Yadum FMX! | Adam Jones Blog #2

Photo by Steve Densmore

MY FMX START

When I was a young kid I was helped into the FMX scene at 17 by one of the OG FMX legends. I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, so let’s see if you can guess who that was…any idea? Well for all of you who aren’t geographic experts for the FMX community, it was Mad Mike Jones. Mad helped me as a young motocross racer before FMX was his, or my thing. When I was 10 years old he gave me my first pointers for riding tracks and trying to get faster. Throughout the years my parents and he kept in contact, and every so often we would meet up for dinner. After a long stint of not seeing Mike we finally met up again, and I brought some pictures my 10th grade English teacher, Greg Geibel, took of me doing some “freestyle” off the biggest jump at our local track, Switchback MX. Mike was impressed enough at that dinner to make a phone call to the IFMA big wigs, and wouldn’t you know it I was set to jump in his van two days later with his mechanic Kibby to go out to California and prepare for my first professional FMX event. At this point, I had hit an FMX ramp once, and it was a very homemade ramp, to put it nicely…nothing like the ones the real pros were hitting. I remember showing up at this ramp and another guy was supposed to meet me there, but he didn’t show up. So here I am standing in front of this FMX ramp for the first time, just me and my dad, and I had no idea what this thing was going to be like. I remember thinking “I think the FMX guys hit the ramps in 2nd gear?”, that was all I had to go off of, so I said screw it and hit it medium in second gear. Haha. Luckily it worked out, so that was the extent of my ramp riding experience before my journey to start my professional career began.

Anyways here I was a 17-year-old senior in high school living a normal life when I find out that in two days not only am I leaving the state of Pennsylvania alone, but I’m driving all the way to California with an Australian guy I don’t know to embark on this journey. I think the only thing that helped me through the situation was my ignorance. I never looked at the situation as a whole. I didn’t imagine where I would be in a day, a week, or a month, I was just like, ”OK, I guess I’m going to California.” Had I thought about it any more than that maybe I would have gotten worried and ended up blowing the whole thing. I mean I was in no way prepared to go ride a professional FMX event…to be honest, I didn’t even know what a professional FMX event looked like! I had about 6 tricks in my bag that were mediocre for the time period, and full FMX runs in those days were roughly 12 tricks for a 90-second run. So the day comes to hit the road, my parents drive me to Mad Mikes’s house to drop me off, and Kibby and I take off for California. Man did I get a lesson in punk rock in those few days, and as far as I remember we never stopped. Just swapped out of the driver’s seat until we made it all the way to California. I was such a young dumb kid, with no connections at all out there. I was basically completely alone, but I didn’t care, I didn’t even think about it. Like I said before it was just my ignorance of not thinking about the whole picture. Day 1 of arrival we head to Pro Circuit so Kibby could get Mike’s bike ready. He spent the whole day working inside on Mike’s bike, and I spent the whole day wandering around outside in the parking lot and sitting in the van by myself….welcome to California, haha!

Day two was ride day. My parents bought me one of Mad’s old FMX bikes, a 2002 KX250. I didn’t touch the thing before riding it, no suspension work, no warm-up day on a track, we just showed up at the evolution freestyle park and unloaded. I went over and looked at the landing and it was freaking giant! I had never seen anything like it before. I was riding these tiny little ant hill landings back in PA, and this thing looked like I was jumping over a damn mountain! Once again, ignorant little Adam didn’t think about it, I just started the bike up, did a test run, and then just jumped the thing. When I look back now I realize just how much luck there has to be in the initial part of an FMX career. Had I cased the jump, or crashed that first day, that might have been a wrap on my FMX career, but instead, for whatever reason, everything went perfectly. I learned a few tricks that day alone, and then with one more practice day at Manny’s in SoCal, I was as dialed in as I was going to be and we headed to Salt Lake City with Mike and Kibby to do my first event. When we got to Salt Lake the guys from the IFMA offered Mike an opportunity to do morning media, and Mike knew I was pretty green to the whole thing definitely saw this as a great opportunity for me to get some course time and learn the ropes of the indoor FMX contest scene. Nowadays if you ask me to do a 6 am riding spot for a local TV channel at an event I am going to do everything in my power to get out of it, but at that time I was happy to do it. Well that big shit eater didn’t happen on the first day I rode a real FMX ramp….it happened on the 3rd. One of the new tricks I learned throughout the week was a double nac, so as I’m riding and warming up at the arena in salt lake at 6 am I throw a double nac a little bit too hard for my current skill set and don’t get back to the bike all the way. I remember hitting the ground and thinking, “Holy shit! I just hit the ground like a ton of bricks!”. You see, moto crashes are much different than FMX crashes I found out that morning. When you crash in moto you have a lot of forward momentum and do a lot more skimming when you hit. When you crash on an FMX ramp you go straight to the ground and quickly screech to a stop. yea…it freaking hurt. But once again that youth and ignorance just carried me through. I didn’t overthink it, I just got up, shook it off, and got back on the bike. Nowadays if I hit the ground I’m not going to ride for a week just out of general principle!

The first event was a hell of an experience. I qualified for the night show and ended up finishing sixth out of eight guys in the final (12 total at the event)…what an entrance! I didn’t know it then, but I had just started something that was going to give me direction and purpose for the next 20 years! Three events later I ended up compounding my tibia in Denver, but that will have to be a story for another day. I was hooked. I always knew I wanted dirt bikes to be my life, but I never had a plan. I never knew how it would happen, I just had this ridiculous and ignorant confidence that it was going to happen….and somehow it did! I haven’t seen Mad Mike or Kibby in years. Life always seems to separate you from people when you do what I do, but I will always hold a special place in my heart for that trip, and for those guys for giving me the opportunity to find my path in life. Thank you Mike, and thank you Kibby! And to anyone else out there cruising through life, I hope you find that thing that makes you happy, chase it with all your heart, and more than likely good things will happen. Don’t forget about that chase it with all your heart part though….in the words of our good friend Joe Dirt, life’s a garden…dig it.