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| Mat Hoffman - Unbreakable |
The Lounge Feature |
Mat Hoffman Interview
Words by Chris Mitchell
Nobody has put more of himself into the sport of BMX. Literally. He lost his spleen setting a world record, picked up a synthetic ligament in a surgery that didn’t have the benefit of anesthetics, and it has been roughly assessed that he has dumped two human bodies worth of blood onto various ramps over the course of his wildly successful career.
It’s not just my opinion: Mat Hoffman is the toughest athlete in action sports.
Mat Hoffman is waxing philosophical. I don’t know what I expected when I finally reached him in his Oklahoma home: brain damage maybe, or the affected insouciance that characterises most interviews with action sports stars. But Mat is no ordinary bike rider. His mind, the same mind that invented over a hundred trick variations on a BMX bike, is sharper than ever.
Hoffman grew up riding bikes in a world that had never heard of foam pits. If he wanted to learn a trick, he had to do it the old-fashioned way, trying and slamming and retrying until the scabs healed and the trick worked. He calls this lifestyle ‘the battle of the bicycle gladiators’.
‘You’d have to think to yourself, this is what I’m going to do. I want to spin two and a half times around or do a back flip, then you’d have to take steps that included four to five months recovery time and a hospital visit and five stitches and a broken bone. You just had to put your life on the line and learn from your mistakes. And hopefully you could get back up, but you had to know there was a big possibility you wouldn’t be getting up. There’s a mindset you need to be in the front of the progression of the sport, and I wouldn’t give anything to not be a part of that.’[sic]
Mat has spent his whole life trying to break free of gravity. He started skydiving when he was 16, and quickly graduated to BASE jumping. ‘BASE jumping,’ he says, ‘is a total commitment. There’s no room for error, you know. You don’t get a second try if you mess up.’
He traveled around the world doing jumps, and it wasn’t long before he found himself riding his bike off the side of a 3500 foot high Norwegian cliff. ‘If I do something, I have to one-up it the next time. So I started thinking, ‘OK now what can I do bigger’?’ This quest led him to pick up power-paragliding, which requires a motorised propeller pack and a parachute. It’s infinitely safer than most of Mat’s other adrenaline habits, but it still gives him the feeling of flying.
You’ve heard the legends: Mat Hoffman won the 1995 X Games with three broken bones in his foot. For years, he had to wear a shoulder sling to keep his arm attached to his body. He once built a cast on his handlebar and duct taped his arm into it, so he could ride a contest with a broken wrist. In 2002, at the age of 30, he made X Games history by pulling a no-handed 900, a trick that hasn’t been duplicated to this day.
Let’s take a look at some of Mat’s early milestones.
Mat Hoffman entered the freestyle BMX circuit as an amateur at the age of 13. He quickly rose to the top and, by the time he was 16, he had become the youngest pro the sport had ever produced. Ride magazine wrote, ‘What’s left to say about a guy who ignored all established limits and redefined vert riding – at age 15?’
But Mat wasn’t ready to rest on his laurels just yet. In 1989, he left his primary sponsor and started his own promotion company, Hoffman Promotions. He designed and built a portable vert ramp and bought a Peterbilt semi to pull it. By then, he had assembled a team of the best bike riders in America, and this Sprocket Jockey Bicycle Stunt Team hit the road. The goal was to form a grassroots movement to introduce freestyle to a broader audience, and it worked. The Sprocket Jockeys toured malls and festivals in the US and Canada, spreading the freestyle virus like an epidemic.
Hoffman was pushing the limits of bike riding, and there wasn’t a frame in the world that could withstand his punishment; he was going through bikes by the dozens. He needed a bike that could stand up to the rigorous pounding required in freestyle riding and realised that he wasn’t the only one. And so, just one year after starting the Sprocket Jockeys, Hoffman began building his own line of bikes, aptly named Hoffman Bikes.
The year after that, Mat expanded his empire further by developing the Bicycle Stunt (BS) Series. For the first time, freestyle riders had a place to compete and showcase their talents. The enormous success of the BS Series inevitably attracted the attention of ESPN, which asked him to preside over the highly coveted X Games and all international X Games bicycle stunt events.
In the years that followed, Mat continued to push himself to new heights of adrenaline, even as he was living out his dreams. In the late 90s, he had the opportunity to meet one of his all-time heroes, Evel Knievel.
‘I was doing a TV show called ‘Kids in the Way’ and I put together an interview with him. That relationship built into doing a signature bike, and then we just started talking, and realised that we see the world pretty similar, you know. All of a sudden, he would be calling me at 2 in the morning about some random crash he had on his motorcycle. I was like a link to his past.’
In 1992, Mat built a 21-foot quarterpipe and set a high air record of 20 feet above the top of the deck. The following year, he adapted a weedeater motor to his bike and took it off a 40-foot roll in. He cleared his previous record, but crashed hard, losing his spleen in the process. In 1994, a year after his near-death experience, he returned to the beast, and set a new record of 23 feet.
For Hoffman 2002 was a banner year. He partnered with Activision to produce Mat Hoffman's Pro BMX video game in conjunction with the release of Mat Hoffman's Pro BMX2 Tour TV show. He released his autobiography The Ride of My Life through Regan/Harper Collins Publishers and stunned the industry and fans alike by successfully completing the first-ever no-handed 900 at the 2002 X Games. At ESPN’s end of the year award ceremony, he accepted their Lifetime Achievement Award, ‘I feel like I'm just getting started,’ he said on stage. ‘Here's to tomorrow.’
As you might imagine, Mat Hoffman is virtually uninsurable. ‘My insurance company called me up one day and they said, “Let me get this right: you tore your ACL on Wednesday, then you got stitches in your eye on Saturday, broke your arm the following Wednesday. Is this all the same person?” I said, yeah, it’s been a rough month, you know.’
To keep some form of coverage for himself and his family, he dabbles in enough Hollywood projects to keep his Screen Actor’s Guild insurance program. Recently, he appeared in Keep Your Eyes Open, produced by Tamra Davis and starring Spike Jonze. He also worked on the IMAX film Ultimate X, the Rob Cohen film, XXX, starring Vin Diesel and he just finished shooting with wild boys Johnny Knoxville and Steve O for Jackass 2.
The irrepressible Mat Hoffman shows no signs of slowing. In 2005, he was elected President of the International BMX Freestyle Federation, the international governing body of BMX Freestyle. The goal of this organisation is to provide cohesion and self-reliance in case the Olympic Committee ever gets around to inviting Bicycle Stunt to participate in an upcoming Summer Games.
Mat is proud of his history and his role in the sport. Hard knocks, in his opinion, are a learning ground. ‘If you want to experience great success and pleasure,’ he says, once again philosophical, ‘you have to be willing to step in the ring and take all the pain and failure that goes with it’.
And what of his future? At 34 years of age, he has had over 19 surgeries. Surely, he can’t keep up his daredevil lifestyle.
‘I think of Evel Knievel,’ says Mat. ‘He’s the deepest root of where our culture is today. He sparked these ideas about not accepting the boundaries of life until you challenge them. I like to talk to him and see how he feels, and what it’s like to grow old with that kind of mind.’
‘Unfortunately, that kind of mind isn’t content with growing old on the porch. You’re always trying to push and challenge your mind and body. I still dream the same. I still think, why aren’t people doing nothings to late bar spins? I wish I could take a couple big slams and learn that trick. Maybe medical science will catch up to me and I’ll be able to transplant my brain into a new body.’
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Tags: The Lounge, Sport
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