The Ride of My Life (46 page)

Kind of difficult because both tricks require upward momentum.

A no-hander into a one-handed lookdown. Jeff Carrol meets Joe Johnson.

I learned this in a warehouse in Los Angeles practicing for the Dan-Up Yogurt tour with Dennis McCoy. After I pulled my first one clean, Dennis crashed, punctured his lung, and started puking blood.

The can-can comes on the way in.

A no-handed one-footer into a no-footed one-hander. When you do a no-hander one-footer, your cranks flip vertically so you have to do a half-crank flip as you put one hand on and take your feet off, which is fairly technical. This is one of those tricks I learned just to see if it was possible. It is.

I did this first time on Ron Wilkerson’s ramp. I had a Freddy Krueger doll zip-tied to my handlebars.

No-handed air, grabbing both front pegs. I saw Dave Voelker doing this but touching his front tire. I tried it without gloves and thrashed my hands on my tire, so I found a less painful place I could grab.

Requires a big ramp and high airs because it takes time to reach over and grab the pegs, then get back to the grips and throw the no-footer. I did it for the first time at the CFB in Merritt Island, Florida.

The peacock was the first trick I ever pulled using a resi mat. I was at a CFB at camp Woodward in Pennsylvania, and I did it on my first try I guess that’s the point of the resi mat. I gives you confidence to take it to vert. I named the no-footed double peg grab a peacock because I had one as a kid.

A no-handed one-footed peg grab.

I put up a contest at Hoffmanbikes.com and let my fans name this trick. Three hundred thousand people voted, and in less than a month, cock block was the name for this no-footed one-handed peg grab.

This is the hardest cock trick I know. It’s one of the hardest vert tricks, period. You’re stretched on the bike in the most awkward position, doing a rocket air and leaning all the way forward grabbing the front pegs. I was so psyched I learned this and debuted it at the 2001 X Games. Nobody even noticed what I was doing.

Around 1988 skateboarding began to influence bike riding, and riders began doing a lot of lip tricks. The disaster is an aerial inspired by skateboarding. You hang up an air to the chainring and then dive into the ramp. The highest disaster I ever did was off a nine-foot air. I used to do them so often my neck started to hurt. My doctor said I had whiplash, so I took it out of my set. But not before I had invented these:

Another skate-inspired air. You blast over the coping but come in backward. Fakies have been around on bikes since Bob Ham first did them back in 1978. Every vert rider has a few fakie variations. My highest were over eight feet out, and I bent a lot of seatposts getting them wired. I finally had to stop doing fakies because every time you crash one you go straight to your wrists. My variations include:

All limbs removed at the peak of the trick.

Unveiled at the KOV finals the day I turned pro.

Aka the superman fakie. This trick feels awesome.

The early lip tricks on bikes were pretty clunky and didn’t flow so well. As bikers started riding with skateboarders, lip tricks evolved in speed and fluidity. The first bike rider I saw doing skateboarding-style lip tricks was Craig Campbell. He did a double peg stall. Steve Swope took that idea and started doing grinds. I learned alley-oop double peg grinds. Suddenly, a door opened up. Here’s what else I ushered through that door:

Front tire on the deck, back peg grinding.

Back tire on the deck, front peg on the coping.

Learned this one two and a half years ago.

Feeble to Smith.

Back peg stalls, invented the same session Joe Johnson invented toothpicks. Rich Hansen, a rider from Minnesota, invented the icepick on ledges while street riding.

Adapted from street skating.

A stall with the grip and pedal connecting with the coping, done as a can-can with on hand holding the seat. I even went to a motorcycle shop and got an enduro bar-protector to see if I could grind this one.

These look and feel smooth. I tweaked a couple so far I ended up learning downside icepicks.

Clicking the downside back peg to the coping. A matter of learning to lean.

Racking my brain trying to come up with a new footplant trick back in 1988, I ended up here. Even though he can’t do this trick, Dennis McCoy is never one to miss the chance to give me shit for doing what he calls circus tricks. I saw some guy do a candybar footplant during a run at the Soul Bowl recently and got so stoked. Take that, Dennis.

A nosepick. With one foot on the inside front peg.

I jab my right foot on the front tire, put my left foot on frame, kick it out, then hop into the tranny.

In 1988, decades were the only impressive semiadvanced flatland trick I could do consistently. I took it to the deck of the ramp as a drop-in and perverted it for style points.

The supercomplex battery of ground tricks in today’s riding scene is confusing to even think about. But back when I was fifteen, I had a claim to fame as a ground rider. That move was the bar spin frame stand. In 1987 at the AFA finals in the Olympic Velodrome, Martin Aparijo and Dennis McCoy were tied for first place in pro flatland. There was a runoff, and Martin edged out McCoy by a slim margin. One trick Martin used in his routine—my bar spin frame stand.

Only a handful of riders have ever pulled a 900. Simon Tabron keeps a journal of his 9 attempts. He’s pulled maybe fifty his whole life. I went to the KOV contest in Canada in 1990 and I had a new 540 variation I thought I’d use as a finale to my pro run. I’d never tried a 900 before, and that day I pulled my first. It’s a trick where you have to feel the rotation, because you’re spinning so fast you can’t see the coping.

My new trick to show people at the Canadian KOV contest in 1990. It kind of got overshadowed by the 900.

I never get tired of this trick. I also like doing it alley-oop.

A 540 while doing a double peg grab.

An X-up 540.

I saw Tony Hawk doing front-flip flyout dismounts and learned them on my bike in 1990. It was a great trick to end a show with, until my knees got messed up.

I learned these right before the first BS contest in 1992. I could front-flip and land on the deck, on my bike. It’s a trick that takes tons of energy, and at the BS contest I was sick and tired and couldn’t pull it. Within a couple years, my rotator cuff got so bad I didn’t have the ability to pull these any more. Another trick lost to injury.

Pulled in public in Paris, 1989. Spike shot it for the cover of Go magazine.

A flip with a twist. Flairs, tailwhips, and big 540s are probably the crowd favorites at any demo.

I crashed a no-handed backflip at the Charles Schultz show in Santa Rosa, California, and my bike got away and hit his grandson and broke his nose. I felt terrible.

Lots of spinning going on here. Learned these around 1993.

Barry Zaritzky is the trainer and medical guru on all the Tony Hawk tours. Barry’s spent a lot of time over the years trying to fix me up after slams. (Photograph courtesy of Frank Barbara)

Checking your bike at the airport has long been a tradition pitting biker against airline. An airline-imposed surcharge on transporting bicycles allows carriers to gouge bike riders an extra $50 to $150 on top of the tickets, just for checking your bike as baggage. I’m talking about a bicycle broken down and packed neatly in a bike box. It’s all the more ridiculous when you see people checking three or five giant suitcases or footlockers and not being charged for their bulky items. The wise way around it was to never admit you were transporting a bike. Creative excuses included calling it camping gear, trade show samples, and the ever-mysterious “exhibition equipment.” The more prominent the X Games became, the less these excuses worked. The airline employees had learned to spot bike boxes. The last time the exhibition equipment line worked in my favor, it was beautiful. The airline counterperson was just starting to question me about what kind of exhibition equipment it was, when a stranger in line recognized me and approached. “Hey, Mat. Are you here to do an exhibition?” was the first thing out of his mouth. I got very chatty with the guy, keeping the word bike out of the conversation, and the airline employee gave up trying to figure out what I was exhibiting. Those days are long gone, now, though.

When I started riding, the reality was, guys who rode pink and lime-green bikes were dorks. Even though the color palette has been toned down a few shades in recent years, bike riders are still dangerously dorky. Initially, the bike contest scene was 99.99 percent male, most of them teenagers with hormones boiling. It’s too bad the sport didn’t catch on with girls the way snowboarding (and to a lesser extent, skateboarding] did. But with very few exceptions, you’d be hard-pressed to even find a female face within a thousand yards of a halfpipe back in the old days. TV coverage attracted an avalanche of new fans—both guys and girls. I don’t participate in the groupie scene, but today’s eligible bachelors who’ve got the right image—usually helped greatly by a set of six-pack abs with a few tattoos, and the ability to pull backflips over the spine ramp—seem to enjoy endless nights of cheap, empty sex with “stripper class” bombshells anywhere they travel.

I am profoundly humbled by the fact that people are impressed enough by my bike skills to want to meet me or get an autograph. Sometimes it makes for some awkward situations. For a long time, it didn’t matter if a top rider’s address or even home phone number circulated freely in the bike community. It was very rare that fans got truly persistent enough to be, well, intrusive. Recently I’ve noticed more obsession has been creeping into the sport. Not long ago, I was getting into my car about 7
A.M.
to go to the airport, and some lady’s car was blocking my driveway. She hopped out when she saw me and ran up for an autograph. I don’t know how long she’d been there. Overnight? I hadn’t shaved or showered and had coffee breath—glamorous. Another time some guys from Portugal got my home phone number, and I would get these bizarre phone calls at 3
A.M.,
consisting of a mix of hip-hop slang in broken English and Portuguese. I had to change my number. The neighbors behind my house built a viewing platform over the fence so they could watch me while I chilled in my backyard. And I can’t count the times that adults have just left their kids at the Hoffman Bikes offices to hang out for a few hours, like it’s a drop-in teen rec center