Hardware, continued

It's not the skill or talent that is gone, it's the vision and the taste. I had a vision tonight of my old sense of aesthetics and how important the soul of a thing was to me, and how important it was that something just look right. To me, my first two BMX bikes had something going aesthetically that inspired.

In 1995, on a morning around my birthday, I got a phone call from the elder Dawson. He called simply to ask me what BMX frame I liked at the time. The answer was so easy, I liked the Supercross. I never anticipated being asked this particular question, but I was definitely prepared for it. Since around March of 1994 I had been reading BMX Plus magazine and I studied the 1.25 page Dan's Comp Ads as closely as I studied anything since baseball card prices in the first part of that decade. Nothing mattered more to me than a perfect combination of aesthetics, uniqueness, and performance. The Supercross had all of those things. My answer was easy.

I didn't think much of the phone call that day. Dawson had pulled some fast ones on me in the past. One christmas he had me unwrapping sticks and rocks only to disciver a nintendo game buried at the bottom of the box. I wasn't thinking about my birthday and I was mostly just thrown off by the question and really didn't think much of it. About a week later Dawson showed up at our apartment with a pretty large box under his arm. I ripped it open and found a shiny chrome frame and fork set inside, absolutely perfect, exactly what I wanted. I'll never forget the tangible anticipation I experienced that day on the bus ride to school and back home. I managed to get that bike built up pretty quickly and I enjoyed it for a couple of years before it finally cracked as all chro-moly race frames eventually do.

 Image from the internet of a 1993 Supercross Pro XL BMX bike

Just before my summer vacation to grandpa Bradford's farm in 1996 I had taken advantage of a blowout deal on a yellow TNT Hwa Fong Daddy which's main shortcoming was the then-outdated 1" head tube. The price was good enough that I looked past it's obsolescence and ordered one with V-Brake mounts.That bike wasn't particularly great and I don't believe I rode it for very long. I did, however, stick a few of my all time best 360's on that bike the day before that summer vacation.

Image from the internet of a 1996 TNT Hwa Fong Daddy BMX bike. I peeled the stickers off of mine right away.

The March 1994 BMX Plus magazine cover. The magazine covered events and riders but was mostly about the hardware. I read my copy dozens of times, even after the cover and following page fell off. The two-page ad just inside the cover was for "Proforx" which Steve Veltman rocked on his Boss at the time, and which didn't seem ridiculous to me at 13 years old, I wanted those $169 bitches, badly.