Super BMX Magazine — The Challenge Publications Years (1980 to 1988)

A Legend Bike Co. history · written first-hand by Bill Ryan, who was brought in as a hired-gun editor on this title

I wrote for this magazine. Not as a fan looking back forty years later — I was one of the hired guns they brought in when they needed words on the page. So this one is personal. Super BMX was never the loudest title on the rack, never the one the cool kids quoted first. But it was there for the whole run, 1980 to 1988, and it sat right in the middle of everything that mattered in BMX. Here's the real story, the parts I lived and the parts the old issues prove.

Where it came from

Super BMX didn't appear out of nowhere in 1980. It grew out of an earlier title called Minicycle BMX Action. That's why the first issue with Super BMX on the cover — August 1980 — is numbered Volume 7, Number 8. Seven volumes deep already. The name on the front was new. The magazine underneath it wasn't.

The home was Challenge Publications, Inc., on Deering Avenue in Canoga Park, California. Ed Schnepf ran the place. Challenge wasn't a BMX-only shop the way Wizard Publications was over at BMX Action. Challenge published all kinds of enthusiast titles. BMX was one line in a bigger catalog. Keep that fact in your back pocket — it explains both the strength and the weakness of this magazine, and it comes back later when I tell you about a job they handed me.

Where it sat on the rack

If you walked into a shop in 1983 there were a handful of BMX magazines fighting for the same kid's allowance. BMX Action and Freestylin' out of Wizard. BMX Plus! And Super BMX. Each one had a personality. Super BMX was the one that landed in the middle.

Mark Noble — who knew the era cold, writing in Ride BMX UK years later — called it "a curious magazine, sort of in between BMX Action, Freestylin', and BMX Plus!" That's exactly right. It wasn't the trend-setter and it wasn't the thick glossy. It was the steady one. Good race coverage. Real bike tests. Rider interviews where the rider actually talked. The August 1980 issue alone tested a Cook Bros. cruiser, ran a Frank Post interview, took a sneak peek at Toby Henderson's Raleigh, and covered the ABA at Grass Valley. That's a working magazine doing the job.

It pulled good people, too. Steve Giberson edited it. Michael A. Collins ran the editorial side. The writing had a voice. You read it and you felt like somebody who actually rode was telling you about it.

The freestyle turn — Super BMX & Freestyle

By the mid-'80s freestyle had split off from racing and become its own world. Every BMX magazine had to decide how hard to chase it. Super BMX chased it, and for a long stretch the cover and the masthead read Super BMX & Freestyle. That's why you'll see the title written both ways — same magazine, two names. The freestyle issues are loaded with the riders who defined that period, and collectors hunt them for exactly that reason.

My side of it — the hired-gun years

Here's where I come in. I was one of the writers and editors Super BMX brought in as a hired gun. You don't always get a byline doing that work. You get a deadline and a stack of pages and you make them good. I'd already been around the BMX print world — I was a technical editor at BMX Plus! in the mid-'80s and later wrote the Workshop column for GO. Super BMX was part of that same run.

The editor, Dave House, would call me up and hire me to write a one-off article whenever he needed one. A hundred bucks, three hundred bucks, whatever his budget could swing that issue — that was the deal. The job was simple: fill the pages and get the thing to print. No glamour to it. He had holes to plug and a deadline bearing down, and I was a guy who knew BMX and could turn copy fast. So I did.

And the Super BMX connection led straight to the strangest writing job I ever took.

In 1996, Schwinn turned 100 years old, and they wanted a centennial catalog to mark it. Challenge Publications — the same outfit that put out Super BMX — got the job to produce it. They needed somebody who actually knew BMX history to write the BMX section of that catalog. They came to me.

Here's the catch. By then I already owned a BMX company. Challenge didn't want Schwinn to know that a rival BMX company owner was the one writing their official history. So I wrote the whole BMX section of the Schwinn 100th Anniversary Catalog under a reversed-name pen name ("Ryan William") — my own name flipped around so nobody would connect the dots. That's the only place that pen name has ever run. Everything I wrote for BMX Plus! and GO ran under my real name, and you can check the mastheads. The Schwinn catalog is the one job that didn't, and now you know why.

How it ended

The last Super BMX issue came out in 1988. The reason it died is the same reason a lot of the BMX titles died, and it ties right back to Challenge being a general enthusiast publisher and not a BMX-first one. Mark Noble put it bluntly: the publishers "jumped right into mountainbiking and forgot about the twenty inchers." Mountain bikes were the next big thing, the money was moving there, and a company that published across a lot of categories followed the money. The twenty-inch magazine got left on the side of the road.

That's not a knock, really. It's just what happened to print when the wind changed. Super BMX had a good eight-year run and it covered the single most important stretch of American BMX while it lasted.

What we don't know

A few things I want to be straight about, because I'd rather flag a gap than paper over it.

The exact full editorial roster across all eight years isn't something I can lay out issue by issue from memory — magazine mastheads changed constantly, and the scanned record at oldschoolmags.com and 23mag.com is partial. The names I'm confident on are Schnepf, Collins, and Giberson, because they show up on the issues that survive.

The Minicycle BMX Action lineage is well documented as the parent title, but the exact founding date of that earlier magazine isn't nailed down in the sources I trust — the Volume 7 number on the 1980 issue points back several years, but I won't put a hard year on it without a primary source in hand.

Related Legend Bike Co. chapters

• The History of BMX (1970-1995)
• Schwinn BMX — the centennial catalog I wrote the BMX section of

Sources

Primary tier: oldschoolmags.com — Super BMX magazine archive and masthead detail ("Published by Challenge Publications from 1980 - 1988"), including scanned issue indicia confirming Challenge Publications, Inc., 7950 Deering Avenue, Canoga Park, California, and the Ed Schnepf / Michael A. Collins masthead. 23mag.com — Super BMX index (Minicycle BMX Action lineage; publishers Ed Schnepf and Dave House; editors Steve Giberson and Michael A. Collins; 1988 final issue; Mark Noble's Ride BMX UK December 1993 recollection). Supporting: Ride BMX UK (Mark Noble). First-hand: Bill Ryan, founder of Supercross BMX — hired-gun editorial work for Super BMX, and authorship of the BMX section of the Schwinn 100th Anniversary Catalog (1996, produced by Challenge Publications) under the reversed-name pen name "Ryan William."