I’d forgotten all of this, really, until today. When I was eight, I had quite a weird relationship with sport.
At school I would fight and fuck around, would distract and annoy, be sent to stand outside the classroom, in the hallway, with my face pressed to the wall. That was pretty much every lesson. Teachers would preemptively bar me from their lessons if there was an upcoming exam. One Spring morning — I’m gonna take a stab and say it was April 1999 because it was close to when Man United were playing Juventus that season — my teacher told me that, instead of distracting everyone from maths revision, I should sit down here and draw a map of the world. I did, and I drew all the sports teams I knew too — English ones, German ones, Brazilian ones I’d seen in books — because sport was the only thing that could keep my focus. I’d sit there, outside Class 4 by the art tables that look out on the grey playground, for hours, and, despite a complete lack of artistic aptitude, would draw hundreds of pictures of sport things and sportsmen doing their sports.
And I’d lie. But because I was eight, we’d call it ‘pretending’. I pretended I really loved extreme sports.
I played football three times a week for two teams — Saturday and Sunday — as well as for the school team but I still had a gulf in my being that wouldn’t be filled until I pretended I was a talented skateboarder who secretly competed in competitions at weekends, despite not owning a skateboard. I pretended to have learned how to surf — aged six — with my dad in Spain. And I pretended to love BMX to keep kids from beating me up.
The kids on my estate were huge. I was tiny. Up until I was ten I must’ve weighed no more than five stone. My arms and legs were stick thin, and my hair was cropped and grey-brown. I looked like a mark, basically. The easiest mark ever. And I didn’t even have a BMX.
The BMXs on our estate were shiny and silver, or matte and black. There was one kid — Omar, he lived just around the corner in a maisonette built of different coloured brick to mine — who had a purple one. Omar was the coolest.
I decided that I needed to have one. I needed to own a BMX, be a BMX person, in that summer of 1999, I needed to know about and love BMX.
Eurosport was showing the X-Games that year and I watched the BMX events— vert and street, aka ‘big fucking bowl-thing’ and ‘a car park with boxes in it’ — for about ten minutes and decided that Dave Mirra was the guy for me. He had swagger, he had a cool name that was fun to say. Mirra. He did tricks and stuff. His bike was yellow. I was into it.
I started throwing his name around in conversation with those big kids and their little bikes, their battered Nikes and black sweatshirts. “I really like Dave Mirra,” I probably said. I don’t remember the reaction but I would hasten to guess that it was, at first, “Haha that’s gay” and then maybe “Oh, cool. Yeah, he’s great.”
I started to go to Halfords on Saturdays with my dad to look at the bikes.
“Get a mountain bike, Sam. These little fucking things are useless,” he’d say, my dad.
“I don’t care. I want a BMX.” That was about the sum of my reply, each and every time. “I just want a BMX.”
It just seemed so cool and so everything — the pros with their backflips on the television, and the kids on my estate with their helmets and the skrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrt noises, the black rubber tyre marks and mini ollies outside my gaff—and I had to feel a part of something. That was probably the crux of it. I wanted to feel a part of something. I was so not-a-part of something that about that same age I walked up to two kids hitting a tennis ball against a wall outside my house and said “Do you want to start a gang with me?” It didn’t work. I was without a gang. I was sans gang, sans mates.
I decided to concentrate. I still didn’t even own a bike and I didn’t even enjoy watching BMX on the television that much but I started studying BMX. I bought proper BMX magazines and I bought shitty BMX zines, read anything with Mirra in it twice. I would tape anything even broadly BMX-related and force myself to watch it vigilantly until the squiggly lines started appearing on screen and the film in the plastic cartridge inside our VCR started to die.
And it kinda clicked. After an entire summer of pretending I loved BMX and Dave Mirra, I slowly started to realise that Dave Mirra — along with scruffy West Ham midfielder John Moncur — was now literally my hero. I idolised him. He became superhuman. I would dream about Mirra doing backflip drop-ins, or a 360-degree version of a move I could barely even fathom. The moves became ingrained into my psyche and I felt them when he moved. I would hop a little when he popped up off a box, would duck and feint a little when he kissed a rail with a peg.
That Christmas I got a bike. It was chrome and black, it had purple stunt-pegs. I nearly lost my fucking mind when my dad wheeled it in. My heart started vibrating when I heard him leading back from the kitchen with the little clk-clk-clk-clk-clk of an idling bike being pushed along. I don’t think I cried, but it definitely wouldn’t have surprised me if I did. If I had let out a scream — which I did do — and hot tears shot out of my eyes and ran sore down my face, I would be like “Sure, sounds like me.”
On Boxing Day I took it out. My dad stood watch from the doorway, shielding himself from the whipping cold.
“Come in, you idiot,” my dad would call. I would just be standing there looking at it. I’d put down the kickstand and stand on the stunt-pegs and lean my chest way forward against the handlebars and I could feel me flying through the air. I would do this every single day.
A month later, I hated it. I couldn’t lift it. I was a weak kid with weaker arms and I couldn’t throw the bike around like the other kids could. I could ride it, sure. I could peddle like a motherfucker. I could even skid it a little. But I couldn’t lift. And with no lift there was no BMXing. I could not be a BMXer without lifting it. I could not be Dave Mirra if I couldn’t will my fucking pale arms to pick the bike that supported my tiny translucent body even an inch off the floor. I was heartbroken at first, and then I filled with hate. I filled up to the top with hate that flowed through me like battery acid. I would lash out at my bike, at my dad, at the friends I had somehow just about convinced that I was maybe-kinda-okay-not-cool-but-acceptable. I felt alone.
This went on for weeks. I thought I had nailed it at around about month two but it was a false dawn — I think I had just had a lucky lift off a cracked paving slab. I would throw my bike down in the alley next to my house, letting the chrome scratch and the rubber handles scuff and chunk-off and fray, and I would sit on my bed and cry. I would look at the zines and look at Mirra, at his bike, at his tricks, at the words on the page, the graffiti font headlines, the whoa-tubular-dude! tone of voice and the classifieds in the back hawking cogs and wheels and frames, and I would cry and cry. Hated it. It was so unfair. Hated me more. I felt like I’d let Dave Mirra down.
When I was nine, it was over. The BMX was used as a regular bike — mostly used as a post during games of football with kids I gradually started to know. I didn’t mention Dave Mirra any more because I’d totally forgotten about him and I totally forgot about that kid I was for eight months at the turn of the new millennium. I loved my bike now. I just called it a bike.
I hadn’t thought about any of this today until I saw the news that Dave Mirra had, aged forty-one, taken his own life. And I felt quite sad but wasn’t immediately sure why. And then I remembered the summer of 1999 and end of 1999 and the start of 2000 when I loved him and felt buoyed by his natural talent thousands of miles away.
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