The wheels came off: BMXer Scot Breithaupt's rise and fall

For Scot Breithaupt, it all came to an end in the same place where it all began — a vacant lot.

At age 13, he created a movement, holding organized BMX races in a vacant lot in Long Beach. From that humble beginning, he helped usher a fledgling sport into the mainstream. A sport that is now part of the Olympics.

At age 57, he was found dead in a vacant lot in Indio on Saturday. The man dubbed the "Godfather of BMX" and a Hall of Famer in the sport spent his final day in the 106-degree heat under a makeshift tent constructed out of a mattress, a bed frame and some mismatched dirty sheets.

So what happened? How did he go from filling up his trophy case to filling up his rap sheet; from leading a pack of BMX racers to leading the police on a two-hour-long chase from Riverside to Costa Mesa?

The people who knew him best reflected on Breithaupt's life, and all of them had different versions of the same story: Breithaupt was a visionary, a promotional genius who helped the sport he loved explode in popularity, but that same zest for living life on the edge that made him a great racer and promoter was also his undoing. While the rest of his contemporaries grew up and grew out of those wild, hard-living teenage/early 20s days, Breithaupt never could.

"Basically he did everything better and harder than everybody else," said Perry Kramer, who was a rider on Breithaupt's SE Racing team in the late 1970s and early 1980s. "That included racing bikes and promoting BMX, but it also included partying. If I was going to party with him, he was going to party harder. Everybody wanted to be his friend, tugging him in all directions and he didn't want to let anybody down. Even if he was being tugged in a bad direction. That took him down. He'd try to climb back out of it, but it grabbed a hold of him and kept taking him back down."

An addiction to drugs — cocaine primarily — which started in his 20s and never really stopped, was Breithaupt's undoing. The man who was a champion racer and owned a self-titled BMX company SE Bikes by the age of 24 lived his last days like a homeless man.

He wasn't truly homeless, though, in that he had a place to stay whenever he wanted — his mother's house in La Quinta. His mother Carole said he would stay with her for a couple days and then be gone for a couple days. Stay with her for a week and then be gone for a month. His body was found on July 4 less than eight miles from her house, but the last time she saw him was June 8.

Carole hopes if anything, her son's death can be a cautionary tale for others.

"I want people to know that illegal drugs killed him and made his life miserable," Carole said. "Good, wonderful people that have so much to offer. The drugs just don't let them flourish. The greatest legacy he could leave is not BMX but helping (curb) traffic of drugs."

In the documentary about the history of BMX called "Joe Kid on a Stingray," Breithaupt gave an assessment of his own life in 2003, but it could have been uttered at any time in his life these past 25 years.

"I had my own periods of self destruction," he said honestly. "I got into cocaine and all that stuff and I regret that immensely because I lost friendships, I lost respect, I lost credibility, I lost self-worth. I just buried myself and there was stuff that was so far underground emotionally that I never dealt with, that I masked with this big ego and this stardom that I didn't deal with. It damn near killed me."

To try to understand what happened to Breithaupt, let's start at that happier vacant lot.

As a boy growing up in Long Beach, Breithaupt and his around-town buddies liked to ride their bikes in a vacant dirt lot near their neighborhood. They would dress up their bikes by putting number plates on the front like the motocross riders they'd seen in movies. They'd set up little tracks and jumps and race each other.

Breithaupt, who had an entrepreneurial gift at a young age, had the notion that if he and his friends loved riding their bikes and pretending that they were motorcycle racers so much, maybe kids in other towns did, too. Turns out they did.

He sent out notice with fliers and word of mouth to nearby towns that they would have races every other Saturday at what he called Bum's Field. He chose that because several homeless people also shared the lot. Cleverly, he later made BUMS an acronym to sound more professional — Bicycles United Motocross Society. The first race, 35 kids showed up. Word spread and two months later, 150 kids showed up.

Breithaupt, though not even 16 years old at this point, turned it into a small business, selling memberships to ride in these races, creating divisions and age groups and turning it into an organized competition, giving legitimacy to the event and the sport. It was clear that he was onto something big.

The apex of his early accomplishments came in 1974, when he created and promoted the Yamaha Bicycle Gold Cup series. It was a series of elite races in multiple age groups with the championship played in front of 30,000 people at the L.A. Coliseum, where USC plays football.

Sure enough, a couple years later, BMX racing was catching fire nationwide. Breithaupt had the idea to put together a team and do a barnstorming tour from California to the East Coast. He gathered the best riders from Southern California and set off. It was 15-20 teenagers in a beat-up school bus with the only supervisor being a now 19-year-old Breithaupt. He was given the ironic nickname "Old Man."

They would go from town to town, win bike races by day and act like teenagers at night. Those tours were legendary.

As Breithaupt himself once said — "We made the 'Bad News Bears' look like a bunch of sissies. Overall, the tours were awesome and kind of revered. It was a hell of a lot of fun. And they figured I knew what I was doing because I was the oldest."

Stu Thomsen, another top young rider for SE Bikes who is now a sergeant in the Orange County Sheriff's Department, was on those notorious bus tours.

"I was like 17 to 19 years old back then, my formative years," he said. "We did crazy things going across country in that pathetic bus that I don't even think made it out of San Bernardino before it broke down. I try to remember as much as I can, but it's not easy. It was fun. I have some stories I tell people from those days and some stories I'll never tell anyone."

Thomsen paused, laughed and then added, "Especially now that I'm with the sheriff's department."

They had the mindset of a touring rock band, but without the responsibility and without the money. For two or three years, they would do these tours in broken-down buses or oversized vans. Each one just as rickety as the last. They would dine and ditch when they could. Use hotel pools to clean off.

Despite the debauchery, everyone survived those tours and, even more importantly, they accomplished their purpose. They showed that BMX racing was cool. The sport was officially entrenched in the mainstream. Every kid wanted a BMX bike at the time, so Breithaupt created SE Bikes (SE stood for Scot Enterprises). They would not only create and sell bikes, but the top riders around all wanted to ride for SE Racing.

The company was becoming huge, too huge as it turns out.

SE Bikes was flourishing in the early to mid-1980s, but while Breithaupt was a great idea man, he was not a good businessman.

It was a perfect storm. He didn't know how to handle the business side of things, yet didn't want to cede any control to people who did. At the same time, he was plummeting more and more down the wormhole of drug addiction. And the boom in BMX that he helped create meant other companies, more well-run companies, like Mongoose and GT, were ready and able to jump in and take over the sport.

Todd Huffman was with SE Racing through the good, the bad and the ugly, as he puts it.

He was a bicycle dealer that sold SE products first, then became a racer on the team in 1980-81. By his own admission, he was only an average rider, so he worked for SE as a telemarketer and helped out with trade shows and the like.

"The company should have been bigger than it was, much bigger," said Huffman, who is now a TV and movie producer and documentarian at Pipeline Media in Fullerton. "It imploded, and Scot's extracurricular activities got in the way of business. Either he wasn't around, or the money was gone when we needed it. People's paychecks were bouncing."

Huffman left SE and started his own company that was later bought out by the much larger GT Bicycles, which is still going strong today as a successful BMX brand.

"GT is what SE could have become if Scot's demons hadn't gotten in the way," Huffman said.

Kramer, who was Breithaupt's right-hand man during those days, helping him develop bikes like the famous PK Ripper, said ego was part of the problem, too.

"Scot's problem in my opinion was that he tried to do everything himself, always had to oversee everything," Kramer said. "Sometimes it drove good, smart people away. The other companies didn't have that problem. That's when GT took off and SE went into a funk."

The SE Bikes company has changed ownership many times, and still exists, but never regained the momentum it had.

By the mid-1980s, most of the people from those glory days of bus tours and legendary races started to separate from SE in general and Breithaupt specifically. People that were still top-flight racers joined other teams, and the rest sort of just went on with their adult lives.

Breithaupt wasn't wired that way.

As Thomsen put it, "Scot took a left turn when the rest of us took a right turn."

Now in his late 20s, with a growing addiction to cocaine and his company floundering, Breithaupt began a downward spiral from which he never really recovered.

The next 25 years of his life were littered with arrests, attempted recoveries, two divorces and a strained relationship with one of his two sons.

During those dire years, he still remained active in the BMX community. He was still able to use his fame and place in the sport to earn money by doing appearances and autograph shows. And his knack for trying to find the next big thing never stopped.

People from the desert may remember an event he organized and put on in 1998 that involved gravity bikes. Gravity bikes are bikes without pedals that are made to just fly downhill at amazing speeds. Breithaupt organized a showcase race of such bikes on Tramway Road in Palm Springs.

But Breithaupt's flickers of success during these years were always snuffed out by the darkness of his addiction. Multiple arrests, usually drug-related, peppered his 30s, 40s and 50s.

Here's just a sample from cases in Riverside County:

•In 1997, he pleaded guilty to felony drug possession, then was sentenced to 90 days in jail.

•In April 2000, he was caught with cocaine, then pleaded guilty to felony drug possession. He was awaiting sentence until …

•May 2000, when he was caught attempting to sell cocaine base, which is highly concentrated crack cocaine. In this case, Scot pleaded guilty to felony drug distribution, and was sentenced to one year in jail. Soon after, he was allowed to move that jail time to weekends only, until …

•May 2001, when he was caught running from police. He pleaded guilty to felony "disregard for safety." He was sentenced to three years, which run concurrent with his prior two cases. During sentencing, the court determines that Scot was a narcotics addict, so his prison term was moved to the California Rehabilitation Center, a medium security facility in Norco.

Believe it or not, for those who still cared about him, his worst moment was still to come. That happened on Oct. 31, 2003.

About 2:10 p.m. on that day, police were pulling over a car in Riverside on suspicion of driving under the influence. The driver was Breithaupt. Instead of pulling over, though, Breithaupt stayed in his green 1993 Honda Del Sol, jumped on the highway and headed west.

He took the police on a two-hour chase — driving at normal speeds — all the way to Costa Mesa. With much of Southern California watching the chase live on television, the pursuit ended in a minor traffic collision with Breithaupt's car surrounded by dozens of police officers with their guns drawn.

"When we saw that car chase happening on TV, we were all just like, 'Holy crap,' " Huffman said. "We knew things were bad, but this was horrible. Tragic, really."

The four violations stemming from that event were: Unlawful possession of a controlled substance; possession of controlled substance paraphernalia; under the influence of a controlled substance; and evading a peace officer/reckless driving.

Breithaupt was thrown in prison for two years. He got out a year and a month later in December 2004. In an after-the-credits sequence in "Joe Kid on a Stingray," the movie-makers caught up with Breithaupt after he left prison.

"I've always done everything full blast," he told them. "I'm lucky to be alive. The places I've been. The things I've done. I should be living in a cage like this (points to prison behind him) the rest of my life. But today, I've got freedom. I've got a new drive, a new focus. Who knows what's yet to come? The possibilities are limitless."

His friends and family all agree this was classic sober Breithaupt. Always positive, always believing the next idea would get him out of the tailspin. He believed, and his charisma made you believe.

But like all of his fresh starts before and after, it soured quickly.

Anchored by his addiction, the final 10 years for Breithaupt were more stationary bike than BMX bike.

He didn't just descend into a hopeless decade of drugs before his inevitable death, though. He was active. He tried things. He tried rehab. He even returned to competitive racing from 2005 to 2006 at age 48. Even up until his final days, he tried to come up with his next big idea.

Thomsen said he talked to Breithaupt on social media as recently as three weeks before his death. As was often the case, he had an idea. It might have been for a T-shirt line or for a nutritional supplement, or an energy drink or something, Thomsen couldn't remember for sure, but that was often the nature of their contact.

"He always had something going on, always wheeling and dealing," Thomsen said. "I wasn't in position to help him this time, but I know that many people, including myself, tried to get him some help. But you know how it is. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. ... It was hard for me to see him take that path.

"I'll remember Scot as a good guy that just lived a destructive life."

Kramer said over the past 10 years, even with all of Breithaupt's troubles and tumultuous life, they remained friends.

"He was a good friend, like he called me when my mother died a couple years ago," Kramer said. "He never lost that love. He still wanted to be part of the old family. It was like that uncle that people don't want to show up at Thanksgiving. But at the same time, you're happy that that uncle stays in touch."

Kramer was with Breithaupt as recently as late March as the two of them and another former rider, Eddie Fiola, were judges at a bike show in San Diego.

"At that moment, he looked great and we had a good time together, but that's how it was," Kramer said. "Sometimes he's doing good, sometimes he's not doing good. I was glad that the last time we were together was a positive experience like that.

"It breaks my heart to hear he died in a tent out there in Indio. It just breaks my heart. He was brilliant. I guess I was kind of expecting to hear news like that about Scot at some time, but to me, he was kind of like Keith Richards, indestructible. And all of a sudden, he destructed."

Huffman, too, had a positive experience the last time he was with Breithaupt. Last June, he invited Breithaupt and others from the good old days to a movie premiere of a documentary about famous motorcycle racer John Penton that he had done. The movie was narrated by singer Lyle Lovett, and Huffman remembers Breithaupt being nervously excited to meet Lovett. It was a good night for Breithaupt.

"He really loved being around everybody who still loved him as the 'Old Man,' " Huffman said. "That still brought him a lot of pleasure."

Huffman's final interaction with Breithaupt came about three weeks ago.

"He had this idea to try to get his retro SE clothing line going," Huffman said. "He was still hanging on to his legacy. His reputation as an icon. Unfortunately so many people, including me, got torched along the way. I'm not one to hold grudges, but I didn't want to get into business with him. At the same time, it was hard not to be hopeful for the guy."

Huffman said people often ask him if he's going to make a Scot Breithaupt documentary. He doesn't think so.

"It'd have to be pretty dark," Huffman said. "And now we know how it ends."

Desert Sun Reporters Emily Donovan and Brett Kelman contributed to this story.