The $200,000 Check I Couldn’t Cash...

I still have a $200,000 check made out to me. It’s dated June 4, 1997, and I’ve never cashed it because I couldn’t. It came from a play-money set.

My girlfriend, Jenn, who is now my wife, gave it to me after one of the most disappointing days of my life. The amount wasn’t random. Two hundred thousand dollars was exactly what I needed to build an indoor action sports park in southern Minnesota.

A few days earlier, I had walked into a bank believing I was getting close to making that dream happen. I walked out realizing it probably wasn’t going to happen at all. But that story had really started three years earlier.

In the summer of 1994, shortly after graduating from high school, I moved my BMX bike shop to the Faribault County Fair in Blue Earth, Minnesota. I borrowed my dad’s circus tent and filled it with bikes, parts, and riding gear. Growing up, I had watched my dad set up that same tent in that same spot to perform puppet shows, do magic tricks, and sing songs with the goal of sharing the Good News of Jesus with kids and adults. At the time, I wasn’t thinking much about that connection. I was eighteen years old, trying to convince people in rural Minnesota to buy BMX parts from me.

A lot changed over the next year. By the summer of 1995, the quarter pipe behind The Center had grown into a halfpipe, and riders from around the region were showing up in Elmore to ride. I returned to the fair with my dad’s tent and the bike shop, but this time I brought the halfpipe too.

The fairgrounds were only nine miles from Elmore, but it took four trips to get the ramp there and four more to bring it home. A group of friends helped me take it apart, load it onto borrowed hay wagons, haul it to Blue Earth, put it back together, and then reverse the entire process when the fair ended. I’m surprised any of them were still my friends after that adventure.

The experience probably should have convinced me to leave the ramps in the backyard. Instead, I started thinking about better ways to build ramps that could be moved from one place to another.

That summer, I was also traveling to BMX tracks around the region, selling bike parts, T-shirts, and riding gear. The more riders I met, the more I heard the same frustration. People all over Minnesota and Iowa wanted a place to ride, but when winter came, there was nowhere for them to go. In Minnesota, winter always comes.

I had already seen what could happen around a few backyard ramps. Riders who had no other reason to visit a town like Elmore were driving from Minnesota, Iowa, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Wisconsin just to spend the day riding. The ramps gave them a reason to come, but the friendships were what kept bringing them back. Somewhere along the way, I began to believe that what was happening in the backyard needed to move indoors.

By 1996, the idea had a name: Over the Edge Action Park.

That summer, I returned to the Faribault County Fair with a different purpose. I still had the bike shop and used the ramps to put on BMX and skateboard shows, but now I was also trying to help people understand why southern Minnesota needed a year-round place to ride. I talked with families, handed out surveys, and tried to determine whether there were enough people in the region to support an indoor facility.

While I was trying to convince people the idea could work, the bike shop was struggling. There weren’t many local customers in rural southern Minnesota, and I was having a hard time competing with the large, established mail-order BMX shops. In March of 1996, I took a job assembling bikes at Walmart in Blue Earth. I built bikes at Walmart and kept chasing my BMX dreams on the side.

That same summer, something happened at the fair that began changing the way I thought about the shows. A family friend brought his young children to watch. At that point, I was mostly focused on promoting the bike shop and the indoor park, so I was willing to let almost anyone participate.

After one of the shows, the kids saw some of the skateboarders smoking cigarettes and cussing behind the ramp. When they got home, they began imitating what they had seen and heard. Until then, I had been thinking mostly about ramps, riders, and business ideas. Suddenly, I had to think about the influence that came with putting someone in front of a crowd. If young kids were paying enough attention to imitate what happened behind the ramps, then I had a responsibility for what I put in front of them.

By the spring of 1997, the indoor park was beginning to feel like more than an idea. Someone had offered to donate land, while others were willing to contribute building materials and money. Those commitments depended on whether I could secure the rest of the funding, but for the first time, it seemed like the pieces might actually be coming together.

I wasn’t trying to figure it out entirely alone. My high school entrepreneurship classes had connected me with people who continued sharing their wisdom and investing their time in me long after the classes ended. Jack Quinlivan at the Faribault County Economic Development Office had helped me launch the bike shop, and I had developed a good relationship with a loan officer at a bank in Blue Earth. Both organizations had helped finance the shop, and I was still paying on those loans.

I took my plans for Over the Edge Action Park to the bank and asked for the funding I needed to move forward. The loan officer agreed to present the proposal to the bank’s loan committee.

The committee said no.

Looking back, I understand why. I was twenty years old. My bike shop was struggling, I was still paying off its loans, and I was proposing an action sports facility in a part of the country where most people were only beginning to understand BMX. The bank had concerns about the market, the risk, the funding, and whether I had enough collateral. Their decision made sense, but at the time, I was devastated.

I left the bank and went home. At the time, home was in the basement of The Center, which was also where I operated my bike shop. I had spent the previous few years trying to turn BMX into something more than a hobby. Now the bike shop wasn’t working, the indoor park wasn’t going anywhere, and I was building bikes at Walmart.

I talked with my parents. I don’t remember the exact conversation, but they had always supported me, and their advice was consistent with what they had taught me my entire life: keep looking for the next opportunity and trust God.

I’m sure I spent some time riding my bike on the ramps, because that was usually what I did when I didn’t know what else to do.

Then Jenn showed up on her way home from work.

She handed me a check. It was dated June 4, 1997, and made out for $200,000—the full amount I needed to get Over the Edge Action Park off the ground. It wasn’t real money, and I don’t know that Jenn was as invested in the idea of an indoor BMX park as I was. The check was her way of telling me she was willing to invest in me, even if my plans didn’t turn out the way I had expected.

I still have the check, and I still have the facility plans too.

Around the same time, BMX was changing across the country. ESPN had launched the X Games in 1995, putting BMX and skateboarding in front of people who had never seen them before. Event organizers who didn’t understand why anyone needed an indoor ramp park were suddenly very interested in having BMX riders perform for their crowds.

Just weeks before the bank turned down my loan, I had organized a show in the parking lot of the Walmart where I worked. For that show, I used a new name: Chaos on Wheels.

I had originally built the portable ramps to promote the indoor park, but after the loan fell through, I began wondering whether the next opportunity looked different from the one I had spent the previous few years pursuing. Maybe, instead of building a place and asking people to come to me, I could take the ramps to them.

In 1997, I arranged three county fair shows in addition to the Walmart show. Most of the time, I was the only rider, while Jenn or my friend Troy announced. Nobody was getting paid. Jenn, Troy, my parents, my brother Mat, my friends Jason and Frank, and others helped because they supported me, even if they didn’t completely understand what I was trying to build.

Frank may have been the exception. He probably loved BMX even more than I did, and he became the first rider I recruited for Chaos on Wheels. By 1998, Frank was riding in most of the events I had scheduled across Minnesota and Iowa, and people were beginning to pay me to bring the ramps and perform.

That was the beginning of Chaos on Wheels.

The indoor park I thought I was building never opened, but the idea never completely went away. The people who offered land, building materials, money, advice, encouragement, a voice over the microphone, help moving ramps, and even a pretend check had not invested in nothing. They had invested in me, and their investment was already becoming something none of us could see yet.

Chaos on Wheels would eventually take me across the country, bring me to Joplin, Missouri, and become part of the much longer story that led to Rooted Action Park. But that’s the next part of the story.

Jeremiah Anderson

Founder, Rooted Action Park

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