BMX Action Magazine — The Bible of BMX, Built by Bob Osborn and Wizard Publications (1976 to 1989)

A BMX history chapter, told by Bill Ryan · hosted on Legend Bike Co

Before there were a dozen BMX magazines, there was one. It showed up on the newsstand in December 1976, a buck for forty-eight pages, with a racer named Brian Lewis sliding down the Corona downhill on the cover. The man who made it was a Torrance fireman named Bob Osborn, and the magazine was BMX Action. For most of us coming up in the sport, that was the bible. You waited on the next issue. You read it cover to cover, twice.

I was around for some of this

I'll keep this short, because the story isn't about me. But I came up around the BMX Action world as a kid. I hung around the Pit — the spot in Torrance the magazine tested out of — and I got to know Scot Breithaupt, the Emrich brothers, and a few of the BMX Action test riders. So when I tell you the magazine carried real weight in the sport, I'm not reading that off a website. I saw it from the inside. When BMX Action said a bike was good, kids bought it. That's the kind of pull it had.

Where it came from

Bob Osborn didn't set out to be a publisher. He was a fireman on the Torrance Fire Department, into motorcycles and photography, raising two kids on his own. His son R.L. raced, and his daughter Windy shot the photos. The family had been contributing to an early BMX paper called Bicycle Motocross News — Bob writing and shooting, the kids shooting too.

In 1976 the woman who owned that paper, Elaine Holt, offered to sell it. Bob was interested. Then, the way the Osborns tell it, the asking price jumped on him right at closing. His answer, more or less: for that kind of money, I could start my own magazine. So he did. He borrowed the seed money — the family says it came from his sister — and put out the first issue of Bicycle Motocross Action in December 1976. The name got shortened to BMX Action soon enough. He ran it all under his own shop, Wizard Publications, eventually out of an office on Kashiwa Street in Torrance.

The Pit, and why the tests mattered

Here's the thing people who weren't there don't always get. A BMX magazine in those days wasn't just words. It was the closest thing the sport had to a referee on what bikes and parts were any good. BMX Action ran a test team and a test track — the Pit, in a yard in Torrance — and the riders who worked there put the bikes through it for real. R.L. Osborn was on that test team. So was a local Torrance hotshoe named Mike Buff, who came on in 1979. The Emrich brothers and other local riders were part of that world too.

When the magazine tested a frame and liked it, that frame sold. When they didn't, you heard about it. No company could buy its way out of a bad bike — though, fair to say, getting good photo coverage was a different game, and a few riders over the years grumbled that camera time followed the ad dollars. That's the trade in any magazine. Doesn't take away from what the tests meant. For a long stretch, BMX Action was the one everybody trusted to tell them what to ride.

The Trick Team — the magazine that started freestyle

This is the part that changed the whole sport, and it came right out of the magazine's own staff.

R.L. Osborn was the test rider. Bob Haro was the magazine's resident artist — the kid who drew the cartoons and the logos. The two of them rode together, made up tricks in the parking lot, and in 1979 got asked to do a trick demo at a motocross race. That show fell through at the last minute. Didn't matter. They'd caught the idea, and they kept at it.

Their first real show was at the ABA Winternationals in February 1980. The original BMX Action Trick Team. Osborn and Haro and a beat-up van. They paid for everything themselves — ramps, P.A. system, gas, the guy who booked and announced. Ten grand each, R.L. said, just to get the first tour off the ground. Half the time they didn't even get paid. They were building a name, and they built one.

Early in 1981 Haro left to chase his own thing — which turned into Haro, the company that more or less invented the freestyle bike. R.L. brought in his fellow test rider Mike Buff, and the Osborn-and-Buff team is the one most people picture. The two of them toured every summer, set the trends, the clothes, the whole look. Pat Romano came through in 1983 and brought fork pegs and fixed-gear tricks with him. By early 1985 R.L. and Buff split up — Buff went to the CW freestyle team, R.L. brought in Ron Wilton, and not long after that R.L. took over the Redline team and the original Trick Team wound down. Roughly seven years. Every freestyle team that came after owes that one.

Freestylin' — the sister magazine

By 1984 freestyle had gotten so big it needed its own book. Osborn saw it coming and started one. Wizard Publications launched Freestylin' in the summer of 1984 — quarterly at first, then bi-monthly, then monthly once it caught.

And here's where Osborn's eye for people shows. To edit it he hired a 19-year-old art-school kid from Wyoming named Andy Jenkins, who'd won a drawing contest in BMX Action and mailed in a resume on a whim. Jenkins drove out to California with two bikes, moved in with Osborn, and started in March 1984. He brought in Mark Lewman, then a kid named Spike Jonze to shoot photos — yes, that Spike Jonze. If BMX Action was the bible for racers, Freestylin' became the bible for the freestyle crowd. Freestylin' also started the NORA Cup — Number One Rider Award — with Eddie Fiola winning the first one in 1985.

The merge into GO, and the end

By 1989 the boom was cooling and the sport couldn't carry two Wizard magazines the way it had. So Osborn combined them. BMX Action and Freestylin' merged into a single title — GO: The Rider's Manual — with the first combined issue in November 1989. They kept both old logos on the cover for a few issues so nobody on the newsstand would lose track of them, until the February 1990 issue, when the GO name finally stood on its own.

GO had good people and good stuff in it. But the industry was pulling back its ad money across the board, and a magazine runs on ads. GO didn't last long. And that was the end of the line that started with Brian Lewis on the Corona downhill in December 1976.

What it left behind

Think about everything that came out of one man's magazine. The first real BMX newsstand title. The bike tests that told a generation what to ride. The first famous freestyle team, started by the magazine's own test rider and its own artist. A sister magazine that gave freestyle its own voice and put Spike Jonze behind a camera. That's not a bad run for a Torrance fireman who borrowed money from his sister because somebody tripled the price on a newspaper.

BMX Action isn't on the rack anymore. Hasn't been since the eighties. But just about every BMX magazine that ever followed was measuring itself against the one Bob Osborn built. We all grew up on it. I did.

Related Legend Bike Co. chapters

• The History of BMX (1970-1995)
• Bob Osborn — The Man Who Built BMX Action · R.L. Osborn
• Freestylin' Magazine · GO Magazine
• Haro · Scot Breithaupt · Eddie Fiola · CW Racing · Corona Raceway

Sources

oldschoolmags.com — BMX Action magazine archive ("Published by Wizard Publications from 1976 - 1989"), BMX Action Trick Team history page, Freestylin' and GO archive pages. 23mag.com — R.L. Osborn biography (Windy Osborn's account of the magazine's founding, the $10,000 loan and Brian Lewis Corona cover; Mike Buff joining the test team in 1979; the 1980 Trick Team debut), Freestylin' magazine page (first issue summer 1984; editors Andy Jenkins and Mark Lewman; photos by Spike Jonze; publisher Bob Osborn / Wizard Publications; NORA Cup), and GO magazine page (BMX Action and Freestylin' combined into "GO: The Rider's Manual" in 1989, both logos on the cover through the February 1990 issue). Legend Bike Co. — Bob Osborn brand page (the Pit test track in Torrance, the Emrich brothers and test riders). BMX Hall of Fame records on Bob Osborn (first newsstand BMX magazine; December 1976 first issue). Bill Ryan firsthand recollection of the Pit and the BMX Action world (used only where noted).