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I was never (and I'm still not) big into
going to national freestyle contests, so I
never heard about this until recently.
But if you saw it, you probably still
remember it to this day. And if you
never saw it, I'm sure you'll find it as
funny as I did. I won't reveal who wrote
this, but at least you'll now know what
the hell he was trying to do...
The Maine Manby AnonymousI'm clueless about Maine Man and the lobster suit. Anyone care to elaborate? (Don't think I'm too big of a dork, this was a long time ago.) I guess I will explain since I was the dork that did it...but first the introduction... Back in the day of AFA contests (around '86-'87 or so) I wanted to have a distinctive run that stood out in the minds of the judges. At the AFA Masters in LA in Nov. 1986 I had a really good idea to kind of make fun of how everyone made such a big deal about the music they chose. So I started by playing 15 seconds of a smooth, soft Lionel Ritchie song (like Martin Aparijo would do) and I did a nice slow fluid rolling trick to go with it. That song faded and I looked around and shook my head. Then "I Wanna Be Somebody" from WASP came on I did some hardcore bouncing trick á la Dizz. That song faded out and I shook my head again. Then a song from Agent Orange came on and I proceeded to do the rest of my run (including a can-can g-turn to decade, a cherry-picker and a bar ride which at the time was all the rage). I got 5th in 16 and over Expert (out of 75 or so guys). Since I had such success at that contest I figured I'd continue the gimmick. Being from Maine I had a jersey made that said "The Maine Man" on the back. Somehow I came up with the crazy idea to do a theme based on "The Maine Man" for my next run at the Florida AFA contest that winter. In my effort to explore the artistic merits of the Maine Man concept I got some plastic lobsters and a yellow raincoat just like lobstermen wear. Then I had a friend's dad with a real downeast accent say "Ayuh, he's our Maine man allright" which of course was recorded incredibly crappily onto a tape. For my run I walked out with the lobsters and the raincoat and the tape with this guy's voice rolled and no one could hear what he said because it was recorded so poorly. Everyone who saw it wound up thinking "why is this dork wearing a yellow raincoat and carrying plastic lobsters at freestyle contest?" Despite feeling completely idiotic I did complete my run. All in all it was a collossal failure; I got 26th out of about 50 and the ignomious honor of being remembered as "the dork with the raincoat at the AFA Masters contest." No one who saw that spectacle can seem to forget it and therefore I am doomed to never live that one down. ...and now you know the rest of the story.
I think this originally appeared on some BMX e-mailing list.
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