BMX Freestyle History · Rider Profile · Legend Bike Co

Ron Wilkerson — The Rider Who Built the Halfpipe Around Himself

Most pros wait for somebody to hand them a contest to win. Ron Wilkerson got tired of waiting and built his own. A freezing barn in Minnesota, 1986, a halfpipe, and a name nobody had heard yet: King of Vert. That's the kind of rider he was. If the sport didn't have the thing he needed, he made the thing.

Novato, a Huffy, and a Kid Named Rich Avella

The first bike he bought himself came out of a newspaper ad. It said Redline, it had alloy parts and Z rims, and it cost about a hundred dollars of grocery-store wages. He found out a few years later it was a Huffy with Redline stickers on it. He has always told that story on himself, and he always adds that it was a rad Huffy. He got into hard jumping on it.

Up the street from his house in Novato, California there was a mini-track, and that's where he met Rich Avella. The two of them raced for a while, but the real tracks were an hour away and neither of them had a car, so they started doing tricks instead. A bike shop that co-sponsored them for racing asked if they wanted to do a show at the county fair. They built a quarterpipe a month out — six feet, no deck — and by the first session they were getting a foot of air out of it. The fair turned into a weekend of shows, the shows turned into more shows, and the two of them named the operation 2-Hip. Wilkerson was nineteen or so and already acting as manager: booking the dates, calling the magazines, mailing resumes to sponsors. That habit — build the thing, then go sell it — never left him.

Early product help came from Vans, Dyno and Skyway. The Skyway hookup came the hard way and the lucky way at once: a Skyway owner watched 2-Hip do a show at Sears Point Raceway, carried photos back to the office, and Ken Coster answered the resume the pair had already sent in.

The First Cover

1984. Wizard Publications launches a brand-new magazine called Freestylin'. Whole sport's about to change, and they need a face for the very first cover. The face they pick is a mop-headed kid going off in Golden Gate Park. That kid is Ron Wilkerson. Think about what that means. Before most people had even heard the word freestyle, his picture was the one that introduced the whole thing. You don't get on the first cover by being good. You get there by being the future.

He has said since that no photo ever hit him harder. His mother ordered about forty copies. He skipped a class and drove home to get one. Twenty-four years later, asked to pick a favorite image from the magazine's whole run, he still picked that cover.

GT, Then the H

He rode for GT first. The 2-Hip crew did a tour for GT in 1984, criss-crossing the country putting freestyle in front of kids who'd never seen it live. Then, that same fall, he came over to Haro — onto the best team the sport had. He got on a Haro Sport, the bike built around vert, and went to work. The Haro years are the ones where the legend really got made. Big airs. Bigger ideas.

The move was not a handshake. BMX Plus! reported in January 1985 that Haro was negotiating with GT to buy out the rest of Wilkerson's contract, and that Bob Haro wanted him to handle promotion and scheduling for the Haro trick team as well as perform in the shows. Haro had just lost Mike Dominguez and needed somebody who could carry the tours. Wilkerson moved from Novato down to the Carlsbad area and, by his own account, spent his first months there feeling the weight of what the company had paid for him. He also had to relearn the ramps: he'd come off six-foot transitions with no vert and was suddenly on eight-foot ramps with vert.

He toured those years with Brian Blyther and Dave Nourie, and he has called them brothers — three new pros on the road together for three and six months at a stretch, working, eating and traveling as one unit. There was, as he put it, never going to be another first generation of BMX pros.

The Tricks Nobody Had Done

Here's where it stops being about results and starts being about invention. Wilkerson is credited with the nothing — you let go of everything, hands and feet off, in the air, holding nothing. The abubaca, a fakie rollback trick on the ramp. Fakies themselves. These aren't tweaks on somebody else's move. These are doors that didn't exist until he kicked them open. Every vert rider who came after rode through them, whether they knew the name on the door or not.

He was doing no-footers at the Venice Beach contest in 1984 and, by his telling, nobody in the crowd had seen anything like it. The nothing came later and came on the road: he tried it for the first time on tour and pulled it on the second attempt, describing it as the next step past the no-footer and the no-hander. He then took nothings to dirt and kept doing them on vert — right up until the one that nearly finished him.

And he wasn't a one-trick guy. People remember him for vert, but in 1985 he took the AFA Flatland, Ramp and Overall titles in the same year. Flatland and ramp don't usually live in the same rider. They did in him.

The Contest Record

Wilkerson was one of the very few top pros of the era who actually wanted to compete, and said so in print while others were sitting contests out. His first real pro contest was Venice Beach in 1984 — flatland and ramp combined, his own event at last — and he finished second behind Eddie Fiola. He took it as a win anyway: for the first time the pros were going head to head in front of a crowd instead of trading turns in a skatepark.

Later in 1984 he placed third in expert at Joe's Ramp Jam, the backyard halfpipe contest that Dave Vanderspek set up and ran at pro skater Joe Lopes' place in Northern California. The Curb Dogs' own archive makes the connection plainly: Wilkerson was a quarterpipe rider more than a halfpipe rider at the time, but he must have liked what he saw there, because about two years later he started King of Vert.

1985 was his year on paper: the AFA Flatland, Ramp and Overall titles, the cover of Haro's own catalog, covers on BMX Plus! and BMX Action Bike, a run at Bercy in Paris, and a win at the UK's Frosties contest — the switchsided one-footed one-hander from his final winning routine there is what put him on the July 1985 BMX Action Bike cover.

By 1988 he was near the top of the whole sport commercially as well as competitively. Period reporting put his earnings around a hundred thousand dollars a year, and BMX Plus! readers voted him freestyle rider of the year. Freestylin' readers gave him the NORA Cup for rider of the year in the poll announced in the May 1989 issue.

King of Vert

By the mid-80s the established circuits were mostly built around flatland. Vert and street riders didn't have a real home. So Wilkerson made one. The first 2-Hip King of Vert ran in 1986 — that barn in Minnesota — and it became the halfpipe series. The one that mattered. He ran the Meet the Street contests too, giving street riding a stage of its own. This is the series where a teenage Mat Hoffman threw down the kind of riding that rewrote the ceiling. None of that happens without somebody building the ramp and hanging the banner. That somebody was Ron.

He started it because Bob Morales and the AFA weren't interested in running a halfpipe contest with him, so he ran one himself. The champions tell you how fast it mattered: Brian Blyther took the title in 1987 and repeated in 1988, back to back, and Mat Hoffman — who turned pro at the 1988 season finals and won the pro class the same day — took 1989 and 1990. Wilkerson kept riding his own series while promoting it, and he was in the 1989 season standings alongside Blyther, Dennis McCoy and the rest. The full contest-by-contest story lives in our 2-Hip / King of Vert chapter.

Meet the Street

Vert wasn't the only thing the calendar was missing. On April 30, 1988, Wilkerson ran the first Meet the Street under the 2-Hip banner, in the Santee and Lakeside area of San Diego County — no purpose-built course, just a real site and whatever riders could find in it. Dave Voelker, Craig Campbell, Dave Vanderspek, R.L. Osborn, Eddie Roman, Rich Bartlett and Chris Moeller were among the riders there. Wilkerson's own framing, in Ride BMX US in 1996, was simple: everyone was riding street, so 2-Hip organized a street contest. The series ran for years afterward, including the 1989 stop at the Brooklyn Banks in New York. Again, the detail is in the 2-Hip chapter; what belongs here is that a working pro rider chose to spend his prime years building events other people would win.

The Enchanted Ramp

He bought a house in Leucadia, in the city of Encinitas north of San Diego, and picked it because the lot could take a vert ramp. Framing started before the family moved in. The Enchanted Ramp — named for the tree next to it — was twenty-four feet wide, nine and a half feet tall, with eighteen feet of flat bottom, and by 1988 he was riding it four and five hours a day. There was a concrete pad on the side of the house for flatland, right outside the bedroom window. The ramp hosted King of Vert rounds, endless photo sessions, and anybody local who wanted to ride.

It didn't last. In 1989 the city made him collect signatures from twenty neighbors saying they had no problem with it. In 1990 he sold the house, moved elsewhere in San Diego, and built a new one in Lemon Grove — two halfpipes joined back to back with a one-foot spine. In 1992 he moved to downtown San Francisco, and 2-Hip landed in Santa Cruz in 2001.

He didn't just ride the era. He scheduled it.

His Own Name on the Frame

In 1989 he started his own thing. First name on it was Wilkerson Airlines — which tells you everything about how he saw a bike, as a machine for getting off the ground. It became 2-Hip, one of the first rider-owned freestyle brands, and it's still around. Owning the company, running the contests, riding the ramps, managing a team and picking up young talent along the way — he worked every angle of the sport at once. Not many people can say that.

He quit Haro to do it, after five years, and he did it in person: he called a meeting at the Haro offices and told Bob Haro and Jim Ford he was leaving to manufacture his own line. He was blunt about the timing. Freestyle was in a slump, every company was cutting back, and he'd rather be on his own than ride out somebody else's pessimism. Wilkerson Airlines was deliberately kept separate from 2-Hip, which at that point meant the King of Vert and Meet the Street contests. The bike company took the 2-Hip name in 1994.

Running it has never been easy money. He has described borrowing from banks, friends and family to keep the doors open, still paying some of them back years later, and getting unsecured loans on nothing but conviction. Asked once what he was proudest of, his answer was that he stuck with the bike company.

The Crash, and the Coming Back

It wasn't all airs and magazine covers. He went down hard once and it nearly ended everything — a serious head injury, a stretch where the riding was taken away from him. He came back. Relearned it. Got back on the ramp. The fact that the comeback is part of the story instead of the end of it tells you what he was made of.

The crash came at the last AFA contest of the 1988 season, in Wichita, Kansas. He was leading the ramp points. He went for a nothing as his last trick, hung up, and went to the bottom of the ramp face first without getting his hands out. He spent about two weeks in a Wichita hospital with blood clots on his brain that, somehow, didn't need surgery. Mat Hoffman wrote in his memoir that once Wilkerson was stable, Hoffman's father converted his own plane into an air ambulance, hired a paramedic, and flew him back to San Diego.

Recovery was strange and slow. He has told the story of sitting in his living room with Eddie Roman, seeing a trade-school ad on television, and asking Eddie what his job was — and being told, to his amazement, that he was a professional bike rider who got paid to travel the world. He was riding again within a couple of weeks, terrified on the roll-in of his own ramp, and had to relearn every trick he knew, including the abubaca he'd invented. Most of the sport switched to full-face helmets right after. He is direct about the cost: the crash was the end of his competitive riding, because the edge that competition requires never came back. What came back instead was the desire to build things, and that is where the bike company came from.

Since

He never left. 2-Hip has run continuously since 1989 — bikes, frames, a team, a summer demo tour that went seventeen straight years, and the King of Dirt series alongside King of Vert and Meet the Street. He put out the video Obsession in 2003, judged X Games vert in 2010, and in January 2009 he and his wife Vanessa opened Samba Rock Acai Cafe in Santa Cruz, the town he has now lived in longer than anywhere else. The National BMX Hall of Fame inducted him in the Class of 2013 as a Freestyler. A 2024 Greystoke BMX interview found him at 58 and still blasting a BMX bike.

Ask him for his best moment and he won't give you a contest. In the Freestylin' book interview he picked riding his bike to work in Santa Cruz on a sunny Thursday, still able to pedal after everything, nobody around him knowing what that meant.

Timeline

• 1966 Born January 8 in New Orleans, Louisiana (per 23mag). Grows up in Novato, California.
• 1983 First quarterpipe, first show. He and Rich Avella name the operation 2-Hip.
• 1984 First-ever cover of Freestylin' magazine — Golden Gate Park. Tours for GT with the 2-Hip crew.
• 1984 Second at the Venice Beach pro contest, behind Eddie Fiola. Third in expert at Dave Vanderspek's Joe's Ramp Jam.
• 1984 Comes over to Haro that fall. Onto the Haro Sport.
• 1985 AFA Flatland, Ramp and Overall Champion — all three in one year. Haro catalog cover; wins the Frosties in the UK; rides Bercy.
• 1986 First 2-Hip King of Vert — a barn in Minnesota. The halfpipe series is born.
• 1987 The Enchanted Ramp goes up at his house in Leucadia, California.
• 1988 First Meet the Street, April 30, San Diego County. BMX Plus! readers' freestyle rider of the year.
• 1988 Nothing hang-up at the last AFA contest of the year in Wichita, Kansas. Two weeks in hospital. Relearns everything.
• 1989 Wins Freestylin's NORA Cup. Leaves Haro after five years and starts his own brand, first called Wilkerson Airlines.
• 1994 The bike company is renamed 2-Hip Bikes.
• 2001 2-Hip moves to Santa Cruz, California.
• 2009 Opens Samba Rock Acai Cafe in Santa Cruz with his wife Vanessa.
• 2010 Judges X Games vert.
• 2013 National BMX Hall of Fame, Class of 2013, Freestyler.

Related chapters

2-Hip / King of Vert · Haro · GT Bicycles · Bob Haro · Brian Blyther · Dave Nourie · Mike Dominguez · Mat Hoffman · Dennis McCoy · Dave Vanderspek · Eddie Fiola · AFA · Bob Morales · Hoffman Bikes · Freestylin' · BMX Plus! · Skyway · Dyno · Vans