Vurbwes Chilidog
Wow, it’s our one year anniversary. Through murder hornets, a plague, an election, almost 12 rounds of Pro Motocross at Loretta Lynn’s, and having a baby come into my life… “WE MADDDE IT. Woo Wooo!” And to think this started purely as an idea to bring vurbmoto back as an Instagram only entity… yes INSTAGRAM ONLY. And, here we are, pretending like we never missed a beat and burning the candle at every end possible (Slaw says I can’t even list all the ends because it’s inappropriate). We simply wanted a fun outlet to post throwback content, funny and sarcastic takes on our sport, maybe hype a few dirtbike parties throughout the year, and sell some old school vurb shirts and let’s just say that shell of a concept lasted for all of 6 or 9 seconds. Once our old vurb partners agreed to sell us the rights, the cylinders just started firing, and in true Wes, Brent and Chase nature, we just couldn’t help ourselves: go big or go home. Right, baby? Let’s goooo.
When we started back, I hadn’t edited an amateur motocross video in years, still double-spaced after every period, couldn’t remember the last time I’d written an article and I didn’t know a WordPress site from a Wix site. For real though, I’m seriously proud of myself for dropping the double space habit. Fast forward a whole year later and it’s pretty crazy to see how much we’ve been able to accomplish with very small finances, even smaller amount of time, and a crew that only has the ability to squeeze 5% of their days towards this right now. It’s been exhausting, overwhelming, I’ve cried, I’ve laughed, I’ve had Aubrey tell me 100 times I’ve taken on way too much (what does she know!), but we always seem to persevere because we love this shit so damn much.
Before I pass this over to Bird Dog Brent, let me just give one example of how incredibly stupid I/we are. Art Dog Kyle Cowling already wrote about this a few weeks back, but it’s too dumb not to reiterate.
March 2-5: Moto Spy and Sipes Shoots every day this week. Remember THIS Ryan Sipes edit? We’re proud of that.
March 6: Daytona SX for Moto Spy
March 7: Drive home with a 1-month-old back to Atlanta
March 8,9,10: Pull 16-hour edit days on Red Bull Moto Spy
March 11: Fly Back to Florida, pick up rental equipment for a shoot with Art Dog, and location scout our spot.
March 12: Shoot with Pastrana and Jett from 8-12. Return rental equipment. Fly Back to Atlanta. Art Dog and I meet Jeff Simpson at Atlanta Airport and then huck it to Millcreek Vurb Shred Tour.
March 13: #VurbShredTour at Millcreek. Dylan and Jeff leave this night to drive to Freestone for the Spring Championship.
March 14: Myself, Art Dog, and Blake Keith hold it down at Millcreek for final day of Shred Tour
March 15: Edit all morning with Art Dog and then fly to Texas to then drive to Freestone and meet up with Jason Crane and Danny Stu who were at the Supercross the night before shooting Moto Spy.
March 16-19: Shoot and edit onsite at Freestone MX with the entire crew while Dstu and Boogie Dog JsnCrane drive back and forth to SX for Moto Spy.
March 20: Everyone gets to go home on airplanes, except Dylan who has to drive the car and trailer back to Atlanta.
When we got home, guess what it was time for… shooting and editing another episode of Moto Spy. For everyone that gives me shit about not replying to texts sometimes, I invite you to come along on a 20+ day adventure like this and you’ll quickly realize why it’s okay we’re trying to charge a $20 head entry into our Vurb Shred Tour events. We ever so obviously need way more help than we got. You know it’s bad when your boy here doesn’t even have time to edit so many epic clips that are just stacked on a hard drive right now. We’re about to fix that though! Anyways, I hope you can see how dumb I am.
Enter Bird Dog:
When we bought Vurb back I promised my wife that I was going to keep my day job and that Vurb was just a creative outlet to have fun with, make some Chick-fil-A money and get back to a world that I’ve missed ever since I originally sold my shares for $1.8 million back in the day.
Fast forward 12 short months and I actually quit my job yesterday. Despite a promotion offer with benefits, insurance and a 401k match, I gave my notice. Everyone thinks I’m a dumbass, including Slaw, but while money can buy a lot of things, it can’t buy happiness. Although it does contribute largely to it. For example, I bet a Jet Ski would make me happy. Vacations are also pretty awesome. Wait, WTF did I just do!
The short end of it is Vurb has been lucky to pull in a group of creative, easy going people that I truly love working with. Corporate life sucks the soul out of you eventually, especially if you don’t love the industry you’re in. And Vurb has always managed to do the opposite. It fills my soul.
As Wes mentioned, what we’ve been able to accomplish on a shoe string budget with a skeleton crew over the last year is nothing short of amazing. From building a site in-house, to design, to events, to shoots, to, well, the list goes on and on. This is a living, breathing machine that doesn’t clock out for lunch and has never understood the meaning of a weekend. And I can’t imagine doing anything else.
If we were able to accomplish all of this with a bunch of part timers, imagine what we can do once we give it everything we’ve got. Well, get ready, because that is exactly what we’re about to do.
Fate plays a role in this mission, and I rest my head for three hours every night with that thought in mind. I don’t know where Vurb is going (actually, I do) but with a wife and two small children, a mortgage and more f’ing overhead than I’ve ever had in my life, I decided to send it 5th gear tapped over a blind triple.
Again, Slaw thinks I’m an idiot and he may be right. We just came off the lip of the jump and are in mid-air, we’ll let ya know this time next year if we came up short.
P.S. I still can’t believe the Evan Ferry Platinum didn’t blow up bigger than it did. I call bullshit on that one.
Enter Slaw:
Bird and Chili are idiots. I literally have to shoot down multiple dumb a** ideas every day. The one I missed on was the Shred Tour. Somehow we’ve already made four of those work so far. I thought 12 was too many, considering we have like three part-time employees running this entire operation. I still think it was a dumb idea, but hey, it’s working.
The one mission I think we all had in regard to the site and everything else we do, was to bring some humor back to our sport. Some fun. This sport can have a stick up its ass a lot, and well, we want to change that a bit.
We literally write some of the dumbest, most idiotic things and I love every second of it. Do we put on our capital J journalist hats on every once in a while? Sure. For example, I broke this huge piece of news earlier this year: “Vurb Investigates: Was Jett Lawrence Eating a Hot Pocket?”
Our goal is to still continue to make bad-ass videos and when you come to the site, read something that will make you laugh and even inform you from time to time.
Thanks for reading our dumb stuff for a year. Hopefully you’ll continue so Wes doesn’t have to sell a kidney to feed his kid.
