"The Last 2 Spots" Contest

Finalist #1 - Shawn Malloy & Matthew Bajdek

"My riding buddy Matt has caused me to laugh so hard that I have literally fallen off my bike - several times. Matt and I have been riding together since the 5th grade. That would be 22 years. We graduated from BMX, to fully rigid mountain bikes, to fully suspended mountain bikes together throughout the years. We even dabbled in road riding together for a while.

The laughs that I spoke of earlier have been spread out throughout the years, but were most concentrated in the late stage BMX years during the first freestyle craze. Matt rode a Haro Master and I rode a Haro Freestyler (fluorescent green). Matt was a tinkerer. Everything he owned he absolutely had to tinker with. Most things he broke in the process and then would have to "Matt" them back into working condition - usually with some combination of duct tape and a dab of crazy glue.

It was his incessant tinkering that led to many of his crashes that led to me crashing from laughing so hard. There are too many, even with a 500 word minimum, to list here but I will describe the ones that still play in my head as clearly as if it were on the big screen.

The first two happened in the same day, and one led to the other. What I do not remember is the preceding events but I could almost guarantee that he had been tinkering with his bike earlier in the day. We were out riding around the neighborhood with a group of riding buddies, all of us around 11 to 13 years old. Matt has always been a little better rider than most and was the best wheelier of the group at the time. While out riding between friends houses, Matt had to stop and "fix" his front brake. For some reason he pulled off the front wheel to do so. After several minutes of fixing while the rest of us circled him like a wagon train doing tricks and hitting jumps, Matt was ready to go again. A few minutes into the resumed ride Matt popped one of his famous wheelies with an unfamiliar result: his front wheel fell off at the apex of the wheelie and caused immediate hysterics from the group - before Matt's eventual crash. When Matt finally hit the tar, several of us were already there having crashed from absolute hysteria. I am giggling as I write this and I can still clearly remember how bad my stomach hurt from laughing to this day.

Several minutes and one more "fix" later, we were back on our way to nowhere, hitting any jump in our way and doing tricks when we paused. It must have been a couple of hours later because we were on our way to Matt's parents' house to check in. Matt had to check in every day at five. I guess his parents knew as we all did, that he was very likely to seriously injure himself throughout the course of the day.

Well, on the way down his parents' street, not 10 houses from stopping at his parents' house (a point's importance that will become clearer in a minute), Matt recognized that his forks were not aligned properly (probably due to the earlier wheelie incident). Rather than wait until we reached the safety of his parents' driveway he decided to make an in-flight adjustment. He placed his foot solidly on his mid-fork fork peg and began to try to twist the forks back into place while riding. One of his thrusts dislodged his foot from the peg and lodged it squarely in between one of the five gaping holes of his TuffWheels mags and sent him ass over tea kettle so quickly that I nearly missed it...but I didn't. I still can't believe how quickly he was thrown to the ground and I don't think he could either.

His second crash of the day caused my second crash of the day. My gut, still hurt from the earlier laugh riot, was now beginning to cramp up.

The last of the major BMX era crashes was done in grand fashion. This one occurred in front of his largest audience to date. There is a local little league baseball park in our neighborhood that was always packed all summer long with kids playing baseball and parents and siblings cheering them on. On one of our typical days of going nowhere on our bikes we decided to ride by the ball field and see what was going on. This ball field is at the bottom of several hills; some paved, some grass. Well, we knew as everyone else did that you can go much faster on pavement than on grass! We all went into full sprint mode to get as much speed as we could heading down the (poorly) paved hill to the ball field.

To this day none of us truly know how it happened; only that it did. One second Matt and I are shoulder to shoulder, pedaling as fast as we could. The next second I see Matt upside down next to me. Then right side up. Then upside down. Then right side up. In all, Matt flipped three times in the air before ending with a whole heck of a lot of rolling on the ground before coming to a halt to the great gasp of the baseball crowd.

This story was legendary because a large part of the ball field congregation saw the flying Mattismo and promptly came running to see the dead pre-adolescent. His pride peeled him off the ground, bleeding from every bend on his body, picked up his mangled bike and we all walked home trying not to laugh (unsuccessfully).

Aside from the obvious enjoyment I have gained from riding with Matt throughout the years it has also been a bond that has tied our lives together. We have grown apart in other areas of life but biking has never changed for us even though the bikes have. Distance, jobs, and family have made us men. But we immediately revert into pre-teens when we are on our bikes together. We ride wherever the trail takes us. We don't worry about curfew, we don't worry about heart rates, we don't worry about much of anything except what is in front of us. We are free, and we have two wheels and a bunch of metal to thank for that.

Thank you for taking the time to stroll through my past with me. This was a very fun exercise and I am glad I finally put these memories on paper. At some point they would have begun to fade, so thank you for driving me to do it!"

Shawn Malloy