Anger Issues

In a post on a Facebook motorcycle group (Yamaha WR250X & WR250R), a new owner’s asked what sorts of farkles and upgrades he should buy for his new bike and someone suggested, “If you add an exhaust, power commander, air filter, sprocket, and tires it's a whole new bike.”

And I agreed, “Yep, way louder and worth at least $1,000 less” and referred the original poster to my “Seat of the Pants Performance Comparisons” essay. Oddly, several of the wannabes and hooligans from the group commented that I must have some “anger issues,” apparently based on either the content of that Geezer article or the fact that doing all of that expensive crap to a decent motorcycle makes it worth less and that bit of reality pissed them off. 

And I’m confused. The whole point of putting a loud pipe on a motorcycle is to piss off as many people as possible, it is also obviously evidence of “anger issues.” While those noisy bikes are a cute expression of a passive aggressive personality disorder, it’s entertaining to hear the accusation of my anger issues when I point out their anger issues (an example of “gaslighting” if there ever was one) Psychology Today has some good stuff about identifying gaslighting and putting in its proper place; for example, “11 Warning Signs of Gaslighting.” These days, we’re so used to hearing that kind of irrational argument on the nightly news that it almost sounds “normal.” Those comments did, however, start me to thinking about the many reasons motorcycling in the United States is becoming a vanishing act. 

It’s pretty obvious from the riding posts and comments these guys put up on this Facebook page, being a good rider, especially a racer, isn’t in the cards for them; regardless of their age. Their claim to riding fame is repeatedly straight line wheelies, usually in completely inappropriate places. I grant you the fact that doing a wheelie is a cool trick, but it’s even cooler (and harder) on a bicycle than a motorcycle and just as pointless a “skill,” unless you are getting that front wheel light in order to get over an obstacle. Mostly, though, street wheelies are a hooligan act of juvenile rebellion. Anger, in other words. 

And, if I sucked that bad I’d be pissed off, too. 

Years ago, I belonged to a sport bike group that, occasionally, rented a closed course and provided racing training. The guys who taught the classes were all intermediate-to-Expert local racers and some had serious skills. The “trainers” were all on liter bikes and when a retired pro racer from Wisconsin showed up with his bone stock 1980’s Honda 250 two-stroke race biker a bunch of the instructors decided to turn a few laps unencumbered by students, rookies, and novices. The 250 owner went out with them.
 
All of the liter bike guys had “exhaust, power commander, air filter, sprocket, and tires” and some had even spent dyno money trying to make all of that aftermarket crap work together. Regardless, they got their asses handed to them by the old pro. They could make lots of noise in the straights, but when they puttered (by his standards) through the many curves in the track he ate them alive. Often passing 4-5 bikes in a single tight corner. After lapping the whole pack one or two times, he came in followed by some of his victims. 

Before packing up and heading back home, he was generous enough to let a couple of the faster guys ride his 250 and they were foolish enough to loan him their liter bikes. Then he tore them up on the corners and the straights, lapping everyone on the track in less than three laps. With modern big horsepower and sticky tires under him, he spent most of the course sideways, playing with traction and front wheel levitation. At least one of the guys who’d loaned out his bike borrowed a friend’s pickup to haul his bike home because his street tires were melted down to the belts. 

There is a lesson here. The overwhelming bulk of characters wasting money on “exhaust, power commander, air filter, sprocket, and tires are people who would be better served signing up for a few dozen track days. When you watch those YouTube packs of street hooligans, you see a lot of no-talent nitwits flaunting the law, expressing their teenage anger issues. Mostly, the aftermarket industry is catering to suckers who hope some add-on part will be the magic bullet that will hide their inabilities. The problem is that it’s not the bike that slows you down, it is your skills. It’s not the bike that makes you fast. It’s being fast that makes you fast.

Book Review: The Art of Racing in the Rain

I am a habitual reader, a speed reader, and I make up my mind about books fairly quickly in the early pages. Sometimes, when a book appears to have some value but the scene and character-building activity bores me, I kick it into high gear and blow through 50-100 pages almost as fast as I can turn the pages. If I start a book, I almost always finish it, but often more as a physical exercise than from a love of or interest in the literature. Garth Stein’s The Art of Racing in the Rain started off with a bang, with a description of the main character’s canine limitations and impending death and the relationship between Enzo, the dog, and Denny, the dog’s partner in life and the human main character. By the third page you have the Big Picture of almost everything that is going to happen in the book, you just don’t have the details and everything is in the details.

Racing in the Rain is filled with reminders of my motorcycle safety training instructor career and some moments that made me recall my motocross days, too. Some of my favorite quotes follow:

• “No race was ever won in the first corner but many have been lost there.” Denny Swift
• “It’s not about a heavier foot. It’s about feel.” Denny
• “In racing, your car goes where your eyes go.” Denny
• “The great driver finds a way to keep racing.” Denny
• “There’s no dishonor in losing a race. There is only dishonor when you don’t race because you’re afraid to lose.” Denny
• 'The best drivers focus only on the present. Never dwelling on the past, never committing to the future. Reflection must come at a later time.' - Enzo (the dog)
• 'When I'm in a race car, I'm the creator of my own destiny.” Denny

Eve: How come you go through the turns so much faster than the other cars?

Denny Swift: Well, most drivers are afraid of the rain, because it’s an unpredictable element. They’re forced to react to it. And if they’re reacting at speed, then they’re probably too late, so they should be afraid of it.

Eve: Well, I’m afraid just watching it.

Denny Swift: Yeah, but if you intentionally make the car do something, you don’t have to predict. You control the outcome.

Eve: So you skid the car before it skids itself?

Denny Swift: Yeah. Yeah. When I’m in a race car, I’m the creator of my own destiny. “That which you manifest is before you.” Create your own conditions, and rain is just rain.

• Enzo: [voice over] In racing, your car goes where your eyes go. A driver who cannot tear his gaze from the wall will inevitably meet that wall. But the driver who looks down the track as he feels his tires break free, that driver will maintain control of his car and his destiny. I realized this was what Denny had done. He had manifested a win because he knew we needed one. Enzo: [voice over] It turned out to be the 1989 Luxembourg Grand Prix in which the Irish driver, Kevin Finnerty York, finished victorious while driving the final twenty laps with only two gears. A true champion can accomplish things a normal person would consider impossible. Denny just needed to remember that. Know who you are on the track with”.

Weirdest Myth Yet

I had a furnace maintenance this week and the young man who did the work turned out to be “bikecurious.” After talking about what he was thinking of buying, we took a look at my motorcycles. He was particularly interested in the WR250X, but said he’d been planning on saving up for a down payment on a Harley of some sort. I asked why someone under 60 would be looking at a Harley and his answer was, “I heard it was safer.” His uncle, apparently a pirate of some sort, had told him “90% of all crashes happen when you are riding alone” and the easiest way to find a group of people to ride with is to own a Harley.

I had to admit, that solo crashing thing has mostly been true for me; because I almost always ride alone. However, I also told him that I’d seen one group of Harley pirates crash in mass when they plowed into a bunch of bees. Every group ride I’ve ever been on has had at least one pretty serious crash, but that’s a poor sample because I’ve only been on a half-dozen or so group rides in my last million motorcycle miles. I wonder if racing is “group riding,” because I’ve sure seen a pile of motorcycles go down together in the first turn.

The whole idea that group riding is in some way safe, amazes me. On every level, the concept seems insane to me. When I taught the MSF classes, I got a constant taste of how true David Roth’s “Law of Crowd IQ” is more true than not (It’s math: the smartest guy in the crowd’s IQ divided by the number of people in the crowd.). People get stupid in crowds, just look at a Trump rally: the bigger his crowds got, the dumber they became. Hillary never had to worry about that because her crowds were always tiny. Motorcyclists are not only no different, we are naturally inclined to be hooligans and not that bright on our good days. So, put us in groups and it’s hard for the group IQ to beat 1.0. Probably the best illustration of this was when a Minnesota motorcycle instructor was on a group ride and dropped her bike trying to exit a light at an intersection and was killed when the nitwits following her ran over her repeatedly. If that event wasn’t a highlighted moment illuminating exactly how stupid groups of motorcyclists  are, we’re just too stupid as a nation to get irony.

Where do myths like this come from? How does shit like this get said out loud without being laughed into hiding from embarrassment?

Minnesota's Off-Road Gem

All Rights Reserved © 2017 Thomas W. Day

I'm out of my depth here. I specialize in criticism, picking apart the flaws I observe in products and services, and general purpose griping about stuff in general. So, after a long, hot July afternoon at the Spring Creek Motocross Park, I don't have a thing to complain about; at least as far as the park itself and the races are concerned.

Since we moved to Minnesota in 1996, my summers have been jammed with work, travel, and play; pretty much in that order. One of the events I have consistently missed because of overbooking and poor planning has been the Spring Creek AMA Pro National outdoor motocross round. This year, purely by luck, I had nothing planned for that weekend and I kept it empty, once I discovered that happy accident.

Once I started planning to spend a day in Millville's main attraction, I realized that the last time I was at a real outdoor motocross was in the late 70's or early 80's. I was lucky enough to see a few of the 70's Trans-AMA rounds with Roger DeCoster and crew, the 1976 AMA season and Bob "Hurricane" Hannah's first national championship season, and a half-dozen AMA national races every year until I moved to California. The year Spring Creek MX Park opened, in 1983, I arrived in southern California just in time to read about the end of the great motocross parks: Saddleback, Elsinore Raceway, Carlsbad, Corona, El Toro, Hopetown, Indian Dunes, Ontario Speedway, and Orange County International; all absorbed by the vast urban and suburban California housing explosion of the 80's. There was still outdoor motocross to see in California, but it required a hundred-plus mile trek through the city and desert. At the same time, stadium-cross was gearing up and I got large doses of an extreme version of the sport at Anaheim Stadium and the Los Angeles Coliseum. Even better, I could convince friends to come with me to those places. Getting beach dwellers to drive to Riverside is harder than teaching a cat to swim. A decade or two later, Denver and Minneapolis stadium-cross was a big step down from the L.A. experience, so my motocross spectating interests dwindled away. After moving to Minnesota in 1996, every year when the Spring Creek pro national round came around, I thought, "I should go." This year, Saturday, July 22, 2017, I made it to Millville.

Dirt Rider magazine provides a solid blow-by-blow wrap-up of the race results (Check out http://www.dirtrider.com/spring-creek-motocross-results-2017#page-4.) and I don't have anything to add to that. I didn't attend the races as "press," so my access was no different than yours. I paid my $10 parking and $45 general entry fee. I hauled a chair, a big umbrella, lots of water, and a backpack full of electronics and camera gear, so I drove my pickup to the races. Motorcycle parking is free and right by the entrance gate, just like you'd expect from a real motorcycle event organization. I wouldn't be surprised if there were a thousand motorcycles in that area. The "overflow parking" for cagers is about a half-mile from the park entrance and I was glad I dressed for a hiking experience. The park's camping area is another parking lot a little closer to the track and I have to say I was unimpressed with motocross fans' camping etiquette. Saturday afternoon, the campsite smelled like a bunch of the campers were dumping their black water tanks on the ground. Out in the overflow parking lot, a disappointing number of young men were dumping trash into piles and setting fire to their garbage between the parked cars. Apparently, if you can't be a motorcyclist the next best thing is to behave like a drunk and brainless hooligan.

The Spring Creek track and spectator grounds are amazing. On Saturday, it was practically a small town in itself. The variety of food available during the national event was diet-busting. The event organization was totally professional. Even the security guards were friendly and helpful. The ticket area was organized and well-run and and if you wanted to get through the lines fast, you brought cash.

Going to these races was a lot like stepping back in time to the glory days of Southern California's CMC, except for the politically-correct Midwestern electric guitar version of the Star Spangled Banner and the weirdest pre-race Road Warrior-style prayer I've ever heard. If this were a CMC event, the between-race entertainment would be a Van Halen-style band (or the actual Van Halen band) and the motorcycles would provide respite from the sound system volume. The track's PA system is adequate for between race dialog, but is pretty much buried by the 4-stroke snarl of 40 race bikes. However, the track also has a simulcast on the 107.9MHz FM radio band and if you bring a radio and some in-ear phones you can follow the jocks' conversation during the races.

There is no one spot from where you can see all of the action on the track: the course is just too long and convoluted for anything short of a hovering blimp for an overall view. However, there are dozens of great spots to setup a shade tent or large umbrella. Most the good spectating spots are within a reasonable hike to a beer garden, food, and a porta-can. Speaking of hiking, thanks to the giant culvert-underpasses, you can hike the entire perimeter of the course. There are stairs to assist those of us who aren't mountaineers up or down the cliff known as "Mount Martin."

The track itself is a little bit of everything; from deep sand to loamy only-in-Minnesota knee-deep topsoil to hard-packed whoops on the way to the finish line. Every stereotypical bit of motocross topology is there, too: killer whoops, even bigger jumps, ruts and berms deep enough stop non-super human riders, a giant hill climb (Mount Martin) and a banzai run back down the same hill with a hairpin at the bottom, more deep sand, and another steep hillclimb and downhill, before the whoop-filled drag race to the finish line.

I've been raving about the Millville park to anyone who will listen since I got back. At least one friend, who raced at Spring Creek back in the early 80's, and I are going back for the end of the regional Millville Super Series season. I can't say enough good things about my day at the park. I'm not familiar with the warm glow of satisfaction, but I could get used to it. The organization that puts on the Spring Creek national races could consult with every other motorcycle event group in the state and improve every one of them.

#152 The Little League Dad Society

All Rights Reserved © 2016 Thomas W. Day

We've all witnessed the "little league dad" syndrome and some of us have suffered that arrogant, egotistical, under-achieving fellow personally. Some of us have even been stuck with little league dads and moms. Way back in 2014 (I Hate Racing #155 April 2014), I made my personal take on watching little kids on motorcycles pretty clear, "When a stadium motocross is broken up (too often literally) with a bunch of 8-year-olds plodding around a motocross track, smashing into each other and the track obstacles, I have to be somewhere else. I can't watch." Even worse, when I end up following a dad on his bike and his kid dangling from the back--feet a few inches from reaching the passenger pegs, in minimal clothing, and an ill-fitting helmet--I have to find another route to where I'm going. I've seen dead and mangled adults and I don't like it much, but I can deal with it. I'd just as soon live my whole life without ever seeing a dead and/or mangled little kid. I'm afraid I'd never be able to get that image out of my mind. I saw a dirt bike foot-peg-gutted high school kid, 40 years ago, and I'm still stuck with that image as if it happened last week.

I wonder how many parents have digested the real message behind the Will Smith movie, Concussion, or the book it is based on, Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru's League of Denial? As one of the doctors in the book said, "We're exposing more than 1 million kids to early-onset brain damage, and we don't know yet how to prevent it." Well, we know there are a lot more than "1 million kids" exposed to this because he's just talking about football. Between baseball, hockey, soccer, motorcycle racing, and a culture that tells kids they can knock each other around like punching bags without consequence, almost half of our kids are exposed to early-onset brain damage (resulting in chronic traumatic encephalopathy or CTE) on a regular basis. Another sports-related concussion researcher said, "If only 10 percent of mothers in American begin to conceive of football as a dangerous game, that is the end of football." Obviously, the possibility that 10% of American mothers don't "conceive of football as a dangerous game" pretty much proves that there are a lot of clueless mothers out there. Anyone who has played football for more than one afternoon knows it's a dangerous game. However, until recently we didn't know how dangerous. CTE has been found in the brains of 18 to 21 year old football players and the leading neurological researchers are now recommending that "kids under the age of 14 should not play collision sports as they are currently played. We believe they should not be playing tackle football." Likewise, it's pretty obvious that kids under the age of 14 should not be racing motorcycles. It's a well-known fact that when you're racing off road, "if you're not crashing you're not riding."

Peter Lenz, center, poses with mechanic Will Eikenberry, Dylan Code, Misti Hurst, and Keith Code. Lenz died at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

Of course, this is an issue where following the money gets to core of the problem. Danger is why we like these high risk sports: football (394,350 injuries in 2012 with an average of 12 deaths per year for the past 25 years), soccer (172,470 injuries in 2012), baseball and softball (119,810 and 58,210 injuries in 2012), basketball (389,610 injuries in 2012), hockey, volleyball (43,190 injuries in 2012), wrestling (40,750 injuries in 2012), gymnastics (28,300 injuries in 2012), field and track (24,910 injuries in 2012), and motocross and road racing (for which there are no reliable statistics). Hell, we've even figured out how to make cheerleading dangerous (37,770 injuries in 2012). And there is a lot of money to be made (the NFL's 2014 revenue was $7.24B) exposing young athletes to death, disability, and damage to their long term mental health. However, we're just getting started with learning about brain damage and the fact that 76 or 79 studied NFL player brains found evidence of CTE hasn't sunk; especially NFL players and their families. Regardless, you would have to be delusional to imagine that motorcycle racing doesn't have these problems. The sad case of ex-NASCAR racer Fred Lorenzen is probably the first shot fired in motorsports and I suspect there is a lot of hidden damage out there in race cars, motorcycles, and every other contact sport. Now that (a few) doctors know what to look for, a lot more cases will be popping up.

The big sea change here isn't that we are surprised that long term consequences result from injuries. We expect knee, hand and arm, shoulder, and even internal injuries from motorcycle racing that will hamper the ex-racer later in life. Racing is dangerous, get over yourself, right? My hip replacement was due, according to my orthopedic surgeon, to "use and abuse" and genetic factors. Racing and riding off-road motorcycles would be major contributors to that use and abuse. I wasn't surprised and I haven't once looked back and wished I'd not ridden motorcycles when I was young and made out of "rubber and magic." The big change in attitude should come from the knowledge that "getting your bell rung" can have long term consequences to your mental health: resulting in CTE which is "essentially pugilistica dementia (boxer's dementia)" with side orders of memory loss, confusion, impaired judgment, impulse control problems, aggression, depression, anxiety, Parkinsonism, suicide, and progressive dementia. If you know your kid is being exposed to chemicals that could result in those symptoms would you keep him or her in that environment?

We use, semi-rationally, to justify risk is the associated reward. Those of us who chose to ride motorcycles, with some understanding of the risk we're accepting, have a collection of rewards that we believe makes the risk acceptable. The problem with this new knowledge is that the information is being aggressively repressed by the people who make the most money from these sports. In the case of football, the NFL has done everything possible (like Big Tobacco) to squash research and evidence that head trauma can lead to long-term cognitive problems. By "everything" I mean everything from creating bogus "research" to ridiculing researchers in public media to suing people for slander. I suppose murder hasn't been on the table, but you never know. Currently, their big argument has been that it's not "certain" that head banging is the cause of CTE. Since we're not absolutely positive that whacking on a kid's skull causes CTE, we don't have to stop it. Drug and chemical companies have used that bullshit argument for being able to continue polluting water, air, food, medicine, and the entire planet for a century. A more rational society would require the polluters to prove they aren't doing harm before they are allowed to do whatever godawful thing they want to do, but humans are mostly irrational. Maybe we're all brain damaged and it's too late to make any difference for the species?

In the meantime, I think parents should seriously reconsider the risk their children are taking for whatever weird cause they've used to justify putting a little kid on a motorcycle and putting that kid on a race track. Ten years ago, you could excuse this behavior with "it's not a problem, he'll shake it off and be ok tomorrow." Today, the evidence is good that not only will that headache and loss of memory stay around a while but it might become a whole lot worse in 30-40 years.

 MMM #183 May 2017

#125: I Hate Racing

All Rights Reserved © 2013 Thomas W. Day

That title got your attention, didn't it? Let me be more specific: I hate (as in “can't watch”) a specific sort of motorcycle racing. I love motorcycle racing, except when kids are doing it. When a stadium motocross is broken up (too often literally) with a bunch of 8-year-olds plodding around a motocross track, smashing into each other and the track obstacles, I have to be somewhere else. I can't watch. Likewise, I can't watch movie torture scenes, horror movies of any sort, much of anything by Disney or Lucasfilm, and romantic or sex scenes that last longer than a handshake. I'm a lightweight, I admit it.

This isn't a new thing for me. I have never liked any of the big three of what we call "organized sports" for little kids: Pop Warner football, Little League baseball, or youth hockey. Motorcycle racing for little kids combines everything that is dangerous and useless in all of those sports into one injury-plagued, little-league-Dad-hyped, emergency-room-filling sport. I did not encourage my kids to ride motorcycles or play any organized sports, although I have always been a sports fan. Neither of my daughters or my grandson have been inspired to ride a motorcycle (although my oldest daughter is seriously considering a scooter this summer), but they have all been involved in a variety of sports: skateboarding, cross-country and marathon running, triathlons, baseball, and archery. If they'd have expressed an interesting in motorcycle racing, I'd have recommended they get serious about bicycling and, once they were good enough on self-powered two-wheels, we'd talk about a motorcycle. So far, bicycles have been more than enough two-wheeling for all of my kids and I'm fine with that. Motorcycling is not for everyone. Motorcycle racing is for hardly anyone.

Kids find enough ways to bang themselves up without having some nutball parent urging them to do dumber, more dangerous stuff to fill in the spaces in Dad's sadly unfulfilled life. No body needs to see good-'ole-dad raging at some pimpled-up teenage kid who was foolish enough to play referee at one of those half-pint gladiator events. The only life-lesson to take away from most little kid sporting events is that most people should not be allowed to reproduce; that goes double for the infamous little league dads. They shouldn't even be allowed to watch other people reproduce.

When kids like Peter Lenz (13), Jake Wilson (5), and ,even, Darrel Davis (16) and Oscar McIntyre (17) are pushing the limits of sanity, I'm not into watching it. I'm not trying to say they shouldn't be allowed to race and risk their lives. I'm just saying I don't want to watch. I don't like seeing anyone get hurt on a race track, but I'm just not up for seeing kids hurt . . . period. I don't watch races for the crashes, I watch racing for the passes, for the battles in the corners, and for the strategy. I don't want to see anything more exciting than a low-side that results in a racer sliding harmlessly into the gravel runoff and, at most, harmlessly bumps into the air fence.

About ten years back, when I was producing a cable show called "Motorcycling Minnesota," I took my grandson to the Dome to watch a Supercross. Ricky Carmichael was on top of his game and the cast of characters who pushed him to AMA Hall of Fame status were on hand. The first heats were terrific and we were enjoying our great press booth seats and the free food and booze when the half-time "entertainment" turned out to be a couple dozen kids pretty close to my grandson's age riding tiny minibikes around part of the pro course. The whoops amounted to large hillclimbs for some of those kids and the course was excessively difficult for the majority of the kids. They high-centered at the top of the whoops and fell over, they nose-dived into the troughs and fell over, they crashed into each other and a couple of kids crawled off of the course in obvious pain and likely injuries. Dads were incensed and a couple of kids got yelled at for crying after crashing. After thirty years of loving motocross, I lost my taste for the sport. Neither I or my grandson have thought twice about going back for another Supercross event since.

Kids don't need to start early to be great at most sports. There are exceptions, like gymnastics and . . . I can't think of any others, but for every "I got into ____when I was four and went on to be world champion" story there are 10,000 "by the time I was nine I hated ____ and hung up my helmet/shoes/skates/bat/hat for the last time" sad tales. For every Valentino Rossi (his failed racer dad started him on karts and motorcycles when he was 8 and put him on a motorcycle racetrack at 11) there are a half-dozen Bob "Hurricane" Hannah's who said, "My father was against racing. He did not mind me riding, but at the same time he didn’t want me getting hurt. So I never raced until I was 18 years old and living on my own."

For more than a year, the AMA peppered me with press releases about how we motorcyclists needed to campaign Congress to overturn the 2009 ban on lead in kids' toys, which included the batteries and other components in motorcycles made for kids. I even took a little editorial heat about consistently finding "more important" things to report in All the News. Sorry, I can't give a damn about manufacturers having difficulty selling crippling "toys" to kids. I think they deserve all the political expense, legal liability, and moral suffering they experience for those products. Eventually, crazy heads won the day and kids were back on their "donor machines," but at least I didn't make a contribution.

In 1988, in an article titled "Controversies about intensive training in young athletes" a pair of British doctors argued, “Young athletes are not just smaller athletes, and they should not become sacrificial lambs to a coach’s or parent’s ego.” To put a fine point on that statement, "young athletes" are our children and should be allowed to be kids without the pressure of imagining themselves to be the future of a sport or their parents' retirement plan. Even more important, if you expect me to pay big money to attend a sporting event, do not torture me with a gladiator kids event at half-time. I'll take a gymnastic display of cheerleaders over gutted and busted-up kids anytime.

My Motorcycles: 1974 Rickman 125 ISDT

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For me, the Rickman 125 was a turning point in motorcycling. It is, 26 years later, one of the two new bikes I've owned. Before and after 1974, I've always bought used. I paid $500 for the Rickman, right out of the box. I did the dealer assembly myself, as part of the price I'd negotiated. The bike was sold as a 1974 model, but I think it was a 1973 that was just relabeled when the '73 inventory carried over. Modern suspensions just started to appear in 1974 and the Rickman was almost instantly obsolete.

On one hand, it was a terrific motorcycle. The Rickman 125 ISDT (International Six Day Trials model) had strong, bulletproof motor and the bike was an artistic example of European design. The chrome-moly, nickel plated frame was an example of the finest workmanship. The quality and beauty of the welding was the best I've ever seen, anywhere.

While the radial head Zundapp motor was a nightmare of false neutrals and monster-Q powerband, the motor had a chrome-plated cylinder and rings. I think the Zundapp 125 would outlast any other motorcycle I've ever heard of, off-road. However, the powerband was so limited that it drove me to disassemble and reassemble the motor dozens of times, hoping to find some miracle that would put me in the front of the pack without having to spend hard-to-come-by money getting there.

In those days, I was earning $3.60 an hour and supporting a family of four on that wage. My average work week was 80 hours and I'd saved spare change for a whole year to scrape up the $500 to buy this bike. Regardless of how unsuited it was for the purpose I intended, it was going to have to work because I had no other choice. I raced the Rickman in the last few cross-country events in the Midwest. I thrashed it through several thousand miles of motocross tracks across Nebraska and northern Kansas, including "the big show"; the Herman, NE track where the nationals and international racers visited on the AMA and and TransAM tour. (My bike actually touched the same dirt as Roger DeCoster, Bob Hannah, and a host of great riders of whom you've probably never heard. I ground the Rickman's gears through a half-dozen enduros, a 24-hour winter endurance race in South Dakota, and, once, an observed trials. I even taught my wife how to ride a motorcycle on the Rickman.

As you can see by the above scan of a nasty old Polaroid, motorcycling was a family sport for my family in those days. No, I didn't ride in that "outfit" (how about those Converse riding "boots"?), but I did a lot of tuning in an enclosed garage that probably could have smoked meat. My passenger is my beautiful daughter, Holly, when she was about three years old. Remembering that exhaust setup, the bike had to have been stone cold for us to be sitting in those positions. That homemade expansion chamber could fry a steak at 2".

Don't ask me why I left the speedo on the bike in motocross form, but there it was. I probably had twice as much invested in the add-ons for this bike than I'd spent on the original motorcycle. I pounded out the exhaust myself, finishing it off with one of the original pie-pan SuperTrapp silencers. I'd "blueprinted the intake ports (which made the bike even peakier), tuned the crap out of the Bing carb, and attempted shimming the transmission (which reduced the number of false neutrals available between gears from 4,358 to 12), and invested a thousand hours in the suspension. All in vain. The Rickman was about 50 pounds too heavy, 10 hp too wimpy, and the wide-band ISDT transmission just didn't cut it on the motocross track. I did OK in the half dozen cross-country races I'd managed to locate, but cross-country racing was all but dead in 1974 and enduros bored me stiff.

Toward the end of my racing "career," all of the major damage I did to myself happened on the Rickman. More accurately, those things happened as I was being flung from the Rickman. Broken toes, fingers, ribs, collarbone, and all sorts of burns and road rashes. After 10 years of riding damage-free, I went through a six month period where I couldn't seem to keep the rubber-side down. At age 31, I quit racing while I could still stand mostly erect.

I probably put several thousand hours on the Zundapp motor and, every winter when I tore it down, the rings and cylinder met like-new specs. I sold the bike in 1978, for $125. By then, it was absolutely useless on a race track. Long travel suspensions and watercooled motors had turned the Rickman and most of Europe's motorcycles into ancient history. It was still a beautiful piece of workmanship, though. It was almost like selling a member of the family. I have not been sentimental about selling a motorcycle since the Rickman rolled out of my garage belonging to someone else.

The left picture is of the Rickman in cross-country or enduro dress. Working (mostly) Bosch electrics, a Carl Shipman toolbag on the tank, and, otherwise, the same bike I raced on Nebraska motocross tracks. I'd gear the bike down about 6 teeth (rear sprocket) for motocross, because the top speed was 75mph over broken ground in stock form. The bike was so stable that a good (and light, less than 150 lbs.) rider could wick it up and hang on for miles, WFO.

The last cross-country race I did on the Rickman was in far western Sidney, Nebraska, about 30 miles from the Colorado border. I was blasting the 125 class when the race was called for the mother of all dust storms after the third lap. I looked like a filthy raccoon, when I pulled off my goggles and helmet and my eyes were so sandblasted that I could hardly open them the next day. The dust was so dense that it chewed through the master cylinder on my Mazda's hydraulic clutch on the way back home. We drove almost 400 miles, clutch-less, 100 of that through dust so thick that visibility was barely beyond the nose of our 1973 Mazda RX3 station wagon. The Rickman, however, was doing fine when the race ended.

It took a lazy Nebraskan, who thought air filters were for girly-men, to kill the Rickman. He put in a whole day of riding on the Platte River bed before the power vanished and he walked back home, leaving the Rickman to sink into the sandy river bottom. He even had the gall to call me and complain about the bike, two years after he bought it and 2,000 miles after I'd sold it to him. The bike's frame was a work of welding art. It should have enjoyed a much more honorable demise, but dirt bikes don't often die happily or attractively.

EYES AND OHS THAT SOUND LIKE EMS

[I write more than rants and unfounded opinion pieces. Sometimes I lie for the fun of it (write fiction). This is a story I wrote for a long-dead Southern California motorcycle magazine way back in the 80’s. I still like it. I hope you do too.]

All Rights Reserved © 1988 Thomas W. Day

Hemingway would have loved this sport. McQueen did, he came here all the time. No moody pampered tennis players for those guys. Speedway. The queen of England ain't gonna show up here.

If the Queen isn't coming, the King's influence is strongly felt. Speedway is a motorcycle sport that has rules more like a moral code than a list of laws. Arthur and the Round Table are alive on the round track. Speedway rules promote sportsmanship and outlaw chance's miss-step. This is not just a man's sport, but a gentleman's sport; like jousting or dueling. There are no "acts of God" here. God has nothing to do with speedway racing. The sport looks out for its participants better than any god that I've seen evidence of.

The racers work every week, at a handful of tracks, sometimes for twenty-year careers. Blue-collar labor on a tenth mile dirt oval. They earn twenty-to-forty-grand annually and a speedway career is probably about as dependable as high-tech engineering. A man can't expect to retire after having done the same job for forty years, but he can make a good living for a decade and then hobble off and learn how to do something else. I guess this is why speedway rules are just and humane; otherwise the racers would join a union like other blue collar guys.

I really want you to understand that this sport is not like other motorsports. Like motocross, for instance. Motocross is like Real Life in the Real World. The Real World that has a real sun that most college professors never see the light of. The Real World where economics is just another brand of pseudo-philosophical-alchemy. The Real World where the closest thing to Hollywood's Super Cops is the seventeen L.A., blue-suited, street-thugs who pounded on an unarmed black traffic offender and claimed "occupational stress impairment' and retired on pensions that would keep Donny Trump happy. Motocross is that kind of Real World game. For example, you lead a race by a mile or so and keep it up for thirty-nine out of forty laps, beating your body to hamburger on terrain that mountain goats would pick their way through. You get twenty feet from the finish line and a hot-dog stand falls over, into the track, and kills you. You lose. The next guy behind you wins, assuming he misses the dog stand. Everybody else who finishes beats you, too. Just like the Real World.

Speedway does not tolerate the Universal Disorder. The rules of speedway protect the competitors from disruptive environmental intrusions. In speedway, if the dog stand scenario occurred, you get squished, but you win. You'd be dead, but a winner and that's more fair than you can hope for in this world. The concession-stand-aborted speedway race ends with the racers finishing in the positions they were in at the moment the tube-steaks ended the race.

Just to keep this train meandering away from the story I eventually plan to tell, but solidly into the philosophy of speedway, let's put you back out in front of the pack. Coming out of a corner, the guy behind you bumps into your rear tire and you both dump it. So does the guy behind him, he crashes into the heap that you and the other guy made. This happens in the fourth lap of a five lap race. Two other guys pass your metal and skin pile and finish the race, but you still win. That's justice. The guy behind you gets booted out of the race and the guy behind him finishes second. When you fell down, the founders of this sport kindly carried the finish line back a few feet behind where you got clobbered. The race ended there.

The Real World will not harm a speedway rider while he is on a sanctioned track. Acts-of-God will not effect the fairness of the speedway universe. You've suffered enough; having to ride a seventy horsepower bicycle in chemically treated dirt, without brakes, in a terribly noisy environment, under eye-damaging Hollywood-style spotlights, risking your life and left leg, chasing other equally disadvantaged guys around the track at sixty miles an hour. If God or Fate wants to screw you up, they will have to wait for Sunday morning; or until the races are over and you are back on Real World freeways. That's why I love this sport. It's as fair as a John Wayne movie.

Anyway, I'm at the races. Friday night in southern California. In a fairgrounds in the redneck part of southern California that most of the country doesn't even know exists. While the folks in Kansas dream of crazy, trendy, immoral Hollywood, I sit on bleachers with a few thousand transplanted Okies, Arkies, and what other breed of Midwesterners managed to earn enough gasoline to find the Golden State.

The structure we are sitting in is only a part-time speedway bowl. It was built to be a rodeo stadium and fairground arena where four-H kids show off their pet calf before sending him on his journey to the feedlot and packing plant. The track is ringed with wooden bleachers and the wooden bleachers are surrounded by concession stands (beer, pizza, hot dogs, speedway t-shirts, more beer) and the rest of the county fairgrounds. We're bruising our buns on the bleachers, soaking up beer from big milky-white plastic cups, chewing hot dogs smothered in red, yellow, and green chemicals.

The track officialdom meanders out to the fake grass hump surrounded by the oval. Referees, linemen, TV cameramen, assorted racer's girlfriends, a few little kids, and The Promoter find places to stand in the center of attention. The brilliant lighting makes the contrast between the track and the plastic grass and the white fence circling the track seem unreal. Like a cross between the vision of Norman Rockwell and Salvador Dali.

When the opening public address system squeal dies down, we notice that Motormouth isn't announcing tonight and a new set of vocal apparatus is at the microphone. We've never seen him, not even seconding Motormouth. In seconds, the new jaw gets tagged "Mushmouth." He's probably related to The Promoter. In California, everybody with a uniform or a microphone has a well- placed parent.

Anyway the Mushmouth's worthless, I can't understand a thing he says and nobody around me can, either. He's not cutting his words out right. No diction. He has his m's down though, every damn word sounds like it owns at least four m's.

Somebody gets vocal, "Makes you wish whats-his-face was back, doesn't it?". Motormouth. Yeah, I do kinda miss him. He can tell a joke and I can make out the punch line. He doesn't know diddly about racing, though.

The stars and stripes are waving and the p.a. blares out a pitiful version of "Oh Say Can You See." Stand up and act like Republicans. While the cheesy, scratchy, distorted recording of some Sow Cal high school band blares on, the crowd talks loudly, makes soggy bomb noises, or sings along, dive-bombing Jimi Hendricks-style at the rocket's red glare. When the tune is mostly over, I drop to my bench synchronized with five thousand other phony patriots. I don't know why they bother with that stuff here. It may be John Wayne county, but this is Saturday night with Ma and Pa Biker. The flag and Oh-Saying-and-Seeing don't symbolize anything more than the God-given right to beat up on faggots and non- whites to most of this bunch. I'm drifting philosophical, again.

The first bikes turn out and the riders sit on their machines waiting for the announcer to read off their names. While the bikes get push-started and sputter onto the track, Mushmouth mumbles away in some foreign language. When I can make out a few of his words, I try to match them with whatever is happening on the track. This guy isn't adding much to my Big Night Out and I'm losing concern for my fellow man, in his case.

Occasionally, a rider will stop, hike the rear wheel off the ground with his right foot peg, and let the rear wheel spin free, warming the engine up and protecting his clutch from frying before the race starts. Then he drops the back end to the track and roars off toward the starting gate. The racers finally line up, four riders across the center point of the oval track, splitting the grandstand straight in half.

The starting gate is a pair of poles on each side of the track, mid-way down one of the two straights. A pair of cables are pulled tight between the two poles. A two foot collar holds the two bands apart and onto the two poles. A giant rubber band is pulled tight through a pulley when the gate is down across the track. A solenoid releases the collar and the gate jumps up like a Polish guillotine.

Mushmouth has been babbling since we finished ignoring the national anthem. My friends are starting to complain about him. I am curious: I wonder if you could see his lips move if you were close enough to see his lips.

One of the guys I came with shares a joint with our row of bleachers, then we all split a bowl, and I'm buzzed. The first heat takes off. We are sitting at the apex of the first corner and the bikes slide by us. The track splatters up over the banister into my beer. Usually, I put my hand over the cup to protect my investment, but the grass has made beer as important as day-old soda. I have gone beyond caring about a little dirt in a cup of piss-colored pop.

Being stoned always makes me industrious and I make a project out of Mushmouth. I'm gonna figure out what he is saying. Off and on, for the last twenty years, I did time in assorted rock and roll bar bands. It takes an unusual sort of training and ability to figure out the lyrics to R&R tunes and I can do it. I am probably among the best in the country at figuring out the words to your favorite pop songs. I probably even know the words to "Louie, Louie." I can figure out what this guy is saying if I concentrate. Dope makes it easier for me to concentrate. I am single-minded, normally, but pot makes me hyper-monotracked.

The first race circles the track twice, then half the field goes down in a pile at the opposite end of the oval. They will re-start. Our man-at-the-mike will make noises into his equipment, probably explaining in great detail what is happening and why. I identify a few words this round, "..sum toms it takes a wall to git thuh feel of thuh track...have seen three ah fo re-starts afoe..." and so on. He isn't that tough. In fact he probably talks as clearly as about everyone I know. I bet cruddy public address systems have suppressed as much information as the Pentagon. That may be, but, in the Real World, a man has to compensate for the obstacles that are thrown in front of him. Motormouth gets understood on the same system. He never says anything worthwhile, but it is understandable. In fact, Motormouth never says anything that wouldn't be immediately obvious to an extra terrestrial stepping out of his saucer into the middle of the track on his first trip to Earth. But Motormouth says his nothing with distinct tees, hissing esses, open ohs, and long eahs.

The race starts, the bikes circle the track five times, shooting the fans with dirt. And the announcer drones on. A couple of elimination races go by, we watch the third-division beginners crash into each other, the walls, and invisible barriers strewn in some pretty harmless looking sections of the track.

After the beginner bodies are removed from the track, the first of the semi-finals is on camera. As the bikes line up and the roar of the engines all peak together, I suddenly decode the announcer's secret language, "Watch him on the right, Number Nine," I interpret. He uses the racer's perspective and describes the way the riders see the start. "He'll jump right in, drop into the middle, and block the track off. There, watch him go!" That's me interpreting again. Mushmouth probably used forty ems in two sentences.

The gate springs into the air, dirt rooster-tails behind the bikes, and they leap toward us. "There he goes, turn, turn, turn, right there! He got it." The fucker did it. Mushmouth called the race right from the beginning. Right on schedule. Dead nuts! He called it and Nine did it, right on cue. Just like he said it. I'm stunned. Now, I'm convinced that this guy is no ordinary fan, he is a super fan. I look at my friends to see if they got any of this. The one guy who really knows about racing is looking back at me. He grins and says, "He does know his racers." I nod back, wide-eyed and speechless. I have to tell you, I am blown away. You are told and I can go on.

Nine wins the race. He was gone, after that incredible start. The other three guys fought it out for positions two through five, but the first spot was never in question. The crowd actually gets off of its collective butt and does some serious screaming. A fair number of people trade "all right" with "shut the hell up," directed at Mushmouth. The announcer is screaming with the rest of the multitude, but he doesn't make sense.

We sit through six more races and he guesses the start four out of six times. The two races he guessed wrong on were restarted twice, because the hot guys couldn't get through the corner using the line Mushmouth thought they would try. Mushmouth called the shots like he had a screenplay on every one of the Division One races. He didn't do so well with the lower division races, because fate has more to do with winning than skill with those guys. They fall down when a cloud covers the moon and the track gets too slick for them maneuver on when it snows in Tibet.

The amateurs aside, Mushmouth is an undiscovered speedway psychic genius and is going to stay that way. It bugs me because he is made for this crowd. This lot of thousand short-sleeved lower-middle-classers is easily the most knowledgeable bunch of sport spectators in the world. This place is full of experts. A bunch of speedway connoisseurs and this guy is a gourmet of gourmets. This great fan who can read races and talks the talk and knows the inside stuff and has a racer's crystal ball, is here to talk to the perfect audience and they can't understand a word he says. Because his eyes sound like ohs. He should talk to his mirror with marbles in his mouth for ten hours a day. Rembrandt without a paint brush.

If these people knew what he is saying, they would be awed. He would be famous. They should love each other, but the affair is as one-sided as a Midwestern twelve year old lusting after Mick Jagger. Mushmouth insists on shoving the mike halfway down his throat because it makes him sound larger than life. No mike technique. He's not alone. Rock and rollers and evangelists do that, too. God has a big boomy voice, so Billy, Jerry, Jimmy, and that whole race of grown men with little kid's names and a set of collection plates have to boom, too. It doesn't matter that nobody understands what those guys are saying because "It's not the meat, it's the motion." I don't know who rock and rollers are trying to imitate.

A sports announcer is heard or hated, heard and hated, or heard and loved. Sport fans don't appreciate an evening of amplified mumbling.

The guy really needs diction lessons. Now! I bet my generation is stacked with stunted geniuses like this sucker. Lost at sea with his cotton-mouth. Poor lip and tongue control. No snap on the tees. He probably couldn't pronounce a vowel in front of a firing squad.

Another third division race is up. He warns some guys along the second straight, "Back off fromat fence...hot and heavy there, bad fur you and the rahders. Sumbuddy git those guys off the fence." The track was starting to hook-up too good. Before, the fast guys were sliding along the fence when they shot out of the first corner. If the beginners did that, somebody would scrape the paint off the ads and the teeth off the fence sitters. Sure enough, two tyros demolished themselves on the wall. The spectators had backed off and only got a little dirtier than the rest of us.

Third division demolition ends and we get back to the pros. A rider skips off the wall at the edge of a turn. He flounders around for a dozen yards and barely gets control of his bike before throwing it into the next turn. I think Mushmouth called him a schlockmeister, "Go tuh Europe an learn tuh really beah Schlockmeister. Learn tuh tripup widout losin it." I guess the fumbling rider had done just that, spent a few years in Europe learning how to stumble but not fall; and hold his position.

Mushmouth tried to lead the "more beer" cheer. It kinda worked, but he got about as many boos as yeas. He yelled, "Who wants to see ... win it?" Somebody behind me yelled, "Who wants to help me shoot that jerk?" That got a standing cheer from our section. It is obvious that these people really dislike the guy. Nothing he mumbles gets any respect. Steinbeck said "no in-between anywhere." Mark one up for Steinbeck. Mushmouth does have a hard act to follow. Motormouth isn't bad. He's clever, he knows some stuff about speedway. He knows something about most every kind of bike racing. "The voice of motorcycling," even. But Mushmouth knows speedway. He called a race, perfectly. He picked the winner and read off his game plan, step-by-step. Motormouth couldn't do that if the number one plate was riding in a third division race.

The crowd is pretty small tonight. A lot of the really hot guys are in Europe, competing in world class speedway. So the racing isn't quite as hot as the best of times. Some of the horde are leaving early, before the main events. His muffled voice calls out, "Come owan back, the races are juss fian. The ress rumes aranent krauted. Ters loss ah rume an tease guys are blowin it out fur you. Hey, here we go!" Another heat takes off, flinging mud that slowly fills the rows of beer cups standing empty on the bleachers. After topping my mountain, I'm bored. This is a short story because I have a short attention span. Mushmouth isn't a challenge anymore and I'm through interpreting for you.

We leave after the handicap final. Sometimes I like to watch the trophy girl get mugged, but my friends have had enough and we go. We leave with a majority of the crowd. I don't think anyone is staying to hear my boy mumble about who won tonight.

The End