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Interviews
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The Bill Boyd Report
In my dreams I can hear Grandma Clema Wade calling, “Billy Wade, Billy Wade, come here and sit on this scooter, and tell me what you think.” As I said, “In my dreams!”
Billy Wade Boyd came from a small town in Kentucky. He
was just a country kid and when he was growing up, no one
had a motorcycle in his town. When he was young he told his Firemen friends at the Firehouse about the new rare car his pops was going to get. And they all said, “Sure, kid.” Then one day Grandpa Boyd got this new car, a Terraplane, and he took Billy for a show and tell at the Firehouse to the amazement of those fi remen. The kid was telling the truth, and what a car - it was a real Terraplane (a fancy 3-wheeled car.) And that’s a piece of history all to itself.
One day Billy Wade joined the US Air Force, and he
got to see some of the Far East, and become a jet mechanic. Afterward he settled in San Francisco, and bought a bike - a Harley! One day he was amazed to see bikers getting their bikes all dirty, riding in the dirt at the Richmond Ramblers Club House. Soon after, Billy was doing it, too - on a Triumph.
After he got the bike, he got the girl, and then he married her, Sue, in the Alemany Church in SF. Then came little Wade Boyd. By now Bill was an AMA expert Flat Tracker, racing everywhere, like Belmont and Hayward Speedway(some called it Hayward Spillway - at Turn 1.) That’s where I learned that bikes do fly because that’s what they all did over the Hayward jump. There were many bike clubs and events; Bill rode with the Bay Cities MC
and he also rode in the historic Catalina TT.
He raced with many Dirt Track heroes of the day like
Dick Duerrstein, Dick Mann, Joe Leonard, Billy Meyers,
Sammy Tanner, Elmer Gantry - (Leaky Larry Lane)
- and Biscuits and Cupcake. And then came Paul and
Dave Bostrom.
This is about the time that Peter Adams and friends started the Sunday Morning Ride. Bill and his dirt riding
and racing friends came out and showed those English
style riders how to do it and on occasion, he’d bring his son, little Wade - on the gas tank! As we say it, Wade learned to walk at 85 mph and they told him he had Castrol Oil for blood. They were a true racing family. Sue even did some racing.
And even back then, Bill was fi ghting for riders rights
with the AMA (because riders didn’t have rights.)
Somewhere in here, Bill’s family split up (1958) and he
started road racing with the AFM. With the help of Uncle
Al Fregoda, the Yamaha dealer in SF, Bill went on to race
Daytona twice (fi rst on a TD1 and then a TD2) and he won
the 250 Championship in the AFM. After, he raced 6 months
in Ireland and loved it, on the way to the Isle of Man TT
Races. Due to a lorry strike, the TT was postponed (Bill always said, “Go race in Ireland, it’s the best and it’s on the roads.”) At the TT, he competed with racers like Mike Hailwood and many others and he was the first there to wear colored leathers instead of the standard black. And the new open face helmet instead of the old porridge
pot helmet. He had state of the art equipment and he is the only American racer to ever win the Cookstown 100 - in Northern Ireland! (He must have felt like he was on top of the world.
Tragedy struck late in 1966 with an accident, and the loss of Bill’s lower left leg, and a long time in the hospital. But he did get right back on the bike, with the cast on and everything - and did well ‘till he had to stop – where he fell over and broke the good leg! (more recovery time…) Then he raced a Kawi triple with a paddle shifter and he was quite fast on the CRDC Monoques of Donald Hagstad with paddle shifters. Bill became an AFM president - twice, and a hippie (flower child) in bright colors and a big purple cape. It was Bill’s push in the AFM that got rid of the Le Mans Start (fi rst in the AFM and then the World) because he could not run across the track and they had bands for entertainment at races. As a hippie, Bill toured Canada, and the Golden Gate Park Love-Ins and the Haight-Ashbury and he was instrumental in the lighting of Sgt. Sunshine’s doobie on the Hall of Justice steps (back when.) Around this time, Bill started searching for his path, spiritually, (he was an Atheist) which led him to Agni
Yoga, and the meeting of his Guru, Ralph Huston. Bill became a student, and disciple, working his way up through the years to become a teacher and healer.
Bill’s weekly pride and joy was always the Sunday Morning Ride, because he still liked to ride bikes and see friends, and he had ridden it for more than 40 years. He
said he felt like Mr. Chips, he’d been there so long – that’s from the movie, folks! Bill was very quick at it, and he became Mr. RD350, and then, Mr. RZ350, and was all
but untouchable. The only bike and rider to get by him and make it stick, was his son, little Wade, on his RD/RZ500’s (1986) and on a good day, the duo would hook up and
disappear on the rest of the gang, with the biggest smiles on their faces, when found at the next stop. In Bill Boyd’s words, as I say, “The SMR - it’s a spiritual thing and it’s far out.” The ride attracts people from all walks of life - for a good time and a good ride, and breakfast! And it’s a spiritual experience on a physical plane, and has been a weekly pilgrimmage for many, over the decades!
Bill tuned bikes for a living in the second half of his life, till retirement. He was Mr. RD/RZ 350 and would always say, “Keep good tires on your bike – that’s what
keeps you off the ground!” One day Uncle Dicky talked Bill into bringing in the SMR into the S.F.M.C. to help save it from a lack of membership, so a bunch of us joined the
S.F.M.C. — and the club and the clubhouse got saved.
In his later years, Bill was mostly into metaphysics (the real history of the planet and humanity) and healing, and watching the Blind Samurai movies, and Supercross
on TV. He said, “You just watch the new little black kid - James Stewart. He’s the one to watch!” And look at him now, on top.
Bill and Uncle Phil Lane drove a chase truck for a while, and kept checking in on the SM Ride. Thanks to Bill and Peter Adams, George Martin and their friends, the SMR is now 50 years in existence, with the second, third and forth generations!
Bill had been video-taped by Channel 7 on the SMR and there is a separate video, Dawn Riders, by Gene Finley, and now Barbra (B. T. Bullet) at Bullet Press has a book,
Tales from over the Edge, and there’s been four generations of t-shirts. The Full Circle Event was Grand — that went on for about eight years! And it shows that the SMR is part of the community.
Bill helped me in the later years, prepping my TT Race bikes on our family quest for a TT Replica (he started it). He was my roommate a few times, and he retired on
my back porch, basking in the sunshine of S.F. Bill never drank or did drugs (except in his hippie days); he only smoked cigarettes and sometimes a cigar. But he quit those
two years before the end of his life and felt like Mr. Atlas.
Then, one June day, Bill walked himself into the hospital at the edge of Golden Gate Park, so he could dream his way back to the Summer of Love, with terminal cancer, while I was at the TT. They tried to make him comfortable, he just wanted to slip out quietly, but he did call me to congratulate me on getting a TT Replica (!) before he
went to the Big Race Track in the sky.
With love, Goodbye, Mr. Chips.
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Written by: Wade Boyd |
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Date: Nov.06.2009 |
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Malcolm Smith
Legendary Enduro and Off Road Motorcycle Mercenary
Photos courtesy of Malcolm and Joyce Smith unless noted as taken by Jill Rothenberbg
I could have never imagined that one day I’d be sitting across from Enduro and off-road motorcycling legend Malcolm Smith, eating Chinese food for lunch.
After all, this is the guy who captured an unbelievable eight gold medals in the International Six Day Enduro, who arrived at the halfway point of the first Baja 1000 thirteen hours before anyone else and went on to win the race six times—three times on a motorcycle and three times in a car--and who has twice finished the Dakar, considered by many to be the most dangerous course in the world. He will also always be known as the racer who flew effortlessly by hundreds of other riders to place first in the Elsinore 100 in the classic 1971 motorcycle film “On Any Sunday,” in which Smith, flat track legend Mert Lawwill, and their friend Steve McQueen became motorcycle icons to legions of young boys everywhere.
And that’s just for starters.
Smith also owns Malcolm Smith Motorsports, a 68,000 square foot motorcycle mecca in Riverside, CA, holds yearly invitation-only rides to Mexico and South America in addition to open rides, and sponsors racers who come work in his shop and live with his family.
And, at 65, you’ll still find him riding one of his bikes, either a four-stroke KTM touring bike or a 250 KTM two-stroke that he uses on tight trails. But these are just the ones that see the most action; Smith also owns forty or so other bikes dating back to the sixties, which he keeps at his home in Riverside and at his ranch in Colorado. On a recent weekend, Smith went on a six-hour ride in the San Bernardino Mountains with three riding buddies. “We were up riding in the snow and ice and had a great time,” he says, in what sounded like a pleasure ride in Smith’s book, a feat of human endurance for anyone else. “We fjorded rivers where the water was over our knees and we had to strap the bikes with a loop on both ends and around the foot stay—three guys pulling like mules through the snow. We probably only rode 75 miles, but it was wonderful. I guess I like it most when it’s a challenge.”
Whether on a motorcycle, in a buggy, or in a car, Smith is still pushing the limits of racing, still making it look easy, and still having a ball.
“Do you realize that you’re going to meet the Messiah?” asked one friend incredulously, when he found out that I’d be interviewing Smith. At 46 years old, he still fondly recalls how excited he and his friends got after seeing “On Any Sunday.” “Malcolm made it look so easy, like he was just flying over the desert and could have had a smoke while he was doing it—that’s how smooth of a rider he was. It was like this Zen thing.”
“Malcolm Smith is the man,” added another friend, who rode on the pro motocross circuit through his twenties. “I remember riding my stingray bike after I saw the movie, pretending it was a motorcycle.” “That guy is a living legend.”
So there I was recently with the legend himself in the bright and modern break room of Malcolm Smith Motorsports, talking with Smith about his new facility (it opened in October, was designed in a sleek industrial style by his wife, Joyce, and took almost two years to build), riding snowmobiles in Colorado (Smith says he fell in love with the state when he did his first Colorado 500 in 1976) and the requirements for his annual invitation-only Easter ride in Baja (if you have to ask, then it’s probably not for you). What’s most striking is that despite Smith’s reputation as perhaps the most naturally gifted racer of all time with the uncanny ability to ride anything with both grace and speed, he is also one of the most friendly, down-to-earth, and unaffected people you will ever meet, in the motorcycle world or anywhere else.
“What Malcolm has is rare,” says Sal Fish, the longtime race director of the SCORE/Baja 1000. “Most people--when they obtain some kind of status, whether in the business world, the movie industry, or sports--somewhere along the line they lose their focus, lose sight of their goal, and begin to believe their own press releases. Malcolm isn’t like that. When I shake hands with him at the finish, there’s still a twinkle in his eye. Eighteen to twenty-five hours later, he’s still the happiest guy in the world that he finished. And he’s so available, shaking hands and signing autographs; not going off to have a massage or a drink. He’s happy to be there and happy that people still want to see him.”
Fish recalls a funny incident at the 2005 race that shows what an icon Smith is to generations of riders and fans. “I was at the finish line at La Paz and this big guy comes up to me and says ‘Guess what happened to me last night?’ This guy, (who turned out to be a player with the Seattle Seahawks), had been at a restaurant/bar and was talking about how much Malcolm Smith was his hero. ‘He says to me “I took off my shirt (to show off the tattoo of Smith in his classic Baja riding pose on his bicep) and you know who was sitting at the next table? Malcolm Smith!’”
Back at his shop, though he’s busy, Smith has the air of not being in a hurry. As his cell phone rang on the way up to his office, playing the “On Any Sunday” theme song (“my daughter Ashley found it somewhere,” he says) and we walked through the huge two-story showroom with its rows of BRPs, Husqvarnas, KTMs, Sea-Doos, Suzukis, and Yamahas (BMWs have their own section upstairs on a large balcony), he greeted every employee by name. And as we made our way through his domain—the sales floor, the parts department, the shop, shipping and receiving, clothing and accessories, the front desk, and finance department, I saw that he was on a first name basis with every employee—all seventy of them.
“Malcolm will be on his way to a meeting, but he’ll always say hi, “says Alissa Nemnich, who works in the accessories/sales department. “And he’ll always stop and talk to customers. They all really look up to him.”
“A lot of guys racing today let it go to their heads and don’t want to sign autographs or anything, “ adds Allison Pentoney, who also works in accessories/sales. “Not Malcolm. Even though he’s a legend, he’s totally down-to-earth.”
No doubt that Smith is a successful businessman, with his new showroom and the outlet store next door—over 80,000 square feet of street and dirt bikes, parts, gear, accessories, and a shop to fix what ails you. Both are clearly visible off Highway 91 as you’re driving through Smith’s hometown of Riverside. But what you might not know is that Smith the businessman and off-road legend is also a dedicated philanthropist. It all started with the Baja 1000, which Smith raced for the first time in 1967 with former Hollywood stuntman J.N. Roberts, and continues to race in a buggy (“125 miles per hour in the dirt,” he says.) Though he has competed throughout the world, Baja will always be Malcolm Smith territory. And Smith wanted to give back to a place that has given so much to him. “In the middle of Baja down there, you break down, sitting at the side of the road,” he says. “Three Americans will go by you in pickup trucks. The first Mexican who comes by, pulls over, and says ‘What can we do to help?’ And I’ve had them befriend me in so many ways. It’s just the gentleness of the people. I don’t like Tijuana, but once you get down to the hinterlands, the people are so nice.”
In 1995 he and wife Joyce decided to help out a tiny orphanage at Valle de la Trinidad in north central Baja. “At first we thought it would just be a family thing; us and the kids,” Joyce Smith says. “Our kids were little and we felt like it would be a good example for them to be part of something bigger and to help those not as fortunate as themselves. And at that point it was just a dirt patch with a couple of buildings.” Fast forward twelve years later and the orphanage, El Oasis as it’s called, has grown into a bustling community that includes fifty children, dorms, a school, a playground, and perhaps most important of all—college scholarships for all students who finish high school, funded by Smith’s own foundation which he started for this purpose. “We’ve taken 80 to 100 high school kids down about six times to do work projects,” says Smith, who clearly has a soft spot for the children of El Oasis. “We planted 420 trees there and we buried an irrigation pipeline that automatically waters all the trees. We put in a playground and a big basketball court.” Smith continues his fundraising for the orphanage all year, including donations from the annual Baja ride he organizes to Cabo San Lucas every year and at parties before the Baja races. “We have about $ 200,000 in the bank right now, enough to guarantee a college education for every kid who graduates.”
When he was filming the movie, “Dust to Glory,” which thrillingly documents the Baja 1000, filmmaker Dana Brown who has known Smith most of his life (his father Bruce Brown made “On Any Sunday”) says he felt lucky to be filming the scene that shows Smith and his son Alexander with the children of El Oasis. “When the kids at the orphanage sang a song for Malcolm, he had tears in his eyes. It was unreal. I felt privileged to be around him that day,” Brown says. “The kids were so stoked to be around him and he was hugging them and they were going on buggy rides. It was so typical of Malcolm to do this without any fanfare; he was just there for them. In your life you don’t meet enough people like him. He reminds me to be a better person.”
But Smith the philanthropist is also Smith the risk-taker. “In my high school annual they said I wouldn’t make it to 21. I fooled them only by luck,” he says smiling, with his usual modesty. It was of course his natural ability, fearlessness, and mesmerizing riding skill that brought him his first win at Baja, at 25, with teammate J.N. Roberts in 1967, when he came in thirteen hours ahead of anyone else at the halfway point.
Roberts and Smith had hooked up as teammates because both were being sponsored by Husqvarna—and both were the fastest guys around. Smith would be riding the first part of the course in the daytime, with Roberts riding the rest of the way—at night--to the finish. And that’s what happened—sort of. “His kind of racing was just raw talent without any thinking,” Smith says of his teammate almost forty years later. “He was actually a better rider than I was, but I studied the guidebook and tried to remember everything, prepped the bike. He just wants to wing it. In those days, they started the race in Tijuana—and said the first entry will be at the halfway point at six in the morning. And I was there at five in the evening the night before—thirteen hours quicker than they thought. So J.N. was sleeping and they had to get him up, and I couldn’t get him to read the guidebook and memorize everything, so he missed a key turn and went clear out to the east coast.”
Roberts, a rancher in Montana who still races off road and who has also won the veteran’s world championships, says Smith got him the bike just as it got dark. “It had a 35-watt Lucas light. It was just an overrated D-Cell flashlight and it would dim when your RPMs went down. And it was my first time down there; I hadn’t had time to pre-run. Malcolm strapped on the tools and got the bike ready. All I did was get on and ride,” Roberts says. “I’d seen this light and I thought I was going the right direction, and it was a star,” he recalled in “Dust to Glory.” “And I said, ‘It’s a checkpoint, it’s gotta be the checkpoint. I totally went to the coast, which I shouldn’t have went to.” Despite crossing the coast again and finally deciding to go to sleep under a cactus, Roberts and Smith still came in with the winning time for a motorcycle in just over twenty-seven and a half hours. “For what we were on in those days, it was good, “ Roberts says. “Now the times are like eighteen hours. Malcolm did great. Back then, the first section from Tijuana was paved. Bud and Dave Ekins seized their Triumphs on the pavement and had to fix them that night. Malcolm had no problem on the pavement. He just tooled along.”
Smith had made a name for himself even before Baja when he competed in the International Six Day Trials in Sweden, in 1966, where he would win a silver medal. In later years he would become the first American to win what would be renamed the International Six Day Enduro. So how does an off road desert racer and motorcycle repair shop owner from southern California, at 24 years old, end up at the Enduro in the first place, racing against some of the top racers in Europe? One word: Husqvarna.
“One day this funny old guy stuck his head in the door,” Smith recalls. “He had a French beret on. And he said, ‘Who’s Malcolm Smith?’ And I said, ‘I am. Who are you?’” Turns out that it was Edison Dye, who became known for importing Husqvarnas and later, for popularizing motocross in the U.S. He’d seen Smith’s times and knew he was one of the fastest racers around. Years later, he would call Smith one of the best long-distance riders in the world. But on that day in Riverside, at Smith’s shop, Dye had some convincing to do. “He said, ‘I want to hire you to race my bike.” “And I said, ‘I ride a Greeves. It’s big and it’s strong and heavy and doesn’t break down very often.’ We argued about twenty minutes about the merits of my bike and his new bike. And I said, “Look at how spindly it is—a little frame—it looks like it’d fall apart.” After more dickering and reassurance from Dye that the bike was steel and worth his time, Smith finally heard something that caught his interest: if he agreed to ride the Husqvarna, Dye would send him to the International Six Day trials in Europe. “This is a kid who’s making $100 a week, “ Smith recalls. “So I said, ‘Well, let’s go test your bike and see how it is.’” One lap around the track was all it took. “I came back and said ‘You’ve hired yourself a rider.”
In local races around Riverside, Smith started winning against much bigger bikes. “I was racing against 650s and 750s—on a 250,” he says. “And it was so much better. Lighter, agile, better power. I rode it as hard as I could, too.” Of course, in true Malcolm Smith style, there was no mention of his own natural ability, something that Dye undoubtedly noticed when he came into Smith’s shop that day. Same for his performance in his first Enduro, held in Sweden. “I’d never ridden in mud, really,” he says of the first day. “I fell down so many times it was pitiful. But I’d just jump up and keep going. I’d hit the ground so many times I’d damaged the throttle control cable. In those days, you carried spare cables. So finally when it got so bad, I’d stop and put a new cable on. But by then, I’d lost about six minutes.” Of course, Smith still went on to win a silver medal and to gain an appreciation for racing in another environment so different from southern California. “I like them (Baja and the Enduro) both, but I think I liked the Six Days better because it’s in a foreign land. And you were totally dependent on yourself.” Of course, it didn’t hurt that racers caught just a little bit of a break if they clocked in ahead of time. “In Sweden, if you got there early, the women would give you a big cup of hot blackberry soup with sugar in it, “ he says. “In Baja, you’re in the race and that’s it.”
One thing’s for sure: Malcolm Smith was born to race motorcycles off road—and to win. Though he says his parents hated that he rode bikes, Smith was a daredevil at a young age and knew that he wanted to be flying down the trails around Riverside and San Bernardino. And the faster the better—at least when he first started racing. The trademark smoothness, as if he seems to be gliding over obstacles that would knock any other rider over—boulders, mud pits, tree roots, ice, you name it—would come later. “How do you win races? You go full throttle the whole time—that’s what I thought,” Smith says. “I was 15.” In his first race ever, in the badlands around Riverside, he left the throttle wide open and passed everybody. “I’m thinking, boy, I’m really good,” he says. “In the first corner everyone slowed down and I didn’t. I took about four guys out and I was under the pile of them. All I can remember is the chain going in front of my face.” Later in the race—throttle wide open, again. Thirteen crashes later in the race, Smith realized that if he wasn’t lying on the ground so much, he might have won. “At the next race, I kept saying to myself, ‘Smooth and don’t hit the ground. And I won that race. All throughout my career, I’ve alternated being stupid with being smart.”
Well, maybe with an emphasis on the smart part. Undoubtedly though, Smith has had his share of bang-ups and accidents, beginning when he was 18. “My first professional race ever was when I turned 18, here in Riverside,” he recalls. “I won the race and I thought ‘Boy, I’m on my road to success in motorcycle racing.’” The next day he and two friends were out riding in an area they knew well, including around a flood control gate where they weren’t supposed to be. Smith and one of his friends ended up waiting for the third guy when they got back down to the road and eventually decided to go back up the little hill to the flood control dyke to find him. Mistake. “I passed the friend I was with, who had gotten stuck on the hill, rode down the dyke, jumped down, and ended up back on the road.” And before he knew what hit him, Smith and the friend he had been looking for ran right into each other. “I was coming out of the trees and didn’t see him at all,” Smith says. “And he hit me here,” lifting his left leg from behind his desk at his office at the dealership. “Broke it in seven places. So I kind of wake up from the shock, and there was a boot right there in front of my face. And I said, ‘Mike, move your foot.’ And nothing happened. And I yelled, ‘Mike, move your foot.’ He said, ‘It’s not me; I’m down here on the ground.’ And I was up in a pepper tree, where I had landed. It was my foot. My leg was broken so bad that it was my foot in front of my face.” Luckily, Smith and his friends were only about a quarter of a mile from a road and someone saw the scene and called an ambulance. “So there I was on the stretcher,” he says, with a smile. “And I’d had a San Bernardino policeman chasing me many, many times. He’d come to my house and tell my mother ‘You won’t believe the kinds of chances your son took to get away from me.’ He’d been after me for about six months. Lester Groves was his name. So I’m lying in the stretcher getting put in the ambulance. He looks down at me and says, ‘I finally caught you, you little bastard.’ He actually got kicked off the force for the way he treated young people.”
Smith re-injured that leg again when he was about thirty and racing Baja with a split gas tank that forced him to refuel every ten miles or so. “So we got a couple hours behind, but we were so determined to win the race that I was going way, way too fast,” he recalls. “I remembered this big sweeping corner with some giant, sixty-foot cactus as a 60 mph corner. I was going about sixty and I looked down at the gas tank to see if it was leaking—and I looked up and it was a hairpin turn—it wasn’t the turn that I remembered. So I went off a twenty-foot ledge, landed on some rocks down in a creek bed. And I landed on the motorcycle upright but kind of sideways on the seat—and the pressure from the seat pushed up and split my leg—my femur—the same leg that I had pins in from the other accident. So I climbed up the bank and stuck my head up on a bank and some Mexican guys in an old station wagon were coming by, and I waved them down. They stopped and threw me in the back of the station wagon. I was holding my leg together because it was on the pin and that way it didn’t hurt as much. But they kept trying to race everybody on the bumpy road. And I screamed ‘Dispensario! Dispensario!’ because it hurt so much.” Hours later, in terrible pain, Smith finally got back home to Riverside, after an illegal flight to Mexicali (planes are not permitted to fly in Baja after dark). “They thought I was faking a broken leg and dragged me out of the airplane,” he recalls. And then we had to wait while they searched the plane for drugs. The airport in Riverside was fogged in so we had to go to Palm Springs and drive the rest of the way.”
Nothing like an adventure, Malcolm Smith-style.
If injuries come with being one of the best off road racers in the world, so too comes the fame. Though Smith will always be known for his magical agility and superhuman endurance in any conditions, he is perhaps best loved for his riding in “On Any Sunday,” which brought motorcycle racing into the country’s living rooms and changed the way bikes and racers would be thought of forever. Suddenly, every boy wanted to ride a bike—just like Malcolm Smith. Once the movie came out, even his parents were converted. “My mother never admitted that her son raced motorcycles,” Smith says. But when “On Any Sunday” came out, then it was ‘My son the motorcycle racer.’” Over thirty-five years later, being in the film is still one the highlights of his career and has made him a legend and hero among a generation of men now in their thirties and forties.
“Malcolm epitomizes the Sunday sportsman motorcycle rider,” says “On Any Sunday” director Bruce Brown. “He’s doing it because he loves it. And I’m glad that he’s been able to take advantage of the notoriety from the movie.”
Originally, Brown had a hard time getting Smith to be in the film because he was so busy running his shop and didn’t know if he could spare the time or money. “He was a little reluctant because he had a business to run. But I told him I’d pay him what he was making. And eventually he agreed to do it.”
At the time neither Smith nor Brown thought they were making a film that would become such a phenomenon. Of course, having Steve McQueen in it didn’t hurt.
“Bruce said, ‘Just do what you do when you’re with your riding buddies, Malcolm. Have fun and we’ll film,” Smith recalls of the scene at the end of the movie where he and Mert Lawwill are riding with McQueen. “And I said, ‘I want to do something to Steve. I want to get him on a creek crossing where he doesn’t know it.’”
“He was testosterone-filled, “ says Smith of his friend, whose bikes he worked on before the two worked together on “On Any Sunday.” “And he always wanted to be the leader. If he wasn’t the leader, he went wide open and got the leader or crashed, one or the other. He thought he was the leader of the pack, but he came up behind me and I sped up and just really splashed him bad,” he says with a laugh.” “He was a fun guy and a real good rider, but kind of crazy. I think he was fearless and that helped.”
In another scene of the movie, Smith is attempting to get up the Widowmaker, a hill in Utah. In his first attempt, he forgot to turn on the gas and didn’t get far. “That wasn’t even staged,” he says, smiling. “I just do that every so often.” “Hill climbing is really about delicate balance. You have to just be far enough forward so the front wheel doesn’t come up in the air and just far enough back so you have traction. And you have to be able to move your body around so you can feel what it’s going to do quickly. You get a natural sensitivity to it if you do it a lot.” Even more impressive than Smith’s getting a ways up the hill on his second attempt was that he rode—not walked—his motorcycle straight back down the hill, to the astonishment of onlookers.
“It was typical Malcolm,” says Bruce Brown. “Anyone else would have lowered it down the hill with a rope. But to actually ride it down, holy smokes.”
From Baja to Africa and everywhere in between, Smith has raced some of the toughest courses in the world, by motorcycle, buggy, and car. He is known not only as one of the toughest competitors on wheels, but also as a mentor to younger riders. One of these was the late South African racer Elmer Symons, 29, who died on January 9 while competing in Stage Four of the 2007 Dakar Rally and who worked as a mechanic at Smith’s shop and lived with Smith and his family in Riverside (see sidebar).
Fritz Kadlec, 45, is a racer who first met Smith in 1984 when Kadlec was sponsored by Smith’s line of gear, MSRP. “Malcolm is a real hero racer and he’s also humble,” he says. Kadlec, owner of Gunnison Motor Sports in Gunnison, Colorado, still rides with Smith when he’s at his ranch and still remembers his help during his financially lean times as a racer. “I was the top American racer in Europe in 1986 in a six-day cross country race,” he recalls. “And Malcolm said he could either do an ad in Cycle News or give me the money that he would spend on it. I thought it was both funny and smart of him to know that I was so broke and could use the money instead.”
Although his schedule is typically packed, Smith still considers time with his family to be number one, especially when they can spend time exploring Mexico and Colorado on their motorcycles. All of the Smiths—wife Joyce and their four kids, Joel, Louise, Ashley, and Alexander—are enthusiastic and accomplished riders. And all had the best teacher.
“I learned to ride by riding with him on his motorcycle,” says Ashley Smith, 22, a recent graduate of Northern Arizona University and the rides and events coordinator at the shop. “When I first started riding on my own, he’d say ‘OK, here’s the line, watch where I’m going and look at where you’re going to go. He taught me to pick the easy path instead of the hard stuff. Trying to keep up with him is the best motorcycle training you could have.”
According to her dad, even at a young age Ashley had a natural feel for riding. “She can put the boys to shame,” Smith says. “She used to ride sitting in front of me all the time. I had a special seat for her. I finally got her a bike when she was about ten. And we went riding in Mexico, in the mountains. It was very difficult, up and down, tight trails on boulders and up and down hills. At the bottom of the hills, I’d wait for her. And she’d get there. And I’d say, ‘Do you want me to ride it up?’ And she’d say ‘No Daddy, I can do it. And away she’d go, to the top of the trail. We’re driving home and I said, ‘Ashley, how do you know the lines, how do you know that odd way straight over the boulder is the best way and not around it? And she said, “Daddy, I rode with you for years. I do the same thing you do.’” Like father, like daughter.
Son Alexander, 21, a junior at Sonoma State, is also a talented rider who’s raced Baja in a buggy and who also races Nor-Cal’s District 36 Enduro. “He’s very humble,” he says of his dad. “He taught me that no matter how hard racing gets—always fix the problem and keep on going because the other person you’re racing against may not have the same drive and could drop out. He always taught me to never quit.”
One thing for sure: it’s never boring being Malcolm Smith. “I’ve had such a great life and so much excitement,” says Smith. “I was kind of like the mercenary motorcycle racer. Anybody anywhere in the world could call and if they had a long distance endurance motorcycle race to do, I would come and work on the motorcycle and bring my own.” As his shop motto says: Adventure has a name: Malcolm Smith. And he shows no sign of slowing down.
Pull quotes
“In Sweden, if you got there early, the women would give you a big cup of hot blackberry soup with sugar in it, “ he says. “In Baja, you’re in the race and that’s it.”
Another Pull quote, not in story
Wisdom of malcolm smith
"Dont ride fast in the dust when you cant see. Ive been hurt a couple
times doing that and it took me a couple of times to learn."
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Written by: Jill Rothenberg |
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Date: Oct.16.2009 |
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Mert Lawwill: One of the Greatest
No Brakes. No Suspension. No Wimps
In the 1960s and 70s, only the most badass iron men raced flattrack across the country at speeds of over 120 on the straightaways and 80 around the turns. One of these was racing legend Mert Lawwill, who is probably best known for his bid to defend his 1969 Grand National title during the 1970 racing season, documented in the classic motorcycle film “On Any Sunday.” But Lawwill, at 5’6 and 143 pounds, not only took hundreds of turns at over eighty miles an hour. He owned them. This is a guy built for speed.
Blazing corners becomes second nature when you do it a lot. And in his heyday, Lawwill was doing it all the time. “I was as comfortable going sideways at 120 as I was sitting on the living room sofa,” he says of his fifteen years as a pro racer where he amassed an astonishing 161 career AMA Grand National finishes.
There’s no question that Lawwill is one of the best motorcycle racers of all time. He’s also considered by many fellow racers to be one of the sport’s most talented and innovative mechanics. He has designed motorcycle chassis, bicycle frames, has patents on rear suspension systems for motorcycles and mountain bikes, and builds his own brand of custom motorcycle, the Mert Lawwill Street Tracker, which looks like a flat tracker but is street legal—and this is just for starters. And sure, he’s in the Motorcycle Hall of Fame as one of the all-time greats. But no other motorcycle racer is also in the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame, as he is. Bottom line: If it has two wheels and can motor around a track or plunge down a steep hill, chances are good that Lawwill has ridden it, road tested it, and very likely improved its performance.
Lawwill’s fierce determination on the track is matched only by the intensity of his quest to keep improving the mechanics and performance of anything on two wheels. “He was borderline obsessed,” says Lawwill’s son Joe, 36, an accomplished motocross racer and the Masters Downhill Mountain Bike World Champion in 2002. “It didn’t matter what it was—tires, rims, hubs—he was always trying to figure it out and make it better.” Now a graphic designer in southern California and instructor for BikeSkills, which run programs and clinics for mountain bikers, he remembers how much the fans loved Mert. “On Any Sunday” was like a home movie, he says of the classic film that shows him as a newborn as Lawwill bids him and wife June goodbye and heads to a race in Columbus, Ohio. “I got in the habit of calling him Mert and not dad when I was about ten,” he says. “Fans at the track would go crazy when they heard me call him Dad and wanted to get my autograph. I still call him Mert to this day.” But though Lawwill is a living legend, he “was not one of those motocross dads” you see, Joe says. “Even now I have people come up to me at bike clinics and say they used to see him ride.”
“The guy is a complete package,” says Steve Morehead, who raced for Lawwill’s racing team in 1989-1990 and is now the operations manager for the AMA Certified Pre-Owned Ford Grand National Championship Series. “As a rider, it was very comforting to be able to come off the track and explain to Mert what the bike was doing, whether the suspension wasn’t right, or the steering was a bit off, and he knew what that felt like because he’d been there himself. He’d tweak it, nut and bolt it a bit, take measurements, and that motorcycle would be like a baby buggy and would roll itself around the track.” Morehead, who raced on Lawwill’s team with the late Ricky Graham says that Lawwill always wanted to improve racing technology for the benefit of all racers. “Mert was building his own racing chassis and he’d sell them to other riders. If you wanted to win races, you had to have Mert Lawwill products,” says Morehead, who won the half-mile at Ascot and the San Jose Mile while racing on Lawwill’s team. “Mert had done all the mechanical work on his own motorcycle. He could build the motor and then throw a leg over the motorcycle and go out and win the Grand National title. “Perfection isn’t his goal; it’s his standard.”
It’s been said that Lawwill was always businesslike about his racing; focused, intense, arriving at a track 2500 miles from his house on the exact dot of eight thirty when it opened, clean-shaven and ready to go even if he’d been driving in a van for twenty-four hours straight. Filmmaker Bruce Brown captured Lawwill’s singular dedication to the sport in “On Any Sunday” in 1971 when he followed Lawwill’s bid to defend his 1969 Grand Am title during the 1970 racing season.
“My favorite scene is when he’s walking down the street in San Francisco, wearing a suit, and then it cuts to him racing on the dirt track,” says Brown, who has remained close friends with Lawwill for thirty-five years. Anyone who’s seen the movie knows that this cutaway is a jarring, yet exhilarating ride. In an instant, Lawwill the suit becomes Lawwill the racer. Both mean business. But Lawwill is also known for being friendly and down to earth. He never has an unkind word for anyone, says Brown. “Classic Mert is one time he and I and Dick Mann were at a race and there were a lot of fans. Dick and I walked under the grandstand being that we felt sort of bashful, but Mert walked right up into the main area. People were saying, “Hey Mert,” and he was totally comfortable and outgoing, telling everyone ‘Hi, how’s it going.”
Lawwill’s reputation as a master mechanic and inventor is evident in his shop, which is a museum of innovations in motorcycle and mountain bike design over the last thirty-five years. It’s a place where Lawwill’s obvious love for anything on two wheels is on display. Case in point: the Mert Lawwill Street Tracker, which starts life as a stock 1,200cc Harley-Davidson Sportster. The only thing saved from the frame is the mounting lugs for the rubber engine mounts and the serial number off the steering head. The frame is a completely custom hand built 4130 chrome molly frame that is designed around Lawwill’s patented rear suspension system. Once Lawwill is done with it, the horsepower has been doubled and 90 pounds have been shed. And though it looks exactly like a flat tracker, number one plate and all (and sounds like one too, as I learn when Lawwill fires it up), it’s still street-legal. Always the hands-on mechanic, Lawwill road-tests every bike he makes, though he typically takes them to Infinium Raceway in Marin . You see, Lawwill has never had a regular motorcycle license, only a pro license with the AMA. “I ride it around here sometimes,” meaning his peaceful hillside neighborhood in Tiburon. “But it’s risky,” he says with a laugh.
Lawwill’s shop would make both motorcycle and mountain bike collectors salivate. Suspended from the ceiling is the first Schwinn that came with Lawwill’s patented rear suspension system, along with the first assembly-made mountain bike, by Lawwill and mountain bike pioneer Gary Fisher, which was also the first suspension bike Fisher produced. There are posters of mountain bike greats Marla Streb and Jurgen Beneke, who both rode Lawwill-designed bikes to world championships. “This red frame right here,” he says pointing to a frame suspended from the ceiling. “It’s the actual frame that Jurgen won the world championship on.” His shop is where Lawwill is always perfecting his inventions and continues to work on a concept that fascinates him: suspension.
“Back when I started my flat track racing, two things were different,” Lawwill says. “One, brakes were not allowed. No brakes at all. And that was done for safety, so that one person couldn’t slow down faster than the next person. They’d all go into the corner together. You’d have to slide sideways to slow down,” bringing to mind visions of the classic Lawwill racing style, as he used his left foot to guide the bike around the turn, his face a mask of intensity for the business at hand. “And there was no suspension. They were rigid frames; hard tails like a bicycle.”
Though perfecting suspension systems for motorcycles and mountain bikes is still the name of the game for Lawwill, he also has pioneered another invention that is clearly near and dear to his heart. What even the most dedicated Lawwill fan probably doesn’t know is that he gives riders a hand, literally, in his designing of a prosthetic hand that makes riding a reality again for amputees so they can get back on their motorcycles or bikes—or for those who never dreamed they would ever ride, let alone on a dirt track or around a velodrome. In short, Lawwill’s hand changes lives, including that of 15-year-old Illinois motocross racer Jake McCullough and eighteen-year-old U.S. Paralympic cyclist Greta Neimanas, both of whom were born with one arm, as well as soldiers at the Walter Reed Army Hospital who lost an arm in Iraq and use the “Mert hand” to get back to their motorcycles, bikes, jet skis, or snowmobiles.
It all started when Lawwill’s longtime friend and fellow Harley-Davidson factory-sponsored rider, the late Chris Draayer, who lost his left arm four inches below his shoulder at a mile event in Sedalia, Missouri in 1967. At the time, doctors told him he would never ride again.
Boy, were they ever wrong.
“He never got racing out of his blood,” says Lawwill of Draayer. “He was always saying ‘You’ve got to make me a hand.” Although Draayer could no longer race on the track, he was back to trailriding and riding on roads within four or five years of his accident. Unfortunately though, the prosthetic hands Draayer was using just weren’t cutting it. They would do one of two things: Either hold on too well and not turn him loose, which would take Draayer down the road. Or they’d turn him loose too quick and leave him with one arm. That’s where Lawwill came in.
“I really had no concept of what to do,” Lawwill says of his first attempt at making a prosthetic hand for his friend back in the early 90s, though after hearing about Lawwill’s reputation for being the obsessed, yet brilliant moto madman of innovation in the shop and seeing it for myself, I had a hard time believing it.
Lawwill’s solution to Draayer’s arm malfunctions: A design based on a ball and socket. He made a socket that fit on top of the handlebar and a ball that fit into the armpiece. But when Draayer tried it, it was a no go. “He came back and said, ‘That’s awful. It feels horrible. There’s a reason your knuckles are where they are and your wrist is where it is and your elbow is where it is—and if you don’t mimic it exactly, the device is a failure’,” Lawwill continues. “And I said, ‘hey, you’re an amputee, how do you know where it goes,’” he says with a laugh. Soon after the test run, Lawwill ironed out the kinks and the Draayer hand was born.
Jake McCullough, of Ottawa, Illinois, who placed fourth this year in the AMA District 17 Class 160 Four Stroke, never thought he’d be up on the podium with a prosthetic hand that has not only radically changed his life but was also designed by Lawwill, one of his racing heroes. “Right now, Mert is a friend to me,” says Jake, who was born without his right hand and half a forearm. “In my wildest dreams, I never thought this would be happening.”
A few years back, when Jake bought his dad DVDs of “On Any Sunday” and “On Any Sunday Revisited” for his birthday, he saw that Lawwill had made Chris Draayer his prosthetic hand. Though Jake had been using a prosthetic hand to ride, it was cumbersome and awkward, and he had to ride with this left shoulder forward so it could pull the cable to close the clamp on the prosthesis. A few phone calls and three weeks later, Jake had his new hand, says his father Jack, who used to ride motocross in the seventies.
“We’ll never be able to thank Mert Lawwill enough for improving our son’s life,” he says. “Jake’s got Mert on speed dial. When we’re at a race, he’ll call him and tell him what’s going on and Mert will give him advice. We’ll go to the pro flat track races and to the pits and the racers will see Jake with his Mert t-shirt and ask if he knows him. Jake says, ‘Well, I ride for him, on team hand.’”
Jakes’ public speaking on behalf of Creative Mobility, an Illinois-based company dedicated to providing adaptive bikes and bike parts and who sell Lawwill’s prosthetic hand, made another rider’s dreams a reality. Eighteen-year-old Greta Neimanas, who had always been athletic despite being born without a left hand or forearm, had a life-changing moment as soon as she tried out the hand at a sports night at the Rehabilitation Institute in her hometown of Chicago a few years back. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is the greatest thing I’ve ever seen,” says Neimanas, whose use of the hand helped her make the U.S. Paralympic Cycling Team this past July. Neimanas will be training at the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs for the Bejiing Paralympic Games in 2008. “I know I can put as much pressure as I want on it and it’ll hold and it’ll also release if I crash, “ she says. “Basically, it feels like I have two hands.”
For Lawwill, inventing the prosthetic hand is one of the most important things he’s done.
“To see how it changes these people’s lives is just really dramatically rewarding,” he says.
Two things for sure: Lawwill was born to invent —and to race.
Originally from Boise, Idaho, the future motorcycle champion grew up with parents who disapproved of motorcycles, though he was born with a fascination for them—and for anything that combined speed and moving parts. “Only Hells Angels had motorcycles as far as my parents were concerned,” he says of growing up in the early 1950s with his painting contractor father and schoolteacher mother. “They didn’t want any part of it at all. But my older brother got one anyway. So that kind of broke the ice for me.” Lawwill recalls the first thing he rode with a motor in it, a tiny scooter called a Corgi originally built for paratroopers in the war. “I didn’t have proper exposure to want to be a racer and yet when I was still in grade school, I can remember taking a shovel and making a little race track in the backyard. I made these little banked race tracks and I’d race around them. And no one in my family raced. I didn’t even know anyone who raced. It’s kind of like I was just born to do something—and that was what I was born to do.”
As he got older, Lawwill’s interest in racing only increased. He joined a local motorcycle club in Boise in 1955 when he was 15 and began racing out of town scramble events. By 18, even though his parents still disapproved of racing, his mom signed for him so he could get a professional license and race the one pro event that came to Boise each year. In the next few years, until the fall of 1961, he raced every professional race in a four-state area—which only amounted to four races. Something had to give.
During this time, Lawwill recalls a moment that convinced him that he was on the right track.
“I remember in 1960, I went down to Sacramento to watch my first national championship race on a mile track there at the fairgrounds. And I remember walking in and the number one at the time was Carol Resweber. He was coming down this long straightaway and I heard the announcer say he was going 115 miles an hour. And he comes up to the corner and he’s still all tucked in. And I go ‘whoa, what’s going on.’ And he just raised up and clicked it sideways. And I couldn’t believe it,” Lawwill says with a laugh. “But then, five years later, I won it.
By 1965 and his first National Championship race at the Sacramento Mile, Lawwill had been racing on the Harley-Davidson factory team for three years. Legendary San Francisco Harley-Davidson dealer Dudley Perkins had seen him race at Ascot Park and offered him a spot on the team in 1962 because he was so impressed with his riding. But Lawwill wasn’t sure he wanted to take it. “At first I said, ‘I’m not going to ride that stinking Harley. I’m a BSA guy,” he says with a laugh. But a series of mechanical failures and cutbacks on race support from BSA and Triumph swayed him, along with a lot of convincing from fellow riders. “This was a chance for a sponsored ride, so reluctantly I took it. And that turned out to be the wisest decision I ever made.”
The riding gig also included a paying job—as a mechanic for his own bike. Because it was a hassle to get a mechanic and Lawwill’s bike from San Francisco down to LA every week, Perkins decided to make it easier on everyone. Lawwill would ride and be paid for maintaining his own bike, which relieved some of the financial pressure he was under working at a printing press in L.A. to support himself during the week. By 1964, Lawwill picked up additional support from the Harley-Davidson factory and was able to quit his printing job and become a fulltime racer. He went on to race for the Harley Davidson factory team until 1977, when an inner ear disorder began to affect his balance. And Lawwill and Perkins remained close until Perkins’s death in 1976. “He really was like a second father to me,” Lawwill says.
The Harley-Davidson factory riding years only marked the end of chapter one for Mert Lawwill and motorcycle racing. But there would be a lot more to come. It had been a good run, with a Grand National Championship in 1969, playing a key part in the phenomenon of “On Any Sunday” and the motocross craze it inspired, along with many other national and state finishes. His parents had also become his biggest supporters, as had the rest of his family. His mother-in-law even stood up in the movie theater, letting everyone know “That’s my son-in-law!” when Lawwill appears onscreen in the film. But with all the good came a few downsides, as Lawwill calls them, in the form of two crashes during his racing career.
Both happened during the ’71 racing season. The first, in Daytona, was caused by a flat tire when Lawwill was going into a banked turn at 155 mph. Somehow, although he was catapulted off his motorcycle and slid across all five lanes of the track to the guardrail, off the retaining wall, and all the way into the infield, he got up and walked away with relatively minor injuries—a compounded elbow and a broken nevecular bone in his wrist. “It’s like skipping a rock across the water,” he says of the experience. “You hit the ground and it’s all silent. And I’d hit the ground again and it was all silent. I went through that silence period three times before I finally slowed down to be in constant contact with the ground.”
The second, in Castle Rock, Washington, when he was going 30 mph by his reckoning, was when he got hurt the worst. “It was at the start of the main event and rider Jim Rice fell,” he recalls. “I hit the brake and my hand slipped off the handlebar and went down and got caught between the fork tubes and the frame, which smashed it. And my body was going through the air in the opposite direction. It left my hand completely mangled and torn up.” The doctor on duty at the local hospital told Lawwill there was no way he could fix it. “I’ll fuse you from your knuckles to your elbow,” he said. Lawwill and wife June left the hospital with pain pills and a ride back to San Francisco with fellow racer Cal Rayburn. When Steve McQueen, a friend of Lawwill’s from the making of “On Any Sunday” heard about his accident, he insisted that he would fly him down to LA and find the best hand surgeon.
Five surgeries and seven pins later, Lawwill’s hand was close to normal again.
“What Steve did for me is tremendous,” he says. “His generosity saved my racing career.”
“Steve sent me a plane ticket down there, took me to the doctor, and I stayed at his house in Brentwood after the surgeries,” he recalls. “And I never received a bill for any of it. He was a complete support wagon; he was always there.”
Lawwill’s expertise in building motorcycle frames during his racing career would serve him well as the growing craze with BMX and later, mountain bikes, took hold, especially in northern California. In the late 70s, he and racing partner Terry Knight were building every Harley frame on the track. “One day Terry says, ‘This BMX stuff is taking off. We should build some BMX frames,” says Lawwill. A visit to the local bike store in Marin, long considered to be the birthplace of the mountain bike, convinced Lawwill that he should go the mountain bike route instead. By 1977, he had his first production run, though he found dealers to be resistant to the idea. “All the dealers would say, we don’t need a mountain bike; we don’t climb mountains,” he says. But when Lawwill changed the name of his bike to Pro-Cruiser, voila: He instantly got dealers. By 1981 though, he realized he couldn’t be competitive volume-wise with bigger dealers and decided to focus on motorcycles—heading up racing teams and designing. But he had an a-ha moment while out on a mountain bike ride in 1987 that led to one of his most important and profitable inventions—a patented rear suspension system for mountain bikes.
“I was coming down a trail one day at 20 miles an hour with white knuckles and a full death grip,” he says. “I realized then that you had to have suspension. Suspension had been around for years, but it had been a big failure because it consumed a lot of pedal energy.” His solution: “I thought about race cars. They’re got suspension that’s on the upper and lower arm and they go around corners. They don’t lean. They’ve learned to put the geometry points in a position to vector off the energy correctly. So I just instantly hit on what I was going to do.” As soon as Lawwill talked to mountain bike pioneer and fellow Marin resident Gary Fisher, the idea became a reality and led to the first production Lawwill suspension bike, the Fisher RS-1. Just as it had with motorcycles, his mechanical innovation made him a star in the field of mountain bike design.
After years of traveling as a racer, team owner, mechanic, and designer, Lawwill is content to keep the creative fires burning out of his home shop in Tiburon, where he continues to perfect his inventions as well as come up with new products. Next up: A 2006 Street Tracker. You sense that he can’t keep still for long. After all, this is a guy who still does things like hauling giant stones up the stairs of his deck to build a beautiful waterfall in his backyard forest when he was supposed to be recovering from a back injury or continuing to encourage racers like Jake McCullough and Greta Neimanas.
Lawwill and wife June live in the same house above the bay in Tiburon that they lived in during the filming of “On Any Sunday,” thirty-five years ago. Though they’ve added on to it since then, I still recognize it as I drive up the hill. “You’re sitting in the exact spot where I was working in my shop in the movie,” Lawwill tells me as I sit across from him in his living room, explaining that what had been the shop had been transformed into what now served as his office and living room, complete with “Mert wall.” Hanging from floor to ceiling are photos of his racing life and his family life, which frequently overlap. There’s one of Kenny Roberts, Dick Mann, Wayne Rainey and Lawwill, back in the day. “Kenny was a world champion, of course, and his son Kenny Jr. won the Moto GP. They’re the only father-son champions,” he says. “There’s one of Joe and his pickup,” he says of his son. “He can pedal his bike up there and bunny hop into it, no ramp, no nothing, “Lawwill says with pride. “He can show you on bikeskills.com.”
And what does the future hold for Lawwill? One thing for sure: This legendary racing champ and pioneering inventor is always looking ahead. “I’m more of a today and tomorrow kind of thinker more than a yesterday’s history sort of person,” he says. Lucky for us.
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Written by: Jill Rothenberg |
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Date: Oct.16.2009 |
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