The Ride of My Life (32 page)

April 1988. With a leg full of hardware, I followed the doctor’s orders and waited patiently before I started riding again. Finally it healed, and I went to Kansas City to ride with Dennis and Rick. We celebrated with an all-night street session. I was careful not to thrash my leg too hard. The next day I woke up and my knee was swollen, supersized. It wouldn’t move, either. I went home and got an MRI. The internal images revealed that I’d totally ripped both my medial and lateral meniscus in half when I’d broken my leg. The meniscus is a shock-absorbing
cartilage in the middle of your knee. When Dr. Yates had put the plate in, he’d never thought to check it for other damage, and I had no idea my knee was jacked. My street session with the Kansas City BMX Brigade had aggravated the meniscus more and more until it was wrecked. Dr. Yates sewed it back together from the inside. Arthoscopic meniscus repair is considered a less invasive surgical procedure than using the knife. Dr. Yates drilled pencil-sized holes and slid all the tools inside my knee, doing the operation using a tiny video camera. Tech.

December 1990. I don’t know how it happened, but a tumor grew in my right leg. I was diagnosed with Cat Scratch Fever, a shocking prognosis. My entire life, I thought Cat Scratch Fever was a just a cheesy fictitious disease, invented by the Motor City Madman, Ted Nugent. But it was real and residing in my groin. The viral infection caused a growth to form under my skin. It was about the size and shape of a bar of soap, and it hurt to do can-cans. I had to get the lump removed, and this was right after my mom had died of cancer, so I was sweating it. The growth turned out to be benign. The day after the surgery I went to Austin with Spike Jonze for a road trip. I had to ride with a drainage tube sticking out of my leg, leaking excess pus. I came up with a few tube variations on vert.

January 1991. I hadn’t done a one-footed 540 in weeks, when I tried spinning one. I held back a little and did it low. I crashed and landed with my right arm fully extended to break my fall. The impact ripped my rotator cuff, the group of four muscles that lay over your shoulder socket, which keep your arm in place and help it rotate. Mine was wrecked.

The irony was I’d hurt myself because I was holding back, to avoid hurting myself. My whole arm stung with electrified hellfire, but it stayed in its socket and didn’t feel like I’d broken anything. The day after the slam, I was scheduled to do some demos in Australia with Mark “Gator” Anthony, Brian Blyther, and Chris Miller. My shoulder ached superbad, but I iced it every night. From Australia I flew directly to the KOV contest at Thrasherland in Arizona. During the pro finals, I got a flat at the end of my second run. I borrowed the nearest bike I could find and dropped in. I had to literally hold on and hoped it responded to what I wanted it to do, which was a flip fakie. I almost pulled it, but the bike felt alien, and the seatpost was so low I had to stand up on the roll back. I bit off a little more than I could chew and paid for it with another slam. My rotator cuff tore some more. But I won the comp and the 1990 Pro of the Year title.

I got home from the Arizona contest and had to get the hardware [ten screws and a plate) removed from my leg because the bone had grown over it. I was still growing and it was going to affect the growth of my leg, so they had to go back in and chisel it out. The upside was, I would only have to take about a week or two off before I could ride again. I asked Dr. Yates if he could take a look at my shoulder during the operation
because it had been aching. I woke up with a big puffy incision on my right arm and a shoulder immobilizer on it. Dr. Yates came in and said I had immensely torn my rotator cuff, and I was looking at a four-month recovery. Shit! I didn’t expect that.

That one-footed 540 injury made me realize my pain tolerance was getting pretty strong, and even if I could handle the pain, it didn’t mean something wasn’t seriously wrong. It was also the gateway to serious rotator cuff problems, which plague me to this day. Every time I put my arm out when I slam, it tears my rotator cuff. All because I held back on that trick.

The incident convinced me to never try anything half-assed again.

October 1992. During the summer I took a bad slam on my elbow. I never got it checked and didn’t know I’d chipped off part of the bone. The bone spur healed in the joint, and before long I couldn’t bend my elbow enough to brush my teeth, brush my hair, or shave. I’m right-handed and had to learn all those tasks using my left arm. It sounds simple, but it’s not. That was my mentality at the time—I’d modify my life around injuries, as long as it didn’t interfere with my riding. I was getting accustomed to my unbendable elbow by the time I went to the Rider Cup in England, in October. A good day of riding came to a halt when I hung up doing a flair. I stiff-armed into the flatbottom with my right arm extended and hit my head on the top of my arm so hard I knocked myself out, ripping my rotator cuff again and worse. The slam put me in so much pain so fast that I knew I’d done something very bad to my body. It was a long, sore flight home. When I got back to the United States I immediately went to Dr. Yates for surgery. I asked him to check out my elbow while he was in my shoulder—two birds, one stone. I woke up with an immobilized elbow that hurt worst than my shoulder. It was a tough surgery. In the video of the arthroscopic portion of the surgery, a bunch of tools are stuck deep into my arm and Dr. Yates says, “I’ll be filleting your elbow now.” I didn’t expect it, but it took a lot of therapy and time before my elbow would bend again.

It works fine now, and I’m back to shaving right-handed.

April 1993. I talked about this earlier. The thing I’ve noticed about life after spleen is I catch colds quicker and have to take more antibiotics to fight the infections. Every time I sneeze, I have bike riding to thank
.

August 1993. There’s nothing like the feel of having stiff wood rammed into your ass. I’m talking, of course, about splinters. I was having a mellow session on the Ninja Ramp and the plywood surface was in tatters. I didn’t really think too much about it. I started working on a few new tricks and crashed, sliding sideways down the tranny. On the way down, a piece of plywood peeled up and was driven through the right side of my butt. I got to the bottom and jumped up like my pants were on fire—a quick inspection revealed a wedge-shaped splinter with a tip thicker than a toothbrush. It had pierced my right cheek on one side, and come out the other. Deep. It was one of those laughing on the outside, crying on the inside moments. I got out a pair of vise grips, clamped onto the wood near the entry wound, took a deep breath, and pulled. It broke off inside. The tip was sticking out on the other side, so I pressed my luck and tried to pull the fat end through the exit hole. I broke off that end, too. By that time, the acute pain had subsided. I went back to riding.

We were holding a contest at the Hoffman Bikes compound in less than two weeks, and there was a lot of work to do fixing up the street park course. The day after my splinter, I was outside pounding nails with Steve, team manager Kim Boyle, and Jamie Mosberg, a cinematographer Airwalk had hired to shoot a promo with me riding my twenty-one-foot quarterpipe. Somehow, the subject of who had the hairiest ass came up. Jamie, whose nickname is Mouse, claimed he did and threw down the challenge. I started laughing that the first contest on the new Hoffman Bikes park was going to be a hairy ass contest. I dropped my pants and heard gasps. Mouse technically won, as we discovered his ass is carpeted in brown fur. But my bruised and inflamed splinter tipped the scales in my favor, and I was declared the champion. I hadn’t told anyone about my splinter, and after the laughter died down, Steve and Kim began to get concerned. I was forced to go to the hospital and have it surgically removed. Mouse brought his camera and documented it and said he’d edit it to General Hospital music. The next day we shot the Airwalk promo, and I couldn’t sit down.

September 1993. We were holding a Bicycle Stunt comp at the Hoffman Bikes park over Labor Day weekend. My rotator cuff had been torn for a while, and I was scheduled to get surgery on it the Thursday before the comp. I told Dr. Yates we’d need to postpone the surgery so I could ride the contest. I was also intent on riding the twenty-one-foot quarterpipe, for the skeptics in attendance. I did a few airs more than twenty feet high, and on my last aerial my arm gave up the ghost. I totally ripped my rotator cuff off the humerus head. That is a very bad thing. Dr. Yates had his work cut out for him. His surgical notes start with a right shoulder diagnostic arthroscopy, followed by open repair of massive rotator cuff avulsion with bicipital tenodesis and subscapularis tendon. Translation? Yates told me my rotator cuff muscles were like a thin piece of fatiguing metal. They could snap anytime, and I didn’t have
any control over it with my arm raised above my head. I could literally rip my arm off if I crashed bad enough. From that day forward, I had to use a shoulder brace with a string attaching the underside of my arm to my ribs, to keep my arm from extending too far up. I lost all movement and strength in my shoulder. After not having a haircut for six years, I shaved my head because I couldn’t raise my arm high enough to brush the dreads out. My arm even dislocates in bed sometimes, and it won’t go back in. Once I rolled over and my arm fell out of the socket. I had Jaci trying to yank it back in, but no go. Finally I had to call Steve at about 6:30 in the morning to help me get it back in. That’s the sign of a true friend.

Despite the best medical treatment I could find, my arm has never healed.

July 1995. My meniscus tore in half again over the course of many slams. In the 1990s, street riding was the fastest-growing facet of bike riding, and there were many opportunities to see where the limits could be pushed even further. Riding was getting progressively more technical, and really burly. It sucked me in and I found myself riding more street and less vert. Street riding can be like therapy. I’d throw a Suicidal Tendencies tape in the Walkman and set out to unveil what the street had to offer. After a good session I’d come back relaxed and cured. It wasn’t uncommon for people to jump off buildings, or if you messed up on a handrail, to tumble down long flights of concrete stairs at full speed. Whenever you crash riding street, your knees usually suffer the most because you try to abandon the bike and run out of the crash. During this era I tore my meniscus, my PCL, and a bunch of other cartilage in my knee. Sometimes the flapping meniscus would get caught up in between my femur and tibia and lock up my knee. Dr. Yates did another arthroscopic surgery on my right knee and Roto-rootered it out. He had to remove my meniscus. I had no shock-absorbing cartilage in the middle of my knee. Yum.

March 1996. My shoulder injury put a limit on my riding. Dr. Yates said that there was nothing left to do; my shoulder was fucked. I think he was sick of spending hours putting it back together only to have me rip it right up again. Basically it had come to the point where I had to decide: If I chose to ride and challenge myself more, then I could lose my arm. I decided I wasn’t done yet.

Yates suggested I see what the Steadman-Hawkins Clinic could do for me. It was located in Vail, Colorado, and I scheduled a stay, right after my first B.A.S.E. jump in New Orleans. Dr. Hawkins was the shoulder specialist and Dr. Steadman, the knee guy. They are a world-renowned surgery group and the team doctors for the Denver Broncos, Colorado Rockies, and the U.S. Ski Team. I flew into Denver and took a bus to Vail. This was my first solo mission to try and find a procedure that would get my body working again. My plan was to get Dr. Steadman to check out my knee and fix my PCL, which I’d torn a couple years earlier. At the same time I was there to have Dr. Hawkins double up
the surgeries, with a rotator cuff overhaul. That way I could stack the recovery times together and be out for the least amount of time. However, after I arrived I found out the knee would take too long to recuperate, and I was scheduled to do the closing ceremonies of the Olympics. I decided to just get my shoulder fixed. I could still ride without a PCL, and live without one. During the surgery on my rotator cuff, I got a nerve block that made my arm completely numb. It was freaky to get a preview of what it would be like to totally lose arm function.

The surgery went well, and after it healed, my shoulder stayed in its socket better. But Dr. Hawkins didn’t have much faith that it would perform well enough to withstand the rigors of riding.

When I wrecked my ACL and PCL at the Shultz Show in June of 1998, I knew what had happened held grave consequences for my riding. ACLs can probably be repaired a hundred times and still get decent results—their job is to keep your tibia and fibula from sliding up your femur and dislocating. PCLs are much harder to repair and can only be fixed two or three times before they’re toast. I’d just wrecked both the ACL and PCL in one shot. I would have little to no chance of ever riding like I wanted to again and was looking at a lot of months of pain just to recover. I was twenty-six years old and had planned on building myself a twenty-six-foot ramp for a belated twenty-sixth birthday. My life had just completely changed. Bike riding, as I knew it, was over, and I would have to accept it.

I went home and Dr. Yates scheduled me for an operation. I had to wait for a cadaver ligament to be “available.” Soon thereafter, I got the call that someone’s Achilles was packed in ice, on its way to meet me. The surgery was a real challenge. Since I’d torn both my ACL and PCL, there wasn’t any accurate way to ensure a tight, centered implementation of both ligaments. I wasn’t encouraged that the outcome would be successful. But I had a very skilled master surgeon on my side, and the winds of fortune blowing my way the day of the operation. It took months, but my knee healed nicely with even tension from both the front and back ligaments.