Perry Kramer's racing career was short by the standards of BMX's all-time greats — a decade, roughly 1974 to early 1984, with a peak period from 1976 to 1981. But in that window he won just about everything worth winning, became one of the four or five defining pros of the sport's first generation, and had one of the most famous BMX frames ever made named after his initials. The PK Ripper has been in production for more than forty years. Almost no athlete in any sport has had a signature product last that long.

Kramer's role in BMX also runs deeper than racing. He was one of the kids whose persistent lobbying convinced Ernie Alexander to start holding bicycle races at Alexander's motorcycle track — a sequence of events that led to Alexander founding the NBA in 1973. He co-founded SE Racing with Scot Breithaupt in 1977. And he's still part of SE today, nearly five decades after first pinning on a number plate.

Palms Park and the Ernie Alexander story

Kramer was born October 6, 1959 in Santa Monica. He started racing BMX in 1973 or 1974 — he's vague about the exact year, which is an honest answer given how unstructured the sport was when he came up. His first documented race result was April 24, 1974 at Palms Park in Los Angeles, where he took second in the 12–14 Junior Expert class. Palms Park — started by Ron Mackler in 1969 — was the very first BMX track. Kramer was there basically from the beginning.

There's a bigger piece of BMX history hiding in his childhood, though. Kramer and his friends are the kids who first asked Ernie Alexander, a motorcycle motocross track operator, to let them race bicycles at his track. That request is what eventually led Alexander to take the idea seriously, figure out he could run bicycle races the same way he ran motorcycle races, and then in 1973 formalize it into the National Bicycle Association — the first national sanctioning body in BMX history. Kramer's direct role in lobbying Alexander is documented in his own recollections and corroborated by multiple biographical sources. That makes a 12- or 13-year-old Perry Kramer a part of the NBA's origin story.

Amateur career and first national win

By 1975, Kramer was racking up regional titles. He took the Arizona State Championship that year. In 1976 he was named NBA Regional #3, Western States Champion, and finished the NBA season as National #2. That same year, on April 17, 1976, he took his first national win at the NBA Winter Nationals in Scottsdale, Arizona — winning the Open Main class.

A detail about this era that needs a little context: in 1975 and 1976, there wasn't yet a formal separation between amateurs and pros in most sanctioning bodies. A "national number one" could be either. Kramer was sponsored directly by the NBA itself for the 1976 season — the sanctioning body, not a bike company — which is an unusual arrangement by modern standards but was common at the time. Late in 1976 he moved to Mongoose (BMX Products, Inc.), which was then the biggest BMX brand in the country.

Kramer turned pro in 1977 at age 18. Bicycle Motocross News named him one of the top five riders in Southern California for 1977.

Co-founding SE Racing

Kramer's relationship with Scot Breithaupt went back to the mid-1970s. Both were Southern California racers. Both were coming up through the same NBA circuit. When Breithaupt founded Scot Enterprises — which became SE Racing — in 1977, Kramer was one of the people who helped him do it.

The formal founding credit for SE belongs to Breithaupt. But multiple biographical sources, including Kramer's Wikipedia entry and his U.S. Bicycling Hall of Fame profile, describe him as a co-founder. The most honest way to say it: Breithaupt built the company; Kramer helped him build it, and his help was significant enough to be recognized in the formal record. The two were friends, collaborators, and eventually teammate and factory rider.

Kramer signed with SE Racing as a sponsored professional in mid-February 1978, leaving Mongoose to do so. He stayed on the factory team through February 1983.

The PK Ripper

SE's first production bike was the JU-6, released in 1978. The frame was named for Jeff Utterback (JU) and his #6 NBA ranking from the 1977 season. It was built from Floval aluminum tubing — an oval-cross-section aluminum that had never been used in BMX before — and was one of the first serious attempts at an aluminum BMX race frame.

Around late 1978 and into early 1979, Kramer worked with Breithaupt on modifications to the JU-6 design. The result, introduced in early 1979, was the PK Ripper. "PK" was Kramer's initials. The Ripper was lighter than a chromoly frame, stiffer when welded correctly, and — critically — durable enough to actually race on, which most aluminum BMX frames of the era weren't. It had the distinctive Floval oval tubing, the now-iconic gusseted headtube, and visible beaded welds that became part of its look.

Aluminum BMX frames wouldn't become mainstream until the mid-1990s, when manufacturing advances pioneered in mountain biking made the material cheaper and easier to work. For that whole two-decade gap, the PK Ripper was one of the only aluminum race frames you could actually trust. And it's still in production today, more than 45 years later — one of the longest continuously manufactured bike models in the history of cycling, period.

The peak: 1979

1979 was Kramer's year. He won the JAG BMX World Championships Open Pro class in Indianapolis that December — the race Renny Roker had built into the biggest event in BMX. The purse for the Open Pro was $1,500, which in 1979 was serious money. Ted Guilmette finished second at $700, Scott Clark third at $400, Clint Miller fourth, Bobby Encinas fifth, and a young Tinker Juarez sixth.

Kramer won the race on an all-black PK Ripper with black Skyway Tuff graphite wheels. He has since called that the biggest win of his career. When SE released the 2019 Perry Kramer signature bike as a 40th-anniversary tribute, they built it as a direct throwback to that exact 1979 JAG bike — same all-black frame, same black Tuffs, same setup.

The JAG World Championship was the first BMX race anyone could legitimately call a "world" event, and winning the pro class made Kramer the first BMX World Champion. That's the headline title on his resume and the reason he's in the U.S. Bicycling Hall of Fame. He also finished 1979 as NBA #4 Pro.

International wins and the early 80s

Kramer's international career peaked in 1980. He won the IBMXF race in Tokyo, Japan that year, taking an early international title at a time when most American BMX pros hadn't yet left the country. He also won the AVRO Invitational Fietscross in the Netherlands, becoming the Dutch "champion" for 1980 (the AVRO race was one of the defining European BMX events of the era). He finished the NBL season as #6 Pro.

Through 1981, 1982, and into early 1983, Kramer kept racing for SE at the top level. The sport around him was changing fast — the freestyle split was happening, the first boom was peaking, and the pro class was getting deeper and harder to win in as a new generation of teenagers (Stu Thomsen in the 16+ class, Greg Hill, Harry Leary, Mike Miranda) matured into dominant pros.

In February 1983, after the ABA Winter Nationals in Chandler, Arizona, SE dropped Kramer from the factory team. He moved to Race Inc. for most of 1983 and into mid-1984. When Race Inc. went out of business in mid-1984, SE brought him back. He raced for SE through 1985 and then retired from active competition in early 1984 by his own account — though the SE return in 1984–1985 suggests he came back for a final stretch after the initial retirement.

Cruiser, old school, and the return to SE

Like many of the first generation of BMX pros, Kramer found his way to the cruiser class as he got older. He raced Pro Cruiser in the early 80s and has continued to ride as part of the old-school BMX street scene. The big-wheel bikes — the 26-inch and 29-inch frames that SE and others have built around the original Ripper geometry — have kept him on a bike for decades longer than most pros from his era.

Today Kramer is still connected with SE Bikes (now part of BikeCo). He does signature bikes, makes appearances, and actively participates in the old-school BMX community — including memorable trips like the Melbourne Supershow where he rode with Australian collectors on his birthday. His Instagram handle, fittingly, is @oldschoolpk.

Hall of Fame and legacy

Kramer was inducted into the U.S. Bicycling Hall of Fame for his contributions to BMX as a pro racer and as the person whose initials appear on one of the most enduring product names in the sport. His competitive peak was short — the big wins are concentrated in 1979 and 1980 — but the impact compounds. Every PK Ripper sold for the last 45 years is a Perry Kramer signature bike. That's a legacy that has outlasted most racing careers, most brands, and most of the sport's original competitive structure.

His role in BMX history also includes two pieces that often get left out of the standard racer bios: his part in lobbying Ernie Alexander into bicycle racing as a kid, which contributed to the founding of the NBA; and his co-founding role at SE Racing with Breithaupt in 1977. Both of those put him into the origin story of BMX at a level that goes well beyond his results on a bike.

He's also, at this point, one of a relatively small number of first-generation BMX pros who have stayed continuously connected to the sport since their peak years. The sport gave him a place when he was a teenager trying to convince a motorcycle track operator to let kids race bicycles. He's given back by staying with it. That continuity matters, because it means a kid buying a PK Ripper today can still meet the person whose initials are on it.