BMX Plus! Magazine — The One That Ran My Frame, Then Made Me an Editor (1978 to 2015)

By Bill Ryan · a Legend Bike Co. history · I have a dog in this one, and I'll tell you why up front.

I was 14 years old when BMX Plus! ran a frame I built in my parents' garage. New products feature, January 1984. A kid in Southern California, a hacksaw, a borrowed welder, and there it was in a national magazine. You don't forget that. A few years later I was sitting on the other side of the desk at that same magazine, Technical Editor, the guy deciding which frames were worth a page. Same magazine. Same kid. So when I write about BMX Plus!, understand I'm not writing about it from the outside. I lived in those pages. Both ways.

Where it started — November 1978

BMX racing already had a magazine when BMX Plus! showed up. What it didn't have was enough of one. The sport was growing faster than anybody could cover it, and there was room on the rack for more than one voice.

The first issue was dated November 1978. Greg Hill on the cover. Seventy-five cents. And here's a wrinkle most people don't know — that first issue wasn't even called BMX Plus!. It was called Inside BMX Plus!, and the name only lasted the one issue. It went out bundled with a subscription offer aimed at BMX Action readers, which tells you exactly where it was trying to plant its flag. Right next to the established guy, saying come look at this too.

The founders were Jim Stevens and Scot Breithaupt. If you know BMX at all you know that second name. Scot Breithaupt is one of the men who basically invented organized BMX racing in the first place, and there he was writing, shooting, and editing the entire debut issue himself. One guy, one camera, one typewriter. That's how these things started back then.

The identity — a magazine built on tests

Every magazine has a thing. The thing that makes it itself. For BMX Plus! the thing was tests.

Look at the second issue, December 1978. Brian Evans cover, a free poster, an interview, and a BMX Plus! evaluation of a Tuf Neck. Issue two, and they're already tearing down product and telling you whether it's worth your money. That was the DNA. Where some magazines led with the race report and the personality piece, BMX Plus! led with the gear. What's fast. What breaks. What's worth saving up for. For a kid with a paper-route budget trying to decide where his money went, that was gold. It was the magazine you read with a highlighter.

And that's exactly why my garage frame ended up in it. A test-and-tech magazine has an appetite for new products, for the homebuilt thing nobody's seen, for the weird angle and the clever weld. They had a page for that. I'll get to it.

1983 — Hi-Torque takes the wheel

The magazine started under Plus Publications. In 1983 it moved over to Hi-Torque Publications — the Daisy / Hi-Torque side — and that's the house that ran it the rest of the way. More than three decades. Hi-Torque already knew how to run an enthusiast magazine, and BMX Plus! settled in there and stayed put. Whatever else changed over the years, that was the constant. Same roof, almost the whole run.

The part I lived — my frame, then my desk

Here's where I stop being a historian and start being a witness.

In January 1984 BMX Plus! ran my frame. I'd built it in the garage — a 13-and-14-year-old kid teaching himself to braze and weld, making a frame because I couldn't afford to buy the one I wanted. I called it Hi-Tech. I sent it in the way every kid sent stuff in, half hoping, mostly figuring nothing would come of it. And they ran it as a new product. The full story of that frame is its own page — the frame I built at 13 — but the short version is this: a national magazine put a homemade bike from a teenager next to the factory stuff. That doesn't happen if the magazine isn't built to care about exactly that kind of thing.

A few years after that, I was working there. Technical Editor of BMX Plus! in the mid-1980s. The kid who mailed in a garage frame was now the guy testing the frames, writing the evaluations, deciding what got a page and what didn't. I knew what it meant to a 14-year-old to open the mag and see his thing in print, because I'd been that 14-year-old. So I took the tech seriously. You'd better, when you remember being on the other end of it.

That's the whole reason I can write this page honestly. I read this magazine as a kid, I got covered by it as a builder, and I made it as an editor. Three angles on the same masthead.

The long run — and the flatland years

BMX Plus! ran a long time. Through the racing boom, through the freestyle explosion, through the lean years when the whole sport contracted, and back out the other side. For a big stretch of its later life it covered flatland better than just about anybody — when other magazines drifted away from it, BMX Plus! kept giving flatland real pages, real photos, real interviews. Riders noticed. A lot of people's first sight of themselves in print came in those pages.

That's a hard thing to keep doing for 37 years. Magazines are fragile. They live and die on ad pages and newsstand sales and the love of a small staff who'd do it for free if they had to. BMX Plus! had that staff for a long, long time.

The end — 2015

It closed in September 2015. Thirty-seven years in print. The editor at the end, Ben Crockett, put out a goodbye that said it as plain as it can be said — that he'd grown up reading the magazine, gotten to run it for a decade and a half, and that Hi-Torque had kept it alive for so many years on nothing fancier than a pure love for the sport. He was right. That's what kept it going. Not a fortune. Love for the thing.

Print was getting harder for everybody by then. BMX Plus! wasn't the first to go and it wasn't the last. But when it went, a real piece of the sport's memory went quiet with it. The back issues are still out there — collectors scan them, trade them, keep them alive. Good. They should be kept alive. There's a lot of BMX history sitting in those pages, and some of it is mine.