Freestylin' Magazine — The Wizard Publications Title That Made Freestyle a Culture (1984–1989)
Freestylin' Magazine — The Wizard Publications Title That Made Freestyle a Culture (1984–1989)
A BMXRacingHistory.com preview · hosted on Legend Bike Co
Most magazines tell you about a sport. Freestylin' didn't do that. Freestylin' was the sport — or close enough that you couldn't tell where one stopped and the other started. It ran six years. It made a few kids from art school into legends. And when it died, grown men say they about lost it. Here's the story.
| Freestylin' Magazine — At a Glance | |
| Type | Freestyle BMX magazine |
| Publisher | Wizard Publications (Torrance, California) |
| Publisher / founder | Bob Osborn |
| Spun from | BMX Action (announced in BMX Action, June 1984) |
| First issue | Summer 1984 |
| Key staff | Andy Jenkins (editor), Mark Lewman (editor), Spike Jonze (photographer) |
| Started | The NORA Cup (1985, won first by Eddie Fiola) |
| Became | GO (merged with BMX Action, late 1989) |
| Today | Long out of print; back issues collected, scanned, and traded by old-school fans |
Where it came from
By 1984, Wizard Publications already owned the race side. BMX Action was the bible — if you raced, you read it. But something else was happening at the same time. Kids weren't just racing anymore. They were riding flat ground, riding ramps, riding skateparks, riding the curb in front of the 7-Eleven. Freestyle. And the race magazine couldn't hold all of it.
So Wizard split it off. In the June 1984 issue of BMX Action, the staff put out the word themselves: "Us folks here at Wizard pubs are so pumped on freestyle that we're in the start-up stage on an all new international newsstand magazine." They figured it'd be a quarterly to start. Maybe go bi-monthly. Maybe monthly someday — who knew. That new magazine was Freestylin'. The first issue hit in the summer of 1984. Ron Wilkerson on the cover, doing a 2-Hip air at Golden Gate. Photo by Bob Osborn himself.
The kid from Wyoming
Here's the part that sounds made up. The first editor of Freestylin' was a 19-year-old fresh out of art school in Wyoming named Andy Jenkins. He'd won a drawing contest in BMX Action, gotten a bike out of it, and mailed Wizard a thank-you note with his resume tucked in. "What the heck," he figured. "Couldn't hurt."
Then the phone rang. Bob Osborn on the line: "Hi Andy, how's it goin'? We're startin' up a new magazine called freestylin'. I was wondering if you might be interested in being the editor?" Jenkins drove out to California the next day with two bikes in the car, moved in with Osborn, and started at Wizard in March of 1984. By his own telling, the job wasn't work. It was a playground. Keys to the building, a darkroom, a copier for their own zines, bikes to ride, curbs to skate in the parking lot. Nothing out of bounds.
Jenkins hired the rest. Mark Lewman came in. Then Spike Jonze — yeah, that Spike Jonze, the one who'd go on to direct movies — shooting photos and running wild. Three young guys with a magazine and no adult supervision to speak of. That's the whole secret. That's why it worked.
Why it mattered
A lot of magazines covered freestyle. Freestylin' didn't cover it — it set the tone for it. The layouts were loud. The writing talked like the kids actually talked, all "radsters" and "spuds" and "hold on to your britches." It ran how-to articles that broke down a 180 rollback or a curb endo step by step, so a kid in Ohio could learn the trick off the page. It put the riders on a pedestal and made them into stars. Mike Dominguez, Eddie Fiola, Brian Blyther, R.L. Osborn, Woody Itson — if you came up in the '80s, you knew those names because Freestylin' put them in your mailbox.
There's a line from Mark Noble, who wrote for Ride BMX UK, that gets quoted a lot and earns it: if BMX Action was the bible for racers, then Freestylin' was the holy book for freestylers. At its peak the thing ran 160-plus pages. Big glossy layouts, beautiful photos. Wizard's Torrance headquarters became the place every hardcore rider wanted to be. You didn't read Freestylin' to keep up. You read it to belong.
The NORA Cup
One thing Freestylin' started that outlived the magazine itself: the NORA Cup. NORA stands for Number One Rider Award — a yearly nod to the best in freestyle, voted on and handed out. Freestylin' kicked it off, and Eddie Fiola won the very first one in 1985. The award carried on for years after, even after the magazine that birthed it was gone. Not a bad legacy for a freestyle title that started life as a quarterly nobody was sure would last.
The run, year by year
| 1984 | First issue, summer. Ron Wilkerson on the cover. Started quarterly, went bi-monthly by the end of the year. |
| 1985 | The NORA Cup begins; Eddie Fiola wins the first one. Magazine settling into its voice. |
| 1986–1987 | Peak years. Monthly, thick issues, the layouts and writing everybody remembers. |
| 1988 | Still rolling. Freestyle changing fast underneath it — flatland, vert, dirt all splitting their own ways. |
| 1989 | Last year as Freestylin'. Combined with BMX Action into GO at the end of the year. |
The end — and GO
Late 1989, Wizard pulled the two titles together. BMX Action and Freestylin' became one magazine — GO: The Rider's Manual. They did it gentle, so nobody would miss it on the newsstand. The first combined issue, dated November 1989, carried both the old FREESTYLIN' and BMX ACTION logos right on the front. If you subscribed to either one, you just started getting GO. The GO logo by itself didn't show up until the February 1990 issue.
By then the original crew had mostly moved on — Lewman, Jonze, Jenkins all heading toward skate magazines and bigger things. GO kept going a while longer with a skeleton of the old Wizard staff, but the industry money dried up and the magazine eventually folded. The freestyle boom that built Freestylin' had crested, and the business caught up with the dream. That's usually how it goes.
What it left behind
Freestylin' lasted six years. Six. And forty years on, people who were kids when it landed in the mailbox still talk about it like it was a friend. The three young guys who made it — Jenkins, Lewman, Jonze — went on to shape skate media, youth culture, music videos, movies. There's even a hardback book that pulls the best of the magazine back together, put out by the same crew going through the old archives. That doesn't happen for a magazine that just reported scores. That happens for one that meant something.
So when somebody asks you where '80s freestyle BMX got its look, its language, its stars — a big piece of the honest answer is a glossy magazine out of Torrance that started as a quarterly nobody was sure would sell. Freestylin' didn't follow the culture. It built it.
What we don't know
A few things we couldn't pin down hard enough to state as fact, so we're flagging them straight:
- The exact final issue date of Freestylin' under its own name. Sources agree the run was 1984 to 1989 and that the merge into GO began with the November 1989 issue, but we did not lock down a confirmed "last Freestylin'-branded issue" date.
- Andy Jenkins is variously described as "editor" and "managing editor." Wizard's mastheads shifted over the run, so the precise title at any given month isn't something we'd swear to.
- The precise corporate fate of Wizard Publications and GO after the early 1990s — exact dates, any sale or shutdown specifics — we left out rather than guess.
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Sources
23mag.com — Freestylin' magazine 1984 page (issue listings, mastheads, BMX Action June 1984 announcement, Andy Jenkins interview excerpts, NORA Cup note); 23mag.com — GO magazine 1989–1990 page (merge details, issue dating). oldschoolmags.com — Freestylin' magazine archive ("Published by Wizard Publications from 1984–1989," "Combined with BMX Action to become GO"). Mark Noble, Ride BMX UK, December 1993 (quoted via 23mag.com). Andy Jenkins interview material (hessenmob.de, 1998, via 23mag.com; No Comply Network). OldSchoolBMXTV — Freestylin' (1984–1989). Slam City Skates blog — "Bike Mags to 'Bunny Hop': Skate Media's BMX History." Roy Christopher — "The FREESTYLIN' Book." Where a claim could not be confirmed across sources, it is flagged in the "What we don't know" box above.