The Ride of My Life (28 page)

Another pet-inspired product was the Hoffman Bikes Deebo, and a slightly smaller model called the ’Lil Deebo. These bikes were named after my spastic dog, who was in turn named after my favorite character from the film
Friday
. A drunken night at a bar in Malaysia with the HB team resulted in a product called the Spice Dog 4 (a nickname I was given for the night], which we later abbreviated to SD-4, for coded purposes. It’s funny what a name can do for a product’s sales — even the name of a color. We got a batch of bikes in stock that were brown. When our sales staff would describe it to bike shop buyers over the phone, we determined that nobody wanted brown bikes. Fearing a large inventory of earth tone product sitting on the warehouse shelves, I told the sales staff that brown was now being called “burnished bronze.” This worked like a charm, and the brown, err, bronze bikes sold out.

After a couple years of importing product from Taiwan, despite the ongoing obstacle course of business, we were paying off our debts and things were looking up. Our lease option was running out on
the old warehouse; my dad had moved out and the new landlord was trying to jack me around. I was pissed and went looking for a new place. I found some property that looked perfect. I didn’t even know if the building was for sale and walked in the door with my checkbook. The owner and his wife had occupied the building for over twenty-five years. His wife had been wanting to move for the last ten years, but they never had a good enough excuse. I was that excuse, and by random luck scored a deal on a new space. I designed the new offices and built fixtures using scrap wood from the old twenty-one-foot-tall quarterpipe, and various parts of ramp park scraps. The decor was one of the things I focused on in my downtime during my numerous riding injuries. As the boss, I also liked making up the rules. I’d heard of Casual Friday business attire, so I ran with that idea and made up my own version. I called it “Speedo Wednesdays.” We had a brand new intern starting the day I put that rule to the test—I walked into our Wednesday morning ten o’clock meeting in the conference room, put my feet up on the table, and asked everybody to fill me in on their departments’ progress for the week. I was wearing nothing but a silky black Speedo.

My sister, Gina, married an investment banker named David Lindley. David was suave and savvy, a BMW-driving numbers ninja. After some coaxing on my part, he agreed to take on the adventure of becoming the Hoffman Bikes chief financial officer. “Say, you know, since you’re naming these products after your pets, you can legally write them off as tax-deductible corporate mascots,” was one of the first insights David noted when he came on board. I liked his thinking.

However, David quickly had his work cut out for him when he walked into a minefield the first couple of months on the job. Steve and I had signed a huge distribution deal with one of the oldest and most respected distributors in the bicycle industry. The company had been around for thirty years and had solid channels into retail accounts all over the United States. We figured if we could rely on a company to sell our bikes to shops, we could focus our laser beam of expertise on designing better products, running a bigger team, and making cooler stuff. Things were looking up. Until our distributor filed for
Chapter 11
bankruptcy protection holding a massive order of our bikes—bikes that I’d maxed out my credit line to get built, and I was counting on a substantial check from the distributor to pay off the loan. Ugh. I was left holding the bag, several million dollars in credit debt, with all my bikes tied up in asset forfeiture limbo with the distributor’s creditors. It sucked. Rather than write off my own losses and take the cheesy way out, I assumed the massive debt and begin rebuilding the company one sale at a time. Even with David Lindley’s master spreadsheets, I was looking at a slow crawl out of debt and back to normal. But I’d rather dig ditches than welch out of what I owed.

Around this time, the official HB company motto became Rise Above. I ran the
tagline in our ads, on our T-shirts, and signed autographs with it. The more I thought about how lame the situation was, the more it hardened my resolve to not give in.

David got HB out of another bind. It was an epic fuckup, and to make matters worse it came via a good friend whom I’d employed. There was an error in the way a batch of bikes had been built in Taiwan, so because they weren’t made to spec we didn’t have to pay for them. Basically, they were free bikes if I could find out how to get them to the United States cheaply. Christmas was approaching in about a month and half, so I asked my friend/employee to get a cost on having the bikes shipped to us, and we could give the bikes away to charities and boys’ homes. The shipping by sea freighter was $4,000, which was more than I’d hoped to spend (or could afford), but it was for a great cause. The boat would take twenty-eight days to arrive and still give us time to get the bikes to their new homes.

Jay “The Canadian Beast” Miron uses the front triangle of his prototype signature frame to open a beer for Chris Gack and Mark Owen. The bottle opener was designed into the rear of Jay’s bike.

Two days later, the UPS truck pulled up out back. “Here you go—sign here.” My buddy had accidentally checked the “second day air” box on the shipping instructions. We’d basically just express mailed one hundred and fifty bicycles from Taiwan via the fastest possible method. It was also the most expensive method—a whopping $25,000 over the original price. David quickly set to work and got UPS to reduce their costs, basically reeling them into the fiasco by crediting them as codonors of the gift. It still cost me ten grand, but sometimes you give until it hurts.

For all the troubles and headaches and sleepless nights, even the worst day at Hoffman Bikes is probably better than the best day just about anyplace else I could work. And when things get
really
bad at HB, I’ve still got two words that keep me coming back, and keep me moving on.

Rise Above.

This was an intimidating jump. It was my first time B.A.S.E. jumping, and I landed in the Mississippi.

I love a good view. I also love jumping off of things.

Edmond, Oklahoma, is pretty flat. In my years as a curious preteenager, I found and climbed the tallest thing in town—the local NBC affiliate’s fifteen-hundred-foot-tall TV antennas. My mission: just to see what the air looked like from up there. By the early eighties, air was supplied by my bike, which had become my hobby of choice. In the late eighties riding was my sport, and by the nineties, it became my art—an art that had begun exacting its toll on my battle-scarred body.

In the first few years following the death of my mother, I entered an experimental era of backflips, 900s, twenty-three-foot aerials on the big ramp. I also started skydiving and B.A.S.E. jumping. I was constantly searching for a new impossible experience.

“Aren’t you scared of death?” is a question that comes up often. In 1995, my typical reply was a sarcastic quip, like “Death is just a moment when dying ends.” Sounds like a tagline in a Van Damme movie, but I had seriously reached a point in my life where I
wasn’t
scared of death. I was driven to challenge my own potential, to map uncharted territory and test possibility.
Can I take my hands off during a flip? What if I tried tailwhipping it? How high can I really go?
Over the years these experiments resulted in many encounters with pain and fear. Panic is replaced by
Aww, shit, how can I fix this before I hit the ground?
You develop an inner calmness and build up a tolerance to crisis situations, and begin losing your perspective on mortality.

I started skydiving because I was superfrustrated with my physical condition. I had to compromise my riding, based on the current status of my body. Every time I pushed the proverbial envelope, a bone would break or a ligament would give out. I’d be forced to percolate and recuperate, unable to ride, yet dreaming up even harder stuff to pull off next time. I was discovering a dark truth: What I wanted to do on my bike and what my body could handle were two different things. Sometimes I was in this injury purgatory for months at a stretch. Skydiving became part of my rehabilitation. It revitalized me.

The most obvious thrill of falling from the clouds is the pulse-pounding ground rushing view and incredibly surreal sensation of being alone in the sky. There is also the more sublime element of pure freedom. You have no gravitational restrictions, and jumping from twelve thousand feet translates to just over a minute of pure playtime. Front-flips, gainers, 360s left and right, docking with other sky-divers, or just complete dork sessions—you name it, I’ve indulged.

For the first couple of years, it was a weekend kick. I’d drive out to the airfield, pay $80, and experience the view as I hurtled toward earth at over one hundred miles per hour from ten thousand feet. After a while it becomes heroin. Skydiving was the most thrilling and intense activity outside of riding I’d ever known, at a fraction of the cost on my body. It was the way I could recuperate without going crazy. The more time I spent wearing a parachute, the stronger my skills grew, and the more I realized all the possibilities.

I only had eight hundred bucks, so I had to go ghetto. My friend John Vincent had a buddy at the Deland Drop Zone in Florida who wanted to get rid of it. I never questioned why. It had thirteen hundred jumps on it, didn’t fit me, and had been dyed about fifty times with acids. Even the style of the canopy had been discontinued twenty years earlier. It was sketchy as hell, but it was mine: a Pegasus parachute. My friends used to joke and call it a pawn shop special or claim it was originally a camping tent that had been retrofitted and resold as a skydiving rig. But I trusted this twenty-pound sack of strap-on nylon and polyester with my life.

Skydiving has something in common with mountain biking, and that’s the dress code. There’s a certain style that consists of sheer gear. You know the look: covered head to toe in technical fabrics and colorful prints, full-on pro shop ensembles that proclaim your status. I’ve always been the guy in the black T-shirt and cargo shorts who looks like he wandered in off the street and accidentally ended up getting on the plane. Occasionally, I will dress for the part, like when jumping in winter.

If you don’t have enough current jumps in your logbook each year, you have to start over if you want to keep advancing. To avoid losing my certification, I’ve gone skydiving in the dead of winter, when it was a cool eighteen below zero where you exit the plane. You can’t wear thick gloves, because you have to be able to grab your pilot chute and control your canopy using steering handles, called toggles. So for these jumps I wore snowboarding pants and a parka and still felt like a free-falling Popsicle.

You learn the basics first, such as how to exit the plane. Nothing makes you feel more like a dumb ass than tumbling out of a speeding airplane and conking your head on the wing, as I deftly demonstrated one fine November afternoon. The other crucial, yet basic, skills you pick up during your early skydives are things like how to manipulate your body to move yourself around, dive fast, slow down, and track toward objects such as your landing zone. Oh, and landing. That’s pretty important. One of the first “think fast, pop quiz” situations to test how well I had learned the basics came courtesy of my sketchy right arm and my equally sketchy old Pegasus rig. Together they scared the crap out of me, but afterward I knew what to expect in case it happened again.

It was over the GCS Metro airport in Skiatook, Oklahoma. The mid-July skies were sunny and bright blue. It was my thirty-ninth jump as a skydiver, and I was getting comfortable in the air. A C-182 turboprop took us up around eight thousand feet and I exited with a triple front-flip and a huge grin. I locked into a standing up straight position, which gets you cooking pretty fast, plunging feet first toward earth at about two hundred miles an hour. I felt like Superman. My temperamental parachute was engaged by throwing a pilot chute—essentially a little parachute that you release into the air first. The drag it creates pulls out the main canopy on your back. My main canopy never worked very well. I’d throw my pilot chute, and instead of immediately engaging my main canopy, the thing would just snivel for a while and take about twenty seconds to open.