In The Beginning
By Shawn McDonald
There once was a time before I knew anything about motorcycle racing. The first race I went to was the 1971 AMA Road Race at Seattle International Raceway in Kent, Washington on July 11. The race was won by a guy who was in his late 30s at that time. For a kid who had just turned 15 this racer was somebody who had probably raced with Jesus. Just imagine a steel shoe for sandals. Somebody who raced motorcycles and was five years older than you was pretty mind blowing; someone who was more than twice your age and winning was a nuclear explosion. The racer was Dick Mann.
For those of you too young to remember 1971, and for those of you too old to remember, here are a few things that were going on back then.
The top music was American Pie from Don McLean, Joy To The World from Three Dog Night and Brown Sugar from The Rolling Stones. The top movies were Love Story, and A Clockwork Orange. 'Tricky' Dick Nixon was our President, with Agnew as our VP, and we were still fighting in Vietnam. In 1971 the population of the US was 206,212,000 and today it is 289,558,000, not counting the illegal immigrants. In 2003 some 996,000 motorcycles were sold, which meant an increase in sales for the 11th consecutive year, but in 1973 around 1.5 million bikes were sold, and I bet a lot of them were dirt bikes and not Harleys. And finally, the average annual income was $4300 ($19,514 adjusted to 2003) and today it is $29,314.
During the 1970 Christmas break my family headed over from Bellevue, Washington, to snowy Ketchum, Idaho (Sun Valley) to visit my Uncle Jim and Aunt Bobby, and all my six assorted cousins including the oldest boy, Steve, who was about four and a half years older than I was. In that mini vacation my cousins introduced me to many new experiences in life such as Led Zeppelin, snowmobiles, the International ski run, inhaling and the munchies.
Steve was a real loner, and his main emphasis at that time was unpacking and assembling his AJS 250 Stormer. Now this was a real race bike with aluminum fenders, an orange fiberglass tank, an expansion chamber with no silencer, and a chrome-moly frame. Steve couldn’t ride it yet since the temperature outside was about minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit, but he could start it up in the garage. Okay, he did rip a couple of good rooster tails up and down the snow-covered streets that went right by the neighbors, the Hemingways (as in the late Ernest).
To this day I can remember Steve kicking over that AJS. I can still feel the back pressure exhaust balls coming out of the expansion chamber stinger and hitting my face like soft snowballs. The sound of an unmuffled two stroke and the smell of Castrol R bean oil in a closed garage was better than any other inhalants I could imagine. And it still is.
That summer my dad took his three sons to the July 11 AMA National Road Race at Seattle International Raceway in Kent, Washington. I’m pretty sure he did it to appease the constant badgering of his eldest son. That would be a fair bet.
That was my first taste of racing, as I watched a true classic battle between two sides of the coin – American champion Dick Mann on his four-stroke BSA Rocket 3, and the World Champion from Australia, Kel Carruthers, on his two-stroke Yamaha TR3 B 350.
Even with all the differences between them, it gave me a lesson in racing that still rings true in every race I watch or compete in. Even at those exalted racing speeds you could see Dick and Kel thinking about not only the next corner or corners, but what they would do on the last corner of the last lap. And they were thinking about it even as they were passing each other time after time after time until the checkered flag dropped.
We got to walk around the pits and peek and peer at the factory Triumphs, BSAs, Suzukis, Harley Davidsons and the exotic zoo of privateer Yamahas and Kawasakis. There were no guards or semi trailers to keep the riders away from the spectators. There was just the common civilized understanding that you gave the riders their own space, without interrupting them from their task at hand.
Then at the end of the day there was Evel. I’m pretty sure many of the spectators that day had come just for the chance to see Evel Knievel crash while trying to jump 13 cars. The buildup to the actual jump was like going to a Catholic wedding, where the ceremony takes two hours and the "I dos" less than a minute. Or was that the honeymoon night?
Evel would keep making fake runs by the jumps at take-off speeds, and then would run up to the edge of the jump and sit on his bike and get everybody all ready to root, rant and rumble. I remember he came up just a tiny bit short of his landing ramp, and his rear wheel hit squarely on the edge of the ramp which collapsed the wheel, and required a spectacular save. Some of the spectators were disappointed that he didn’t crash.
One of the things I still remember about that day was the three hour traffic jam to get out of the track. We didn’t have the Seattle Mariners or the Seattle Seahawks back then, so a crowd of 20,000 was the biggest my young eyes had ever seen. All these people coming out to see a motorcycle race. I wasn’t alone. There was the sweet sickly smell of castor bean oil that hung over the track.
A few weeks after the road race came the release of the Bruce Brown movie On Any Sunday, on July 28.
I really respect my parents more and more these days as I remember what a PITA (Pain In The Ass) I really was, pestering them about motorcycles 24/7. The movie was in downtown Seattle, at the Uptown Theater. Sort of oxymoronic, isn’t it, going downtown to be uptown.
Going anywhere in those days was an adventure, and even though it was only a half hour from little old Bellevue going into downtown Seattle was entering a big, scary world.
In the small lobby there was a 1971 250 Montesa Cappra MXer with an orange fiberglass tank and aluminum fenders. Must have been the styling craze that year for European MX bikes to have orange tanks and aluminum fenders. Anyways, it was really cool to have that bike there, and after the film you just wanted to silently slip it out of the movie theater and sneak it back home to your garage without anybody noticing. The only problem being that there was a sold-out theater waiting in line to do the exact same thing.
Anybody reading this story knows the impact seeing that movie, for the first or even the 50th time, had on the zillions of nerve connections inside your overloaded cerebrum. The real world was no longer that. You had shifted your brain waves to a different plane of existence, one where you found friends and companions of the same psyche. It was like opening a live action version of the motorcycle Bible, and seeing Apostles Mert, Dick, Gene perform miracles on the dirt track.
Why didn't they teach this stuff in school? Isn’t that what education is about? To teach you the true meaning of life as we know it! The joy. The amazement. I was 15 now, and any need to search the unexplored lands of the female or mind-altering substances had now completely disappeared. Dude! There was only one final frontier!
Remember we were still in 1971, and the draft was still being conducted to send our young men, guys with the average age of 19, to fight and die in Vietnam. Unfortunately Steve’s draft number came up. He thought about crossing the short distance from Idaho to Canada, but chose to honor his country’s wishes.
My younger brother Kevin – younger by one year and three days – and I had just each got our own Suzuki TS 125 bikes. They were styled somewhat after the Suzuki GP motocross bikes that Joel and his team-mate Roger DeCoster rode. Somewhat is a very loose interpretation, as they did have a downpipe exhaust that swept up at the end, and had a plastic high front and rear fender. Still, I could fantasize that I was just like Joel and Roger when riding that bike.
In September, after boot camp, Steve had a few days off before he was shipped off to Southeast Asia, so we took my stripped down Suzuki TS 125, with its 21-inch front wheel, and went up to 80 acres (main HQ of Microsoft today) to ride. Steve had a great time riding that 12 HP bike over the hard-packed bulldozed fields. If you got a good enough run at one of the jumps you could actually fly for a short while. While Steve was still with us my Dad loaded my TS on the bumper carriers of our white Pontiac station wagon, and off we went with my brothers Kevin and seven-year-old Keith for the one hour drive down to Puyallup to watch a local motocross race. After the race Steve and I unloaded the TS off the bumper carriers and rode around the track for a good long time, until we had to turn on the headlight to see where we were going. Wow! To be actually on the same dirt that real racers had just been on a few hours earlier. I could not have been flying higher unless the throttle had stuck wide open over the Mount Rainer jump.
Steve then went off onto another adventure.
Soon enough it was time for my first Trans-Am race at Puyallup Motocross Race Track. It was November 21. Once again there were constant utterings from me. "Dad! Please, oh please, please, please I need to go. I promise that my grades will get better and I will stop kicking Kevin with my Full Bore motocross boots when he pisses me off. PLEEEEEAASE!" Like almost all kids promises I lied. My grades didn’t get any better, and I continued to kick my brother in the tailbone with my Full Bore boots with the steel toe. But all the male McDonalds piled into the station wagon (pre SUVs), with the TS 125 on the bumper carriers, and headed down the road.
JOEL! JOEL! This short, stocky blonde Belgian, who smoked cigarettes in between races, won both motos. I could now identify who all the other competitors were by their bike and riding gear. There were the seasoned Europeans, Roger DeCoster, Arne Kring, Sylvain Geboers, Ake Jonsson, Hakan Anderson, Torsten Hallman, Pierre Karsmakers, Heikki Mikkola and Adolf Weil, and youngster Americans like Brad Lackey, Jim Pomeroy, Gary Jones, Mark Blackwell, Marty Tripes and John DeSoto. I went around the track budging and slithering my way through the crowds, snapping pictures of these visitors from a different world on the track and in the pits.
In those younger days I had never heard any foreign languages, except for the mandatory Spanish classes in elementary school and the occasional French my Irish grandmother would speak from her home in Quebec. Now, in the very small area of the racing pits, I could listen to Finnish, Swedish, German, Walloon, Belgian, English (not American), Dutch and Japanese. It was like visiting the United Nations, except without the arguments and the condemnation of anything American. It reminded me of listening to the Catholic priests, before Vatican II, speak Latin at masses in which I didn't understand one damn word they said, which actually intensified the power and significance of whatever the hell they were saying.
The racers were probably talking about the gas/oil ratios, gearing or how hot that blonde was who just walked by them. I thought they were talking about the world’s geo political stature, or the economic reforms in the Botswana Republic. No. They were just yakking about hot plugs and hot chicks. "Hur-de-Heikki-finkstal-trep-it-dou-illumni-yankii-boidoftski" translated would be "Hey there Heikki, check out the headlights on the American chick
Once again 20,000-plus people arrived to see this new sport. All around the track it was two to four people deep to catch a glimpse of the racers whizzing past and hurling dirt rooster tails.
It certainly was a different world back then. We could just walk into the pits at the Trans-Am race and watch the factory stars working on their own bikes. The Suzuki riders did have their own Japanese mechanics, while the Maico and Husky riders had to survive on their own mechanical skills.
After the race we unloaded the TS, and I road on the track where JOEL had just won on almost the exact same bike! I was almost like one with JOEL! You could still smell the last wisps of bean oil lingering in the air.
The next week, on November 28, Steve was in a Chinook helicopter being transported in a heavy storm when it ran into the side of a mountain in South Vietnam. That was the last time he was airborne, but I will always think of him flying on my TS over the jumps at 80 acres, and I’m sure he was thinking of flying his AJS through the air in those last moments, and smelling that bean oil. You can bet on that.
What was I to do now? All the planets had come into alignment. Einstein had theorized about black holes, and I could attest that I was being dragged into the racing black hole where there is no exit. There was first racing with my buddies on our Honda Trail 90s, then the AMA road race, then the movie, then JOEL and the Trans-Am, then cousin Steve, but no-one in my immediate family had ever done anything so silly and stupid as to actually race. There were, of course, the guys at Loew’s Cycle, like CC (Chuck Akin) who were racers, and they encouraged me by saying, "C’mon you little Joel pussy. Get your sorry ass out there, and you'll never forget it!" As we all know, racing is a religion that should be adhered to every Sunday, with certain strictures and laws. But to be converted you have to BELIEVE. And to believe and have your soul taken over by the green flag you must take a leap of faith.
I decided that my leap of faith was to race at the Monroe MX track in the first week of December. I had no way of getting up there, so Scotex (Scott Johnson) – who had a 1971 Yamaha RT1 MX and had actually raced a couple of times – loaded up the two bikes and we took a short half hour drive to the track. Half hour my foot. It seemed more like days as I wondered what would happen, and how I would do when face to face with the dragon.
We parked in front of some truck that Scotex kept telling me was Pomeroy’s, and sure enough there was local hero Jimmy on his Octaco. The Octaco was a Bultaco engine stuffed into an aerospace engineer’s stainless steel-designed frame, with the tank as the backbone of the frame. This was the same Jim Pomeroy I had just watched racing a few weeks back at the Trans-Am against the best in the world? WOW!
Scotex pointed me to the sign-up booth, and told me to go enter. I didn’t know shit, so when they asked what class I wanted to sign up for I asked them "What do you mean classes?" I could just see them thinking ‘not another one’ when they told me, "The A class is for professionals, the B class is for intermediates, and the C class is for novices." In my mind I was certainly a professional, so I told them to sign me up in the A class. When I got back to the truck and told Scotex what class I was in, he said, "You dumb ass. Go back and tell them that at best you want to be in the B class, if not the C class." So back I went, and ate a little humble pie. The 125 B race was huge, with 40-plus riders on the starting line. In the first of the three 30-minute motos I finished 27th. Then in the second moto I learned some more things, and finished 17th. By the third moto I finished in seventh place, against some real race bikes that had real horsepower. I had survived the dragon and had officially become a member of a secret society.
You can plainly see that all these events were in harmony with each other, and my path was now decided for me to be a racer for the rest of my life. After all, I could not deny the natural laws of the universe. I had to be a racer. What else was there to do?
By Shawn McDonald
There once was a time before I knew anything about motorcycle racing. The first race I went to was the 1971 AMA Road Race at Seattle International Raceway in Kent, Washington on July 11. The race was won by a guy who was in his late 30s at that time. For a kid who had just turned 15 this racer was somebody who had probably raced with Jesus. Just imagine a steel shoe for sandals. Somebody who raced motorcycles and was five years older than you was pretty mind blowing; someone who was more than twice your age and winning was a nuclear explosion. The racer was Dick Mann.
For those of you too young to remember 1971, and for those of you too old to remember, here are a few things that were going on back then.
The top music was American Pie from Don McLean, Joy To The World from Three Dog Night and Brown Sugar from The Rolling Stones. The top movies were Love Story, and A Clockwork Orange. 'Tricky' Dick Nixon was our President, with Agnew as our VP, and we were still fighting in Vietnam. In 1971 the population of the US was 206,212,000 and today it is 289,558,000, not counting the illegal immigrants. In 2003 some 996,000 motorcycles were sold, which meant an increase in sales for the 11th consecutive year, but in 1973 around 1.5 million bikes were sold, and I bet a lot of them were dirt bikes and not Harleys. And finally, the average annual income was $4300 ($19,514 adjusted to 2003) and today it is $29,314.
During the 1970 Christmas break my family headed over from Bellevue, Washington, to snowy Ketchum, Idaho (Sun Valley) to visit my Uncle Jim and Aunt Bobby, and all my six assorted cousins including the oldest boy, Steve, who was about four and a half years older than I was. In that mini vacation my cousins introduced me to many new experiences in life such as Led Zeppelin, snowmobiles, the International ski run, inhaling and the munchies.
Steve was a real loner, and his main emphasis at that time was unpacking and assembling his AJS 250 Stormer. Now this was a real race bike with aluminum fenders, an orange fiberglass tank, an expansion chamber with no silencer, and a chrome-moly frame. Steve couldn’t ride it yet since the temperature outside was about minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit, but he could start it up in the garage. Okay, he did rip a couple of good rooster tails up and down the snow-covered streets that went right by the neighbors, the Hemingways (as in the late Ernest).
To this day I can remember Steve kicking over that AJS. I can still feel the back pressure exhaust balls coming out of the expansion chamber stinger and hitting my face like soft snowballs. The sound of an unmuffled two stroke and the smell of Castrol R bean oil in a closed garage was better than any other inhalants I could imagine. And it still is.
That summer my dad took his three sons to the July 11 AMA National Road Race at Seattle International Raceway in Kent, Washington. I’m pretty sure he did it to appease the constant badgering of his eldest son. That would be a fair bet.
That was my first taste of racing, as I watched a true classic battle between two sides of the coin – American champion Dick Mann on his four-stroke BSA Rocket 3, and the World Champion from Australia, Kel Carruthers, on his two-stroke Yamaha TR3 B 350.
Even with all the differences between them, it gave me a lesson in racing that still rings true in every race I watch or compete in. Even at those exalted racing speeds you could see Dick and Kel thinking about not only the next corner or corners, but what they would do on the last corner of the last lap. And they were thinking about it even as they were passing each other time after time after time until the checkered flag dropped.
We got to walk around the pits and peek and peer at the factory Triumphs, BSAs, Suzukis, Harley Davidsons and the exotic zoo of privateer Yamahas and Kawasakis. There were no guards or semi trailers to keep the riders away from the spectators. There was just the common civilized understanding that you gave the riders their own space, without interrupting them from their task at hand.
Then at the end of the day there was Evel. I’m pretty sure many of the spectators that day had come just for the chance to see Evel Knievel crash while trying to jump 13 cars. The buildup to the actual jump was like going to a Catholic wedding, where the ceremony takes two hours and the "I dos" less than a minute. Or was that the honeymoon night?
Evel would keep making fake runs by the jumps at take-off speeds, and then would run up to the edge of the jump and sit on his bike and get everybody all ready to root, rant and rumble. I remember he came up just a tiny bit short of his landing ramp, and his rear wheel hit squarely on the edge of the ramp which collapsed the wheel, and required a spectacular save. Some of the spectators were disappointed that he didn’t crash.
One of the things I still remember about that day was the three hour traffic jam to get out of the track. We didn’t have the Seattle Mariners or the Seattle Seahawks back then, so a crowd of 20,000 was the biggest my young eyes had ever seen. All these people coming out to see a motorcycle race. I wasn’t alone. There was the sweet sickly smell of castor bean oil that hung over the track.
A few weeks after the road race came the release of the Bruce Brown movie On Any Sunday, on July 28.
I really respect my parents more and more these days as I remember what a PITA (Pain In The Ass) I really was, pestering them about motorcycles 24/7. The movie was in downtown Seattle, at the Uptown Theater. Sort of oxymoronic, isn’t it, going downtown to be uptown.
Going anywhere in those days was an adventure, and even though it was only a half hour from little old Bellevue going into downtown Seattle was entering a big, scary world.
In the small lobby there was a 1971 250 Montesa Cappra MXer with an orange fiberglass tank and aluminum fenders. Must have been the styling craze that year for European MX bikes to have orange tanks and aluminum fenders. Anyways, it was really cool to have that bike there, and after the film you just wanted to silently slip it out of the movie theater and sneak it back home to your garage without anybody noticing. The only problem being that there was a sold-out theater waiting in line to do the exact same thing.
Anybody reading this story knows the impact seeing that movie, for the first or even the 50th time, had on the zillions of nerve connections inside your overloaded cerebrum. The real world was no longer that. You had shifted your brain waves to a different plane of existence, one where you found friends and companions of the same psyche. It was like opening a live action version of the motorcycle Bible, and seeing Apostles Mert, Dick, Gene perform miracles on the dirt track.
Why didn't they teach this stuff in school? Isn’t that what education is about? To teach you the true meaning of life as we know it! The joy. The amazement. I was 15 now, and any need to search the unexplored lands of the female or mind-altering substances had now completely disappeared. Dude! There was only one final frontier!
Remember we were still in 1971, and the draft was still being conducted to send our young men, guys with the average age of 19, to fight and die in Vietnam. Unfortunately Steve’s draft number came up. He thought about crossing the short distance from Idaho to Canada, but chose to honor his country’s wishes.
My younger brother Kevin – younger by one year and three days – and I had just each got our own Suzuki TS 125 bikes. They were styled somewhat after the Suzuki GP motocross bikes that Joel and his team-mate Roger DeCoster rode. Somewhat is a very loose interpretation, as they did have a downpipe exhaust that swept up at the end, and had a plastic high front and rear fender. Still, I could fantasize that I was just like Joel and Roger when riding that bike.
In September, after boot camp, Steve had a few days off before he was shipped off to Southeast Asia, so we took my stripped down Suzuki TS 125, with its 21-inch front wheel, and went up to 80 acres (main HQ of Microsoft today) to ride. Steve had a great time riding that 12 HP bike over the hard-packed bulldozed fields. If you got a good enough run at one of the jumps you could actually fly for a short while. While Steve was still with us my Dad loaded my TS on the bumper carriers of our white Pontiac station wagon, and off we went with my brothers Kevin and seven-year-old Keith for the one hour drive down to Puyallup to watch a local motocross race. After the race Steve and I unloaded the TS off the bumper carriers and rode around the track for a good long time, until we had to turn on the headlight to see where we were going. Wow! To be actually on the same dirt that real racers had just been on a few hours earlier. I could not have been flying higher unless the throttle had stuck wide open over the Mount Rainer jump.
Steve then went off onto another adventure.
Soon enough it was time for my first Trans-Am race at Puyallup Motocross Race Track. It was November 21. Once again there were constant utterings from me. "Dad! Please, oh please, please, please I need to go. I promise that my grades will get better and I will stop kicking Kevin with my Full Bore motocross boots when he pisses me off. PLEEEEEAASE!" Like almost all kids promises I lied. My grades didn’t get any better, and I continued to kick my brother in the tailbone with my Full Bore boots with the steel toe. But all the male McDonalds piled into the station wagon (pre SUVs), with the TS 125 on the bumper carriers, and headed down the road.
JOEL! JOEL! This short, stocky blonde Belgian, who smoked cigarettes in between races, won both motos. I could now identify who all the other competitors were by their bike and riding gear. There were the seasoned Europeans, Roger DeCoster, Arne Kring, Sylvain Geboers, Ake Jonsson, Hakan Anderson, Torsten Hallman, Pierre Karsmakers, Heikki Mikkola and Adolf Weil, and youngster Americans like Brad Lackey, Jim Pomeroy, Gary Jones, Mark Blackwell, Marty Tripes and John DeSoto. I went around the track budging and slithering my way through the crowds, snapping pictures of these visitors from a different world on the track and in the pits.
In those younger days I had never heard any foreign languages, except for the mandatory Spanish classes in elementary school and the occasional French my Irish grandmother would speak from her home in Quebec. Now, in the very small area of the racing pits, I could listen to Finnish, Swedish, German, Walloon, Belgian, English (not American), Dutch and Japanese. It was like visiting the United Nations, except without the arguments and the condemnation of anything American. It reminded me of listening to the Catholic priests, before Vatican II, speak Latin at masses in which I didn't understand one damn word they said, which actually intensified the power and significance of whatever the hell they were saying.
The racers were probably talking about the gas/oil ratios, gearing or how hot that blonde was who just walked by them. I thought they were talking about the world’s geo political stature, or the economic reforms in the Botswana Republic. No. They were just yakking about hot plugs and hot chicks. "Hur-de-Heikki-finkstal-trep-it-dou-illumni-yankii-boidoftski" translated would be "Hey there Heikki, check out the headlights on the American chick
Once again 20,000-plus people arrived to see this new sport. All around the track it was two to four people deep to catch a glimpse of the racers whizzing past and hurling dirt rooster tails.
It certainly was a different world back then. We could just walk into the pits at the Trans-Am race and watch the factory stars working on their own bikes. The Suzuki riders did have their own Japanese mechanics, while the Maico and Husky riders had to survive on their own mechanical skills.
After the race we unloaded the TS, and I road on the track where JOEL had just won on almost the exact same bike! I was almost like one with JOEL! You could still smell the last wisps of bean oil lingering in the air.
The next week, on November 28, Steve was in a Chinook helicopter being transported in a heavy storm when it ran into the side of a mountain in South Vietnam. That was the last time he was airborne, but I will always think of him flying on my TS over the jumps at 80 acres, and I’m sure he was thinking of flying his AJS through the air in those last moments, and smelling that bean oil. You can bet on that.
What was I to do now? All the planets had come into alignment. Einstein had theorized about black holes, and I could attest that I was being dragged into the racing black hole where there is no exit. There was first racing with my buddies on our Honda Trail 90s, then the AMA road race, then the movie, then JOEL and the Trans-Am, then cousin Steve, but no-one in my immediate family had ever done anything so silly and stupid as to actually race. There were, of course, the guys at Loew’s Cycle, like CC (Chuck Akin) who were racers, and they encouraged me by saying, "C’mon you little Joel pussy. Get your sorry ass out there, and you'll never forget it!" As we all know, racing is a religion that should be adhered to every Sunday, with certain strictures and laws. But to be converted you have to BELIEVE. And to believe and have your soul taken over by the green flag you must take a leap of faith.
I decided that my leap of faith was to race at the Monroe MX track in the first week of December. I had no way of getting up there, so Scotex (Scott Johnson) – who had a 1971 Yamaha RT1 MX and had actually raced a couple of times – loaded up the two bikes and we took a short half hour drive to the track. Half hour my foot. It seemed more like days as I wondered what would happen, and how I would do when face to face with the dragon.
We parked in front of some truck that Scotex kept telling me was Pomeroy’s, and sure enough there was local hero Jimmy on his Octaco. The Octaco was a Bultaco engine stuffed into an aerospace engineer’s stainless steel-designed frame, with the tank as the backbone of the frame. This was the same Jim Pomeroy I had just watched racing a few weeks back at the Trans-Am against the best in the world? WOW!
Scotex pointed me to the sign-up booth, and told me to go enter. I didn’t know shit, so when they asked what class I wanted to sign up for I asked them "What do you mean classes?" I could just see them thinking ‘not another one’ when they told me, "The A class is for professionals, the B class is for intermediates, and the C class is for novices." In my mind I was certainly a professional, so I told them to sign me up in the A class. When I got back to the truck and told Scotex what class I was in, he said, "You dumb ass. Go back and tell them that at best you want to be in the B class, if not the C class." So back I went, and ate a little humble pie. The 125 B race was huge, with 40-plus riders on the starting line. In the first of the three 30-minute motos I finished 27th. Then in the second moto I learned some more things, and finished 17th. By the third moto I finished in seventh place, against some real race bikes that had real horsepower. I had survived the dragon and had officially become a member of a secret society.
You can plainly see that all these events were in harmony with each other, and my path was now decided for me to be a racer for the rest of my life. After all, I could not deny the natural laws of the universe. I had to be a racer. What else was there to do?
