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

Picture a grown man with a track, a rule book, and a payroll deciding that a bunch of kids on Sting-Rays deserved the same. That was Ernie Alexander. He wasn't a kid racing bikes. He was a motorcycle race promoter, and he ran his thing like a business.

Before BMX was a sport anybody had organized, Alexander owned and ran A.C.E. Racing at Indian Dunes, the big motorcycle motocross facility north of Los Angeles. That's where a lot of the era's MX films and TV got shot. The Dunes was built and managed by Walt James. Alexander designed the International course and the Shadow Glenn course inside it. He'd been putting on motorcycle races there for years, and by most accounts he was the first guy promoting motorcycle motocross in the country.

In 1970 — same year Scot Breithaupt had kids pitching a quarter each for that first BUMS race on a dirt lot in Long Beach — Alexander caught the same thing happening out at the edges of the motorcycle scene. Kids on Schwinn Sting-Rays, trying to run their own races. No track, no rules, no insurance. Being who he was, he helped them out. He opened the Yarnell track, a steep downhill course, fast and a little terrifying, where 40 to 45 mph wasn't unusual.

The bike races kept growing. By 1973 they were close to a full-time job. So Alexander did what he'd already done with motorcycles. He made them official. On November 1, 1973, he registered the National Bicycle Association, built straight off the structure of the American Motorcycle Association (AMA), which ran motorcycle motocross back then.

And that was it. The first national sanctioning body BMX ever had.

Why the NBA mattered

BMX had sanctions before the NBA came along. BUMS, the body Breithaupt started building in 1970, had been handing out membership cards, running points, and printing t-shirts for three years already. But BUMS was a Southern California deal. A regional thing, with a teenager running it.

The NBA was a different animal, and it came at the sport from three directions nobody had tried.

Start with this: it was built to be national from the first day, modeled on how the AMA did it. Alexander wrote the first BMX rule book himself. He set up districts — letters that grouped tracks by where they sat, not 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.

Then there were the national plate numbers. The No. 1 plate turned into something kids would chase all year long, on one national ranking.

And here's the one that rewired the money side of the whole sport. The NBA created the first professional class in BMX. First time anybody printed the word pro was the October 1974 issue of Bicycle Motocross News, in a write-up on 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. Before that, every BMX race in the country was amateur.

The first National — Phoenix, March 30, 1975

The first real national went off on Sunday, March 30, 1975 at the Kartland Track, 3610 West Indian School Road, Phoenix, Arizona. First big BMX race ever held outside California.

That first season gave the sport its 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.

Then in 1976 the NBA made the pro class official and named its first National No. 1 Pro: Scot Breithaupt, 20 years old — the same kid who'd been running BUMS as a teenager five years before.

The rise — 1975 through 1978

For six years the NBA ran BMX, plain and simple. First national, first pro class, first rule book, first touring program, and a district map that stretched from California clear out to the East Coast.

By 1978 NBA tracks were 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 — every one of them grew up inside the NBA's ranking system.

The rename — NBA becomes NBmxA, 1979

By 1979 those three letters were a headache. The National Basketball Association had been sitting on "NBA" since 1949. So in 1979 the National Bicycle Association renamed itself the National Bicycle Motocross Association — NBmxA for short.

Where it started to come apart

The same year as the rename, 1979, was the year the NBA lost its spot as the biggest sanction in BMX. By the end of that year the title belonged to the ABA. The NBL had been climbing steadily on the East Coast since George Esser started it in January 1974. The NBA had been first. It just wasn't biggest anymore.

Race-day operations had gone loose, too. When BMX Action asked the NBA in mid-1979 when the Grand National would be, 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 put it in print: "(Heavy Sigh) Sometimes it's tough to understand the internal workings of the NBA."

The gate started getting strange, too. The NBA's Grand Nationals charged $20 for amateurs and $50 for pros — and then stacked spectator fees on top, which nobody else was doing. The NBL and ABA honored each other's licenses. The NBA made you buy an NBA membership before you raced and gave nothing back the other way. And it had a habit of dropping its qualifier dates right on top of ABA national dates.

The 1979 Mongoose Grand National pushed the strain out into the open. Mongoose was the principal sponsor. Bicycle Motocross Action reported later that the NBA had signed up additional sponsorship deals at the same race without telling Mongoose.

The 1980 reset attempt and the resignation

By September 1980, Alexander had gone looking for outside money. Peter DeRaffaele came on as CEO and got set up at the NBmxA's Newhall, California headquarters.

That held together through the 1980 Grand Nationals — 1,400 sign-ups in Long Beach. Then Alexander told DeRaffaele he didn't need his help anymore. The board asked to see the books. Alexander said he'd hand them over once the 1980 year-end racer points were tabulated. They never came. In January 1981, Ernie Alexander resigned as president.

DeRaffaele went out to the Newhall office and found year-end points standings and 13,000 membership applications — but no actual membership list. The board moved headquarters from Newhall to Fresno and spent the next several months rebuilding the mailing list from scratch and patching things up 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."

Track was good. Turnout wasn't. Sign-ups landed somewhere between 600 and 700 racers across 101 motos — way down from the 1,400 the year before. Once the season closed out, the officers went to the National Bicycle League with a merger proposal.

Absorption into the NBL — 1982

After the 1981 season the NBmxA quit sanctioning its own races and partnered up with the NBL. The NBL honored NBmxA cards until they ran out and slowly took in both the membership and the tracks. In the end the NBmxA got folded into the NBL entirely. Ernie Alexander's organization — the first national sanctioning body the sport ever had — was gone, nine years after he started it.

Alexander's next move — WWBMXA and after

Alexander didn't walk away from BMX right off. In February 1981, the same month he resigned, he started a new sanctioning body: the World Wide Bicycle Motocross Association (WWBMXA), out of Chatsworth, California. The biggest thing the WWBMXA ever touched was the Knott's Berry Farm Pepsi Cola Mongoose Grand Championships. It didn't last. Gone by the middle of 1983.

Alexander left BMX for good in 1982. He went on to run dance clubs, then to designing acrylic water sculptures. One of those sculptures wound up in the lobby of GT Bicycles — a quiet way of circling back to the sport he'd 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 BMX has had since 1973 has been running off the template Alexander put together at that Newhall office. All of it.

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

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

The riders who came up on 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 sets it down 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.