If you spend all your weekends in the winter building the place, when you could be working, earning money or hanging out doing other shit. Then spring rolls around and a bunch of dudes your own age or older turn up, especially if they’ve got a clothing company selling stuff off the image of the place…

They wanna talk a lot, but never wanna shift any mud.

Would you advise a young kid reading this to start building trails?

Yeah, course. I reckon it’s a hard decision to make as a kid now, as there are so many good skateparks and you can just go out your door and ride street, to then go ‘I’m gonna bust my arse all winter to build some jumps.’ You can understand why people don’t, but you can’t explain the reward in building your own spot.

Quitters

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EDWARDES

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221-225 Camberwell Rd London SE5 0HG 020 77033637 Rider Jason Forde, photo by Chris Hill-Scott

TM

DWELLING PORTABLY WITHIN THE ANTI-SOCIAL NETWORK Words & Riding Photography

by STEVE BANCROFT

Incidental Photography

by STEVE CRANDALL FBM have always been an independent and hands on company. Even in these information technology driven times they are still sat steadfast behind their do-it-yourself guns. Hell, they’re so DIY they even run a social network all of their own.

Far away from the superficial world of cringe-worthy self-portraits and unwinnable popularity contests, theirs is an unofficial, real-life network of like-minded individuals. United by music, beer, bikes and an insatiable thirst for a goodtime, this network of rockers, punks and vagabonds has nodes and servers in all corners of America and beyond: coverage is near universal.

Forget satellites and fibre optics, FBM’s network runs at its own pace. It is only through hours of travelling, riding, eating and drinking together that friendships as deep as these are scored. Friendships like these certianly do not just pop into existence at the click of a mouse.

To find spots and book hotels, the majority of today’s BMX teams drive around the streets looking for WiFi

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hotspots and internet cafes – the FBM team ride around the bars looking for bad tattoos and cut-off denim jackets.

Usernames and passwords are replaced by shared values and shared 6-packs. Pokes and friend requests are swapped for handshakes and floor space.

Although a bit tatty and frayed, their vast network of nodes and cells allows the team to cover boundless distances at bare minimal costs. This system does not accept PayPal or bank wires, this circuitry runs on loose change, straight swaps and gambles. It is DVD sales, homemade t-shirts, fuel siphoning and c-lo in the car park, all the way.

FBM use their unofficial network to dwell portably, moving cheaply and not uncomfortably between pockets of awesomeness. Always ones to keep it wild and play by their own rules, to most, theirs is an Anti-Social network. And that is just about fine by them.

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Cloaks and Daggers Everyone in the van has a cloak on.You get one when you get it. The cloaks are invisible, but they change things. Like water off a duck’s back, the cloaks make things that were once serious just slide away. They act like shields: deflecting woes and fending off damp spirits.

1.

Evan Venditti, Hip Hanger, Columbia, SC.

A homeless man jitters over to the van on the forecourt of a petrol station. He is half shouting, half singing. Drunk or deranged or both. Wormz shouts and dances with him while Cranpa fills up the tank.

The tramp gets excited. He is having a great time.

Soon we are fuelled up and everyone gets back in, ready to get back on the freeway. “C… c… can I go!?” stutters the bum in a desperate wreck of a voice as he tries to get in. We all laugh and someone says, “sorry my man.” And the door closes in his face. The bum’s jubilance drops as we pull out past him and onto the information super freeway.

He looks sad, like he has lost something precious.

For a minute he was happy. For a minute his broken antenna tuned into something it liked. “We used to pick them up,” says Crandall nodding back towards the tramp “but they are only fun for the first hour or so, after that they just get too fucking weird.”

Inside the bus it is very weird already. To think that it can get too weird is hard. The cut off point must be very high. Very near the line of insanity. The ticket holders are all good friends and all good riders. Kenny looks like Todd off Bevis and Butthead. Evan is reading “How To Survive a Nuclear Disaster.” From the back Wormz sends a mysterious text to Crandall about his pants.

The next time we stop for fuel is at South Of The Boarder. It is the biggest service station slash firework shop slash carnival slash tat-shop in the world.

Not tattoo shop – tat as in: cheap plastic stuff. The crew load up on explosives. Some get let off in the van. It already feels like a Props commercial from 1998. Thank god!

I slap a big South Of The Boarder sticker on the van.

Proud to have been there. It turns out to be a cardinal sin. He shouts. I pick until my fingernails hurt. It gets dark. We stop for beer. In the beer shop a woman holds her hand out to shake as she approaches Eric “Hi,” she says in a happy tone “you must be the band, I’m Laura from Johnnies, I booked you guys. What time are you on?” A bit bewildered Eric looks at me for an answer. My cloak is on so I say “About eleven. Do we get a free bar?” “Of course,” she says with a smile “see you tonight.” And she’s off out the door.

We ask the man behind the counter where Johnnies is and plan to go there later. The crew look like a band.

A lot of travelling BMXers look like they could be in a band. These guys look like they should be in a band.

Kenny decides we are called ‘The Piss Buckets’.

We walk in to Johnnies. There is already a band on stage. We are too late. Eric sets off fireworks and gets kicked out. Outside is a limousine. Eric and Wormz

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get in with the squawking gaggle of 17-year-old birds and we do not see them again for a long time.

The next day we ride bikes. We are not picky about spots. If fun can be had at a spot then it is. If it can not, then it is not. Stuff gets filmed. If tricks are not landed perfectly then sometimes they are done again. And sometimes they are not. It is more about the act of riding bikes rather than the end result.

BMX is not a means to an end. It is a means. It is a great means. It is a means of transportation, of communication, of fun, of meeting people, of continual movement. BMX is a means to a lot of things. But it is not a means to an end.

We meet more people. They are different but they look quite the same. Jordan and Dave run this particular node. They have tattoos also and denim jackets without sleeves. They ride for fun too. We stay at their house. Crandall cooks for everyone. On the menu is Bum Stew or Swath. They are both the same thing. Crandall scrapes together $20. The result feeds 12 people. It tastes good. Outside, stood around the stove, stories are exchanged. Fighting stories, girl stories, riding stories: the best kinds of stories. People have knives on their belts. Like daggers. The neighbourhood is undesirable and the knives are also used to shotgun beers – two birds, one stone. Cloaks and daggers.

We go to a house party. I do my first keg stand. My cloak kept me dry even when the beer spurted everywhere and I was too old. It is a great time. We are all stood around a fire. Eric and Evan set off fireworks. Lattiné does a keg stand and topples onto a tray of BBQ corn. The people from the van are having more fun that the other people there. Most people shine to the portable dwellers. They are good people. One man did not like Kenny Horton. The man was too drunk and went to start something.

Kenny punched him with a beer can still in his hand.

Later the police came and the party was over.

Eric sleeps outside always. He has a hammock and a sleeping bag, or if there are no trees, then he just has a sleeping bag. Wormz does not recognise the moon for a minute and mistakes it for a new planet. I wet the bed again, just like issue two. It is a cheap motel bed. There is a piss blanket like a crisp packet and it is all crinkling as I drunkenly fumble to get it off. It is annoying Crandall. He is half pissed off and three quarters laughing. My cloak keeps me dry.

In the morning, Kenny is spray painting on a sheet of ply. What he is painting does not really look like much. “What the hell is that?” Asks Lattiné in confusion, “I dunno” replies Kenny angrily, “What is anything?” It is straightforward philosophy, Horton style.

We go to bowls and Eric kills it. We go to big drops and rails and Kenny kills it. We find spots for everyone and everyone kills it. As we are leaving one spot, following our network guide, there are three television sets next to the road. We drive past slowly. We

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2.

Eric Hennessey, Power Mower, Charleston, SC. 3.

Eric Hennessey, Down Table, Savannah, GA.

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get about a hundred yards down the road before it is deemed “Rude not to.” The van gets reversed and all three television sets get smashed. We lost our guide.

But there will be more.

4.

Kenny Horton, Tight Peg Grind, Fayetteville, NC. 5.

Ruel ‘Wormz’ Smith, Curb Cut to Peg Grind, Savannah, GA.

We go to the beach. People throw dead jellyfish and fireworks. We ride more and film more. Kenny gets a puncture. We find a bike shop. It is a posh one filled with flashy road bikes. As Todd from Beavis and Butthead walks in the people look uneasy. It is not his kind of place. He is not their kind of person.

If it were way back, they would have reached for their shotguns. But Kenny is nice, and he fixes his puncture.

We go to the bar. After the bar we grab a bite to eat and a late coffee in a diner. There is a booth full of middle-aged women eating and laughing. One of them has nice chimps. We sit opposite them and get chatting. “We are on acid.” Crandall tells them convincingly. “We are all on acid,” he adds. The ladies love it and it is a goodtime.

After food we are back in the van out the front about to hit the sack when the waitress from the diner comes running out with a telephone in her hand. It’s 3am.

“It is for you,” she says a little confused. It is the ladies from the booth, they are back at home now and were wondering what we are up to. Some people head round to hang out and wear masks and get weird.

In the morning we ride. The tricks are simple. More often than not the tricks are simple. Their hearts are

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still on show, even though their sleeves have been cut off. Tables, hip hangers, peg grinds, straight hops and power mowers. They ride straight and they ride fast.

Whatever happens the wheels keep spinning. Sometimes fast and other times slow. But they keep turning.

One experience moves on to the next. There is laughter and warmth inbetween. We stay on floors, couches and crammed in cheap motel rooms. It doesn’t matter where you sleep. It is one long psychedelic fairground ride of a goodtime and when it stops we have memories and photographs and footage and new friends.

We all take off our cloaks. And right away we all want to plug back in again.

This is what Cranpa calls ‘Dwelling Portably’. ‘Living Properly’ could be another name for it. FBM are a different breed of bike riders. They have seen a lot and they know a lot. They keep the best bits of the old school and use them to spice up the new one. BMX has come a long way. It is big now and modern and it is easy to lose things. Some ‘reasons why’ get lost.

Or blurry at least. But not for these guys. These guys stand firm like crystal cliffs. Solid and unwavering in their values but wavering gloriously all over the place in their actions.

After the trip I was left in awe of just how apt the antisocial network is at connecting people and providing the basis for a buck-wild – but still productive – goodtime. I gave Crandall a few topics that were pertinent to the trip so we could get a few words; with the hope of lifting the lid on his well honed ‘on the road’ philosophy.

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6.

Kenny Horton, Dumpster Hop, Savannah, GA. [next] 7.

Steve ‘Cranpa’ Crandall, Pool Carve, Columbia, SC.

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Crandall’s 9 Step Guide To Dwelling Portably Within The Anti-Social Network 1. The Vehicle – No Stickers On The Van The shit that goes on in an FBM van is rarely something a cop would be stoked on, and sending out an invite to an authority figure to scope out a rolling debacle with a bike rack on the back isn’t gonna make the trip anymore fun. I try, usually in vain, to keep the van looking as close to a legitimate family BMX weekend van as possible.

7. Camaraderie – There’s No ‘I’ In Team What’s the point if you and your crew aren’t having a blast together? Good times resound when shared with the people you spend time with… and a little help goes a long way. Luckily all the dudes traveling with FBM understand it isn’t a free ride, everything has its expense, so we all try to help out however we can, so we can get the most out of our time together traveling.

2. Navigation – Stars, Planets, Hunches and Wild Geese A good attitude is the best GPS, and not giving a shit is better than any map. Some road worn experience and common sense can land you about anywhere with reasonable accuracy.

8. Improvising – Things Ain’t Perfect You can’t tell a river which way to flow, except down stream, and roadtrips can be just as hard to control. Best-case scenario ‘don’t freak out every time something weird or unplanned happens.’ Not having a plan helps keep a good back-up plan handy.

3. Sleeping Options – The World Is Your Oyster Especially in winter, when sales are down and so is our travel budget; sometimes you just have to rough it at night and sleep where you fall. Sometimes, if you’re lucky you can drink yourself a hotel suite, and what you fall asleep on is irrelevant.

Other times, it’s ‘make tuna fish outta tuna shit’ – sleeping in the van, sharing space in an over capacity shitty motel room, or on a crowded floor in a friend’s apartment… sometime it’s whatever dry ground you end up on.

9 Party Etiquette – Keg Stands And Corn Kicking There are no rules at parties with strangers!

(Except: fuck the police!)

4. Couch Etiquette – Know When To Fuck Off Whether you are traveling on a budget or not, the phrase ‘don’t shit where you eat’ is crucial, and it’s especially important if you are riding someone else’s spots or staying with someone at their home. After you are gone, they will still be there, and whether the memory of your visit is looked back upon with a smile, or as a total bummer is something I think is a big deal.

Simple things like cleaning your mess, being polite, pitching in on food, or household items are more than just nice gesture, it shows you aren’t just some asshole passing through, and you appreciate peoples generosity.

5. Eating Cheap – Bum Stew The guys are strapped, they spend most of their money on beer and cigarettes, so I try to cook whenever possible on trips to make sure the dudes are fed, nourished, stoked and happy. Aside from the nutritional value, and being a way tastier alternative to most dollar menus: Bum Stew is a good time. On trips, the time spent together, cooking, eating, telling stories, recounting the days events, and getting hyped for the nightlife, is way better than scattering to nearby fast food chains and texting throughout your meal on your cellphone…

6. Befriending locals – “We’re On Acid” Something as simple as a friendly exchange of pleasantries with the locals can come back at you with anything from free food, to shared beers, or even a weird 6am gimp mask party at a stranger’s house! Be nice and take whatever comes your way.

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Photo: Steve Bancroft

Balum Frame

Scott Ditchburn

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