Total BMX Magazine — The East Coast's First Slick (1980 to 1983)

Total BMX Magazine — The East Coast's First Slick (1980 to 1983)

A Legend Bike Co. history chapter

Quick note before we start. If you searched "Total BMX" and landed here looking for the freestyle bike and parts brand out of the UK — that's a different company that came along years later. This page is about the magazine. An East Coast BMX racing magazine, printed in Pittsburgh, 1980 to 1983. Same two words. Nothing else in common.

Out West in those early years you had BMX Action and BMX Plus coming out of California, and if you raced anywhere east of the Mississippi you read them and you felt a little invisible. The big nationals in those pages were the West Coast ones. The riders were West Coast riders. Then a guy in Pittsburgh decided the East Coast deserved its own book, and he made one. That was Total BMX.

The basics

What it was A BMX racing magazine (a printed publication — not a bike company)
Publisher Bob Tedesco. By 1982 the masthead also showed Ken Burnett (publisher) and Pete Reynolds (editor)
Where Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
First issue May 1980 — Greg Esser on the cover
Last known issue May/June 1983
Known for The first "slick" BMX magazine based in the East; heavy NBL and Northeast race coverage
Not to be confused with The modern UK Total BMX bike and parts brand — unrelated

Bob Tedesco and why the East needed its own book

Bob Tedesco was a Pittsburgh BMX guy through and through. His love for the sport started up at North Park around 1976, and he had a hand in getting the South Park track off the ground a couple years later — a track that's still running big nationals to this day. But the bigger thing about Tedesco is the National Bicycle League. He was a heavyweight inside the NBL for decades, and the East Coast racing scene basically ran on that sanction. So when he started a magazine, it came from the same place all his work did: the East Coast scene was real, it was growing, and somebody had to put it in print.

That's what Total BMX was. People who lived through it call it the first "slick" BMX magazine based in the East — "slick" meaning real glossy magazine stock, not a stapled-together zine. It covered the East Coast hard, and it gave Northeast riders the kind of ink they weren't getting from the California books.

What the pages actually held

Flip through the run and you see exactly what it was built for. NBL War of the Stars coverage, race after race. ABA East Coast Nationals. NEBA classics. The Pepsi team challenge, the Niagara Falls doubleheader, opening day in Pittsburgh. Tracks and races that the West Coast magazines barely mentioned, all over the front of the book.

The covers tell the story too. Greg Esser on the first one in May 1980. Roland Veight. Bob Haro in March 1982. Toby Henderson. "Dollar Dave" Dechert on his Thruster. "Bad Brad" Birdwell winning in Pittsburgh. Bob Hunt and Mat Harris. These were the East Coast and the up-and-coming names of the early '80s, getting the cover treatment they earned.

And the ads are a time capsule all by themselves. One September 1981 issue carried ads from Shimano, Cook Bros., Torker, Mongoose, Hutch, Skyway, Redline, MCS, Schwinn — a who's-who of who was selling BMX in 1981. There's even an early Hutch ad in there showing some of their first frames and forks. If you want to know what the BMX industry looked like at that exact moment, you could do a lot worse than a stack of these.

The run, and the end of it

Total BMX ran from May 1980 to May 1983. Roughly three years. Early on it came out every couple of months — issues are dated in pairs, May, June/July, August/September — and by 1981 it was hitting a tighter, more regular schedule, numbered into volumes. The last issues anybody has cataloged land in the spring of 1983.

Three years isn't long. Plenty of magazines from that era burned bright and short — the sport was young, ad money was thin, and printing a glossy book every month was an expensive way to love BMX. But Tedesco's bigger work was always the league, not the magazine. He kept building the NBL long after the magazine wrapped, helped push BMX racing toward television and eventually toward the Olympics, and got his due with a National BMX Hall of Fame induction in 2015. Total BMX was one chapter of a much longer story for him.

What we don't know. The exact total issue count and whether anything came out after spring 1983 isn't fully pinned down — the archives that survive are scans collectors uploaded, not a complete library. The masthead also shifts partway through: the early issues point to Tedesco, and by 1982 you see Ken Burnett listed as publisher and Pete Reynolds as editor, so the exact ownership and staffing through the run isn't perfectly clear. Circulation numbers, we don't have. If you've got original issues or know the rest of the story, we'd take the correction.

Related Legend Bike Co. chapters

Sources

23mag.com — Total BMX magazine issue-by-issue archive (publisher, location, covers, contents, masthead, ad listings; citing v1.bmxne.com, vintagebmx.com and others). FatBMX.com — "2015 National BMX Hall of Fame Industry: Bob Tedesco" (Bart de Jong, Oct 2015), confirming the magazine as the first slick BMX magazine based in the East, the 1980 to May 1983 run, and Tedesco's NBL and Hall of Fame record. USA BMX — "National BMX Hall of Fame announces the Class of 2015," on Tedesco's NBL tenure and Total BMX. Magazine scans archived at oldschoolmags.com. Note: the modern UK "Total BMX" bike and parts brand is a separate, unrelated company.