The Potential of Little Creative Scenes

This is a local TV segment from the San Francisco Bay Area that aired in 1986.  I'm the dork running after his bike at 5:07 in this clip.  This was shot on a Sunday afternoon at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.  Back when BMX freestyle was a new thing, little freestyle scenes started popping up all over the country.  But the Golden Gate Park scene was the best by far.  When I say, "make a scene," this is what I'm talking about.  I'm not talking about acting like an idiot or yelling at the McDonald's clerk because your fries are cold.  Not THAT kind of scene. 

The group of bike riders above is a creative scene.  We traveled from all over the Bay Area every weekend to  hang out, ride, show off new tricks, and stoke the crowds that gathered to watch us.  The thing about creative scenes is that the people in a scene feed off each other, push each other, and usually improve faster than one person alone would.  Creative scenes, like ours above, attract people who have an urge to explore the boundaries and find something new.  In our case back then, we were seeing how many different things we could learn to do on a BMX-style bike.  It was a new thing then.  We were coming up with tricks no one had ever done before at times.  And we just had a lot of fun. 

But that little Golden Gate Park BMX freestyle scene turned into much more.  Maurice Meyer, the focus of this clip, was one of six pro freestylers that were part of the scene.  Each of them influenced the emerging sport of freestyle in a lasting way.  Months before, I started a zine.  A zine is a little, hand-made, photocopied, booklet with interviews and photos of our scene.  By the time this segment aired on TV, I had taken a job at Wizard Publications, home of BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines.  The guy talking at 6:03 is Karl Rothe, he went on to be the editor of BMX Plus magazine for several years.  The guy in the yellow shirt at 4:43 is Marc McKee, and he went on to completely revolutionize the world of skateboard graphics in the 90's while working at World Industries.

At the time this was shot, none of us had any idea those things were going to happen.  We just wanted to progress as riders and and have fun.  But we all had talents in other areas that bloomed later, in part because of our interest in BMX freestyle.  That's a big lesson about creative scenes.  You never know who those kids trying creative stuff will turn out to be in the future.  Keep that in mind.