The Ride of My Life (19 page)

With the machine shop up and running full speed, Steve and I realized the errors of our ways. Building our bikes in-house didn’t solve the money-juggling problems; instead, we’d compounded the insanity. There were twenty-five full-time employees on payroll, plus rent, utilities, raw materials, shipping costs, and forklifts. The monthly overhead was gnarly. Our accounting books just didn’t balance, and we were living shipment to shipment. We’d already maxed out our SBA loan, but we needed extra cash to grow the business. I figured out a way to approve ourselves for a high-interest loan: We stopped paying taxes for a few months. I didn’t like bending the law, but it was either skip the taxes or shut down the business. We used the money we were supposed to give to the taxman to buy more tubing and materials, to hire more people, and to generate more income. I knew I’d have to square up with the IRS eventually, but I never would’ve guessed they made house calls. One afternoon the IRS agents showed up with guns and badges and demanded to see the company’s records. Immediately. After an audit, the IRS informed us we were fined $18,000 in back taxes and penalties. By the time the bill was due, we’d made just enough profit to pay it off. We squeaked through a crucial fiscal year. Profit was an elusive leprechaun, and the little bastard seemed to be very afraid of bike riders.

My office, after I’ve cleaned it. (Photograph courtesy of Mark Losey]

The coolest aspect of building bikes is being able to enjoy them. When I was growing up and riding for other companies, it was frustrating to submit suggestions to my sponsor about product development or marketing and have them nod politely, with no intention of acting on my input. If my forks broke and left me in a coma for a day, I had to deal with it as an “unavoidable occupational hazard” rather than a design flaw. With my name on the down tube, I made it a personal commitment to be a control freak about every facet of Hoffman Bikes. Steve and I put together the best team we could hire. Part of it was for selfish reasons—so we’d have awesome guys to ride with—but it was also for strategic reasons. The best team meant we would also be getting the best input and could channel that brainpower and creativity into top-notch products. When our rider Kevin Jones came up with a new head tube gusset design, we not only listened but acted. Gack came up with the idea for oversized axles, and our core R&D team (Steve, Gack, Chad Herrington, and me) came up with the Super Fork. Today, all manufacturers’ high-end bikes come with similar head tube gussets, oversized axles, and forks that employ the same design as the Super Fork. An entirely new set of industry standards were created by rider input.

Early on, we could barely afford to pay for products or get our team to events, let alone put our riders on lucrative salaries. At first, the guys on my team got a good bike, a free place to stay if they were in Oklahoma City, and a black leather jacket with Hoffman Bikes painted on the back. When we lured Dave Mirra onto the team, we couldn’t even afford to get him a new jacket, so I gave him my leather from the Swatch Impact tour and had it repainted with an HB logo. The black jackets were our armor against the corporate mentality.

When Jay Miron started riding for us, he abandoned his Canadian homeland and moved to Oklahoma City. We rode together every day, pushing one another and progressing. He pitched in around the offices, doing everything from working the phones to helping ship orders. Kevin Robinson was another kid who was one hundred percent committed. He relocated from the East Coast to Oklahoma City for a year, just to help out with our cause. That kind of teamwork made our operation more than a team—it was a family. Over the years, Hoffman Bikes was fortunate enough to expand and got the honor of sponsoring a ridiculously talented roster of ams and pros, such as Taj Mihelich, Simon Tabron, Ruben Alcantara, Evel Knievel, Rooftop Escamilla, Jay Miron, Dave Mirra, Psycho Hallford, Kevin Robinson, Butcher Kowalski, Day Smith, Rick Thorne, Chad Kagy, Seth Kimbrough, Kevin Jones, Chase Gouin, Pat Miller, Jimmy Walker, Mad Jon Taylor, Rob Sigaty, Brian Tunney, Leif Valin, Achim Kujawski, Daniel Randall, Edwaldo “The Fly” Terreros, and many others.

We were blind busy. Just keeping the UPS orders flowing out the door involved so much work, my plate runneth over. Add the mayhem of operating a jacked-up semi truck and putting on Sprocket Jockeys fair shows around the country, plus whatever miscellaneous mission-critical projects that randomly popped up, like building giant ramps. I had no business taking on any other responsibilities.

“Shit, we should do a comp,” I said to Steve. The bounty of contests had dried up, and the sport was hurting for some action. Steve was equally as devoted and naïve as I was. So, at the same time we launched our bike company, we became contest promoters. Before we knew what we’d done, an advertisement was placed in one of the last remaining freestyle magazines, calling all bicycle gladiators to come forth. Our concept to do a contest had steamrolled into a whole series of events, and while we were at it, we’d decided to rename the sport. Freestyle sounded dated and confusing. There was freestyle skiing, freestyle swimming, freestyle rhyming, freestyle dog shows … the word just didn’t fit anymore. I proposed calling our activity BS, for Bicycle Stunts. I figured I was full of BS and wanted to spread it across the land.

The motivating factor for holding a comp was not to decide who was the best, or keep track of winning or losing. The purpose was to gather with my friends and celebrate who we were and what we did. A contest meant a place to exchange ideas and feel like part of a community in which riders could groove on a sense of purpose and absorb the energy generated when a mob of freaks gathered to go off. The riding was getting insane. A new jack hybrid style had emerged, demanding technical finesse and a balls-to-the-wall approach. It was a mix of influences, blending trails, street, park, and vert.

The BS series made its debut at Jeff Phillips’s skatepark in Dallas, Texas. I decided to call it “The Texas Chainwheel Massacre.” Steve and I chose Phillips’s park because it was fairly close to Oklahoma City. I knew Jeff was easygoing and would let us hold our experiment there, and, most important, it was a good park. At the time, there just weren’t many decent places with permanent ramps and park courses to ride.

When contest weekend rolled around, I was so sick I couldn’t see straight. I had a fever of 103 degrees, was oozing poisonous sweat, and was unable to keep food down. Existing on pure nervous energy, I tried to stay focused on helping Steve handle entry fees, sign-ups, setting up our PA, recruiting capable judges, and getting the thing to start on time. Occasionally a crisis erupted, like when Greg Guillotte transferred out of a ramp and landed on the roof of the pro shop. The thin fiberglass roof held up for a half second before Greg crashed through and took out the pro shop.

Between dramas and organizing duties, I lay shivering under a blanket in a germ-filled car. For the record, I have to credit the unsung heroes: The event would have never happened without the help of Dennis McCoy and Trend Bike Source, the hardcore mail-order company and longtime supporter of all things cool. At the last minute before the pro street finals, I got on my bike and hit the course. Literally. With my cloudy head I was seeing lines for new ways to use the park and pulling backflips off everything. I envisioned pulling a flip over a spine ramp, and although it had never been done before, I was sure it was possible. In my second run, I tried a big flip over the spine and, despite being totally confident I could make it, was shocked when I landed with the coping in my guts. I took the full blow of the ramp’s peak and heard the collective “Ooofh” of the crowd when I impacted. I lost my breath and spent a minute or two turning blue, unable to inhale.

The next day on the vert ramp I had my wind back and was feeling less ill. I turned out a couple strong runs: a 900, tabletop 540s, a flair, and a front-flip fly-out, flipping with my bike and landing on the deck, on my bike. At the end of a crazy weekend I found my fever had broken, the contest had come off successfully, and I’d won pro vert.

The first year of the BS series proved to be a logistical nightmare. But they were too much fun, and the experience of putting them on was the reward. We scheduled more contests, tried to up the prize money for pros, and with the help of an all-volunteer crew we took the grassroots series all over the country. In the second or third year of BS events, the rewards and reasons why we were even involved became clear.

The Kansas City BS comp was scheduled months in advance. It was planned to happen at the Big Red One Army Base, at the eighty-foot-wide halfpipe they had set up. About a month and half before the event I called to check in and make sure things were still on track. The military recreation department liaison told me the ramp had been taken down, and the location was off.

Dennis McCoy stepped in and said we could have the vert event at his house in the Kansas City suburbs, but we had to scramble to find an alternate location for the street course. Between our full-blown workload at HB, and having to build an entire park’s worth of portable ramps and figure out how to get them to Kansas City, the clock was ticking at high speed. Several weeks of eighteen-hour days blurred by, until the day before the contest. I’d been booked in Europe for an appearance and flew direct to Oklahoma City from Budapest. With help from Mark Owen, our BS volunteer and crucial HB employee (he was the second guy I’d hired], we loaded up a caravan of U-Haul trucks and a flatbed trailer for the semi, which was stacked precariously with partially built park pieces. We drove to Kansas City, and the scene I found was comical. Steve was there with a skeleton crew. They were passed out on the vert ramp, tools still in hand, eyes open, and snoring. They’d been up for way too long, trying to get things ready. The lack of sleep had taken its toll—but the work was nowhere near complete. We pulled a fifty-hour shift, some guys were up even longer, and with sign-up and start time just a few hours away, there were
still
ramps to be built.

As riders began to arrive for the event, things started happening that inspired us. Under the direction of Jay Miron, a crew of Canadians rolled up expecting to get in some early practice and found our bleary-eyed crew stumbling headlong into the work left to do. The Canucks didn’t even ask if we needed help—they just grabbed hammers and started layering plywood. As more riders showed up, our participants came together and pitched in to make the contest reality. There were thirty guys helping to build the vert ramp, and another sixty putting nails and sawing the street park into place. It was madness. Nobody got much sleep, but it wound up being probably the best vert ramp, and maybe the most fun, I’d ever had at a contest. The field of pros was insane, and you could literally feel the caliber of riding had changed at that event. Three 900s were pulled, tons of tailwhips, double tailwhips, and I came close to making a triple. Dennis showed everybody what a barspin 5 looked like. Jay went off, and along with Dave Mima, John Parker (the first time I’d ridden against him), Steve, Thorne…we had a huge pro class and everybody was ripping. In the end, it had transcended being just a contest. It was a brotherhood.

I went into business based on the different things I needed. I heard the word no about ten thousand times along the way, from people who didn’t think it was possible for a guy with an eighth-grade education to accomplish whatever task was at hand. I discovered it’s tough leading people, or even finding the right people who believe. I spent all the money I made keeping a dream alive and learned things about myself along the way. What more could I ask for?

Instead of labeling my work staff with traditional corporate lingo like CEO, CFO, Vice President, and more, I gave their job descriptions my own names, and in return, got the code name
HMFIC
from my staff. HMFIC is trucker speak. It stands for
Head Mother Fucker in Charge.
A bold and saucy business card title, but it was never something I’d planned.