Legend Bike Co — BMX History Project · Riders & Builders

Kevin Jones

Kevin Jones never raced much, never toured constantly, and by his own telling never wanted to be anybody's hero. He is also one of the two or three riders most responsible for turning flatland from a between-events sideshow into a technical discipline with its own vocabulary. Working out of a garage, a lit basketball court, and a playground in York, Pennsylvania, Jones built tricks nobody had done before -- the Locomotive, the Trolley, the Elephant Glide, the Dump Truck, the Hitch Hiker -- and then quietly walked away from the contest scene at the peak of his own run. In October 2022, thirty-three years after his last contest, the National BMX Hall of Fame finally caught up to what riders had been saying about him since 1987.

York, Pennsylvania, and the Cardboard Lords

Jones was born May 12, 1967, and grew up in York, Pennsylvania, a small industrial city about 25 miles southeast of Harrisburg. He started riding as a kid in the late 1970s, mostly dirt jumps, and gave BMX racing a one-month try in 1982 before deciding he liked jumping more. For years his main outlet was Thunderdome, a local cement skatepark he rode steadily for about five years.

In 1983 he got into breakdancing -- by all accounts he was genuinely good at it, capable of 30 consecutive head spins -- and formed a crew called the Cardboard Lords with Mark Eaton, Mike Daily, Jamie McKulik, and Dale Mitzel. By April 1985 the Cardboard Lords had won every local competition worth winning, including a York cable-access show called The Great York Talent Hunt. Breakdancing's moment was passing nationally, and the crew drifted back to bikes.

The Plywood Hoods and the pegs that changed everything

Around that same time, Jones and Eaton ran into Mike Daily, an old BMX friend who had started a freestyle crew called the Plywood Hoods and come back from a trip to California with a bike modified for flatland -- pegs, a Potts mod, a detangler rotor. Jones, in a 2005 Ride BMX UK interview, described the moment plainly: Daily could barely do the tricks himself, but he described what he'd seen other riders doing on the West Coast, and something clicked. "It took me maybe two seconds to realize that's what I was going to do," Jones said. "And pretty much that day was the end of break-dancing for me." He ordered a lavender Hutch Trick Star and never looked back. Not long after, the Plywood Hoods -- Daily, Brett Downs, and Brian Peters -- brought Jones, Eaton, and the rest of the ex-Cardboard Lords onto the team.

Jones has said his first trick with pegs was the fork wheelie, then the side glide, then peg hops, fork whips, and cherrypickers. He went at it hard from day one.

1986-87 — Austin, the Moliterno decision, and Skyway

Jones' first real notice at a national level came at the November 1986 AFA Masters Finals at the velodrome in Compton, California, where he placed 11th in 16-and-over expert flatland but debuted new tricks -- the Hang Glider Boomerang, the Chicken Hook Switch, the Insanity Roll -- that turned heads.

The bigger moment came in 1987 at the AFA Masters round 3 in Austin, Texas. Jones, competing in 19-and-over expert flatland, debuted the Trolley, the Locomotive, and the steamroller -- moves nobody in AFA competition had seen. Rick Moliterno, the reigning star of that class, rode a flawless routine of his own, and the judges gave him the win with Jones second. Enough of the crowd disagreed loudly enough that it's remembered as a controversial call. It also got Jones signed: Skyway team manager Ron Haro had seen enough to tell people Jones was the first rider he'd watched who looked like he could someday beat Martin Aparijo, R.L. Osborn, and Dennis McCoy. Skyway signed him.

Jones won the 19-and-over expert class outright at AFA Masters round 5 in Wayne, New Jersey, in Moliterno's absence, then went to the AFA Masters Finals in Carson, California, and delivered what witnesses called a perfect run -- an entire routine, including inverting the bike mid-ride and riding much of it on one wheel, without a single touch of the ground. It's the run where he debuted the Dump Truck: riding a wheelie off the rear pegs with the bike turned upside down. Dennis McCoy, talking to American Freestyler in May 1988, put it this way: "Kevin Jones is so innovative and definitely has what it takes as a competitor, too... he just went out there and hit his run, perfect, no mistakes. It was completely emotionless, straight-faced, like he had nothing to prove."

Dorkin' in York and the trick-inventor years

In May 1988, Plywood Hood Mark Eaton released Dorkin' in York, one of the first rider-made BMX videos, pressed in a run of only 500 copies. It became the first entry in a series that ran for years and turned York, Pennsylvania into flatland's unlikely capital.

Jones kept inventing. In November 1988 he landed the Hitch Hiker -- standing on the front pegs with the bike upside down, rolling on the front wheel while holding the back tire -- one of the first two-footed rolling tricks in flatland. He'd first thought about the move that summer while on tour with Skyway, and spent weeks working out the balance points before it came together on a family vacation. The Backpacker followed soon after.

Jones made the cover of Freestylin' in May 1989 on a Skyway Streetbeat, and again that August (issue #51) alongside Joe Johnson.

GT, Wilkerson Airlines, and going quiet

Jones rode for GT for part of 1989 -- by his own account the relationship soured over an unsigned tour contract -- and told interviewers his last contest was in New York or Philadelphia around that year. In 1990 he toured with Ron Wilkerson's Wilkerson Airlines team, did a Kudos granola bar TV commercial, and made an appearance at the Bercy 6 international contest in Paris alongside a young Mat Hoffman. After that tour, Jones largely disappeared from public view. Riders mostly caught up with him through whichever Dorkin' tape came out that year.

In 1991 he was riding roughly ten hours a day with fellow Plywood Hood Chase Gouin, the two of them working through every trick in both "switch" and "regular" stance, chasing the idea that any trick should connect into any other trick. That summer the Plywood Hoods -- Jones, Eaton, and Gouin -- ran a national tour sponsored by Peregrine, whose frame division Jones worked with the following year on a Plywood Hoods flatland frameset.

Big Daddy and later years

In 1993, Hoffman Bikes released the Kevin Jones Big Daddy frame. "The only thing I did was design the bike," Jones said at the time. "I get a royalty from every one sold." He stayed connected to flatland through the 1990s and 2000s -- a 1997 appearance in the ninth Dorkin' video, Balancing Act, that's still cited as some of the smoothest flatland ever filmed; a 2001 interview where his friend and Plywood Hood Brett Downs described him as, simply, "a rider" and nothing more mythical than that. In August 2006, Jones designed a new version of the Big Daddy and rejoined the Hoffman Bikes team.

National BMX Hall of Fame, 2022

In October 2022, the National BMX Hall of Fame inducted Kevin Jones, more than three decades after his last contest run. The York Daily Record's headline captured the gap well: he'd starred in the Dorkin' in York videos in the 1990s, and now he was a Hall of Famer. It closed a loop that had been open since a controversial judging decision in Austin, Texas in 1987 -- proof that in flatland, the tricks outlast the trophies.

Where Kevin Jones fits in the bigger story

Jones came up on the East Coast, in flatland, a full continent and a different discipline from the Southern California vert scene that produced Mike Dominguez and Brian Blyther -- but all three were cover subjects of the same magazines in the same years, part of the wave of riders who took the sport Bob Haro and the original BMX Action Trick Team had started and pushed it into a real technical discipline with its own stars. The bigger arc is in our History of BMX series.

Sources

Freestylin' — Generation F: 1984-1989, edited by Mark Lewman, Andy Jenkins, and Spike Jonze (Endo Publishing LLC / Nike SB, 2008) — Kevin Jones interview, pp. 44-49. 23mag.com — "Kevin Scott Jones" people archive, citing period issues of Freestylin', BMX Plus!, American Freestyler, and Ride BMX UK. Wikipedia, "Kevin Jones (BMX rider)." York Daily Record, "In the '90s, he starred in the 'Dorkin' in York' videos. Now he's in the BMX Hall of Fame" (October 24, 2022). FatBMX / Flat Matters Online, "Kevin Jones: BMX Hall of Fame 2022." SplendidBMX.com, "About Kevin Jones" profile. oldschoolmags.com and bmxsociety.com were checked for independent coverage; no material beyond what's cited above was found there at the time of research.