BMX Freestyle History · Rider Profile · Legend Bike Co

Craig Grasso

Before BMX street riding had a name, there was a crew of teenagers finding curbs, banks, and stucco walls in the South Bay and treating them like a skatepark nobody had built yet. Craig Grasso was one of the ones who never stopped looking for the next weird thing to ride. He wasn't the rider who racked up the most contest wins of his era — by his own crew's telling, he usually wasn't the top finisher — but he's the rider that Dennis McCoy, on the record, credits with making street riding popular in the first place.

The Spot, and the crew that became Club Homeboy

Grasso's home terrain was The Spot, a brick plaza at the north end of the Redondo Beach Pier complex. Rider and writer Steve Emig, who landed a job at Wizard Publications and moved into the neighborhood in 1986, has written in detail about the nightly scene there: Wizard staffers Mark Lewman and Craig "Gork" Barrette sessioned constantly, R.L. Osborn rode down two or three times a week, and Grasso and a local high schooler named Chris Day showed up every single night. "Industry guy and natural comedian" McGoo would come by too, often bringing Ceppie Maes and Dizz Hicks of the CW Racing freestyle team. That nightly session, and the flatland games of HORSE the crew played to push each other's tricks, became the founding core of what Lewman would that fall name "Club Homeboy" — a joke that grew into a mail-order phenomenon with thousands of members.

The first wall ride fakie

Street riding in the mid-1980s meant kickturns and footplants on banks, since wall rides and wall fakies as tricks hadn't been invented yet. Emig recalls trying for months to land a fakie on a wall near the Wall Ramp in Hermosa Beach, without success. Grasso got there first — and by most accounts got the first wall ride fakie photo anywhere, shot on the Jinx Bank wall along Pacific Coast Highway, the same bank where the first wall ride photo of fellow rider Eddie Roman was later shot by photographer Windy Osborn.

On a separate occasion, Grasso and Emig discovered they had independently arrived at the same trick within the same week: a fluid, skater-style version of the backside boneless footplant, different from the stall-and-hop can-can footplants Dennis McCoy's era of vert riders were already doing. Neither rider knew the other was working on it.

Popularizing street riding

The clearest, most direct credit for Grasso's place in BMX history comes from Dennis McCoy himself. In an interview reprinted in the 2008 retrospective book Freestylin' — Generation F: 1984–1989, McCoy explicitly credits Craig Grasso with making street riding popular — not just in Kansas City, where McCoy watched the discipline take hold locally, but nationally, as the wider sport followed. That's a significant credit, coming from a rider who was himself one of freestyle's most versatile competitors across flatland, vert, and street.

Sponsors and the Freestylin' years

Grasso's first documented sponsorship came through SE Racing in 1985, alongside fellow rider Todd Anderson — the pairing that put him in front of Emig and his touring partner Jay Bickel on their first trip to the AFA contest circuit at Venice Beach that year. He went on to ride for Diamond Back, Ozone, General Bicycles, and Vision Street Wear, and was a regular presence in Freestylin' magazine through the late 1980s, photographed by Spike Jonze and Windy Osborn among others. He entered the first 2-Hip Meet the Street contest in Santee, California in 1988, finishing 4th in the Pro class behind Dave Voelker, Craig Campbell, and R.L. Osborn — serious company for a rider known as much for his humor and creativity as his contest placings.

After BMX

As the 1990s arrived, Grasso stepped back from the BMX spotlight. He moved to San Francisco, played music, and worked for a stretch as a bike messenger, occasionally joining 2-Hip tours alongside Ron Wilkerson. He's lived a quieter life since, out of the public BMX scene for long stretches, though riders who came up with him still point to his influence on where street riding started.