One lazy July afternoon as I was playing ultimate frisbee with some friends a receive d a phone call from a Mr. Marc Matson of Huntington Beach California informing me that he had put together a new pogo stick and he wanted to demo this new pogo stick at the upcoming X Games.  A few phone calls and confirmations later, Nick McClintock and I were recruited to fly to LA to try out the Motostik MX1.

            I flew out of Salt Lake City Thursday Aug. 4.  The plan was for me to meet Nick at LAX and then Marc would come pick us up.  It didn’t work out quite that well.  Apparently the airline’s have a vendetta against Nick.  His couple hour layover in Cincinnati turned into an overnight layover because of some problems with his plane.  So he was stuck overnight alone somewhere between where he came from and where he was going.

            I met Marc at the airport and took the 405 to Huntington Beach.  I was about 10:30 p.m. by the time we got to his house.  I dropped my luggage in the garage and went straight for the pogo sticks.  I spent the next few hours playing on the pogo stick.

            The Motostik was built for Motocross cross training in mind.  The stick is built to look like the half of the front forks of a motorbike, the handlebars are real motorbike handlebars, even the rubber stopper has thick bike tread on it.  It is a very very cool looking stick.  The extra wide handlebars took a little getting used to, but the stick got excellent air and was extremely quiet.  Justin, Marc’s neighbor who had been helping him test the stick, came over with a friend and we played for a while before Marc finally talked me into getting some sleep.

            The next day we went back to the airport to fetch Nick, where his ongoing airport troubles continued.  His bag split open on the jetway and spilled his stuff all over the place.  They were kind enough to buy him a new bag (which was 10 times nicer than his old bag) and pay him for all the stuff they lost.

            We brought Nick back to Marc’s place and let him have a chance to play with the Motostik.  We also chopped the handlebar width down on couple of the sticks.  Shortly after Justin showed up and we all headed down to Huntington Beach to give the sticks a proper test run.  We had a lot fun!  We drew some nice crowds, got tons of pictures and video footage, even signed some autographs.  Nick spent a lot of time on the smaller stick to learn to transfer some tricks onto the new stick.  The highlight for me was doing some tricks on the landing of a stair set heading down towards the beach and looking up and seeing the peer just lined with people looking down on us.  Although I enjoy having people cheering when I land a trick, for some reason I get a bigger rush out of being reacting to a missed trick with “Ahhh, man, he was so close!” and stuff like that.  I’m just weird that way. 

            We then drove across the valley to the Home Depot center and covered a few hundred cars with Motostik flyers.  Because the X Games staff are huge idiots they wouldn’t less us in to see the end of the Step-up finals.  A little disappointed we headed home and got some sleep.

            Saturday started earlier.  We headed down to the beach to catch the crowds leaving the wakeboard competitions.  Once again we were surrounded by people.  It’s a good feeling to have an audience.  Nick busted some quality tricks in front of the X Games entrance sign and I miserably failed a few front flip dismounts.  Good times were had by all.    It’s fun having cameras constantly on you while you’re jumping.

            After a quick break we headed back to the Home Depot Center.  Nick and I watched the Motocross Freestyle semifinals while Marc and Justin tagged cars in the parking lot.  They were extremely awesome, however, no one wrecked.

            Back in the parking lot we did a little bit of jumping for the crowds coming and going.  I also got in touch with the amazingly awesome to the greatest degree ninja Tosh “The Offical Xpogo Mascot” Roberts.  He was spending the summer in the LA area and so he dropped by.

            Marc Matson has got to be one of the nicest guys on this planet.  On top of flying me and Nick out to LA, setting us up with a hotel room, paying for food, X Games tickets and everything else, as soon as Tosh shows up Marc, without question, hands him a ticket for the games, tells him he can crash in our hotel room and join us for breakfast in the morning.  Marc rocks!

            So of course we caught the BMX freestyle finals and the rest of the MX freestyle finals.  Then we rushed outside where Marc had gotten us a nice little demo area set up right outside the main gates.  We did some serious jumping!  We had so many people gathered around we kept having to push the crowds back to keep people from getting killed by runaway pogo sticks.  It was by far the best demo we did.  It was dark when we started and late when we finally packed up the sticks and head home.  We were sufficiently exhausted.

            Sunday was a lot slower.  We got to sleep in a wee bit before heading to breakfast.  We hit a skate park that morning where Nick got some good grinds and stalls in.  I’d injured my ankle the night before, so we grabbed me an ankle brace.  We got to the Moto X SuperMoto race at about 1:30 and Nick, Tosh, and I watched all 40 laps.  McGrath did an awesome job of coming from way behind to take second.  Afterwards we did another demo outside.  It was a lot more casual, but I still did some solid flip dismounts and Nick and I both landed new tricks.  We spent a lot of time letting other people try out the sticks.  It was a lot more casual and layed back than the other demos.

            We spent the rest of day hitting some awesome pogo spots we had scoped out before including this really awesome little place called Signal Hill which was a sweet little LA overlook.  We also ripped up Long Beach State College.  There were nothing but sweet pogo spots all over the campus.

            It was a very productive day.  We capped it by spending the evening hanging out in Marc’s pool and hot top, eating pizza, and talking about the future of the sport.

            Because Nick and I had never been, Tosh drove us down to Hollywood to check out the Walk of Fame and all that fun stuff.  We met a lot of freaking people and we were very graphically informed by a nice crack-head with lots of flowers to not believe any of Nick’s sexual exploits.  It was fun!

            Tosh dropped us off at the hotel and headed out and Nick and I headed to bed.

            Marc picked us up in the morning and drove us to the airport.  After being as obnoxiously happy in the overly long airport check in line, Nick and I both bored our separate planes and flew home.

            And that, my friends, is the story of the Dave and Nick’s X Games demo.  I hope you enjoyed it!