One Spring day in 1988 my dad drove me to a BMX track that we had seen driving down highway 55. We had brought with us my white GT, that was 3 sizes too big and weighted more than I did at the time. That Friday night at the Orange YMCA I brought home a trophy and it was amazing! It had a grand marble base with a foot tall silver plated column and at the very top it had a silver BMX bike & rider.

Before that night I have never really won anything in my 8 years on that planet, excluding the 1 or 2 team sports 'thanks for being here' trophies. I was hooked. Slowly over then next several years we started to race more and more until one day we were racing 5 or even 9 races in a 7 day week continuously.

Starting in November of 1980 we would get our ABA newspaper in the mail and flip right to page 3 where it listed the 1991 Nationals. With this information, we started to map out what Nationals were close to our home in CA-14. We hit every one of them we could, Blackjack in Reno (Jan), Spring (Napa), Fall (SoCal)...

My favorite tracks were Orange Y with Ray Rome at the helm and Coal Canyon with Paul Boyd at the helm. I also had support from ELF and Bike Alley.

I gave up the sport in 1994 for personal reasons. Today I'm a dad and my son loves to ride his balance bike so I just got back into it after being away for 30 years. Technically I should be a Novice but because when I retired I was an Expert ABA forced me into Inter. Many guys at the track had similar stories but they just signed up as Novice and didn't say anything during membership signups. I couldn't do that because I felt like it was unfair to the real Novice riders.

You can see some of my old meberships here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NPJcX8DwwDDibm_NXHWHb1WxD-5QHJgC/view?usp=drive_link

Photos of some of the trophies that brought joy to my life or wer important events, like the SoCal State win!: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dDXO-nd1H23aEOCVH8FWoO2Q-tMe6igi/view?usp=drive_link