for and dedicated his life to? I ask him, is this where he intended BMX to go? His reply is immediate and humbly honest. “I never intended BMX to go anywhere but my backyard. I was just trying to hold on so they didn’t take it from us and make it into something that I had not subscribed to. BMX is so much bigger than where I came from that I can’t really compare it. I can’t compare the industry now to the original thought I had as a boy, even though that thought is still there with me. BMX is everything now. I decided to BMX because it was nothing, except for what my heart and soul told me, now it’s everything beyond that. People always ask me can I believe how big it got? I say ‘Dude, I can’t believe it took so long’. I believed BMX was greatest thing in the world when I was 13 years old. And now I’m 38 and people ask me if I ever believed it was going to be this big? I believed that for the last 25 years this shit should have been this big. “BMX…I will have no control over it. It is its own animal. But I’ll always believe and be what BMX is. If anyone ever wants to check back into that, they can, I’m always going to be that. That’s what BMX is: the freedom to not get along with anybody. That’s the beauty of BMX. Yes it’s huge but it can be whatever it wants to be through the eyes of whoever does it. There’s always been that good pocket of our community that isn’t distracted by anything, and follow their soul, and their heart.”
The Purity Of BMX
In other conversations I had with Mat, he often refers to a jock side of the BMX aside from his punk influenced side, but I was wrong to assume he didn’t regard the more competitive side of riding as pure. “BMX today is not completely pure as what I define the purity of our sport to be. I’ve seen the sport go from having no distractions like money and sponsorship, and there was no interest, all there was only the value of ripping. That’s one thing about BMX, is that it doesn’t matter what you do, if you’re ripping you earned that seat off the purity of BMX. You don’t get back on your bike after you’ve jacked yourself up a millions times unless you love it, and you don’t get that good unless you’ve jacked yourself up a millions times. If someone is freakin’ ripping it on a BMX and going big, they earned that, they earned that through their heart and soul because that’s no smoke or mirrors. When I see someone rip, I think bro you know what it’s about, because this what you love, it may not always be what I loved, but it’s what they love. It used to be a small community where we loved the
same thing, now it’s a big community and we love different things.” When Mat started riding, everything was different, the tricks, the bikes, the style, but larger still, public perception. Nowadays BMX is accepted, the Olympics recognize racing as a sport and barely a music video passes without a foot jam whip. In contrast, what attracted Mat to BMX in the first place was the break from social acceptance. “I started riding because I had no interest trying to be the cool kid on the block. I saw BMX for something I could for myself without anybody trying to accept me. I decided to bow out of the social race in schools, or getting on teams or stuff like that. I saw BMX as a way to escape that.”
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I WOULD MAKE DECISIONS FOR THE BEST INTEREST OF BMX, AND THEN WATCH THOSE DECISIONS SHATTER MY IMAGE.
” Mat’s natural talents quickly took him to the top contests and to a new world of competitions, interviews, fans, press and the very attention and acceptance he sought to avoid. “I was 13 or 14. I friggin’ hated it. I was this shy kid that wants to ride his bike so I didn’t have to deal with anything else. It was the first time someone else judged me. I had that problem when I was a wrestler and doing judo. When I would lose, it would always bug me. Bike riding was so great because it was mine and I didn’t have to lose or win, I just did it. I didn’t want to compete. I’d rather just ride. I don’t value winning or losing. I value just not going to the hospital on that 900, or just trying to hit that ramp as hard as I could and just look down and just hold on, get as tweaked with whatever energy I have. But whether I crashed or won a comp, I fucking went for it, and that’s the only thing that makes me happy. Whether I went to hospital and everyone’s sad or I won the contest and everyone’s happy, I was always pretty happy.” The Death Wish Mat’s disregard for winning and losing, is rooted by a rare, possibly eccentric outlook. He is devoted to seeing the world through his own eyes, and his eyes only. He’s a man
with a brilliant mind that is quick fired and unique. He bears a talent for fantasy and holds a wonderfully reckless imagination. Such minds are rarely satisfied by the simple black and white of winning and losing. Mat has a hunger to question and challenge everything, none more so than gravity, reality and death. “The sky is a great environment of unknown possibilities.” Mat says looking up to the night sky with a childlike fascination. “It’s wide open because of the taboo and fear of falling to the earth. With the mass up there that you can control and play with, you can get some of the most incredible superhero feelings. Street riding made me originally see everything for a different purpose and what made me want to base jump was to be able to look at the world without any barrier or any limits around me. It makes you look at skyscrapers, bridges and antennas as a playground. If I’m on top of a building and I wanted to run off that, I could do that. Or if I wanted to take a parachute and ride a volcano up to the stars from the thermals it puts off, I will figure out a way to do that. I don’t have to play under the conventional rules anymore, I can play everywhere, in fact I want to play up in the stars. I’m going to get up to the stratosphere some day, chill, hang out and look at the world, jump back in and land my backyard.” Visions of a 38 year old man wanting to play in the stars could be interpreted as a mind lost to dreaming and fantasy, but that is not so. Mat Hoffman lives his dreams. After my visit his emails to me were punctuated by the previous day’s head cam video of him running off the edge of mountains in Huahine, or taking his family up in a hot air balloon and jumping out the basket to the disbelief of his young daughter and son. In his lifetime Mat has jumped from hundreds of planes, bridges and towers, with and without bikes, flown over coral reefs and volcanoes with nothing but a big fan and a parachute strapped to his back, all fulfilling the burn in his heart when his injured body can’t support riding. Throughout his riding and leaps into the sky, death is very real and very close. Never more so than when he attempted a double back flip off a notoriously deadly cliff, the Kjerag in Norway, and he found himself falling 3,200ft at 150 m.p.h. flipped upside down on a bike with his trousers caught in the chain. His assessment of what is possible and what is dangerous is a rare trait of a rare breed – the daredevil. His mind is in the dangerous state where pleasure and danger are blurred and overlap, it is both euphoric and self-destructive. But what is his driving force and reasoning? What was it about the boy from dusty old Oklahoma that made him the great Mat Hoffman? 85