BMX Racing History · BMX Media · Legend Bike Co.

Club Homeboy

How a joke at the Redondo Beach Pier became a thousands-strong BMX cult

Club Homeboy never set out to be a business. It started as a name for a handful of guys riding flatland by a pier, and it ended up as one of the most recognized logos in 1980s BMX freestyle — up there with the Haro chevron and the GT letters. Nobody planned that. It just happened, the way most of the best things in this sport did.

The Spot, and the crew that hung out there

By late 1986, a loose crew of Freestylin' staff and their friends had a regular riding spot on the north end of the Redondo Beach Pier — they called it The Spot. Regulars included Steve Emig, Mark Lewman, Craig Grasso, and Chris Day most nights, with Craig "Gork" Barrette showing up several nights a week to ride flatland and R.L. Osborn riding there regularly too. Andy Jenkins, who lived half a block away, skated down a couple of times a week. Because Jenkins and Lewman had mentioned The Spot in Freestylin', riders from all over the country made a point of stopping by when they were in Southern California — an AFA contest nearby could bring 75 out-of-town riders through in a single visit.

One night, after a session, Lewman and Jenkins sat around trying to find a name for the regulars. Lewman was into rap music at the time and reached for "posse," but it didn't fit. A few other names got tossed out before Lewman circled back to one that stuck: Club Homeboy.

Stickers made on the office copier

For a few days it was just a joke the group repeated to each other. Then Lewman bought sticker paper and started running the Wizard Publications copy machine after hours — technically against the rules, so the crew kept it hidden from Bob Osborn, the company's owner, for a while. The first design paired a found photo of an odd-looking older man with the phrase "Feelin' Nifty." The second used a photo of Buckwheat from The Little Rascals, an image that became the club's signature logo. Lewman took a batch of the Buckwheat stickers to the first 2-Hip King of Vert contest, held in a Midwest barn, and slapped them up everywhere. Nearly every top pro at the event went home with a Club Homeboy sticker on their frame, and from there other riders started asking for them directly.

From inside joke to Bob Osborn's blessing

A couple of months later, Wizard hired Spike Jonze, an 18-year-old who'd worked at Rockville BMX and roadied for Bob Haro's tour van before landing at the magazine. Jonze became one of the club's central figures as it grew past its original Spot-locals membership. Around the same time, Bob Osborn — who kept noticing the stickers everywhere — finally asked Jenkins and Lewman what Club Homeboy actually was. He liked what he heard, and with his backing, small mentions and ads for the club began appearing in Freestylin' itself. What had been an underground bit became an official, paid membership organization: roughly $20 got a rider a Club Homeboy T-shirt, a zine, stickers, a membership card, and a couple of plastic wristbands.

How big it got

Sources don't agree on the exact number, and rather than pick one, we're presenting both. One account of the club's business history puts membership over 11,000 within its first year. Other retrospective coverage of Freestylin' magazine — including the 2008 Nike SB retrospective book Freestylin' \ Generation F: 1984–1989 — cites roughly 15,000 card-carrying members at the club's peak. Either figure describes a phenomenon that outgrew its founders' expectations fast. The "Chuck Brown" Charlie Brown-parody T-shirt design alone reportedly sold in the thousands.

Homeboy magazine, and what came after

Club Homeboy's popularity was strong enough to justify a magazine of its own. Wizard Publications launched Homeboy in the winter of 1987, a skate-and-lifestyle title that Jenkins moved into almost full time. It ran seven issues before folding along with the rest of Wizard's BMX-era titles as the freestyle boom cooled. Jenkins, Lewman, and Jonze later revived the same spirit by starting Dirt magazine together.

A freestyle thing, not a racing thing

Club Homeboy's Buckwheat logo is still one of the most recognized images from 1980s BMX freestyle, but it stayed exactly what it started as: an inside joke for the riders who lived it. As one of the original Spot regulars put it years later, the era's racers never got it, and the skateboarders, inline skaters, and snowboarders from the same period generally don't know it exists. It belongs entirely to BMX freestyle.

Where Club Homeboy fits in the bigger story

People: Andy Jenkins, Mark Lewman, Spike Jonze, R.L. Osborn. Media: Freestylin' Magazine, Radical Rick — another piece of the same era's BMX-media culture. The bigger arc is in our History of BMX series.