The NBA — National Bicycle Association

The First National Sanction in BMX (1973–1981)

A BMXRacingHistory.com preview · hosted on Legend Bike Co

We're telling this story neutrally. No brand gets elevated. No rider gets shorted. Where the record is contested, we say so.

Where it started

Ernie Alexander was not a kid on a Sting-Ray. He was a grown motorcycle race promoter with a track and a rule book and a payroll.

Before BMX existed as anything organized, Alexander owned and ran A.C.E. Racing at Indian Dunes, the big motorcycle motocross facility north of Los Angeles where a lot of the era's MX films and TV shows were shot. The Dunes was built and managed by Walt James. Alexander designed the International course and the Shadow Glenn course inside it. He had been running motorcycle races there for years and was, by most accounts, the first promoter of motorcycle motocross in the United States.

In 1970, the same year Scot Breithaupt was getting kids to pitch a quarter each for the first BUMS race on a dirt lot in Long Beach, Alexander noticed the same thing happening at the edges of the motorcycle scene — kids on Schwinn Sting-Rays trying to put their own races together with no track, no rules, and no insurance. Being the promoter he was, he lent them a hand. He opened the Yarnell track — a steep, fast, hair-raising downhill course where speeds of 40 to 45 mph were not unheard of.

The bicycle races kept growing. By 1973 they were practically a full-time job. So Alexander did what he'd done with motorcycles — he formalized them. On November 1, 1973, he registered the National Bicycle Association, modeled directly on the structure of the American Motorcycle Association (AMA), which ran motorcycle motocross at the time.

That was the founding of the first national sanctioning body in BMX.

Why the NBA mattered

BMX already had sanctions before the NBA. BUMS, the body Breithaupt built starting in 1970, had been issuing membership cards, running points, and printing t-shirts for three years. But BUMS was a Southern California operation. It was a regional sanction with a teenager at the top of it.

The NBA was different in three ways the sport had never seen.

First, it was national in design from day one, modeled on the AMA's national structure. Alexander wrote the first BMX rule book. He set up districts — alphabetical letters that grouped tracks by geography rather than by state lines. District X for Southern California / Los Angeles, District N for Northern California, District S for San Diego, District A for Arizona, District K for Oklahoma, District T for Texas, District G for the northeast, District P for the Mountain West, District V for Nevada.

Second, the NBA issued national plate numbers. The No. 1 plate became a thing kids chased for the rest of the year, on a single national ranking.

Third, and this is the one that changed the economics of the sport for everybody — the NBA created the first professional class in BMX. The first published mention of a pro class came in the October 1974 issue of Bicycle Motocross News, in a write-up of the Valley Youth Center track in Van Nuys: "A new professional class for 14 and over experts is in effect." That was September of 1974. Until that point every BMX race was an amateur race.

The first National — Phoenix, March 30, 1975

The first true national happened on Sunday, March 30, 1975 at the Kartland Track, 3610 West Indian School Road, Phoenix, Arizona. It was the first major BMX race held outside California.

The first season produced the first nationally ranked champion. David Clinton took the No. 1 Amateur plate at the end of 1975.

Eight months later, on Sunday, November 23, 1975, the NBA ran its first Grand National at Randall Ranch in Newhall, California. 457 racers showed up.

In 1976 the NBA formalized the pro class and crowned its first National No. 1 Pro: Scot Breithaupt, 20 years old, the same person who had been running BUMS as a teenager five years earlier.

The rise — 1975 through 1978

For the first six years of its existence the NBA ruled BMX. It had the first national, the first pro class, the first rule book, the first touring program, and a district map that reached from California to the East Coast.

By 1978 the NBA had tracks running races as far east as the Mississippi. The brands that became BMX's first generation — Redline, Webco, Mongoose, SE Racing, the early Torker years — all grew up inside the NBA's ranking system.

The rename — NBA becomes NBmxA, 1979

By 1979 the three-letter acronym was a problem. The National Basketball Association had been using "NBA" since 1949. In 1979 the National Bicycle Association renamed itself the National Bicycle Motocross Association — abbreviated NBmxA.

Where it started to come apart

The same year the rename went through — 1979 — was the year the NBA was overtaken as the biggest BMX sanction. By the end of 1979 that title belonged to the ABA. The NBL had been growing steadily on the East Coast since George Esser launched it in January 1974. The NBA had been first, but it was no longer biggest.

Race-day operations had gotten loose. When BMX Action asked the NBA in mid-1979 when its Grand National would be held, the answer was: "We don't even know where it's going to be yet, so how can we know the date?" BMX Action publisher Bob Osborn summed it up in print: "(Heavy Sigh) Sometimes it's tough to understand the internal workings of the NBA."

Costs at the gate started getting unusual. The NBA's Grand Nationals charged $20 for amateurs and $50 for pros, stacked on top of spectator fees, something no other sanctioning body charged. The NBL and ABA both honored each other's licenses; the NBA required NBA membership before entry with no reciprocity. The NBA had a habit of scheduling its qualifier dates directly against ABA national dates.

The 1979 Mongoose Grand National brought the strain into the open. Mongoose was the principal sponsor. Bicycle Motocross Action later reported that the NBA had entered additional sponsorship deals at the same race without Mongoose's knowledge.

The 1980 reset attempt and the resignation

By September 1980, Alexander had reached out to a group of outside investors. Peter DeRaffaele was brought on as CEO and installed at the NBmxA's Newhall, California headquarters.

The arrangement lasted through the 1980 Grand Nationals — 1,400 sign-ups in Long Beach. Then Alexander told DeRaffaele his help was no longer necessary. The board responded by asking for an accounting of the sanction's books. Alexander said he would produce them after the 1980 year-end racer points were tabulated. The accounting never came. In January 1981, Ernie Alexander resigned as president.

DeRaffaele went to the Newhall headquarters and found year-end points standings and 13,000 membership applications, but no membership list. The board moved the headquarters from Newhall to Fresno and spent the next several months reconstructing the mailing list and rebuilding relationships with the brands.

The last Grand National — Long Beach, December 1981

The 1981 Grand National ran December 11–13, 1981, on the grounds of Veterans Memorial Stadium in Long Beach. Greg Hill told the magazines: "It was good dirt, they didn't have to water it, the layout was good, everything was perfect, it was challenging."

The track was good. The turnout was not. Sign-ups came in between 600 and 700 racers across 101 motos — down from 1,400 the year before. After the season ended, the officers approached the National Bicycle League with a merger proposal.

Absorption into the NBL — 1982

After the 1981 season the NBmxA stopped sanctioning its own races and entered a partnership with the NBL. The NBL honored NBmxA membership cards until they expired and gradually absorbed both the membership and the tracks. Eventually the NBmxA was folded into the NBL completely. Ernie Alexander's organization — the first national sanctioning body BMX ever had — was gone, nine years after its founding.

Alexander's next move — WWBMXA and after

Alexander didn't leave BMX immediately. In February 1981, the same month he resigned, he formed a new sanctioning body: the World Wide Bicycle Motocross Association (WWBMXA), out of Chatsworth, California. The most prestigious event the WWBMXA was involved with was the Knott's Berry Farm Pepsi Cola Mongoose Grand Championships. The WWBMXA was short-lived. It was gone by the middle of 1983.

Alexander left BMX entirely in 1982. He moved on to running dance clubs, and later to designing acrylic water sculptures. One of those sculptures ended up in the lobby of GT Bicycles — a quiet circle back to the sport he had built the first national structure for, twenty years earlier.

In 2012 Alexander was inducted into the BMX Hall of Fame.

What the NBA defined for the rest of the sport

Every national sanctioning body in BMX since 1973 has been working off the template Alexander put together at the Newhall office.

The national No. 1 plate. The district map. The professional class. The Grand National. The summer touring program. All NBA inventions.

The ABA and the NBL each refined those ideas. When the ABA acquired the NBL in June 2011 and rebranded as USA BMX, what they were running was still a more polished version of the operation Alexander wrote the first rule book for in 1973.

The riders who came up under NBA plates — Scot Breithaupt, Perry Kramer, Stu Thomsen, Greg Hill, Mike Miranda, Tommy Brackens, David Clinton — built their careers inside Alexander's structure.

That's what the NBA built. The big-picture History of BMX places it as one chapter in a longer story.

Sources

Wikipedia: National Bicycle Association; David Clinton; Scot Breithaupt; National Bicycle League; American Bicycle Association; BMX racing. USA BMX Hall of Fame inductee record for Ernie Alexander, 2012 induction class. USA BMX official BMX history. bmxultra.com — "Scot Breithaupt: The History of BMX" interview series. Britannica, "BMX" sport entry. BMX News, "A Partial History of the Sport of BMX Racing" timeline. University of BMX history archives. Bicycle Motocross News, October 1974, March 1975, November 1976. Bicycle Motocross Action, September 1979, January 1981, July 1981, March 1982. BMX Plus!, May 1981. Super BMX & Freestyle, January 1986. Available in scanned form via oldschoolmags.com.

Primary-source recollection: Bill Ryan, founder of Supercross BMX and a co-owner of Legend Bike Co., on the NBA-era Southern California scene as it ran around the SE Racing building on Paramount Boulevard and the tracks of District X.