The Ride of My Life (5 page)

My riding skills were improving, but part of the equation in racing is getting the most out of your equipment. I learned about bike maintenance the hard way at the 59
^th
and Douglas track. I got the holeshot and led the pack for two laps before my bike bogged down and sputtered to a standstill. I couldn’t figure out how to revive it and later found out the gas tank was fouled with water. I got last that day. Tom hipped me to the concept of maintenance for maximum mechanical performance. He taught me everything from fast flat tire changes, to how to swap out the rods and pistons and bore out the engine to increase horsepower. My bike got more dialed, and my riding got faster.

Tom also taught me how to merge technical knowledge with the practical. One afternoon it came in handy. I’d ridden my cycle down the road to a gas station near our neighborhood trailer park. As I bent over the bike to fill the tires with air, shadows fell across me. Then came the “hey, nice motorcycle” jeers, followed by several requests to hop on and take my bike for a ride. I knew where it was heading; these were the kind of comments that can only lead to a bike jacking. I flipped the cap to the spark plug off to discreetly disable the engine and turned around. I told the wolf pack of local toughs the
motor wouldn’t run, offering to let them try kick-starting it. After some unsuccessful attempts, I got on and said there might be a way to get it to turn over. I put the cap back on the plug, kick-started, and gunned it, roaring away to freedom.

The owner of the Edmond Bike Shop, Ron Dutton. He was the Godfather who sparked our imaginations by stocking his shop with treasure.

My parents were always incredibly supportive of anything their children wanted to do, but I could tell they weren’t that into my motorcycle phase. Dirt bikes are obnoxiously loud, make you smell of oily two-stroke smoke, and it’s a lifestyle synonymous with mud. When they did come to watch me race, Mom and Dad usually scoped from the safety of the car. I think they were also starting to worry about my odds forgetting injured. I was consumed. I raced Friday night, Saturday afternoon, and Sunday afternoon, plus during the week, I rode after school. I began developing an appreciation for jumping and was always trying to go higher, land farther. If I took a weekend off from my bike, my throttle wrist would get so sore and feel broken my first race back. My body was a revolving landscape of scraped shins, bruised elbows, and pepperoni-scabbed knees.

It was a knee injury that raised my parents’ eyebrows toward my fixation with speed and jumping. I was out by myself, ripping around the fields in our backyard without a lot of safety gear on. As I powered through a turn, my front tire spit a splintered tree branch into my exposed kneecap and tore open a deep gash. I plastered on the biggest Band-Aid I could find, concealed the limp, and didn’t tell anyone what had happened. I hoped I could hide the injury and still go on a family trip to Whitewater, a nearby water park. That much blood and swelling is tough to keep secret, and Whitewater made the cut even worse. When my mom found out, there was a scolding, followed by stitches. Just after I got the knee sewn up I went out riding again and slipped off my foot pegs over a jump. I put another puncture wound in my knee, prompting another trip to the doctor. This time I got additional stitches and a knee immobilizer. This injury was the beginning of the end of my motocross days. My attention was being stretched in several other directions.

Let’s face it; eleven-year-old kids are flaky. I was at a point in my life when my interests were all over the map. In school, I was a shape-shifting social chameleon, transforming from a glasses-wearing superpreppy nerd one year, to a curly-mohawked (frohawked?) loner the next. I got into wrestling for a spell and won a few matches. I was drawn toward the sport by the incredible mental focus and individualist aspect; if you got beat, there was no team to blame it on, just yourself. I also experimented with basketball and football; I was okay shooting rock, but on the gridiron I was the kind of kid who ran the wrong way and scored touchdowns for the opposing team.

My first true BMX bike was a red Mongoose that I picked up during my chameleon phase. The bike’s main purpose was entertainment and to get me around Edmond. There were a few different trails in town where kids congregated to dirt jump, tell lies, and throw down breakdancing challenges.

I was known to partake in the art of electric boogaloo on occasion, and after learning the basic robo-style popping and locking moves, I graduated to the gyroscopic stuff. Since backspins in dirt are pretty rugged, we’d leave the trails and seek out smooth surfaces to polish our skills. Battles were organized at the local Wal-Mart and other random places that had good floors. In these spontaneous spin sessions I learned to do backspins, which progressed into the crotch-grabbing shoulder-blade-torquing windmills.

I got a chance to show off my Straight Outta Wal-Mart style when my school had a cotillion. Like most of the unlucky bastards I knew there, my parents had dressed and signed me up against my will. It was rough. Everything I didn’t like under one roof. A posse gathered, and we took over the floor, converting the most sanitary sanctuary into a breakdancing battlefield. My friends and I were part of the younger crowd, but there were older kids ring leading it, rocking the moves to the cheesiest eighties Top 40 music. It was a defining moment, and a lightbulb flipped on over my head that helped shape my attitude of, “if you don’t like something, do your own thing.”

I won the tournament in my weight division, eighty-five pounds. My coach told my dad he
thought I could win the state title if I stuck with it. That didn’t make it much easier for Dad when I decided to stop and ride my bike full time. He still supported me, though.

I also followed Todd’s lead and dabbled in BMX racing, but instead of staying low and going fast, my goal was to go slow and get passed, then sky off all the jumps. It was a sign of things to come.

My life changed the day I went with my mom to the Edmond Bike Shop to pick up Travis’s birthday present. It was a Skyway TA frame and fork. To some it was “Just” a bike, but the TA’s chrome-plated teardrop tubing and TIG-welded seams were practically glowing with possibility. It screamed pure performance, a brand-new ride for brand-new times. Freestyle was an upstart hybrid sport that was spreading like wildfire from the West Coast. An extension of BMX racing, it was an activity that revolved around individuality, freedom, and style. And it was about to hit Edmond, Oklahoma.

When I told my dad I wanted to give up all sports and only concentrate on bicycle riding—it nearly killed him. He wanted to be in the stands watching me play basketball or football and say, “That’s my boy out there.”

But he and my mother were supportive. They built the first ramp for Travis and me. Mom was so worried that we would get hurt that my dad said, “Don’t look out the window for two weeks.” That helped—but it was a rough two weeks.

My brothers and I had seen ramp plans in a copy of
BMX
Action magazine and set about acquiring the plans, permission, and materials to make a quarterpipe. Tom’s dad, my uncle Larry, had the carpentry skills needed to create our first driveway ramp. The early ramps were deadly compared with what we have today. They were typically about six feet tall, five feet wide, and the transitions had more kinks than the Amsterdam red-light district. Our driveway was made of dirt, so we got used to riding a lumpy, rock-pocked runway up to the wooden ramp. It’s a wonder anybody who rode those things survived.

The first time I rode a ramp is the day it all clicked for me. I was eleven years old, and it freaked me out just standing on the deck looking down the barrel of our mighty six-foot quarter. The thought of pulling aerials or dropping into the thing seemed impossible. Todd talked me into letting him hold me on my bike over the edge of the ramp. I wanted to be held in a bomb drop position, to see what the perspective would look like. “Don’t let go,” I warned him. He promised he would hold me steady. I peered over my bars at the ground below, pretending, and without warning, Todd let go. I dropped to the transition and rolled away, barely in control. As I whisked down the runway I realized I’d just pulled what I didn’t think I had the balls to do. In a split second my mental outlook had been changed by a burst of accidental action, erasing the limitations that existed in my mind. I wanted to try it again, without second-guessing myself on what I could or couldn’t do.

My first contest. This was also the first time I rode a quarter-pipe that was over six feet tall. I could barely air out, but man, was I was excited to drop in on it. This was the day I realized how much there was to learn, and that I was just starting my journey.

I dropped in on that ramp for the rest of the afternoon, over and over. Todd and Travis went inside the house, leaving me to ride alone. Eventually, I got caught behind my seat while dropping in and went straight to my head. I woke up on the bottom of the ramp, with no idea how long I’d been unconscious. All I remember is my sister’s boyfriend waking me up, asking me if I was okay. That was my first experience with tunnel vision. But there was a glimmer of something good at the end of that tunnel.

Vert is an intense discipline. It takes years of dedication to get to the point where you can go off and blast big, and along the way you don’t get many instant payoffs. But that first spark early on was enough to kindle my curiosity. I imagined what else I could do with my bike, and I was hooked.

For a new life-form to thrive, the organism needs the proper environmental conditions. Our sterile atmosphere was Edmond, a vacuum of culture. BMX exploded nationwide in the early 1980s, but in our town, riders were outsiders. Freestyle had a rebellious vibe to it, because it was often the dividing moment, separating the kids who liked racing from the kids who liked showing off. Riders in the early eighties caught the rush of being swept up in something new, and the activity wasn’t restricted to the confines of a dirt track. Riders were free to experiment with tricks on flat ground, in the streets, and on ramps. We’d camp out in the magazine aisle of the local grocery store and read BMX Action, BMX Plus!, and Freestylin’. Every issue seemed to cover a new stunt, breakthrough trick technology, and fresh faces and places. There were barely any boundaries or rules—as a sport, the paint wasn’t even dry. It was up to the participants to shape it.

Our petri dish was the Edmond Bike Shop. Aside from the trails, the shop was where local riders gravitated. Ron Dutton was the good-natured owner of the Edmond Bike Shop. He was tolerant enough to allow a pack of spastic eleven- twelve- and thirteen-year-olds to cluster around the shop for days on end, ogling the inventory and steaming up his sticker counter with our sweaty faces. Sometimes Travis and I would ask to get dropped off there for a couple of hours, like we were going to the movies. To us, it was a form of entertainment. Dutton kept the shop stocked with the cream of the crop in BMX technology. Product hung from the ceiling, covered the walls, and crowded the showroom floor: Hutch, Torker, SE, JMC, Redline, and more. Whenever we’d notice a new part or accessory had arrived, my friends and I would descend on it and begin babbling with plans to purchase that new set of Skyway wheels or the Vector stem/handlebar combo, or we’d debate what brand of foam donuts to get for our Oakley grips. I’d walk in the door and be rendered powerless, the wad of lawn mowing money melting a hole in my pocket. The interior of the shop had an energizing effect on us. After being thoroughly charged up, we’d get on our bikes and ride.