BMX Freestyle History · Event File · Legend Bike Co.

The Amarillo A'me $5,000 Pro Spectacular

July 4th weekend, summer 1980 · Amarillo, Texas · Held alongside the ABA Summernationals

Most of the landmark moments in early BMX freestyle happened at a track, in front of a few hundred people who happened to be there for the race. The Amarillo A'me $5,000 Pro Spectacular was built to be something else on purpose — a stand-alone, big-money show, timed to the ABA's marquee summer national, with a name built the way period BMX purses were built: sponsor name, dollar figure, and "Pro Spectacular" stapled together like a marquee. It's also, by the account in BMX Freestylin', the place where the quarter-pipe aerial — the trick that eventually defined an entire discipline — reportedly happened for the first time.

July 4th weekend, Amarillo, Texas

The event ran over the July 4th weekend of 1980, timed to the ABA Summernationals in Amarillo — one of the marquee national race weekends on the American Bicycle Association's calendar that year. BMX Freestylin' — Featuring the BMX Action Trick Team (Mike Buff, Bob Osborn, R.L. Osborn, and Len Weed; Wizard Publications, 1982) covers the show on pages 12-13 and again on page 125, describing it in the text as "the first ever super big bucks Pro spectator event of its kind" — a big claim, but one that fits the moment. Through the 1970s, BMX racers had been paid in trophies. A show built around real prize money, attached to a marquee national weekend, was new.

The quarter-pipe show

The BMX Action Trick Team — in the summer of 1980, still just Bob Haro and R.L. Osborn, before Mike Buff joined in early 1981 — performed at the Amarillo show on the quarter-pipe ramp Haro had designed and his brother Scott had built. According to BMX Freestylin', the team's quarter-pipe aerials were reportedly performed for the first time at this show, in the summer of 1980. The book credits the team collectively rather than naming which of the two riders actually cleared the coping first — and nothing in the record checked for this page settles that question. We're presenting it the way the source does: a team milestone, not a solo one.

Legend Bike Co.'s own BMX Action Trick Team page documents the same event the same way, as part of the team's 1980 calendar, and this page is written to stay consistent with it.

The name: A'me

The "A'me" in the event's name almost certainly points to A'ME — formally Aeromarine Molding and Engineering — the grip company founded in 1974 by Phil Downey and Bob Paley, which by the early 1980s had become one of BMX's biggest names in grips, best known for the A'ME Tri grip. Period BMX purses were routinely named for the sponsor putting up the money, and "Amarillo A'me $5,000 Pro Spectacular" reads exactly like that pattern. That said, the source material for this page documents the event's name, date, and billing, not the specific terms of A'ME's sponsorship, so we're presenting the connection as the strong likelihood it is rather than a confirmed fact.

Part of a bigger 1980

The Amarillo show landed in the middle of a packed calendar for the Trick Team's first full year of touring. That same year, the team also appeared at a $5,000 Pro show at the Anaheim Convention Center alongside "Jumpin' Jim Pratt." And on the racing side of BMX that summer, Redline's Stu Thomsen was riding into his run as the sport's dominant ABA pro — a reminder that the same ABA calendar hosting a freestyle sideshow in Amarillo was also carrying the sport's biggest race storylines. The ABA's Summernationals was one of the sanction's marquee national weekends of the era, which is exactly why a promoter looking to debut a big-money spectator show would attach it to that same July 4th weekend.

Where the record runs thin

• The exact date and full results. The source material places the show on the July 4th weekend of 1980 and describes its billing, but doesn't give a single date, a full card, or a purse breakdown beyond the "$5,000" in the name.
• A'ME's exact role. The naming pattern strongly suggests A'ME sponsored the purse, but the record checked for this page doesn't spell out the sponsorship terms.
• Who cleared the quarter-pipe first. The Trick Team at the time was Bob Haro and R.L. Osborn. The source credits the team, not one named rider, with the first aerial.
• Whether "Red Line" formally titled the 1980 ABA Summernationals at Amarillo. Not confirmed in the sources checked for this page; we've referenced Redline only as background on the era's dominant race brand, not as this event's sponsor.