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2-Hip / King of Vert

Ron Wilkerson asked the AFA to run a halfpipe contest. The AFA passed. So Wilkerson ran one himself, in his own backyard, and kept running them for the next five years — through the AFA's best seasons and past its close. King of Vert became the contest series that kept vert riding alive when the sport's first sanctioning body wouldn't make room for it, and the loose, rider-run outfit behind it, 2-Hip, grew into one of the first rider-owned brands in BMX.

Where it started

Ron Wilkerson and Rich Avella formed a trick team called 2-Hip in 1983, touring shows around California. In 1984 the team did a tour for GT Bicycles; when it wrapped, Avella left to chase music and college, and Wilkerson quit GT to ride for Haro.

Building King of Vert

Wilkerson was competing in AFA contests through the mid-1980s, and it bothered him that there weren't any halfpipe events on the calendar. He brought the idea to Bob Morales directly: a co-run halfpipe contest. Morales wasn't interested. So Wilkerson ran it himself. His own account, from BMX Plus!, May 1992: I was competing in the AFA contests and hated that there weren't any halfpipes. I spoke with Bob Morales at that time about a halfpipe contest, but they weren't hip on it so I did the contest on my own. The first 2-Hip was a half pipe contest at my house on December 7, 1985. A separate 2hip.com retrospective from 2012 labels a November 8, 1986 event in LaSueur, Minnesota as the very first official 2-Hip contest — the two accounts don't fully agree on which one counts as the true first, and we're not picking a side. Either way, King of Vert was running by the mid-1980s.

The format broke from how the AFA ran things. King of Vert was halfpipe-only, no ground or flatland runs, and it used a jam format — riders taking turns inside a shared twenty-minute block instead of individually judged runs. Fields stayed small, six to eight pros most rounds, next to the AFA's sixty-to-ninety-rider contests. Brian Blyther summed up the difference himself, in BXM magazine, February 1989: KOV is fun and friendly. At AFA contests, it's the sponsors pushing you to go. I don't dislike it, I just prefer KOV.

The champions

Blyther closed out 1987 as King of Vert champion, then repeated in 1988 — back-to-back titles, per Legend's own Brian Blyther chapter. The 1988 season finals, held January 14, 1989 in Irvine, California, also marked Mat Hoffman's professional debut — he won the amateur class, turned pro the same day, and won the pro class too. The 1989 season finals (January 27, 1990, Newport Beach) had Hoffman on top of the pro standings, followed by Joe Johnson, Blyther, Dennis McCoy, Wilkerson, Dino DeLuca, Bob Kohl, Dave Voelker, Chris Potts, Joel Alamo, and Mike Dominguez. Hoffman took the year-end title again in 1990.

Hoffman's tie to the series ran deep from the start. His first-ever King of Vert contest was December 13, 1986, at Wilkerson's Enchanted Ramp in Encinitas, California — a fourteen-year-old amateur with no sponsor, riding past a field that included established pros. And on March 25, 1989, at a King of Vert round in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, Hoffman landed the first 900 ever pulled in a BMX contest.

Meet the Street

Wilkerson didn't stop at vert. On April 30, 1988, he ran the first Meet the Street contest under the 2-Hip Promotions banner in the Santee/Lakeside area of San Diego County — built around fun over rules, riding whatever the site handed you instead of a purpose-built course. Dave Voelker, Craig Campbell, Dave Vanderspek, R.L. Osborn, Eddie Roman, Rich Bartlett, and Chris Moeller were among the riders there. Wilkerson later called it plainly, in Ride BMX US, February 1996: No one had done halfpipe contests. We were tired of riding sketchy little quarterpipes. Then the AFA disappeared, and it was only the 2-Hip. Then everyone was riding street, so we organized the first street contest in San Diego. That was the first street contest ever. The series' most famous single stop came September 2, 1989, at the Brooklyn Banks in New York City — a spontaneous, packed street jam in one of BMX's most photographed spots. Meet the Street kept running for years after, including a 1990 stop in Palm Springs and a 25th-anniversary edition on Treasure Island, San Francisco, in October 2008.

2-Hip becomes a brand

In 1989 Wilkerson left Haro and started his own bike company, first named Wilkerson Airlines. The name changed to 2-Hip Bikes in 1994, and the company built complete bikes and frames over the years — the Riot, the Pork frame, the Sub, the Terra Firma among them — while sponsoring a rider team continuously from the late 1980s into the 2010s. Alongside King of Vert and Meet the Street, 2-Hip promoted a third contest series, King of Dirt, starting in November 1988, and ran an annual 2-Hip Summer Tour of bike shop demo shows for over seventeen straight years. The company moved from San Francisco to Santa Cruz, California, in October 2001.

AFA and 2-Hip — the two poles of late-1980s freestyle

The two organizations ran side by side through the back half of the 1980s, built on opposite instincts — the AFA formal and sanctioned, 2-Hip loose and rider-run — and 2-Hip outlasted it. When the AFA folded in 1990, King of Vert and Meet the Street were still standing, carrying vert and street competition into the next decade under Wilkerson's own name.

What we don't know

The exact first King of Vert contest is genuinely contested between two dates in Wilkerson's own camp — December 1985 at his house, or November 1986 in Minnesota — and we haven't resolved it here. A complete year-by-year champions list beyond 1987-1990 hasn't turned up in what we could find; the series appears to fade as a named event in the early-to-mid 1990s while 2-Hip's other contests, King of Dirt and Meet the Street, kept going.

Related Legend Bike Co. chapters

Ron Wilkerson · Brian Blyther · Mat Hoffman · Dennis McCoy · Mike Dominguez · Hoffman Bikes · Haro · GT Bicycles · AFA — American Freestyle Association

The History of BMX (1970-1995)

Sources

23mag.com's 2-Hip company history and contest-by-contest results archive, citing BMX Plus! (May 1992), Ride BMX US (February 1996), BXM (February 1989), and Mat Hoffman's memoir, The Ride of My Life (2002). USA BMX Hall of Fame, Class of 2013 induction writeup for Ron Wilkerson. Wikipedia, "Mat Hoffman." Block Bikes Blog and Freestyle BMX Tales, firsthand cameraman accounts of the first Meet the Street and Hoffman's first 900. Legend Bike Co.'s own Brian Blyther, Ron Wilkerson, and Haro chapters, cross-referenced for consistency. oldschoolmags.com and bmxsociety.com were checked for independent coverage; neither returned material beyond what's cited above at the time of research.