Here is a racing career that was short by the standards of BMX's all-time greats. Roughly a decade, 1974 to early 1984, peaking somewhere between 1976 and 1981. And in that window Perry Kramer won just about everything worth winning. He became one of the four or five pros who defined the sport's first generation. He had one of the most famous BMX frames ever built named after his initials. The PK Ripper has been in production for more than forty years now. Think about that. Almost no athlete in any sport has had a signature product run that long.

But Kramer's place in BMX runs deeper than the wins. He was one of the kids whose nagging convinced Ernie Alexander to start holding bicycle races at Alexander's motorcycle track — the chain of events that led Alexander to found 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 he first pinned 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 on the exact year, which is an honest answer given how loose and unstructured the whole thing was back then. His first documented result came 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. So Kramer was there basically from day one.

There's a bigger piece of history hiding in his childhood, though. Kramer and his friends were the kids who first asked Ernie Alexander, a motorcycle motocross track operator, if they could race their bicycles at his track. That request is what got Alexander thinking. He took the idea seriously, worked out that he could run bicycle races the same way he ran motorcycle races, and in 1973 turned it into the National Bicycle Association — the first national sanctioning body in BMX history. Kramer's part in lobbying Alexander shows up in his own recollections, and multiple biographical sources back it up. Which means a 12- or 13-year-old Perry Kramer is woven into the NBA's origin story.

Amateur career and first national win

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

One detail about this era needs a little context. Back in 1975 and 1976, most sanctioning bodies hadn't yet drawn a hard line between amateurs and pros. 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 sounds strange by modern standards but was pretty normal at the time. Late in 1976 he moved to Mongoose (BMX Products, Inc.), the biggest BMX brand in the country at that point.

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

Co-founding SE Racing

Kramer's relationship with Scot Breithaupt went back to the mid-1970s. Both were Southern California racers coming up through the same NBA circuit. So 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 put it: Breithaupt built the company, Kramer helped him build it, and that help was significant enough to land in the formal record. The two were friends and collaborators, and eventually teammate and factory rider.

Kramer signed with SE Racing as a sponsored professional in mid-February 1978, leaving Mongoose to do it. 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 nobody had used in BMX before, and it was one of the first serious cracks at an aluminum BMX race frame.

Around late 1978 and into early 1979, Kramer worked with Breithaupt on changes to the JU-6 design. What came out of that work, introduced in early 1979, was the PK Ripper. "PK" was Kramer's initials. The Ripper was lighter than a chromoly frame and stiffer when the welds were done right. Most important, it was durable enough to actually race on, which most aluminum BMX frames of the era simply weren't. It had the distinctive Floval oval tubing, the now-iconic gusseted headtube, and those visible beaded welds that became part of its look.

Aluminum BMX frames wouldn't go mainstream until the mid-1990s, when manufacturing advances borrowed from mountain biking made the material cheaper and easier to work with. 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, full stop.

The peak: 1979

1979 was his year. He won the JAG BMX World Championships Open Pro class in Indianapolis that December — the race Renny Roker had grown 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's since called it 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 straight 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 honestly 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 run peaked in 1980. He won the IBMXF race in Tokyo, Japan that year, an early international title at a time when most American BMX pros hadn't even left the country yet. He also won the AVRO Invitational Fietscross in the Netherlands, taking the Dutch "champion" title for 1980 (the AVRO race was one of the defining European BMX events of the era). He closed the NBL season as #6 Pro.

Through 1981, 1982, and into early 1983, Kramer kept racing for SE at the top level. But the sport around him was changing fast. The freestyle split was happening. The first boom was peaking. And the pro class kept 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 by his own account retired from active competition in early 1984 — though that 1984–1985 SE return suggests he came back for one more stretch after the initial retirement.

Cruiser, old school, and the return to SE

Like a lot 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 kept riding as part of the old-school BMX street scene. The big-wheel bikes — the 26-inch and 29-inch frames SE and others built around the original Ripper geometry — have kept him on a bike decades longer than most pros from his era.

Today Kramer is still tied in with SE Bikes (now part of BikeCo). He does signature bikes, makes appearances, and stays active 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 enough, is @oldschoolpk.

Hall of Fame and legacy

Kramer was inducted into the U.S. Bicycling Hall of Fame for what he gave BMX as a pro racer and as the man whose initials sit on one of the most enduring product names in the sport. His competitive peak was short — the big wins cluster in 1979 and 1980 — but the impact keeps compounding. 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 place in BMX history also includes two pieces the standard racer bios tend to leave out. There's his part in lobbying Ernie Alexander into bicycle racing as a kid, which fed into the founding of the NBA. And there's his co-founding role at SE Racing with Breithaupt in 1977. Both of those plant him in the origin story of BMX at a level that goes well past his results on a bike.

He's also, at this point, one of a fairly small number of first-generation BMX pros who've stayed continuously connected to the sport since their peak years. BMX gave him a place when he was a teenager trying to talk a motorcycle track operator into letting kids race bicycles. He's paid it back by sticking around. And that continuity matters, because it means a kid buying a PK Ripper today can still meet the person whose initials are on it.

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