Anaheim Stadium

The Big A, and the night freestyle BMX played to forty thousand people

Legend Bike Co · BMX heritage series

Almost every chapter in this series is about dirt. A landfill in Orange. A city lot in Torrance. A hillside somebody smoothed out with a borrowed tractor. Anaheim Stadium is the odd one, because nobody ever built a BMX track there, and as far as the accessible record goes, nobody ever ran a BMX race there either. It belongs in a BMX history library for one night, and for what that one night was worth.

The Ballpark, and Its Names

The stadium opened in 1966 on the flat ground off Katella Avenue in Anaheim, built for the California Angels, and it got its nickname almost immediately from the enormous A-frame scoreboard that stood over it. Everybody called it the Big A. Through the whole period this page covers, its actual name was Anaheim Stadium, and that is the name we use here.

It has been renamed twice since. It became Edison International Field of Anaheim in 1998, and Angel Stadium of Anaheim in 2004, which is what it is called today. Anybody researching the BMX-era stories will hit all three names and should keep them straight. In the 1980s, on a race poster or in a magazine caption, it was Anaheim Stadium.

The building also changed shape. It went up as an open-ended baseball park with a view out past the outfield, and at the turn of the 1980s it was enclosed and expanded so the Los Angeles Rams could play football there, which they did from 1980 through the 1994 season. That enclosure is the version of the stadium that matters to this story. By the early 1980s the Big A was a fully wrapped bowl that could hold a crowd well north of sixty thousand, and that is the room a couple of BMX riders walked into.

How Motorcycles Got the Stadium First

Anaheim came to two-wheeled dirt racing through motorcycles. The stadium hosted its first stadium motocross on December 4, 1976, billed as the American Motocross Finals, in front of 30,569 people, with a $20,000 purse that was reported at the time as the biggest single payday in stadium motocross. From 1981 onward Anaheim became the traditional opening round of the American Supercross season, and it has stayed that way for decades. By January 1984 the Anaheim round drew 70,305 spectators.

None of that is bicycle history on its own. It matters because it is the reason a BMX rider ever got to stand on that floor. The stadium had a dirt course built inside it every winter, it had a crowd measured in tens of thousands, and it had long gaps in the program that needed filling.

1982: Forty Thousand People Who Did Not Come to See Bicycles

In 1982, Bob Morales and Eddie Fiola rode a freestyle BMX demonstration at the AMA Supercross at Anaheim Stadium in front of 40,000 spectators. The National BMX Hall of Fame states it flatly in Morales's 2018 induction as an Industry inductee, and it is the single hardest-sourced BMX fact attached to this building. Historical Supercross results place that season's Anaheim round on January 30, 1982.

Secondary rider profiles add a detail we have not been able to confirm from a period source: that Oakley founder Jim Jannard was the one who asked the two of them to do it. Treat that as reported rather than proven. What is not in dispute is that they were there, on the floor, on bicycles, with a Supercross crowd in the seats.

Understand what that meant in 1982. Freestyle was maybe three years old as an organized thing. Its entire business model was the demonstration — roll into a bike shop parking lot or a shopping center, draw whatever crowd the local dealer could pull together, show a few hundred kids something they had never seen a bicycle do, and hope some of them walked inside and bought one. A good demo was a couple of hundred people. A great one was a thousand.

Forty thousand is not a bigger version of that. It is a different job. The riders were not there to sell bikes to a room that already liked bikes. They were the intermission act at somebody else's motorcycle race, and every person in that bowl who had never once thought about what a twenty-inch bicycle could do got shown, at scale, in one afternoon.

What the Two Riders Did Next

Both men were on the way up when they rode that floor, and both went on to shape the discipline rather than just perform in it.

Morales had come out of racing, started his first BMX business at fourteen selling stickers at local races, and was a founding member of the 1980 Haro freestyle team, touring the country alongside Bob Haro. The same year as the Anaheim demonstration he formed the Amateur Skate Park Association, which became the American Freestyle Association — the first freestyle sanctioning body, and the direct ancestor of every organized freestyle contest series that followed. He organized the King of the Skateparks contests at Pipeline in Upland and at Del Mar. He renamed his own company to Dyno, sold it to GT Bicycles, and stayed on as chief designer.

Fiola became the rider whose name is welded to the skatepark era. He and Morales formed the MF team together, and MF sponsored a young rider named Mike Dominguez. Both of them turn up a few years later in the first action-sports television commercial for a soft drink, alongside R.L. Osborn, Ron Wilkerson and Pat Romano — which is the same trick as the Anaheim demonstration, run at national broadcast scale.

That is the throughline. The people who put freestyle in front of audiences that had not asked for it are the people who turned it into an industry. Anaheim Stadium is where you can watch that instinct working early, in a building that had nothing to do with bicycles.

What Did Not Happen Here

Two things get attached to this stadium that the record does not support, and it is worth clearing both.

The first is BMX racing. We could not find a single documented BMX race at Anaheim Stadium. Stadium motocross for motorcycles, yes, going back to 1976. A freestyle demonstration, yes, in 1982. A sanctioned bicycle motocross event under the ABA, the NBL, the NBA or anyone else — nothing in the sources we could reach.

The second is the Yamaha Bicycle Gold Cup. One widely copied reference places the 1974 series finale in Anaheim, and that line has spread. Every detailed account of that series, including Scot Breithaupt's own firsthand version, puts the final at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, on a course laid out around a football field with hay bales, fiberglass berms and wooden jumps, on September 7, 1974. Stu Thomsen and David Clinton won the Expert and Junior classes there, in front of more than five thousand people. That was the Coliseum, not the Big A. The Gold Cup does not belong on this page.

Timeline

• 1966Anaheim Stadium opens as the home of the California Angels. The A-frame scoreboard gives the place its nickname, the Big A.
• December 4, 1976The stadium hosts its first stadium motocross, billed as the American Motocross Finals, in front of 30,569 people with a $20,000 purse.
• 1980The stadium, enclosed and expanded for football, becomes home to the Los Angeles Rams through the 1994 season.
• 1981Anaheim settles in as the traditional season-opening round of American Supercross.
• 1982Bob Morales and Eddie Fiola ride a freestyle BMX demonstration at the AMA Supercross at Anaheim Stadium in front of 40,000 spectators. Historical results place that year's Anaheim round on January 30.
• 1982The same year, Morales forms the Amateur Skate Park Association, which becomes the American Freestyle Association — the first freestyle sanctioning body.
• January 1984The Anaheim Supercross draws 70,305 spectators, a measure of the room BMX had borrowed two years earlier.
• 1998The stadium is renamed Edison International Field of Anaheim.
• 2004Renamed again, to Angel Stadium of Anaheim. It still stands, still hosts baseball, and still opens the Supercross season.

Where Anaheim Stadium fits in the bigger story

The places that built the sport: The Tracks That Built BMX, The Orange Y, Entradero, Azusa. The riders on the floor: Bob Morales, Eddie Fiola, Mike Dominguez, Ron Wilkerson. The companies that grew out of it: Haro, Dyno, GT Bicycles, SE Racing, Redline, Torker, Mongoose. The sanctions and the press: ABA, NBL, BMX Action, Wizard Publications. The full arc lives in our History of BMX series.

Sources

National BMX Hall of Fame, Class of 2018 announcement via USA BMX (July 2018) — the Bob Morales Industry induction, which is the source for the 1982 Anaheim Stadium freestyle demonstration in front of 40,000 spectators, for his 1980 Haro freestyle team membership, the 1982 founding of the Amateur Skate Park Association and its evolution into the AFA, the MF team with Eddie Fiola, the sponsorship of Mike Dominguez, the King of the Skateparks contests at Pipeline and Del Mar, and the Dyno sale to GT. Racer X Online venue and historical results archives for Anaheim Stadium — the December 4, 1976 first stadium motocross, the 30,569 attendance and $20,000 purse, Anaheim's role as the season opener from 1981, the January 30, 1982 date for that season's Anaheim round, and the 70,305 attendance in January 1984. Cycle News archives for corroboration on the 1984 Anaheim Supercross. University of BMX (Gerrit Does), History of BMX 1968–1974, including Scot Breithaupt's firsthand corrections — the Yamaha Bicycle Gold Cup course description and the Los Angeles Coliseum as the site of the 1974 final. Mike Carruth, A Partial History of the Sport of BMX Racing (BMXNews.com, updated January 2019) — the September 7, 1974 Gold Cup final date, the crowd figure, and the Stu Thomsen and David Clinton class wins. Wikipedia's National Bicycle Association entry, which carries the conflicting Anaheim line for the Gold Cup finale and is the reason that claim is addressed and set aside on this page. The Jim Jannard detail comes from secondary rider profiles and is flagged as reported. Not reachable during research: bmxsociety.com was down throughout, and bmxmuseum.com blocks automated access, so their Anaheim and freestyle-era threads could not be read directly.