It still is these days isn't it? John: Especially in California. The weird thing is that that skatepark was the only one that would accept bikes. Home Avenue and Mission Valley had good parks too but non of them would accept bikes. They thought we would damage the parks but we did not damage the parks. We just rode the streets in the beginning for a couple of years. Bob Haro at the time was a freelance artist. He had a great art talent, he still has to this day. A lot of people don't understand what happened to the HARO thing but I was a lot younger than he was and I wasn't able to leave town. Bob was older, moved out of the house, moved to LA, got hired by Bicycle Motocross Action magazine as a freelance artist. Previous to that he started making the HARO number plates. He made the HARO number plates in his bedroom, cutting them out of 8 inch plastic with a knife and I cut all the graphics for it.
You helped him out with that?
John: Yeah, we did it all out of contact paper and we did each layer at a time so the first plates had one layer over another layer. We kinda debuted the first two number plates as one as an oval and one as a rectangle. And I had the ractangle and I had number 51, and Bob had number 15 in an oval shape. So it was just the opposite. And I have that plate to this day.
Funny fact here is that John's son JD is a sponsored MTB rider by HARO Bikes and hits the skateparks that allow bikes. Unfortunately the tape recorder screwed up (or better, I messed up) and I lost a lot of info on John inventing the rockwalk in 1977, riding for the local San Diego bike shop teams like Wheels 'n Things to eventually making it to the Redline BMX team. John's still super enthusiastic about bikes and enters downhill races where he smokes his age group more often than not. It was a pleasure talking to him.
BdJ
To get an idea of how BMX freestyle looked back in the day, click this link of a [url=http://youtube.com/watch?v=9WmEgWi6mPo]Bob Haro freestyle display[/url].
To get an idea of how BMX freestyle looked back in the day, click this link of a [url=http://youtube.com/watch?v=9WmEgWi6mPo]Bob Haro freestyle display[/url].
After doing a BMX 'zine for ten years (1987 - 1996) FATBMX made it on the internet. The year was 1998. Here to stay.