The Thirteenth Hour Podcast #460: Finding a Home at Princeton University Through Sympoh, the 25 Year Old Breaking Crew We Started

The Thirteenth Hour Podcast

The Thirteenth Hour Podcast #460: Finding a Home at Princeton University Through Sympoh, the 25 Year Old Breaking Crew We Started

https://archive.org/download/podcast-460/Podcast%20460.mp3

This week’s podcast episode is a bit of a trip down memory lane as I recently went back to my undergrad university, Princeton, where three friends and I started breaking in 1998 – Justin Liang (who was on episodes 47, 48, and 255), Sherwood Forlee, and Tim Ferriss. I don’t think any of us at the time would have imagined that the club we started, later christened as Sympoh in 1999, would still be around 25 years later, but it is, and each time I see what the current members are doing, it always kind of blows me away. I figured I would put some of that early history down while I still remember it.

One weird thing about trying to learning to break in the mid to late 90s is that aside from a few underground pockets that had been stoking the embers since the 70s, it was a pretty dead art by then for most of mainstream America. So if you wanted to learn, you basically had to dig up old movies from the 80s, like Breakin’ or Beatstreet. (Speaking of the latter, the battle at the Roxy from that movie is still great decades later).

Aside from that, there was very little info out there unless you managed to find a crew. The only legit info I had been able to find prior to finding these guys in college existed on the nascent internet – the website of a Swiss breaking crew – the Spartanic Rockers – called “Cardboard Only.” Although that site no longer exists, there is still a website for the crew, which you can view here. Other than that, my only real visual models came from memories of breakers dancing in the subway of NYC as well as a few scattered clips from TV – notably karateka Jamie Webster‘s character, Grey Wolf on the mid 90s martial arts show, WMAC Masters, doing windmills:

And then in the 1996 Olympics, Russian gymnast Alexey Nemov did flare and mill combos during his floor routine. Here he is during demonstration, I think after the games had finished:

Other than that, if you could find VHS tapes of footage from jams or battles, that was the Holy Grail, but those tapes were hard to get and sometimes very poor in quality, having been dubbed multiple times. We also didn’t have easy access to televisions or VCRs in college so if we wanted to watch one of them, we had to use one of the public TVs around campus, which weren’t always accessible, as the rooms were often locked or someone would have already reserved the room, and many of the TVs did not have VCRs. (I have managed to find some of this footage online, e.g., this one. They were basically home videos, so the camera work and overall flow of these videos often left a lot to be desired. Still, it was the best we had until technology progressed to the point where it was possible to digitize analog video so clips could be isolated, which meant you could slow things down to see what was going on.)

So we mostly had to teach ourselves, meaning progress could be slow at times. I’m slow learner at baseline without much natural talent for any of this, so windmills, the move shown above, took me about two years of pretty regular work to learn to do. Still, I will always remember those practices fondly. They combined martial arts and gymnastics into breaking, and although we were all working independently on different things, we were all working together to achieve similar goals. When you are around people like that all the time, you can’t help but get better.

So I’ve always been happy to see that that spirit continues to be a lifeblood of Sympoh in the years since we graduated. So I wish to thank all the current and past members for their efforts in keeping the club alive and open for all who want to learn. They con’t to inspire me to continue to practice, even though at my current age of 44 (kind of old for a bboy), things are more difficult and harder to maintain. At this point, I just to keep up

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Just for kicks, I included two mainstream magazine articles I could find that are about 40 years apart – one from the 10/1984 issue of National Geographic World, about kids breaking in NYC, and the second from the June/July 2024 Wall Street Journal Magazine on breaking in the Olympics. I’d love to know if the kids featured in the World article ever imagined their dance would one day be in the Olympics. Then again, if you look closely, you can see a young Crazy Legs in the the battle picture, who has spoken about the inclusion of breaking in the 2024 summer games.

Thanks for listening!

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As always, thanks for listening!

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