The season is approaching (wow, we have a ?season" now?) and I?ve been informed another bird dropping was due last week. I?m sitting here with my baby g in one hand typing with the other hand icing my knee. Yesterday was a wild day. I guess I?ll start there:

I was riding my new park with Kevin and Psycho. It was our annual riders meeting. Psycho had just painted some of his art on the walls. I had selected a few of the characters he had drawn over the past 10 years from my collection to put up as murals in the new HB park. I picked this bad ass gladiator dude with bones and broken bike parts around him to look across at me when I?m on the big roll in with a 15-foot height pole right in front of him. It was like he was just tempting me to clear it.

I?m a little rusty from the time off for my MCL ligament tear in my knees, but I thought when I built that last roll in on the old ramp that I could get 16 feet out of the 11? tranny. The roll in wasn?t big enough last time, so I could only pump the ramp up to around 15? max, and that was only when I got a perfect pump on both the first and second wall. With this new ramp I may be able to get the speed to clear that from the roll in alone, so I was determined to try. Losey was on the deck shooting photos and I told him I wanted to get a photo with the eyes Psycho drew to be looking right through me. The eyes were about 16 ½ feet. I rolled in and tried to pump hard and hold on. I made it up to his eyes and wanted to celebrate with a nice high smooth 540. I had been landing 540?s mid transition all day because I added six inches of vert on my ramp, making a total of 1-foot-9 inches, so I wanted to be real light on the vert so I could land high and keep my run flowing. Being light on the vert translated into being light on my spin too and I did a big 360 air.

I knew I was in trouble so I started thinking about the best way to escape this slam. I thought about jumping off, but if I did that I would land backwards on my feet mid tranny, facing the coping, and probably wreck my knee right before hitting my back and snapping the back of my head on the flat bottom. I had slammed this way last October in Colorado on a double tailwhip and so I vetoed that escape plan. The next thing that went through my mind was to take my hands off the grips to maybe protect my head, but I knew this was a recipe for another rotator cuff tear, so I vetoed that one too. By now time had run out and I knew I was just going to have to just take it. They say I was out for over three minutes. When I came to, I had complete amnesia. Kevin asked me if I knew my name and I wanted to make a joke, but I couldn?t think of any jokes, so I just made a fictitious name up. I guess my timing was bad. Kevin looked at me really strange and then realized I was attempting to make a bad joke. The next thing I knew I was in my office and we were just about to have a party so a lot of people started showing up and I was trying to place how I fit into all of this ?

I was told I that I rode bikes and that we were all here to ride together. My friends were asking if this and/or that part of my body were OK, telling me I do this all the time, and making jokes like it was just another day at the office. It was weird. I thought "why the hell am I still doing this if this happens all the time to me?" I thought I must be an idiot and under my new insight I could never see myself doing this again! I felt fear. It was like the first time that I had experienced fear that completely controlled me and that I couldn?t ignore. In my mind I was finished riding forever, and there was nothing that would justify going through this intense pain again. When you have amnesia, for a short period you see the world through someone?s eyes, someone that doesn?t ride.

Your mind can?t understand why you do this. When I weighed the physical and tangible reasons, I looked at myself in a way that completely questioned what goes trough my mind that justifies putting myself in harms way over and over. When my memory came back, I don?t know what it is that changed, but I couldn?t wait to get back up on the ramp and spin another 540, this time inverted and higher. It will have to wait a few weeks, at least, because I just got 100 milliliters of blood drained out of my knee today and my doctor says I need another surgery on it, but knowing that it awaits me is good enough for now. Happy New Year! I have a baby now! Man, is she cute ? She?s looking at me like I?m crazy?

- mat hoffman

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