Serious dirt jumping in the parking lot, just north of the Huntington Beach Pier, Core Tour 2002. The Sheep Hills Locals were in strong effect that day, with guys like Cory Nastazio, Stephen Murray, Chris Duncan, Marvin Loetterle, Sean Butler, and Midget Cory Walters hucking it over these three big sets of doubles. But BMX riding at the Huntington Beach Pier area goes back almost to the beginning of BMX itself.
If you've read any of my other blogs, you know I come from the 1980's BMX freestyle world. I got into BMX as a high school kid in Boise in 1982, and somehow would up as a mediocre freestyler and BMX/skateboard industry guy in the Huntington Beach area by 1987. So this post is about my tribe, people who do tricks on "little kids' bikes."
The Huntington Beach Pier itself dates back to 1915, and as I wrote in the surf post about the H.B. Pier, a "surf riding" demo by Hawaiian George Freeth was part of the opening day festivities. So the H. B Pier's history with action sports goes back to the very beginnings of modern action sports. But BMX itself started in 1970, in Long Beach and Malibu, so it was sometime in the early 1970's when BMX bikes first rode by the pier. While it's not a BMX bike, here's some film of a bike rider cruising around Huntington Beach in 1970. It was a much different town then, with two story brick buildings on Main Street, with no big hotels to be seen, and lots more oil pumps pumping away in the downtown area.
BMX freestyle, the trick riding aspect of the sport, was invented by Bob Haro in about 1977-1978, and began to spread in the early 1980's. Sometime around 1983 or 1984, flatland freestylers began to hang out below the Huntington Beach pier, and do tricks for the crowds of beach goers. Two of the very first BMX freestyle, flatland and ramp contests, were put on by the American Freestyle Association in the Surf Theater Parking lot. That was a couple blocks form the H.B. Pier, right behind Wimpi's Burgers. Those comps happened in the summers of 1984 and 1985, and were run by H.B. local freestyler/entrepreneur Bob Morales. Here's NorCal rider Rick Allison doing flatland at that contest in 1984, and Eddie Fiola riding ramps. I wrote another post about the BMX history in that parking lot, which you can check out here. The first AFA contest was in Venice Beach in 1984, followed by the H.B. comp. Those contests took the brand new, tiny sport aspect of BMX freestyle out of the skateparks, and turned it into a sport that could happen anywhere. Huntington Beach was the home to both GT Bikes, Bob Morales, and the AFA, so it played a key role in the early growth of BMX freestyle.
I moved to H.B. in January of 1987, to work for Bob Morales, as editor and photographer of the AFA monthly newsletter. Thanks to a zine I did in NorCal, I got a job at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines, based in Torrance, in 1986, but didn't really click with the staff there, so I got laid off. Bob picked me up to work at the AFA, and the magazines hired an East Coast BMXer/skater kid named Spike Jonze. He did click with the crew there, and proved to be th eperfect fit for that crew. And yes, it's that Spike Jonze. Spike Jonze really was a BMXer. Meanwhile, I headed down to the H.B. Pier on the weekends, and became one of the locals at the pier within a few weeks.
This is me (Steve Emig) doing a Shingle Shuffle under the H.B. Pier in 1987. Not sure what was going on with my hair, I let it grow out for about three months before spending money for a haircut. I'm still a cheapskate like that.
The 1980's flatland scene at the pier had a few locals, most prominently Mike Sarrail, a 6' 4" guy who excelled at Miami hop hops, among other tricks. Mike actually lived in Covina, way inland, but drove down to H.B. to ride every weekend, and was the most hardcore H.B. local BMX freestyler. I was there most every weekend from 1987 to 1992 or so, unless there was a contest somewhere.
At that time, there were a few freestyle skateboarders, Pierre Andre' from France, Don Brown from England, and Hans Lingren from Sweden, who skated there nearly ever day. They all skated for one of the Vision Skateboards companies, which were based in Costa Mesa then. We all hung out together, and rode and skated in the area under Maxwell's restaurant (where Duke's is now), where the outdoor seating is now, below, and just south of the pier itself. Here's Pierre in 1989 in a short video that shows what that area looked like in the late 1980's on a weekday, when hardly any people were around.
That was our riding and skating area. On the weekends, the skaters would skate for a while, and get a big crowd, usually 100 to 200 people, sometimes up to 500. Then the police would roll by on their quads or a car, and break up the crowd because it was blocking the bike path. Then, a few minutes later, us BMX freestylers would start riding, get a crowd of 100-200 or more people, and then the police would roll by in 20-30 minutes, and break up that crowd. We did that all day long on both Saturday and Sunday, every weekend, from the late 1980's until the early 1990's. I once figured out that I rode in front of at least 140,000 people, in person, at the Huntington Beach Pier, 100 or 200 people at a time. The same goes for the other locals. So while I didn't tour like the top pros and ams in freesytle, Mike, me, and the other H.B. locals rode in front of a lot of beach going people, spreading the stoke of BMX freestyle in our own way.
Because the Huntington Beach Pier was a known spot for both skateboarding and BMX, and because it was right at the beach, anyone could show up on any given day. The Lakewood area crew, which comprised Jeff and Tim Cotter, Ron Camero, Nathan Shimizu, Ron McCoy, and a couple others, came by a couple of weekends a month. They were all good, solid riders, and most ended up in the 1988 Vision video, Freestylin' Fanatics. Other SoCal local freesytlers, like Dan Hubbard, Scott Robinson, Chuck and Joe Johnson, and others came by frequently. Top pro flatlanders, Martin Aparijo and Woody Itson, came by now and then as well. One Saturday there might just be three of us there at noon, and by 3 pm, we'd have ten solid freestylers riding for the crowds. Randy Lawrence moved to Huntington Beach from the desert in 1988, I think, and joined the locals at the pier. Randy could learn any trick in five minutes, which drove Mike and I nuts. He's the most natural rider I've ever met.
The same was true for skaters, German freestyle skater Per Welinder showed up often, Bob Schmelzer was around a lot, street skaters Ed Templeton, Mark Gonzales, skate by often. Jason Lee was part of the street skating crew in the 90's, also. Natas Kapas came by once when I was there, Ray Barbee did as well, along with many others. During that same era, Pierre Andre' got a French shoe company to start making skate shoes, called Etnies. Pierre wound up taking it over, and bringing the operation to Costa Mesa, and it took off from there, becoming Sole Technology, parent company of Etnies, Emerica, E's, and Sheep shoes over the years, and Altamont clothing. Don Brown worked there form the start. So while there was a big "Skaters hate BMXers" vibe in a lot of places in the 1980's, at the H.B. Pier, were were all hanging out, loaning each otehr money for burritos, and influencing each other. I learned half Cabs, nollies, and no comply's (footplant to 180 on flat) on my bike, influenced by the skaters.
While its seems really hard to believe now, but in the late 1980's, the lot on the Southeast corner of PCH and Main in Huntington, right across the street from the pier, was a paved vacant lot. Bob Morales at the AFA had a few AFA local contests there, from 1987 to 1989, as I recall. I don't know of any video footage or photos from those contests, but they were always fun comps, flatland and ramps, with lots of girls in bikinis hanging out to watch. And every time, there would be a fender bender on PCH, somebody would be watching us ride, and run into the car in front of them.
One weekend in early 1988, Some guy started talking to Mike Sarrail while we were riding. The guy said he wanted to put on some BMX contest to make a video. Mike, being a helpful guy in general, told the guy all about freestyle, and told him that street riding was the new thing building. Then the guy left. When we would flatland in a public spot, random people would come up at times, and say they wanted to make a movie about us, or put on events, or do a TV show, or whatever. 99% of those people were full of shit. But the guy Mike talked to actually did put on event, renting the Stonehenge jump ramp from GT, and getting a Beastie Boys clone band, called Metal MC to show up, and shoot a music video. The guy had a video crew, and shot footage and made a video that sold in places like Kmart and Target. It was a really fun event, all the top riders showed up, and we had a blast. The guy actually made a video, and probably sold thousands of copies.
San Diego shredder and Dirt Bro, Brand Blanchard turns one down at the video jam on the corner of PCH and Main in 1988. Bill Batchelor photo.
In the early 1990's, both skateboarding and BMX freestyle went underground, as the businesses collapsed in the early 90's recession. Pierre and Don got busy with Etnies, and freestyle skating pretty much died. Street skating took over, so those guys stopped hanging at the pier. On our side, BMX flatland was into the rolling tricks, starting with whiplashes and Hang 5's in the 80's, and progressing from there. Most riders got more into street riding, and there were a lot less riders, in general. The flatland sessions at the H.B. Pier died off mostly, though riders would show up and session, on occasion.
In the 1990's, as a little BMX bike company S&M Bikes was housed in a single car garage on Alabama Street, BMX at the Huntington Beach Pier kind of faded, as we hit the jumps at Magnolia, near the Power Plant, or that new place on the edge of Costa Mesa, called Sheep Hills. There was no money in BMX in the early 1990's, so the industry largely collapsed, as the hardcore riders learned ten different ways to make a meal out of a pack of ramen to survive. But it was during this time that the riders took over the industry. Along with S&M Bikes, Hoffman, FBM, Standard, Eastern, Kink, and a few other garage BMX companies got their start. By the time ESPN woke up in 1995, got a whiff of Action Sports stoke, and started the X-Games, both the BMX and skate industries were being run largely by actual riders and skaters. The TV coverage for action sports blew up, though the marketers tagged it with the dum bass "Extreme Sports" label, which took years to die off. As snowboarder Steve Graham once said, "How can it be 'extreme,' this is what we do every day."
During the 1990's, sparked a lot by Chris Moeller and the S&M Bikes crew, dirt jumping became it's own genre' of BMX riding, and a part of the X-Games. A smaller contest series, the Core Tour put on comps nationwide, like the one in the video at the top of this blog post. So dirt jumping, featuring several Sheep Hills Locals every time, pulled solid crowds at the Huntington Beach Pier area, once a year.
As Action Sports grew in the late 1990's, with Huntington Beach being a worldwide hub for surfing, skateboarding, BMX, snowboarding, and early free ride and freestyle motocrossers, the U.S. Open of Surfing added the Soul Bowl comps to the annual surf extravaganza. Every year, usually around the end of July or early August, the huge surf comp draws crowds of 100,000 people on the beach by the, and a small village of promotional booths springs up on the sand on the south side of the H.B. pier. The Soul Bowl BMX draws some top BMX vert riders every year.
Van's Rebel Jam park and street highlights from the summer of 2019.
As we all know, Mother Nature put us all in Time Out for over a year with the Covid pandemic in 2020, so no Rebel Jam happened. There's not a lot on the web right now, but the Van's U.S. Open of Surfing is back on for 2021, happening August 2-8 at the H.B. Pier. You can bet BMX will be part of the mix yet again. For close to 40 years now, great BMX freestyle has been happening right around the Huntington Beach, California Pier, and it looks like it will keep going for a long time to come.
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