Dave Vanderspek

Vander, the Flying Dutchman, 1964–1988

A Legend Bike Co. rider page · built from Freestylin' II: The Book (Wizard Publications, 1987), the Curb Dogs History archive (mauricemeyer.net), and period BMX press

At a glance

Level Pro — the first rider to compete pro in BMX racing and freestyle at the same time
Scene Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, and San Leandro, California, 1983–1988
Team Curb Dogs (the bike/skate team he drove into being) · Skyway (factory sponsor)
Later bike sponsors Dyno, GHP, Patterson, Kuwahara, and Boss
Known for Leading the Curb Dogs and the Golden Gate Park freestyle scene, inventing the Vanderoll, and setting up BMX freestyle's first pro halfpipe and street contests

Dave Vanderspek — known around Golden Gate Park as Vander, and as "The Flying Dutchman" for his Dutch heritage — was born May 30, 1964, and grew up in San Leandro, California. He rode into Golden Gate Park on a Sunday in 1983 and, within a year, had turned a loose crew of riders and skaters into one of the most influential teams freestyle BMX ever produced. He died four years later, at 24, and the sport is still telling stories about him.

Golden Gate Park, and a team with "a less factory look"

By the early 1980s, magazine coverage of the BMX Action Trick Team had freestyle riders around the country starting their own trick teams and shows. Vanderspek wanted something different — a bike-and-skate team without the factory look. He had no budget and no parents building ramps for him. He built the Curb Dogs anyway. The team's first show ran February 18, 1984, a few blocks from Vanderspek's house at Pizza Marina in San Leandro — a jump ramp, a small crowd, riders in jeans and Curb Dogs shirts, paid about $25 each plus pizza. The original lineup included Maurice "Drob" Meyer (a founding member who later built the team's tribute archive), Ray Meyer, Tony Guerrero, Marc Babus, Richard Anderson, Ben Rose, and skateboarder Tommy Guerrero of the Bones Brigade. Within months Vanderspek had built and hauled a half-pipe to team shows at Dublin Cyclery — he was nineteen.

The team's own roster page adds two more names to that original group — skater Camden Scott and a rider listed only as Deadbeat — and splits it by discipline: Meyer, Babus, Anderson, Rose and Vanderspek on bikes, Ray Meyer, Tony Guerrero, Camden Scott and Tommy Guerrero on boards, with Vanderspek the one doing both. Ray Meyer rode pro for Santa Cruz Skateboards and had signature freestyle decks; Richard "Rick" Anderson was smooth enough on a halfpipe that Meyer compares him to Brian Blyther, and was one of the few riders outside the factory teams to land a poster shot in Freestylin'. Tommy Guerrero rode BMX as well as skated, which was the whole point of the team.

The roster kept growing. Six people in 1983 became seventeen by the Curb Dogs ad that ran in Shreddin' in July 1985, and Meyer's flat description of the hiring process is that it was a bro thing and they were signing people faster than they could spell their names. Vanderspek also ran a Junior Curb Dogs support team for the younger local riders — Kevin Knight, Mike Golden and Angelo Juras among them — and made a point of coaching them.

Vanderspek's team quickly became inseparable from the Golden Gate Park scene itself. Freestylin' II: The Book (Wizard Publications, 1987) names him, alongside Robert Peterson, Maurice Meyer, Rick Allison, Chris and Karl Rothe, and Oleg Konigs, among the riders who "got their start" in Golden Gate Park.

The park worked because the city closed it to cars on Sundays. Skateboarders adopted it for freestyle practice, BMX riders followed, and the flat center by the bridge became a place to try things and find out who could do what. Vanderspek's local reputation there came less from the Vanderoll than from pancake-flat tabletop bunny hops out of a near standstill — a trick Meyer says the magazines never caught, and which mixed dirt, street and flatland into one move. He was a decent skater too, and that mattered more than it sounds: because he rode both, he and Meyer landed on the same view that bikes and boards belonged in the same places, doing the same shows, and that freestylers should not have to dress like motorcycle racers. That argument — freestyle as its own thing rather than an offshoot of racing — is a large part of what the Curb Dogs actually were.

The shows

The demo work was the engine. After Pizza Marina came parades and fairs, then a PA and an announcer, then the halfpipe Vanderspek built and hauled to the Curb Dogs shows at Dublin Cyclery through 1984. There was briefly a Curb Dogs van — a primered-out mail delivery van Ray Meyer bought for about $500, spray-painted on both sides, no seat belts, questionable brakes. It made about two shows and lasted six months. Shirts and stickers were made by whoever had time and money; in the first issue of Freestylin', Marc Babus is wearing a tank top with the team name drawn on in marker.

The press came fast for something with no budget. The local Daily Review wrote the team up three days after the first show. The San Francisco Examiner put them on its cover on July 27, 1985, and the West County Times followed in October 1986. Vanderspek worked every angle: he shot promotional photos of the whole team, kept a portfolio that advertised a ten-car jump he had never actually done, hired an agent named King Lauter, and placed ads in Freestylin' with a tour in mind.

The 1984 Skyway European tour

One of the first things Skyway did with the crew was send them to Europe for three weeks — France, Germany, Belgium, Denmark and the UK. Skyway went largely on Vanderspek's word in signing Robert Peterson, Damon Frost and Maurice Meyer; Frost broke his wrists before the trip and Meyer went in his place. They were among the first American freestyle teams most of those towns had ever seen, and they rode whatever was put in front of them, including dirt and cobblestone. Skyway was not thrilled that Vanderspek and Meyer ran "Curb Dogs" large on their number plates, or that the European coverage kept playing off the name. They held their ground.

Firsts: halfpipe contests, street contests, riding two sports at once

Vanderspek set up BMX freestyle's first pro halfpipe contest and its first pro street contest, at a time when street riding barely rated a mention in the magazines. He was also the first rider to compete pro in BMX racing and freestyle simultaneously, and he stayed sponsored for skateboarding and BMX at the same time — a dual-discipline approach almost nobody else in the sport was attempting. Freestylin' II: The Book shows him demonstrating the Boneless Foot Plant, captioned "showin' you how it's done."

The reason he built the halfpipe contests is the same reason Ron Wilkerson built King of Vert two years later: the calendar didn't have them. In 1984 every vert contest was in Southern California, which put anybody from out of the area at a disadvantage on unfamiliar parks, and Northern California's own parks — Whittier, Campbell, Winchester — were already gone. Vanderspek's friend Joe Lopes, a pro ramp skater, had run the first pro backyard skateboard ramp contest at his house, so Vanderspek set up and ran the first professional BMX ramp contest on the same ramp: Joe's Ramp Jam. He won the expert class at his own event. Ron Wilkerson placed third in that class — and the Curb Dogs archive draws the line directly from that day to the launch of the 2-Hip King of Vert series about two years later.

He ran a second, less publicized ramp contest a few months after that, which made the pair of them the Nor-Cal Ramp Series and, by the archive's reckoning, the first professional BMX halfpipe series. That second one nearly washed out: it rained, riders hesitated, and Hugo Gonzalez went out on the soaked ramp doing four-foot airs to try to talk everyone into it. The weather cleared instead. The contest report ran in the AFA newsletter, written by Vanderspek himself — he set it up, competed in it, and filed the story.

Street, and what he actually rode

Vanderspek was a street rider first, in a city that rewarded it. The crew would leave Golden Gate Park and ride San Francisco itself — the Embarcadero, which was the proving ground for early street skating, plus Pier 39, Market Street and the Van Ness run down from the wharf. Hills and wheelchair ramps meant free speed and free air. Meyer's split of the two of them is that he was the technical one and Vanderspek went big: wall rides up the sides of buses just as they pulled away, huge airs off curbs.

Much of what they did was improvised out of skateboarding. Meyer is credited with the first blunts and nose picks on a bike; not long after seeing the nose pick, Vanderspek was doing them on mailboxes, and Meyer says he decided at that point the trick belonged to Vander. None of it was photographed at the time, which is the recurring problem with the whole NorCal scene of those years.

For all that, he entered only two street contests: the one he ran himself in Northern California, and the first 2-Hip Meet the Street at Santee, California in April 1988, where he placed seventh and threw his bike in practice out of frustration with where the sport was going. He was dead six months later.

Tricks, covers, and a Time magazine mention

Vanderspek is credited with inventing the Vanderoll, the Bar Endo, and the Tail Tap, and could even pull off a Table Top Bunny Hop. The Vanderoll was voted best trick in ABMX (UK) in 1985, and Vanderspek placed 5th in that same magazine's most-popular-rider poll. He rode for Skyway, toured Europe with the team in 1984, and covered BMX Action in November 1985 and Freestylin' in May 1986, the latter with a full interview. The Curb Dogs were voted 5th most popular team in Freestylin's NORA Cup poll — the highest placing any non-factory team achieved — and the team's own retrospective site states Vanderspek was the only BMX freestyle rider to appear in Time magazine.

He polled well as an individual too, and the numbers show both his reach and the moment the sport changed under him. NORA Cup readers put him seventh among riders in 1985 and ninth in 1986, tied that year with Brian Blyther. In 1987 he dropped off, pushed out by the arriving generation — Mat Hoffman and Dennis McCoy among them.

Sponsors, and the Vander Syndrome

The Skyway deal did not last. Meyer can't point to a single blow-up; his read is that Vanderspek was not corporate enough for Skyway, or Skyway was not loose enough for Vanderspek, and that Vanderspek was sore about Robert Peterson getting the team captain role after Vanderspek had made the first contact, effectively picked the riders, entered everything going, run contests and brought in the coverage.

After Skyway he moved through bike sponsors quickly enough that Freestylin' turned it into a running joke and gave it a name: the Vander Syndrome. In rough order the bikes were Dyno, GHP, Patterson, Kuwahara, and finally Boss — a local Bay Area company that appears to have been his longest-running bike sponsor and that built a Curb Dogs frame which never went into production. Counting everything, Meyer's list of Vanderspek's sponsors at one time or another runs to A'ME, Avocet, Boss, Dyno, GHP, Hank and Frank Bicycles, Haro, Kuwahara, M&J Cyclery, Off Shore, R&S Racing, Rector, Schmitt Stix, Skyway, Tiger Cycle / Nighthawk BMX, and Vision.

Selling the idea

Vanderspek was marketing the Curb Dogs from the first week. He met producer Richard Christiansen and made a Curb Dogs video meant to capture the BMX and skateboard culture of the decade; there were far slicker BMX videos around, but the Curb Dogs tape was the one Blockbuster picked up, and for a while it was the only BMX video in the chain's catalog. A second Curb Dogs video was made after his death, carrying an anti-drug message. Both have since been re-released.

He also opened a restaurant, Boarder Burgers. It didn't last long. While it did, the kitchen shuttled meals out to the wait staff on skateboards. A planned series of combined skate-and-bike contests never happened, for the plain reason that not enough people did both.

Remembering Dave Vanderspek

Dave Vanderspek died in October 1988, at 24 years old, at a warehouse in San Leandro he had been caretaking. His death certificate listed the cause as accidental. The news hit the BMX freestyle world hard — his funeral at Broadmoor Community Church was standing room only, more people than the building could hold. Freestylin' ran a tribute in issue #46 (March 1989) and covered a Vander Memorial Jam in issue #47 the following month.

Meyer's account of that winter is that the whole sport went quiet at once. It came at the same moment the freestyle boom was ending and the AFA was winding down, and the tributes came from every direction: BMX Plus! in its February 1989 news pages, the Dutch-run FAT 'zine in issue #12 (Vanderspek's family were Dutch too), Club Homeboy's own magazine, and a mention in Freestylin's fiftieth-issue wrap-up of freestyle history. The O-Zone crew dedicated an indoor jam to him. Meyer made memorial stickers and offered them through a letter to Freestylin'; more than five hundred people wrote in for one.

The Curb Dogs later placed a memorial in a spot that would outlast any of them: an inscribed brick in the commemorative path built for the Golden Gate Bridge's 50th anniversary, on the San Francisco side. When that path was torn up during a 2012 renovation, Curb Dogs alumni tracked down the demolition crew and got Vanderspek's brick pulled from the pile before it went into the recycler.

Where he stands now

He is remembered mostly by builders. In 2006 Rob Quinlan wrote an essay about him for Ride magazine's "Be Mike Ardelean" contest and won it. That same year Timo Lanki in Helsinki finished a Vander memorial Boss Freestyler built from original 1980s parts. William Fong completed a replica of Vanderspek's 1986 Kuwahara Bravo KT in the winter of 2009, and David Childs in the UK built a copy of the 1984 Street Beat prototype Vanderspek rode on the Skyway European tour, down to the bend in the seatpost. A crew in Germany who called themselves the Stoke Bros still wear their original 1980s jackets with his name on the sleeve.

The clearest measure of his standing, though, is structural. The Golden Gate Park scene he organized produced a generation of Northern California riders; the halfpipe contests he ran gave vert its first professional stage and fed directly into the series Ron Wilkerson built; the bikes-and-boards-together idea he insisted on became the default for the next thirty years of action sports. He was 24.

Where the public record runs thin

Vanderspek's exact role in founding the Curb Dogs is described slightly differently even by the people who were there — Maurice Meyer's own site credits Vanderspek with getting the team off the ground while identifying Meyer himself as a "founding member," and this page treats Vanderspek as the team's driving force and leader rather than assigning sole-founder credit either way. The scope of his contest firsts is also worth stating precisely: the Curb Dogs archive calls Joe's Ramp Jam the first professional BMX ramp contest and the Nor-Cal Ramp Series the first professional BMX halfpipe series without qualification, but describes the street contest he ran as the first BMX street contest in Northern California — while Ron Wilkerson has said in print that 2-Hip's Meet the Street, in April 1988, was the first street contest ever. Both accounts come from the people who ran the events. We have not resolved it, and readers should treat "first street contest" claims on either side as contested. The claim that he was the only BMX freestyle rider ever featured in Time magazine comes solely from the Curb Dogs' own retrospective site and was not independently verified against a Time archive for this page. The fuller circumstances of his death are documented in first-person detail on the Curb Dogs memorial site itself; this page states only what the death certificate and contemporary reporting confirmed — an accidental death — rather than repeating unverified speculation.

Where Dave Vanderspek fits in the bigger story

Brands: Skyway, Dyno, Patterson Racing, Kuwahara, Boss. Riders and events: Ron Wilkerson, 2-Hip / King of Vert, Brian Blyther, AFA. Publications: BMX Action, Freestylin', Club Homeboy. The bigger arc is in our History of BMX series.

Sources

mauricemeyer.net/curb_dogs — the Curb Dogs History archive, built and written by founding member Maurice "Drob" Meyer: Introduction, Starting the Curb Dogs, Golden Gate Park, Marketting the Curb Dogs, The First Pro BMX Half-Pipe Contests, Street, Changing Sponsors, 1984 Skyway European Tour, Memorials, Vander R.I.P., and Accomplishments/Contributions pages, which in turn reproduce Freestylin' (Summer 1984, May and November 1985, May, July, September, November and December 1986, January, April, June and August 1987, February, March, June and September 1988, March, April and July 1989), BMX Plus! (December 1984, April 1985, February 1989), Super BMX (August 1985, August 1988), Shreddin' (July 1985), FAT BMX 'zine #12 (1989), the Daily Review (February 21, 1984), the San Francisco Examiner (July 27, 1985) and the West County Times (October 7, 1986). Steve Emig, "'No one got hurt, no one got arrested' — How early NorCal freestylers changed EVERYTHING," freestylebmxtales43.blogspot.com (May 2017) — contemporary account naming Vanderspek the charismatic leader of the Curb Dogs and the Golden Gate Park scene. Freestylin' II: The Book (Wizard Publications, 1987) — the Boneless Foot Plant demonstration and the Golden Gate Park originals photo caption. Cross-referenced against our own 2-Hip / King of Vert and Ron Wilkerson chapters for the Joe's Ramp Jam result and the first Meet the Street. bmxmuseum.com forum threads referencing Vanderspek were checked via search snippet only, not a full page load, and are disclosed accordingly; bmxsociety.com was checked and returned nothing usable at the time of research.