Mike Kidd has done it again. This time he gave up a secure, comfortable living to risk it all and go racing. For the 52-year-old Texan promoter we could say it has paid off big time, but in the case of this story, it's paid off "BooKoo." Savvy motorcycle enthusiasts already know that Kidd, a 1998 inductee into the Motorcycle Hall of Fame, was the '81 AMA Grand National Dirt Track Champion, a title it took him 10 years to win. Those 10 years were filled with hard times when he was forced to start over after a bad injury, win a race and start over again. When he ultimately called it quits in '83, Kidd started all over again-this time in the promotions business. Instead of going with what he was good at, which was flat track, Kidd went indoors and kicked off an arenacross series. While it's debatable who actually promoted the first arenacross race, Kidd was the first to put together a series, keep points and award a championship number-one plate. Kidd's father was a promoter in the '60s and '70s and even held the occasional indoor race at Will Rogers Stadium, which used to be "barn number 8." But when young Mike got into the business, he went after a more specialized niche in the sport, seeing an opportunity nobody else did.
"Arenacross was an exciting sport, easy to put on TV, easy to sell tickets to and the thing has kind of blossomed," Kidd said. "One of things that I always knew as a racer was the first person who had to make money was the promoter. Without a promoter making money we'd have no racing. When I was racing, I did a lot of PR work for promoters, running around town doing interviews. I kind of learned what worked to put people in the stands. When I started promoting, I did the same thing. I'd grab one of the riders like Dennis Hawthorne, and we'd do a lot of PR." In '84, Kidd held the first round of his arenacross championship at the Fort Worth Convention Center, and for 20 years he watched the series grow into 12 rounds with 48 main events and riders who became stars from racing in this championship. In '97, Kidd partnered with Pace's Gary Becker, then the promoter of supercross. After several buyouts, the company that eventually owned the promoting rights to arenacross was Clear Channel Entertainment, now Live Nation. Becker was pushed out in '01 and Kidd was left in a situation he hadn't planned for. "When I sold in '97, for me to take the sport to the next level, I needed more than the three or four people I had in my office. When Gary left in '01, it appeared that there wasn't much interest from the upper hand of CCE for arenacross. Things that I wanted to do got turned down and I felt it was time to move on, so I left and joined forces with Advanstar on the motorcycle shows."
Of course, before Kidd walked out the door he was slapped with a one-year noncompete contract stating that he wouldn't try to compete with the AMA Arenacross Series, which was then promoted by CCE. Mike walked away from it and took his spot at a desk inside Advanstar's Fort Worth, Texas, office. He stayed true to the agreement he signed. Not only did he not compete or start anything new, he kept quiet. But only for one year-because once the year was up, the press releases began flying.
Mike Kidd was starting all over. He was going racing again. Kidd said he got the bug back in April '05 and approached Advanstar Communications about putting together an arenacross championship. His goal was to finally do it his way and tie the racing into a show like the media always talks about happening in the off-season European supercross races. Within two months of knocking on doors, Kidd was looking at an 11-race series with BooKoo Energy drink as a title sponsor and K&N Filters and Toyota Truck on the top and bottom of the official series logo. There's one small kink in the story, though: Live Nation never stopped producing its AMA-sanctioned series and when the BooKoo Championship was announced, the folks in Aurora, Illinois, woke up and started burning through the toner trying to keep up with the press releases flying out of Fort Worth. Mike Kidd was ready for the battle.