As a black kid growing up in the 70’s you saw most kids in our neighborhood playing the average sports. Football, basketball, and baseball. I was a skinny kid back then, too skinny to play football, not good at dribbling a basketball and baseball was too slow for me. I use to watch evil Knievel on ABC wide world of sport on the weekend. I got infatuated with him jumping his motorcycle over buses. I would go outside pretend to be him. Set up ramps and jump them on my Royce union bike with the banana seat. So the seed was planted that riding my bike is all I wanted to do. Jumping my bike made me feel happy.
I had this cousin who lived south of me in Carson Ca. Back then Carson didn’t have that many blacks. He was the big cousin I looked up to. He had the dirt bike motorcycles, the real good skateboards, and the BMX bikes I never had. Around this time had to be like 11 years old.
My uncle bought my cousin a honda cr 125. I would love to go over to his house on the weekend just to look at all the cool shxt I didn’t have. I would spend hours looking through his Motocross Action and Bicycle motocross action mags. One this one trip to my cousin’s house I was looking through this mag and I saw this one picture that caught my eye. It was a picture of three guys who looked like me. They were in this mag that I loved to look at. It was at that point I said I can do it too. back then if you were black and from the hood.
So after 29 years of doing this sport I love, I decided to film a documentary of the history and plight of the African American BMX racer.
– Eric Sweets
After doing a BMX 'zine for ten years (1987 - 1996) FATBMX made it on the internet. The year was 1998. Here to stay.