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The Road To Revelation – Dirt Rider Magazine

By: Kurt Markham

Thursday, May 27, 2010

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<p>I was at Anaheim One 2010, next to the land that Disney built, to see my second-ever stadium motocross race. My first was the first; a pivotal night on October 30, 1970, when Chris Agajanian brought the world’s motocross elite to his small stadium, Ascot Park in Gardena, California, to compete on an artificial racetrack under the lights. He had promoted other night motocrosses before, but nothing of this caliber. This was the acid test. If the experiment failed, the concept could have died right then and there on the muddy floor inside Ascot’s legendary half-mile oval, but it didn’t. Never again would our sport be relegated to the back pages of public consciousness.Just two short years after the test firing of the concept, the world got its first “Superbowl of Motocross,” 10 short miles from Ascot at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. The event was ground zero for the firestorm now known as Supercross.So where was I during those 40 years? Missing all the fun and excitement is where, due to a plethora of reasons and excuses, but thanks to Dirt Rider magazine, I’ve crawled out from underneath the dirt clod that I call home and back to something I should have never strayed from. You see, I was in that first international motocross at Ascot in 1970, but suffered a night-ending mechanical failure in practice and was forced to watch from the sidelines. As time passed, I lost my grip on the dream of motocross stardom, but never regretted a single second of the time spent on the track or lost my love and admiration for the sport.As the years went by, I’d always wondered what modern motocross was like, what had changed and what had remained the same. At 56 years of age, time is no longer an ally, and I felt the need to reconnect with the sport. So with press pass in hand, I took the 40-year step to the present and held on. It was going to be a hell of a night.After getting my press kit, I headed toward the pit area with at least 40,000 of my newest friends. There, beyond the woven steel fence and security was what had to be the biggest collection of “motobilia” ever assembled. It was overwhelming.The 1970 pits were nothing like this. Back then, if you weren’t “ridin’ or mechanickin’” you got waltzed out the back gate with the garbage, by track security, a hell of a lot faster than it took you to sneak in. At intermission you could walk up and talk to people through the high chain-link fence that surrounded the track. I like the New Age, all-access, love-in-the-atmosphere vibe of today’s pit area a lot better.During a lull in the pit cacophony I saw the image of Steve McQueen on his motorcycle coming at me from the Troy Lee Designs compound. Today was the unveiling of TLD’s Steve McQueen tribute helmet. Seeing his image on that helmet brought back strong personal memories of the man who made me want to ride motorcycles in the first place. Troy Lee’s new lid is a fitting tribute to the man who will always remain the King of Cool.At the core of the supercross experience are the riders and their motorcycles. They always have been, and they always will be. Everything here, every light, sound and mind-altering visual, is connected to those two main elements. They are the engines that drive the show and the foundation that the entire billion-dollar industry is built upon. Names like Stewart, Dungey, Villopoto, Reed and Millsaps are the headliners that fill the seats. Somewhere in the ground fog of supercharged pit energy were the riders and their bikes. The source of the power.They were here, but had they changed? I know that the bikes are radically different from the body-beating, undersprung instruments of torture that we rode in the early ’70s, but had the riders changed since the last time I’d put on my Torsten Hallman leathers and rolled to the line?
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<p>As the last neon embers of the stadium’s flood lights faded into the night, the sky lit up in a display of fireworks, creating an atmosphere that was equal parts Fourth of July parade and political rally, Bruce Springsteen’s voice boomed over the PA as a hundred skyrockets heralded the beginning of the 2010 Supercross series. When the last blasts of sonic bombardment faded, the first notes of the national anthem, played by Ace Frehley of KISS, shook the stadium like an earthquake. As the last notes of Ace’s solo fed back through his Marshall amplifiers, a hundred more skyrockets shot into the sky. I was speechless. All we got in the old days was a scratchy recording of the anthem played over a very overtaxed PA system.At that point, there was nothing left to do but race, and oh good Lord what a night of racing it was; the Supercross Lites were on the line and ready to whip the show into high gear.When the gates of the first race dropped, the scene was as familiar as the back of my own throttle hand. The charge to the first turn was as brutal and savage as it had ever been. There’s nothing in the world like being fed into a million-dollar meat grinder and coming out the other end of it in one piece.The pack then chewed and clawed their way over the first set of whoop-de-doos in a no-holds-barred mosh pit of agitated motorcycles, but when they straightened out and attacked the first set of triples, I realized I was seeing a whole new kind of moto war.Lap after lap, jump after jump, the riders shot into the flood-lit Anaheim sky like warring aircraft, only to land and continue the battle as a ground assault against the turns and trench-like whoops that made up the rest of the track. The action went on race after race throughout the night, creating enough of a heart-pounding rush to send even a speed freak into cardiac arrest. Motocross always did make me feel this way.When the big bikes hit the track, the intensity level went into full afterburner. These were the riders whose names strike sparks whenever they are mentioned. The energy that they create today is equivalent to the payload created in the early ’70s by the names Hallman, Robert, Aberg, Weil and the man who has done more for the development of motocross in the United States than anyone, Roger DeCoster.The stage was set for a donnybrook of epic proportions. No one was willing to accept second place, especially Stewart and Reed. This matchup had all the tension and excitement of the Robert/Hallman battles of the late ’60s and early ’70s. All eyes were on Reed. Could he dethrone Stewart by sheer will and brute force, or would he crash out in the attempt to muddy the face and the red plate of the reigning champion?Unfortunately for Reed, he was KO’d in the first round, not by Stewart, but by his own machine that crumbled under him from the abuse poured into it. With Reed out, Stewart was fair game. Any man on that track was capable, with a little luck, of sending anyone in the supercross world to the canvas in defeat. But not tonight.As another round of fireworks saluted James Stewart, the winner of the opening round of the 2010 Supercross season, I stood and applauded for all I was worth, not just for him but for motocross, its past, its present and its future. Supercross has brought motocross out of the back woods to a stadium near you, no matter where you live in this great country of ours. It has grown and prospered by exponential bounds, and the recognition for the riders and the paychecks at the end of the night have exceeded our most enthusiastic dreams. The bikes work better, and the sponsors’ belief and investment in supercross have made their products household names. For once, on this wildly spinning orb that we live on called Earth, something great has not lost momentum or been watered down to suit the tastes of the masses. Maybe that’s the secret to supercross. Supercross and motocross remain as real as the planet we stand on; no surgically enhanced matinee idols, computer fantasies or any other real-life substitutions. Just real people doing really extraordinary things on motorcycles…just like they always have.</p></div>

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