A Legend Bike Co. history page. Primary sources: BMX Freestylin' — Featuring the BMX Action Trick Team (Mike Buff, Bob Osborn, R.L. Osborn, and Len Weed, Wizard Publications, 1982) and The Complete Book of BMX (Bob Osborn, Harper & Row / Wizard Publications, 1984), cross-checked against Legend Bike Co.'s own Bob Haro, R.L. Osborn, Bob Osborn, AERO Racing Products, and Wizard Number Plates pages.

The BMX Action Trick Team

Formed winter 1979, Torrance, California · First show February 1980, ABA Winternationals, Chandler, Arizona

At a glance

Founded
Winter 1979, by Bob Haro and R.L. Osborn, both working out of the BMX Action / Wizard Publications offices in Torrance, California.

Riders
Bob Haro and R.L. Osborn, 1979–1980. R.L. Osborn and Mike Buff, 1981 onward.

First show
February 1980, ABA Winternationals, Chandler, Arizona.

Signature tour
The 1981 Oakley/BMX Action Trick Team Summer Tour — two months, national, coordinated by Dana Duke of Oakley.

Why it matters
The first organized BMX trick-riding act to headline shows on its own, credited alongside Bob Haro's later Freestyle Tour and the 1982 Haro Freestyler as one of the founding moments that split freestyle off from BMX racing into a sport of its own.

Before freestyle had a name, it had this: two BMX Action kids doing tricks on a half pipe borrowed from a rival brand, in front of crowds who'd come to watch a race. The BMX Action Trick Team started as Bob Haro and R.L. Osborn messing around after work at the magazine's Torrance offices, and inside two years it was touring the country as a paid act, switching riders once, and helping invent an entire branch of the sport along the way.

Winter 1979 — two guys after work

Bob Haro was BMX Action's staff artist. R.L. Osborn was the publisher's son and one of the magazine's test riders. Neither of them was racing. What they were doing, after the workday ended, was carving smooth concrete and dragging skateboard-style lines onto bicycles — wheelies, rollbacks, curb endos, none of it counting for anything on a scoreboard. Over the winter of 1979 they turned that into an act and gave it a name: the BMX Action Trick Team.

February 1980 — the debut

The team's widely cited first public performance came in February 1980 at the ABA Winternationals in Chandler, Arizona — the date Legend Bike Co.'s own R.L. Osborn and Bob Haro pages both point to as the start of organized BMX freestyle. A related account in BMX Freestylin' describes an early quarter-pipe show at an Anaheim Stadium motocross-intermission event, coordinated by the ABA's Gene Roden, using a half pipe borrowed from Scot Breithaupt of SE Racing — originally built for a Pepsi-Cola promotion. Whether that Anaheim show came before, after, or was the same event remembered two ways isn't settled in the record we could check; we're presenting both rather than picking one.

The ramp itself was Bob Haro's design, built by his brother Scott. That quarter-pipe — and the borrowed SE Racing half pipe before it — is the piece of equipment that made the whole act possible. No ramp, no aerials, no show.

Building the show, 1980

The Trick Team's calendar filled out fast through 1980. At the ABA Summernationals in Amarillo, Texas, over the July 4th weekend, the Amarillo A'me $5,000 Pro Spectacular — billed as the first big-money spectator event of its kind — is where the team's quarter-pipe aerials were reportedly first performed, in the summer of 1980. That November, the team appeared at a $5,000 Pro show at the Anaheim Convention Center alongside "Jumpin' Jim Pratt," the rider who later ramp-jumped five pickup trucks on national TV's Games People Play.

Early 1981 — Haro out, Buff in

Bob Haro left the Trick Team in early 1981 to build Haro Designs into its own brand. R.L. Osborn brought in fellow BMX Action test rider Mike Buff as his new partner. Buff's debut came at the Oakley Expo in Mission Viejo, California — the hinge point where the act that made Bob Haro's name became the act that made Mike Buff's. Full detail on Buff's own path into the team is on his Legend Bike Co. page.

The Astrodome — Buff's biggest stage yet

Buff's first BMX Action Trick Team performance came at the Houston Astrodome's "GNC Superbowl of BMX" — a show big enough that Bob Osborn opens his foreword to BMX Freestylin' with it. BMX Freestylin' (1982) puts the crowd at 70,000; The Complete Book of BMX (1984) describes the same Astrodome show for 50,000. Both figures come from Wizard Publications books written by people who were there. We're citing both rather than resolving the gap ourselves.

Summer 1981 — the Oakley/BMX Action Trick Team Tour

The team's signature run was the 1981 Oakley/BMX Action Trick Team Summer Tour: two months, coast to coast, coordinated by Dana Duke of Oakley. Sponsors on the tour included Oakley, Premier, Kuwahara, SE Racing, Skyway, Bicycle Source, and BMX Action magazine itself. Stops ran through Texas, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, Wisconsin, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Missouri, New Jersey, Arizona, and Canada. Around May 1981, the team shot a home-video short called Trick Flick at a Bicycle Source open house, produced for the emerging home-video cassette market.

The gear

The team's equipment tells its own small story about how fast the sport's supporting brands were moving. Through most of 1981 the team rode Haro's own Factory Plates — Bob Haro's number-plate company, the one that started his whole career — but by July 1981 the team had switched over to Wizard number plates, the brand a teenage Dave Marietti had started that same year. When the magazine's own demo team changes plate brands mid-season, that's a real signal about where the market was moving. On the apparel side, the team wore AERO pants top to bottom — AERO's own period advertising put it plainly: "the entire Trick Team uses AERO pants."

The media blitz

Writing the foreword to BMX Freestylin' in 1982, Bob Osborn ran down a media schedule that reads like a sport trying to become mainstream overnight: an appearance on TV's That's Incredible (still being filmed as the book went to press), a segment on PM Magazine shot at Marineland, a Ted Dawson sports program on Los Angeles TV, shows for Murray Bicycles in Nashville and Huffy in Miami, a Bugles corn chips commercial shot in San Francisco that aired on Japanese television, a show at the Pontiac Silverdome, a big race event in Houston, and early talk of trips to Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. None of that happens for a halftime sideshow. It happens for an act that's already become the story.

What the Trick Team actually built

The BMX Action Trick Team wasn't the only thing that turned freestyle into its own sport — Bob Haro's 1981 solo tour and the 1982 Haro Freestyler, the first freestyle-specific frame, both mattered just as much, and both are told on our Bob Haro page. But the Trick Team came first. It's the act that proved a ramp show could headline on its own, that a magazine's in-house test riders could become touring stars, and that a trick with no scoreboard could still fill an Astrodome. R.L. Osborn stayed with the act through the years that followed; Legend Bike Co.'s Bob Haro page notes the BMX Action Trick Team "rolled on under R.L. through 1985."

Where the public record runs thin

• The Astrodome crowd count. 70,000 (BMX Freestylin', 1982) versus 50,000 (The Complete Book of BMX, 1984). Both are Wizard Publications books; we haven't found a way to settle which is right.
• The debut venue. Whether the team's actual first show was the Chandler, Arizona ABA Winternationals in February 1980, or an earlier Anaheim Stadium motocross-intermission show using the borrowed SE Racing half pipe, isn't reconciled across the sources we checked.
• The team's later lineup and end date. The record we mined documents the team clearly through the 1981 tour and into 1982–1984. A precise account of who rode for the team, and when it stopped touring under that name, isn't in the four books or the pages checked for this page.

Sources

BMX Freestylin' — Featuring the BMX Action Trick Team, © 1982 by Mike Buff, Bob Osborn, R.L. Osborn, and Len Weed. Wizard Publications, Torrance, California. Foreword by Bob Osborn. The Complete Book of BMX, by Bob Osborn. Harper & Row, Publishers, New York, © 1984 Wizard Publications, Inc. Legend Bike Co.'s own Bob Haro, R.L. Osborn, Bob Osborn, AERO Racing Products, and Wizard Number Plates pages, checked for cross-consistency.

Read more on Legend Bike Co.

The riders: Bob Haro · R.L. Osborn · Mike Buff · Bob Osborn

Gear & sponsors: AERO Racing Products · Wizard Number Plates · Oakley · Skyway · SE Racing

Overview: The History of BMX