News From Osiris

Nyquist won the Dew Cup in dirt. You already knew that. Photos are courtesy of Haro Bikes.

Dew cup, huh?
Yeah, pretty crazy!

How stoked are you?
I’m a very, very happy man. Winning the dirt overall once was insane, but to do it twice is more than I could have asked for.

Did you do anything big to celebrate?
Ummmm, not really. Hahahaha! The family and I went to Greenville afterward to hang out with all of our old friends. We had a great dinner. Pretty tame celebration, I guess.

What were the high and low points of the season for you?
High was probably winning dirt in Salt Lake City. It always feels good to be able to pull off a win when you’re in a do or die situation. My low was probably the way I rode on dirt in Orlando. I was really hoping to ride well there and really clinch the title. Instead I barely made it happen and was stressing the whole contest.

So does the Dew Cup go on display in your house or in a box in the garage?
Not sure. Right now it’s probably gonna get put on a shelf somewhere. I’m not super into displaying trophies around the house, but my wife really wants me to. She says it’s cool to have stuff like that on display for people to look at. So, I guess it’s still undecided… haha!

I think we all saw your dirt victory coming, but you came out of nowhere and shut down the park contest in Florida. What happened there?
Yeah, park was amazing! I couldn’t have been happier with the way it all ended up. Perfect way to end the weekend and year.

What sort of an effect do you feel that your shoes had on your success?
Without sounding too cheesy, having comfortable shoes that are grippy and look good is great. Fashion and function. I’ve had some shoes in the past that didn’t have a good sole on them and it actually made me slip a pedal at the X-Games. I’m really happy with my shoes… South Bronx!

Now that the Dew Tour season is over, what’s next for you?
Chillin’! Chillin’ hard. I just want to relax and be at home doing home things. Still gotta ride, but I’m giving myself a little break.

Any thanks?
Well, thanks to Osiris first off for believing in me as a rider and as a person. Thanks to Haro, Rockstar, Ogio, Bell Helmets, SST, and the Jiffy Mark of Los Gatos. Also, a big thanks to my family.

Final question… can I borrow $75,000?
I wish it was $75,000… turns out they dropped it to $60,000! Hahahaha! Hard economic times for sure.

Tony Mag and Allysha Bergado ventured up north to the great skatepark of Lake Cunningham in San Jose, California. This was the site for the 11th annual Tim Brauch Memorial contest. Neither the veteran T-Mag nor the upstart protégé AB had skated the park before, so it was a tall task to show up the day before the contest and figure out lines and dial tricks in a pool that also had 30 other skaters doing the same thing. On top of that, it was also close to 100 degrees in San José over the weekend. AB wasn’t as affected by the heat as the old dog T-Mag, who only skated a couple of hours on Saturday.

Because the girls contest practice started real early on Sunday morning, T-Mag and AB showed up at the park at 8.30, which turned out to be a good call, since it wasn’t very hot then and not really crowded either. T-Mag was slow to get ready so by the time he was skating, the session was already fired up with girls, masters and pro’s, all trying to do their thing in the famous keyhole pool with a setback shallow end.

The girls were up first at 10.30 or so and Allysha had really put together her stuff well and ended doing 3 ft. backside and frontside airs on the face wall, super clean inverts and even threw in a switch stance air at the end, one of T-Mag old claims to fame in the early 80’s. While there was plenty of female talent, it looked like AB might end up on top, but she ended with second place, just barely bested by X Games champ Lyn-Z Adams, who took the top honors, with Priscilla Lee taking third.

Then it was time for the grandmasters pre qualifications, which consisted of Steve Caballero, who is a long time San Jose local, Christian Hosoi, who won the event last year, Tony Mag, Lord Salba, Master Of Disaster Duane Peters, Josh Nelson, Mark Partian and about 20 other local rippers, who all knew the bowl well. Christian didn’t have to qualify for the final, there was only five spots for the rest of the field, so competition was fierce. To T-Mag’s surprise, he qualified second, after Cabbie, along with Salba, Partain and Nelson.

Unfortunately, during practice, Duane managed to take a slam so hard, that he dislocated his left leg out of the hip socket and had to be carted off on an emergency stretcher.

Later in the afternoon, after 8 heats of pro qualifications, it was time for the grand master final. The heat had died down a bit, enough to keep everyone pumped. The final was every bit as exciting as you might imagine, with Cabbie taking long, strong and well put together runs, showing his mastery of pool skating, while having the advantage of being the local. Christian is about as exciting as he ever was, also taking great looking runs, with plenty of Hosoi patented aerial maneuvers. T-Mag also put together some great runs, with plenty of aerial attacks, frontside inverts, ollies and what not. In the end T-Mag banged out a crystal clean rodeo on the face wall amongst loud screams and cheers and Hosoi did a couple of face high backside airs to end the whole thing. The pool has a couple of hips that required some time to dial in to be usable for competition runs and T-Mag was a bit short on unique lines and using the hips so in the end it was Cab on top, followed by Hosoi and T-Mag taking third.

A strange thing happened right after the grand master final, as the pro’s warmed up for their final; more than half crowd left. While there weren’t top pro names present, there were a slew of really amazing riders certainly worth watching in what turned out to be a super exciting final. Later, someone said that happened last year too, that most people came for the grandmaster event. That made some sense, since I saw T-Mag constantly get stopped by people that wanted to talk to him about old school skating, Osiris, H-Street, history, his skating, places they saw him skate in the past and on and on. I was quite refreshing to see a So Cal rider get so much support from a Nor Cal crew and I know that T-Mag was super stoked on that, as well as having placed well in the event, though he was probably even more stoked to see AB come so close to winning.

Bali is bagus. If you don’t already know, bagus is Balinese for “good” and its one of the first words I learned there. Some other cool words I learned on my adventure were “teramakasi,” which means “thank you,” and “chelat langkong,” which means, “crooked penis.” By the way it’s pronounced bag-ooose, not bag-us, like some Irish food or something. Anyways, if you think learning weird phrases is kinda strange then you have never been to Bali.

Bali is the only island in Indonesia that is populated mostly by Hindu’s. Muslims overwhelmingly populate the rest of Indonesia. That is probably the main reason why Bali in particular is so cool and weird. Instead of having one main God or even a couple for that matter, the Hindu’s believe in something like three hundred different gods. They are very good stone carvers so they build all these gigantic statues for their three hundred gods all over the island. It’s a bit intimidating at first when you step off the plane and there are five different giant half-dragon half-man statues that all have different weapons surrounding you. If that isn’t a bit unsettling then the giant yellow “Death to Drug Traffickers” sign at customs will definitely get your palms sweating. Hindus DO NOT like drugs, except for magic mushrooms, which you can buy at almost any restaurant or bar over there. Weird, right? Some other weird facts about the culture there is that they believe in ghosts, file their teeth flat, think monkeys are gods, and when someone in their village dies they carry that persons body in a coffin down to the beach and light it on fire. So now that you kinda understand how strange this place is, we can begin our tale.

The first couple days in this crazy place were awesome. My companions on this journey were my friend Kai, filmer Scott, photographer and professional sleeper Damea, and Bali legend Tai. The waves were good so we got to surf our little hearts out and it was sick. We were staying in a really cool villa that had our own private pool, so the setup was epic. We would surf then come back and have a pool party and bbq. It was amazing. We met up with all sorts of different travelers from all over the world who would come to our pool parties and that was really cool too. We were determined to do as much crazy stuff as possible that you could only do in Bali during our trip. After much intense research we nailed it down to a few choice activities. Those activities were: drinking snake blood, attending a cockfight, and riding off a bungee tower strapped to a motorbike. So now we had our to-do list and we were locked and loaded.

 

Snake’s blood is disgusting. I don’t recommend anyone ever drink that crap, ever! We went to a place called “Kobra Palace” that specialized in snake blood and bile cocktails. The first thing you see when you walk in is a bunch of purses and belts made out of snakes. Kinda cool till you realize those are all snakes that people drank the blood out of. Then they give you a menu and take you to the back room where all the snakes are. A guy wearing no protection gear comes out and starts pulling king cobras out of a box like they are baby kittens or something. Then you pick out what kind of cocktail you want. We went for a combination of three: cobra, python, and something they called “aggressive snake.” So then the guy just picks up the snakes and lops their heads off with a knife. Then he starts draining the blood in to a bowl. By this point we are all thinking about leaving and barfing at the same time. So they take us out to an area with tables and chairs and what not and then pull out some weird organ that was in the snake and drain it into the bowl as well. Right on. Then they put a shot of vodka in just for good measure. I ask for a chaser and they laugh at me. So then we did it. We drank snake’s blood, mixed with vodka. It was every bit as disgusting as you would imagine it and I will never do it again, ever. Mission accomplished.

The next item on our list is the cockfight. Now let me just say I don’t endorse this crap at all and it’s not something I believe in or approve of. Cockfighting in Indonesia is like a national sport. Going to a cockfight there is literally the equivalent of going to a baseball game here at home. There are special stadiums for it and they are EVERYWHERE. For those of you who don’t know a cockfight is a fight between two roosters, not two naked guys. So we talk to a local cockfighter and he tells us that not only can we watch and bet but he will sell us a rooster. So we figured hey “when in Rome” right? Right. We get our rooster and we go to the arena. There is a bunch of local Bali dudes there and they are very excited that we are going to cockfight. So they tie a four-inch blade on to our rooster’s foot and do the same with the opponent. Gnarly. Then they put them on the ground and let them peck at one another to get them pissed off. They were already pretty pissed so I didn’t see the point of that. All the sudden they let go of the roosters and they start jumping all over each other. I can’t tell what was happening but there was a lot of wing flapping going on. Anyways all the sudden they back away from each other and ours falls down, dead as a doornail. All the Bali dudes were laughing at us but I was just bummed for our rooster. He was cool for the twenty minutes that I knew him. I asked what they were gonna do with him and they told me that the guy who owned the other rooster was gonna take him home and bbq him. So that’s good that they use them for food. It was gnarly to see that happen and I’m glad they ate our rooster after the fact but I think I’m retiring from cockfighting permanently.

The last item on the list is by far the scariest for me because I’m the only one doing it. At one of the nightclubs in Bali there is a 250-foot high bungee tower. This is the only bungee tower in the world that you can ride a motorbike off of. I had to do it. We showed up on the last day of our trip and I walked up to the counter and told them that I’d like to ride a motorbike off the tower. They then proceeded to tell me that in order to do that, I have to first do three different types of bungee jumps to get to that point…crud. I had to do it though! It’s the only one in the world you could do that at! I quickly drank a bintang and said “ok lady I’ll do it”. The first one was the standard jump with the bungee strapped to my ankles. I got up to the top of the bungee tower and nearly shit my pants. The people below looked like ants! They tied my ankles up and then told me to do a swan dive, I don’t even think I said anything back I probably just made some weird noise. I got to the ledge and they counted down and I jumped and the only thing I could think to do was yell ffffffuuuuuuuuuccccccccccccckkkkkkkkkkk! The whole way down. I don’t know why. Once the bungee kicked in and was on my way back up I was giggling like a little girl. One down, three to go. The next was the harness jump. That is where you are strapped to your stomach and you can do flips. I already felt like a pro from the adrenaline rush so I went for it. I did a triple front flip and then got even more of a rush off that. Now it got weird. The next jump was the bicycle jump. In this one you are strapped to a bicycle and you ride it straight off the edge. The hard part was that you have to actually pedal yourself off the edge. It’s a narrow runway and you can’t be crashing in to stuff. My problem was that every pedal I took my knees were buckling as if my body was saying, “don’t do this dumbass!” So I rode off the edge a bit weird and leaning foreword too much and ended up doing a front flip on the bike! I’m pretty sure I yelled some more obscenities on the way down that time as well. So now it was the big one, the motorbike. After my bicycle episode I felt invincible so I was stoked to be doing this. I pounded a beer and got on the elevator up to the top with the motorbike. Once I got up I saw that not only do you get to ride this thing off the edge, they even set up a launch ramp for you! Sicky! I got strapped in and the guy told me to hold the throttle all the way down and hold the brake at the same time. So I did. He gave me the go ahead and I let go of that brake and flew off that tower like a rabid spider monkey! It was epic. It was like when you stand on the edge of some super high cliff and think, “what if I rode my bike or drove my car off this?” Well I did, and it was awesome! I think everyone should ride a motorbike off a bungee tower at least once in his or her lives. It’s just as fun as you imagine it.

 

So that was it. We accomplished all our goals. We even managed to spear a few fish in between these epic tales you just read. This was the best trip I’ve ever taken to Bali and I can’t wait to go back next year. By that time we will have a whole new checklist and I already know that eating monkey brains is on it! My comrade Scott will be making videos of our escapades you just read about so I will post them as they come out. Stay tuned for more of my epic tales from around the globe!! Chelat langkong!!!!

C-Mags

The Ambiguous team took a Northern California trip through Sacramento, San Fransisco, and Bakersfield. Check out the new online zine

If you missed the videos, you can see them here: Part 1 and Part 2.

Woodward Skate Park has been redesigning some of the parks obstacles this week! New stuff to skate! It’s going to be good!