The Justin Mulford Story
Words by Brett Smith
A film by Fox Racing Digital Cinema | Photography by Anthony Acosta, Derrick Busch, Gordon Dooley, Jordan Hoover, Ryan Marcus & Avery Rost
Denise Mazzotti bolted from the hospital room the moment she heard the “pop!” Running down the hallway and screaming, she overheard a walkie-talkie, maybe a speaker, crackle: “RAPID RESPONSE TEAM TO ROOM 448!” Her oldest son, Justin Mulford, was bleeding to death. Again. He had asked to get on his feet to use the bathroom and brush the fuzz from his teeth. He hadn’t brushed his teeth since he had shattered his right leg four days earlier. An occupational therapist assisted him to the restroom. While brushing, Mulford mentioned how dizzy he felt. The therapist moved with haste to get the patient back to the bed.
The loud “pop!” happened when Mulford moved to a prone position and swung the tender leg back on the bed. Blood squirted “like water out of a sprinkler,” Mazzotti says, from every hole in his leg, which had multiple incisions and staples from several surgeries in two different hospitals over the previous four days. He also had seven holes left over from the external fixator he wore after a failed first surgery. Blood gushed from all outlets.
Staff rushed into room 448. Distraught, Mazzotti says she waited in the hallway because she didn’t want to worry him. She could hear the nurses and doctors telling Justin to keep calm so his heart wouldn’t pump blood faster. She felt far from calm.
Ten minutes went by. “But it could have been three minutes,” she says. “It felt like forever.” Then she got the sinking feeling that maybe she would never see him again. She poked her head into the room and locked eyes with her boy. He had no saturation in his skin tone. “Mom, I’m cold,” he said. While the medical team rushed to get blood back into his body and prep him for yet another operation, he remembers having what seemed like “100 blankets” on top of his body, yet he still shivered. Someone looked down on him and repeated in a mantra-like tone “stay calm, stay calm, stay calm.”
“I thought I was losing him right there,” Mazzotti says. Mulford says the constant pain he’d felt for days suddenly evaporated. His body was letting go. He urinated and defecated in the bed. Then, a serene, euphoric feeling overcame him, and he no longer felt he was in his own body. “I thought I had died,” he says. “I felt like I was in some waiting room, waiting to go to heaven…” He pauses. “Or hell.” He laughs. “I felt really pure. There was no one around. I didn’t get it.”
Mulford had suffered a ruptured pseudoaneurysm in his lower leg. The “pop” was the artery bursting. Also known as a false aneurysm, a pseudoaneurysm is a collection of blood trapped between soft tissue layers of an artery.
How the artery was compromised to begin with is hard to prove, but when Mulford arrived at Palomar Medical Center – after being transferred by his mother from a different hospital – on the afternoon of June 6, 2019, major swelling in his leg prohibited doctors from performing an ultrasound. He arrived unannounced to the Palomar ER in the back of his own cargo van. Twelve hours earlier, in the small hours of the morning, Mulford had emerged from a five-hour surgery at an acute-care facility north of San Diego, California. Mazzotti and her younger son Anthony spoke with the orthopedic surgeon for almost 20 minutes. He told them Justin needed further surgeries, the bone was “pulverized,” and the rod didn’t take because his bone was too fragmented. Instead, a fasciotomy was performed so the leg didn’t get compartment syndrome, which would have killed the muscle tissues.
Mulford had no medical insurance. They were advised to apply for emergency Medi-Cal, California’s Medicaid healthcare program, and get transferred to a trauma hospital that accepted that coverage. Mazzotti already felt dizzy from trying to understand why her son needed more surgeries and learning the logistics of what to do about being uninsured; when she finally saw Justin later that morning her concerns multiplied. Ultimately, she signed an “against medical advice” form, plopped him in a desk chair and wheeled him out to his van.
With his leg still caged in an external fixator and bleeding from the fasciotomy, he gritted his teeth and bumped along California Highway 78 toward Escondido. A storage tote supported his limb; the toes of his black-and-blue foot stuck out the end of the ecru-colored bandage wrap. This was a familiar scene: Less than 24 hours earlier, he had arrived at the first hospital in the back of this van, his Honda CRF450R tied down next to him. Wrapped in a blue hospital gown, he scrolled through his Instagram feed. When he arrived at Palomar, he needed six pints of blood. The average human body contains 10 pints total. Three days later, most of that blood pooled around the bed in room 448.
Mulford knew he hadn’t gone to heaven (or hell) when he saw a friend, professional skateboarder David Loy, sitting next to him. He said to himself, “No way! I’m not dead!” When the artery was sealed and he woke from surgery and saw his leg still attached to his body, Mulford cried from happiness. “I saw the light and kissed death,” he says. He had been through hell and survived, but he wasn’t even close to the end.
He spent nearly the entire month of June 2019 in hospitals. And, not only did he have another operation planned six weeks into the future to fix his shattered right ankle, he was hoping that his bones would be strong enough to someday continue what he had started: a full video part for Fox.
From Bikes to Boards
Listening to Justin Mulford talk is exhausting. He speaks rapidly in syntax-challenged sentences that either don’t get finished, or he changes thoughts midway through. It’s mental whiplash for the listener. But that grinding, energetic, erratic mind is what gives Mulford – known as MULFS to his fans and friends – the creativity to pursue his craft. Raised by a surfer and heavily influenced by skateboarding, Mulford has a unique blend of talents not found in most dirt bike riders. But those talents sometimes came at the expense of contentious, emotional and often painful circumstances.
In 2006, he came home from school to see, with mixed feelings, his father selling his motorcycles. Support from a benefactor had dried up, and the money wasn’t there anymore. He didn’t think it was permanent, though. He had hit the pause button on his amateur motocross career before.
Born in October 1989, Mulford grew up in Huntington Beach, California. His dad, Jerry, wrapped automobiles and worked for the City of Pomona as a painter. Though his passion was surfing, he bought Justin a Yamaha PW50 off the showroom for his third birthday in 1992 and got himself a Honda CR250. They rode together until Jerry broke his leg and gave it up. Justin continued to ride, and Jerry focused on his son. Justin remembers the exact date – March 17, 1997 – at Starwest; riding a 50cc LEM, he entered his first race and won.
He became one of the kids to watch in SoCal. At the major races, such as the AMA Amateur Motocross National Championships at Loretta Lynn’s, the World Mini GP and Mammoth Mountain, he had tough competition. He saw Josh Hill, Wil Hahn, Zach Osborne, Drew Gosselaar, Sean Hackley, Jeff Alessi and others regularly. He earned the nickname “Bustin’ Justin,” which announcers often elongated to “Bustin’ Justin The Beach Boy Mulford.” A funny side note – yet still connected to his love of video parts – Mulford lived down the street from Seth Enslow and appeared in several Crusty films. His most notable appearance was in Crusty 4: God Bless the Freaks, where he opens the movie delivering newspapers on his Kawasaki KX60 (he was only eight years old). In Crusty 2000: The Metal Millennium, he’s the kid who rides up and steals the ice cream from Bubba. This association might explain how he wound up with sponsorship from alt-edge brands like Fleshgear and Black Flys Eyewear.
Mulford’s star shined. Honda of Houston supported him, and the contingency money earned at major races in Southern California and the wider region became a windfall. Then came the expectations.
“I stopped [at 13 in 2003] because the pressure got to be too much,” Mulford says. “I felt like my dad wanted it more than I did. We got physical with each other. Mentally it was hurtful.” He paused for eight months and went to live with his mom. Two years later the money evaporated, the bikes were sold off, and he stopped talking to his dad. They’re very close now, but he didn’t touch a motorcycle for almost 10 years.
Mulford immersed himself back into his other passions: board sports, especially skateboarding. He idolized Mark Gonzales, a street skater named “The Most Influential Skateboarder of All-Time” in a 2011 issue of Transworld Skateboarding magazine. He watched the 1998 Birdhouse Skateboards film The End every single morning and owned three Willy Santos boards as a child.
“I just know that if I lost everything in the world, I could have a skateboard in my hand and just be chill,” he says. He was 15 when he stopped racing motocross for good, but he already had a decade of street skating exposure and experience. He also liked to snowboard. His parents split in 1992, not long after the motorcycles arrived, and his mom eventually ended up in Big Bear, California. Justin stayed in Huntington Beach, but when he stopped racing, he said, “I’m going to be a little scumbag snowboarder!”, and he lived in Big Bear.
With his friends and younger half-brothers, he made street snowboard videos at Bear Mountain, applying to snow what he had learned from years of watching his skate idols. He traveled to Japan four times and all around the U.S., started a media brand called FEELixx and earned some small sponsorships and even pro boards with Smokin’ and Tech 9. A contract worth $30,000 was put in front of him at one point. He was 17 years old but didn’t really feel like he had earned anything. “I didn’t want that pressure. I wasn’t comfortable with that.” He turned it down.
In 2009, he went to the Anaheim Supercross by himself and got a gut punch. Riders he had battled just a few years earlier ran up front in the qualifying heats. Damn it. Jerry was right. As a child, whenever he had struggled or expressed desire to give up, Jerry told him someday he would go to a professional race, see kids he competed against and be bummed. Those kids would win because they worked hard and put in the effort.
“I walked out of that race with tears in my eyes,” he says. “I told myself I’d never touch a dirt bike again.” He sunk himself deeper into snowboarding, skating and filming. Mulford openly admits his bitterness and how he acted like a “punk ass” to counter his depressed feelings. Snowboarding helped him cope, and he learned to collaborate with other riders on video parts and sessions. He still wanted nothing to do with dirt bikes.
Taking it to the Streets
Through mutual friends, he met Nyjah Huston in the summer of 2011. Huston was 16, had just cut off his dreadlocks, was in the middle of filming his Element video part, “Rise & Shine,” and already was on his way to earning the title he owns today: most successful competitive street skater of all time. As of November 2020, Huston is a 13-time X Games gold medalist, with 23 Street League Skateboarding victories. He has a 10,000-square-foot personal street skate course in a Southern California warehouse, owns a fleet of exotic cars and splits his time between homes in Hollywood and Laguna Beach, where his ocean-view mansion earned a feature in Architectural Digest. He also loves dirt bikes and rode them around the Huston farm as a child, where his parents lived a strict and secluded Rastafarian lifestyle.
Huston remembered Mulford’s name from the pages of Racer X Illustrated, a magazine devoted specifically to motocross racing and lifestyle. They also bonded on the subject of overbearing fathers. In a February 2018 appearance on The Nine Club, Huston opened up about his youth: “He was always on our ass,” he told host Chris Roberts, about the Huston brothers working with their father managing and coaching them. “‘You need to be winning this shit!’ It was hectic being that young, having a father figure that was so, like, ‘you need to do good.’”
Huston and their friends begged Mulford to get back on the motocross track. He rejected the idea outright every time. “No, I’m not going,” Mulford remembers saying. “You cannot fucking get me to go out there ever again.” They didn’t relent and spent over a year working him, needling him. They knew better than he did where he needed to be.
During a night of partying and too much liquid courage, Mulford caved and agreed to show up at Milestone MX, a now-closed public facility in Riverside, California. He was pissed about what he had gotten himself into, but he kept his word. While gearing up to ride, he got the old vibes and energy that he’d thought were long lost. “I felt like a Transformer,” he says. “You know when you have that routine as a kid, you think about how you want to do things… I was already calculating what I was going to do when I got on the track that day. I was focused. That’s why those kids walk around with a mean look all the time; they’re focused as shit.”
Riding Huston’s 2012 Honda CRF450R and wearing his gear, Mulford felt fluid on the track. The skills, the muscle memory, the motorcycle memory came back. Maybe they had never left. He thought maybe he could even race! After all, he was only 24 years old. He teared up when he came off the track and talked faster and more erratically than usual. “I annoyed myself I was so excited!” he says. Mulford tried to buy a bike the very next day. He had no money, nor the credit to finance a bike. He loaded up on credit cards, even got a Best Buy card and bought a laptop and other accessories to build up a credit score. When he could, he sold his Volkswagen Jetta, bought a truck and then a 2015 Kawasaki KX450, and he started hitting the tracks and hills. Old sponsors started sniffing around, and he was happy to enjoy two wheels again.
The euphoria of spinning laps at the motocross tracks around SoCal, however, faded. “I realized I wasn’t going to be able to afford racing,” he says. “Plus, I would have to have 10 people sacrifice for me. I would have to kiss a bunch of ass, and I was so far behind already. I didn’t want to do freestyle; I didn’t want to do backflips. I needed my own route.”
He can remember the day, even the moment, when his route became clearer. In October 2015, at Fox Raceway in Pala, California, he motioned his crew’s attention toward a three- or four-step staircase that had a six-foot-long picnic table set about a bike length from the top step. He said he wanted to “firecracker nose press” it, a board sports term that doesn’t completely translate to dirt bikes. Basically, he wanted to use the stairs as a ramp and ride across the picnic table on the front wheel of his bike.
His buddies scoffed. “You’re not going to do that,” he remembers them saying. “So, I go to nose bonk this bench and it hit me right there, ‘Bro, I want to make films!’” A half-dozen people stood around the table and captured Mulford on camera. He got a confidence boost when Jeremy “Twitch” Stenberg’s brand, Dirt Bike Kidz, posted the clip with this caption: “Our dude @_justinmulford using his snowboard skills at the track again haha.”
The following summer, Huston asked Mulford to bring a bike to a public park in San Juan Capistrano for help filming skate clips. Mulford towed Huston into a roller for a high-speed backside flip. Eventually a moto session broke out in the middle of the public park. In an Instagram post, he officially put the word out that he wanted to release an urban moto part. But he learned quickly that the dirt bike community wasn’t as welcoming as skating and snowboarding. If a spot had already been ridden, it was considered “shut down,” and if you rode it after someone else, you were labeled a copycat or a poacher. It wasn’t a collaborative effort as it is in skating, where one rider tries to outdo another and urges each other on in the interest of progression.
Ricki Bedenbaugh has spent 30 years in the streets with a camera in his hand. He understands the code that street skaters live by. “Skaters won’t tell you about a spot until they get what they want out of it,” he says. “But when someone sees somebody do something at a spot or on a feature, then everyone else knows it’s possible. And it means something else can be done on it.” Now a full-time employee in the Fox video department, Bedenbaugh said motorcycle riders are still developing their code.
Mulford openly discussed ideas with other riders whose talents he respected. He wanted to build camaraderie and community, lift each other up. But then he’d see his ideas pop up in social media clips days or weeks later. Backs started to turn on him, and he knew he had to be more careful. It confounded him, because he thought he could bring a lot of value to this sub-niche of riding. He believes people take his kindness as a weakness.
“It takes a lifetime to know the streets,” he says. “I know how to study a spot, evaluate the security and patrols, and hurry up and get it done when it’s time.” He’s learned the hard way, too. After spending hours prepping a snowboard location, he and his friends didn’t realize the cops were waiting and watching nearby. When they finally went to ride it, the officers stepped in and shut them down.
A break came when he met skate videographer John Note, who helped finish the urban moto part. Having an experienced cameraman with equipment and connections didn’t solve all his problems, though. Mulford was so broke in 2017, trying to focus on riding and stacking clips, that he lived out of his truck. He painted houses with his dad, trimmed weeds for friends and occasionally worked for his mom’s taxi company in Big Bear. “I love this whether I’m paying to do it or getting paid to do it,” he says.
He was close to finishing the part when a $1,000 one-night demo gig at a county fair popped up. On the first jump, he framed the landing hard and broke four ribs, lacerated his liver, bruised a lung, dislocated a wrist, and blew tissue out in his ankles. He had to wait another four months to ride again and had to watch in agony while other riders released clips of themselves hitting his spots.
After more delays, the part finally landed May 1, 2018, on Race Service Media’s channels, with the curious and cumbersome title “Justin Mulford drops the first ever STREET MOTO part.” Today he laughs about that headline, which raised eyebrows with its bold claim of being “first.” Nobody asked him what he wanted to call it. Between YouTube and Facebook, the part picked up 4.5 million views, an impressive haul for a rider with no major sponsors pushing his message.
Mulford hit legendary skate spots like El Toro and incorporated favorite hangouts of his youth. He rode up and over a baseball field’s chain link backstop, and for the finale, jumped over the 710 freeway on-ramp in Long Beach. Running into the frame at the end of the two-minute, 25-second part was Nyjah Huston.
The video caught the attention of Jeff Taylor, then the senior vice president of global marketing at Fox. Taylor wanted a full street moto video part for Fox and signed Mulford, who couldn’t believe it: Fox wanted to pay him to do something he would do (had been doing!) for free. Ryan Marcus, Fox’s video director, also saw it and said to himself, “This dude is insane and he’s thinking about things differently. Who is this guy?”
Suddenly, Mulford didn’t have just one videographer simply happy to help; he had the entire video department of an iconic moto brand at his disposal. Mulford made a location wish list and went to work riding spots that he had wanted to hit in his first video. Bedenbaugh was one of three videographers on the project. He jelled with Mulford because they shared skate influence. “He’s got the mentality of a skater and sometimes acts like a skater,” Bedenbaugh says. “If it doesn’t work, you keep coming back. Mulfs has that mentality. He gets it.”
They started in earnest on the film in February 2019. Bedenbaugh met Mulford at Hollywood High, a legendary LA skate location. Huston came, too, which was such a rich confluence of talent for Bedenbaugh. He had first shot Huston around 2003, as a dreadlocked grom. At Hollywood High, Mulford rode up the 12-step, wheelied across the flat and jumped down the 16-step. They also did some doubles shots where Huston grinded the rail and Mulford jumped down the stairs.
Mulford banked clips through the winter and spring and checked locations off his list. Support from Fox came in. His dreams weren’t just dreams anymore. They were actions. Then disaster struck. “I got greedy and I got served,” Mulford says of the crash that put him in the hospital on June 5, 2019. Make that two hospitals. He had found a wall ride in Oceanside he wanted to hit. But first he made the grave error of jumping over a chain link fence. He wanted to warm up, get psyched for what he came to do. An easy blip of the throttle put him up and over the fence. He landed on a sloped dirt bank that butted up against an asphalt access road. He went for it again, only this time he wanted to “send it to the street.”
In mobile phone footage shot from the landing side, his takeoff looked awkward. The bike turned down to the right side, and Mulford’s left leg dangled off the back like he planned to pull either a nac nac or eject. As the bike descended toward the smooth, dark asphalt, he swung the leg back to the foot peg. He didn’t get fully straightened out and landed on the rear tire’s side knobbies. The front wheel pointed toward 11 o’clock. Mulford’s right leg stabbed into the ground while the rear end bounced back into the air for a fraction of a second. With the force of 240 pounds falling from approximately 20 feet in the air, the leg bent and twisted underneath and behind him at an unnatural angle. Mulford’s head slammed into the ground; his helmet visor ricocheted. The bike slid to the other side of the road and Mulford grabbed his right leg before the body stopped rolling.
After five surgeries and 27 days in hospitals, followed by months of wheelchairs, crutches and canes, Mulford returned to the bike on February 7, 2020. Before he hit the track, he pulled his riding sock over the leg that gruesomely told the story of his struggle. The skin graft on his right calf looks like a large piece of smoked salmon embedded into his body. Taken from his upper thigh, the piece of flesh (attached with 90 staples) runs from his knee to his ankle. After a day on the vet MX track, he hit booters in the hills later that week. He wanted to get back in front of the camera.
Then COVID-19 came to America and shut down everything in its wake. The checks stopped coming in, and the video crew was grounded. Thankfully, like most of the world, they slowly got back to work as restrictions eased. Now Mulford is antsy and excited to share his vision but also move forward.
“I’m so ready to get it out,” he says. “I want to get on to other stuff. I want to drop this thing and go ‘All right, cool, what’s next?’ I want to keep it going. I got youth left. Images and clips of the part have stayed on lockdown, to use an appropriate 2020 term. Over two dozen locations were visited during the nearly two years of filming. They went to Moab, Big Bear, Arrowhead, Red Bluff, Bakersfield, Oceanside, Huntington Beach and more. Mulford wanted an international locale, but again, the virus. While the streets play a heavy role, the edit found on Fox’s YouTube channel will have a broad range of scenery. “It’s not just trick porn,” Marcus says. “It’ll show a different side of Justin and how much he cares about the tricks he does, the locations he visits, how he looks on the bike. He understands the power of storytelling. He texts me constantly with ideas, locations, even the camera equipment he wants to try. There are few other riders who care about the final product the way he does.”
Mulford hopes this video inspires and sticks in people’s minds. He enjoys seeing other riders post their clips, but he feels new feats lose their strength in the white noise of social media feeds. He hopes he can create lasting memories.
“I hope the part will set a new tone,” he says. “I want longevity. I still watch stuff from 1995 because it stands the test of time. I want to unlock doors for people who don’t have the opportunity to ride every day.”
