The Ride of My Life (41 page)

When it was my turn for the spotlight, I got ready and stood in front of the cast and crew, opposite Vin as the camera captured our scene at the party. I was stiff. Between takes, standing off to the side, Samuel L. Jackson gave me pointers on how to loosen up and be a more natural version of myself. He’s one of my favorite actors, and having him giving me advice on how to act like me—it was so surreal. It was awesome. I hoped Sam’s tips would be enough to keep me off the cutting room floor.

We stayed up all night filming, and I had to jet back to Oklahoma City to do a show in a mall. It was the first show I’d done in my own hometown in ten years, and it was the Saturday before Christmas-peak shopping season frenzy. A week
before the show, the local radio stations had been plugging the demo, and my friends were getting that ominous, gleeful, “this is gonna be nuts, Mat” tone in their voice. I hoped I wouldn’t blow it by eating shit in front of a hometown, capacity crowd. I was operating in a haze of jet lag and sleeplessness from flying to Los Angeles and back in less than twenty-four hours.

I touched down at the Oklahoma City airport with just enough time to bolt to my car speed across town, hop on my bike in front of a big crowd, and drop into a ramp I’d never ridden before. Dennis McCoy, Jimmy Walker, John Parker, and vert skater Mike Frazier were there to help me do the demo. I couldn’t believe how insane the crowd was—more than four thousand people stood clustered shoulder to shoulder in the mall, totally blocking the stairs, hanging off the balcony, and shutting down the entrance to JCPenney. The crowd had been waiting for over an hour. I grabbed my pads and took a deep belt off a bottle of honey from the bear I keep handy for just such sleep-deprived occasions. I perked right up and dropped in. Flairs, 540s, tailwhips, superman seat grabs … we gave it up, and the crowd gave us lots of loud love in return. Afterward, the autograph session clogged up the mall for hours, and it didn’t even seem to make a dent in the line of people waiting to get stuff signed.

I felt like, for lack of a better term, a movie star.

The mustache was fake, the flip was real.

Yeah, we’re both dorks. This was my thirtieth birthday.

Never in a million years would I have guessed the best way to promote the reality of my sport was to re-create it as a digitized world.

     During the arcade boom of the early eighties, one video game touched on the fringes of BMX. The game was called Paper Boy, and the plot was simple: pilot through the suburbs, picking off points for accurately pitching papers. Steering a pixilated bicycle across the video screen and dodging animated obstacles was remotely entertaining to me when I was fourteen, but Paper Boy’s roster of tricks and amplitude—pulling wheelies and bunny hops—didn’t stand the test of time.

About fifteen years later, video games had made the leap from the mall arcades to in-home systems and portable units with mind-blowing graphics and game play that was leaps and bounds beyond anything offered by Atari or Colecovision. At the start of 2000, software companies approached me on three different occasions. Each wanted my help building a modern-era BMX-oriented video game. As I sat in these meetings listening to the spiel, I realized I didn’t want to help make a game just because action sports were an easy sell. The money the gaming companies were throwing around was on an entirely different level than any payday that had ever been offered to a bike rider. I could have closed my eyes, signed a contract, and cashed a fat check—but what was at stake was more than an easy bucket of cash. I knew a lame game would ultimately do more damage than good in representing bike riding. If a signature video game was in the cards for me, I wanted a good reason to make it. I turned down the offers from the first two game companies because I didn’t think they understood enough about my sport to competently re-create it.

Activision and I got together in the summer of 2000. The company was riding a wave of success that they’d created with
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater.
Tony and Activision had nailed the details in developing the first awesome action sports game. Skateboarding looked realistic, fantastic, and the gameplay was superfun. It was also selling like crack.
Pro Skater
launched and became an overnight hit, eventually triggering a whole series of Tony’s games for Activision—at last count, they were on
Pro Skater 3
.

I noticed right away that Activision was a company passionate about their work. Shipping a finished game required an army of programmers and producers, all staying true to an artistic vision. With Tony’s game, they’d merged the cleanest technology and smoothest interface with a sport they had to learn to understand and appreciate the nuances of. When Brian Bright and Will Kassoy of Activision said they wanted to get inside my head and create a Mat Hoffman signature game using an enhanced version of the
Pro Skater
engine, I knew it would rule. In the months we spent in development, Activision was the first large company I’d ever dealt with where things just clicked from the start. They wanted my input (while managing to keep my nuttiest suggestions in check], plus they brought their own ideas into the mix and made it work great. Together, we built a game I felt stoked to put my name on.

Mat Hoffman’s Pro BMX
was released in May 2001 and sold in the neighborhood of a million copies—I’d gone platinum. I rode in demos throughout the United States to promote
MHPBMX
, and at every event I met kids who told me the same thing: They dug the game so much that they bought a bike and were now riding. I got flooded with E-mail from gamers who wanted to know more about my sport—were all the tricks in the game real? (a lot of them, yes], and did I really bleed that much when I slammed? [unfortunately, sometimes yes).

With the success of the first game, Activision wanted to keep the wheels rolling with Mat Hoffman’s Pro BMX2. They began building a new gaming engine. In the time that had passed since the creation of Pro BMX, my brain was twitching with ideas fora follow-up. I wanted the premise of the game to reflect the realities of a modern-day bike rider. I told my team at Activision the second game should be a tour around the United States—we’d ride real streets, parks, parking lots, and even an old school backyard ramp jam. As the technology guys in the Activision labs cooked up the new strings of code to bring my ideas to life, I got busy putting together the crew of riders we’d need. I wanted everything as true to life as possible, which meant we’d have to hit the road with the riders in the game, shredding every surface we ran across while documenting the entire fiasco.

I talked Jones Soda into providing us with two crucial touring tools: a bright yellow Jones-stocked motor home with flames on the sides; and their legendary driver, Sweet Pussy Frank. Frank is a veteran of numerous tours; I first encountered him on the Birdhouse/Hoffman Bikes Whoop Ass expedition back in 1999. Frank can drive like jehu. He’s one of those guys who wears a headband at all times, sunglasses at midnight, and is happy as a puppy dog, even behind the wheel for thirty hours at a stretch. On the road, Frank’s as smooth as glass when confronted with massive traffic jams, tiny parking stalls, and horn-honking hicks who think he is the devil. We piled nine of my favorite guys in the Jones rig—Kevin Robinson, Nate Wessel, Rick Thorne, Mike “Rooftop” Escamilla, Joe “Butcher” Kowalski, Cory “Nasty” Nastazio, Ruben Alcantara, Seth Kimbrough, and Simon Tabron. We hit the highway for three weeks with a few cameras, plenty of digital videocassettes, and a loose agenda to ride our asses off.

We’d call some parks the night before and ask for access to their facilities. This was translated to, “free demo with ten of the best guys in the sport.” We were met by crushing mobs of kids demanding autographs, stickers, and whatever else they thought they could talk us out of. On other tour stops, Frank’s rolling dormitory would creep in unnoticed, and we’d unload in stealth mode, slip into the park, and be flipping transitions before anybody knew what was going on. With a good portion of our tour squad consisting of top-notch street assassins, we left our peg marks upon urban architecture, too. And, since I had Captain’s powers of navigation, I made sure we made a swing through Elkhart, Indiana, so I could take my team out for the best Italian food east of the Mississippi, at Dantini, my Aunt and Uncle Dandino’s place. It felt satisfying to parade into a swank restaurant with a greasy cluster of troublemakers, get the Mafia booth in the back, and rack up a quadruple-digit dinner tab—then write it off as “game research.”

There were a couple stops on our jaunt that I was especially stoked to get in on—a series of mellow backyard sessions. One of the best was in Austin, Texas, a backyard vert setup where Pat Miller and Kevin “The Gute” Gutierrez play. I almost took myself out doing superman airs wearing a makeshift cape I found on top of the deck, but the casual vibe of a ramp, a deck full of friends, and a few decent tunes is an environment I just can’t resist. We stopped in Riverside, California, at Cory Nastazio’s backyard, a dirt jump utopia infested with bunkers and berms. Nasty’s track was given a whipping by local motherhuckers like Stephen Murray, a kid they called Whitesnake, and Brian Foster. Nasty was in true form, cracking shirtless double bar spin backflips one minute, and proudly serving up his mom’s custom chili the next. The tour ended in San Diego on Bob Burnquist’s insane capsule-bowled, multilayered, multileveled backyard ramp. It stood like a fortress. I knew just by looking at it, the session was going to be good. The setting sun put a clock on our riding time as Simon, Kevin, and I rode our bikes while Bob and Tony Hawk skated. The casual backyard appeal was merged with a tingling rush as we explored the transitions of probably the second-best ramp ever built. The highlights: Kevin floating no-handed corkscrews over the channel, and witnessing the electromagnetic speed lines of Bob on his board and a bike he had tucked away in his shed. The low-lights: Simon and I both managed to knock ourselves out in no time.

When the tour ended, hundreds of hours of footage were sifted through and organized into bite-sized nuggets. The Activision crew merged our documentation within the levels in the game; players would be able to unlock videos along their route and check out the real tour and personalities of the people living it.
Pro BMX2
has ninety-nine videos in all, which works out to about three and half hours of bonus video footage buried deep within.

In January of 2002, I turned thirty. For my birthday, Steve and Jaci threw me a surprise party. My friend Page’s band, 20 Minute Crash, played at the Hoffman Bikes warehouse, and about two hundred friends from around the country made it to town to welcome me to “Old Man” status. The best gift I got was from Steve and the HB crew, a vintage Hutch Trick Star, which they’d assembled part by part from Ebay auctions. It was an exact replica of the bike I had before I got sponsored by Skyway (I got on the cover of The Daily Oklahoma doing a one-handed visor grab air with that bike back in 1985). As the party progressed into the night and the levels of frolic got more brazen, my new old school Hutch was put through the paces of many long-forgotten flatland moves in a marathon midnight dork session.

With no contest season to train for, I planned on taking life easy and enjoying a few quiet months at home, chilling, riding, and working. But life had other ideas in store for me.