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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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