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The Anger of Youth

“The Anger of Youth”

While listening to Roger Daltry belting out The Who’s “Substitute” one day it dawned on me that he must’ve been poor as a youth just like I was. The song came straight from the anger of his youth in London, England. Mine was spent dreaming of dirt bikes… specifically getting one of my own. When I pedaled out of the gate at my first real BMX track on my crappy CYC Stormer, the kind with the rear foot brake, I had no idea how much of a dork I must’ve look like. I ignored the audible comments from the side as real racers uttered, “He’s gonna crash…I give him half a lap, etc.”
Well, I didn’t crash and I made the whole lap…out of spite to my detractors. Ahh, the anger of youth. I was eighteen years old and this was as close to motocross I could get financially. I was just happy in my delusion that I actually belonged to this new group of people. The taunting stopped for the rest of the day; my determination to be a part of these cyclists wore them down and won me a spot if not in their hearts then their minds.
The next time I rolled out of those same gates it was for practice in my first real race and the bicycle under me was a twenty-two pound wonder-bike built by my best friend in New Rochelle High School, Rafael Schlanger. Rafe, as he likes to be called, eventually went on to invent the original Spinergy Rev-X wheel and currently owns and operates the even better Topolino Technology wheel company in nearby Connecticut, but for now he was simply by cool buddy who lent me his awesome bicycle to race.
While I didn’t win my class I did make two main events and won nice ribbons in both races for my efforts. The anger of youth served me well as I was still hurt from the snide comments made at my first venture on the track and was intent on making them all eat their words. Aggressive riding with a hint of berserko didn’t win me any friends on the track but Rafe, Milko, and Sven were pretty proud of me that day. I remember that day at Craigmere BMX in New Jersey like it was yesterday but it wasn’t, it was 1979, almost thirty years ago.
Flash forward a couple of years into the future and I had flown through the BMX ranks going from 17+ Novice to B-Pro in a year and a half. My last BMX race was at an NBA national in Massachusetts. My old car gave up the ghost on the trip up and my buddy Richie Robinson (Factory Torker) had to call his dad to come get us afterwards... all the way from New York. One crash in the heats cost me a spot in the mains but I beat Mat Harris, a noted Pittsburgh Pro at the time, in the heats I didn’t crash and that was my consolation. The motocross bug was pulling hard at the time and the anger of youth conspired with a healthy dose of impatience and I hung up the BMX helmet after that race.
In the next several years I suffered on the motocross tracks not understanding why fat guys who were not in as good shape as I was were regularly beating the snot out of me. They weren’t better athletes, they were better motorcycle riders. A decade passed before I won a moto and the coveted first overall followed a few months later. Past that, two top ten district championships, one Amateur class championship, a room full of trophies and enough stories to keep Cycle News interested and my knees had had enough. A total knee replacement in April of 2007 had me sitting on the couch and channel surfing to a new channel called Versus and I fell into a hypnotic stare as lycra-clad warriors sped down a mountain in a country on the other side of the planet. It was the Tour de France, a race I had heard of sporadically through my own racing days but had never paid much attention to. In an instant these guys with shaved legs and colored Lycra looked pretty damn heroic—how can anyone ride that far, that fast, for that long? I sat glued to every episode I could catch, some on repeats and saw the beauty, the brutality, and the purity of cycling. I had come full circle back to my original roots. I was a cyclist long before I was a motorcyclist.
The anger of youth kicked in again even though my biological youth was well past and as soon as I got the okay from my physical therapist and surgeon to ride a bicycle I was riding my mountain bike along the paved paths of the South and North County Trail near where I live. At first I couldn’t ride four miles without stopping; I had forgotten how difficult pedaling was. My buddy Terry who was racing novice moto when I was terrorizing the amateur class and giving the experts/semi-pros reason to worry, was romping all over me.
The anger of youth kicked in again and sent me on a mission: develop the new knee muscles and kick his ass. On a Sunday morning ride we were moving at a pretty decent clip only to have a hoard of roadies come hammering by us.
“Hold your line,” and ”On your left,” got annoying pretty quickly. We all vowed to get road bikes and try to keep up with them now. Being the most OCD of my friends I got mine first. I was blown away by the speed of this carbon fiber Tommaso. In a short time I was riding twenty miles at a time at fourteen to fifteen mile per hour average. When a group of twenty-somethings blasted by on one ride without the benefit of even a warning, I damn near busted a lung catching, passing then dropping the young punks until they were out of sight. They saw for real how a forty-six year old who is crotchety but not quite as angry anymore can motivate himself and drop the hammer.
Two months later after witnessing Team USA (all of whom are avid road cyclists) win the prestigious Motocross of Nations I lost all sense and decided to go for my year end goal of a fifty mile non-stop road ride. I was three months ahead of schedule and every time my body wanted me to stop the anger of youth burned brighter inside and kept my legs rolling.
The excitement I feel right now for road riding is how it was when BMX and motocross were new to me. Every ride I am learning something new about the bike, the setup, and the techniques but mostly I am learning stuff about me, who I am and what makes me tick inside. Cycling is without a doubt the purest sport on Earth and I have tried my capable hands at many. I love my new Lycra friends as much as my old nylon friends. I love my Tommaso as much as my KTM. I love the Tour and will always defend it and the gods who race it. I love my fellow cyclists – young and not so young. We all can live boldly through our machines with the anger of youth guiding our competitive instincts along each of our chosen paths. Enjoy the journey for the race itself is against only you and no one else. It’s gonna be a great ride, see you out there.

Some Things Never Change

“Some Things Never Change”

It’s true, some things really never do change. Case in point, my BFF “N.Y.” Terry, the victim of the Good Old Daze article before this one, is a true blue friend. He is to me what Jimmy Mac and Fred Phlange are to Jody Weisel, fodder for some of my best articles. A serious mugging by an RM125 years ago made him infamous if not well known in the north east corridor.
But that was then and this is now. We’ve forsaken the motors for human power, and the mountain bike for road bikes. “How hard could they be to ride, it’s a piece of cake,” were Terry’s ominous last words before we decided to pop the duckets for full on mid-level road racing bicycles. Not long after those fateful words we were testing each other on the North County Trail in lower Westchester were we live. The experienced roadies would creep up on us in stealth mode and stalk us without our knowledge just to check out where our abilities lay.
Usually after hearing us huffing and puffing hard enough to blow the house down on the slightest of hills, they’d click another gear and slowly pull away, much to our chagrin. Being former racers our pride bit us every time that happened. On one occasion I played stalker with Terry on my heels. I crept up on a middle-aged guy who was keeping an amazing tempo and cadence for several miles. I changed gears until my speed and cadence matched his and settled in. I sneakily waited until we reached my favorite downhill then shot past him like a cannon ball. NY Terry sucked in my draft right behind.
After a few minutes of righteous hammering I was sure I had dropped the other guy and settled into a pace. A short while later I snuck a quick glance behind and was shocked to find the only person I dropped was NY Terry; the other guy was right on my six, not breathing heavy at all. The hunter was now the hunter, stalker turned into the stalked. Before I had a chance to respond, the guy jetted from behind me and immediately resumed his 16.5 mile per hour pace, like some mad German metronomic automaton. I managed to suck his draft but I kept looking back to see if Terry had caught up. I soon realized something was wrong.
I yelled, “good ride” to the other roadie who simply flashed a thumbs up signal and kept his pace, never once looking back. I turned around and half a mile later saw a small crowd gathered on the trail. As I cruised to a stop there was Terry sitting on a bench, nee scraped up.
“What the hell happened to you?”
“Don’t ask.”
“Well, I am asking.” I said. “You alright?”
“I forgot.”
“Forgot what?”
“I’m not on a motorcycle.”
“What!?”
“I was flying down one of the hills and when I came to the road crossing and I realized I was going way too fast.”
“Yeah…?”
“Then I grabbed the brake real hard and when I pulled the clutch, uhm, the front brake I started to endo. I was scared, man.”
By now I was cracking up much to his embarrassment.
A kid on a cheap mountain bike chimed in, “You should’ve seen it, he was side saddle.”
I looked at Terry for an explanation. Terry sheepishly continued.
“I knew I was going to crash so I clipped out my right foot and tried to drag it on the ground like a brake but my left foot got stuck. I endoed anyway still clipped in to the bike. I thought I was going to break my neck.”
That was too much; I fell over laughing so hard my stomach hurt. When I finally regained my composure NY Terry looked at me, probing to see where my thoughts were.
“Why is it,” he pondered, “that you fall so much faster on a bicycle than you do on a motorcycle even though you are traveling slower?”
“Dude, you’re not gonna write about this, are you?”
“No way! You’re my Bro, I wouldn’t do that to you.”
Like I said, some things never change. NY Terry is my best friend and as long as he keeps crashing, I’ll keep writing about it. Shhh, here he comes.

Good Ole Daze

"Good Old Daze"

Ah, the "good old days"- everyone remembers them. We look back fondly through misty eyes and hazy memories at our humble moto-cross beginnings… Back to the early eighties, back to the time when bikes had eight inches of travel and radiators above the front fenders. Kawasakis had the worst suspension and the most potential. Yamaha's motors were smooth (read slow). Hondas were fast but handled like run-away jack-hammers. Suzukis were the best overall bikes with their "Full Floater" suspension. The plain truth was that the rear wheels of bikes from yesteryear spent so much time in the air that Suzuki was justified in calling them "Floaters."
The bikes were junk back then, but they were as good as they could be at the time. In comparison, modern bikes almost ride themselves. With each new model, we didn't think the bikes could get any better. Back in the "good old daze"(sic), our riding wasn't the only thing novice about us; our tuning and wrenching abilities were also at the novice level. One much needed apparatus was the on-board diagnostic computer. Case in point: the year was 1985, and I was at the Whitestone practice track with my buddy New York Terry. His year-old RM125 refused to start. We had pulled the plug out and determined from the liquid dribbling off the plug that gas was indeed getting in the cylinder.
"Kicking the starter will un-flood it," I said smugly. "Trust me."
"Let's see if it's getting spark first," Terry added, trying to sound knowledgeable. I snatched the plug from him, stuck it into the plug cap and held it close to the cylinder head like I had seen others do. I motioned him to kick the lever.
"Go ahead, kick it," I said. "Trust me."
I immediately felt the surge of what felt like one million volts travel through the joints in my hands on up through my elbows. I learned quickly to grip the plug by the rubber cap instead of the threads when checking for spark. Don King would've been proud of my new-found afro.
"Man, what are we going to do now?" asked Terry.
"Simple, jump start it," I said. Terry looked down at me warily... "Trust me, really."
The Whitestone Bridge's toll plaza side road was long and smooth, perfect for a running bump-start. Besides, I had remembered seeing an expert rider do it all by himself. There were two of us so it should've be a cinch. Terry snicked the bike into second gear and I pushed from behind while he manned the handlebars. The RM belched a puff of white and blue smoke, splattering oil on my new riding pants. That bike was as stubborn as a three year old in Toys R Us at Christmas. The three of us were locked in a mortal battle of wits and Terry and I were the unarmed ones. The sound of a nearby rider wailing through the gears inspired Terry. He was going to push that beast to life even if it killed him. Little did we know that was exactly what the RM had in mind.
When I ran out of breath, I stopped and watched Terry run alongside the bike waiting for the right moment to hop on. The motor burbled and gurgled and protested with all its might. Terry looked like the "six million dollar man" in a slow motion bionic sprint. An eerie silence accompanied this poetry in motion. In the movies, this means something dramatic is about to happen. I came back to reality when the RM's engine fired up a split second before Terry could swing his leg over the saddle. I watched in amazement as his right foot snagged on the tip of the long rear fender.
The RM motor instantly revved to nineteen-thousand RPM and proceeded to drag him like a rag doll. Terry weaved down the road with only his chest and hands connected to the now speeding machine. When second gear attained fourth-gear speed I couldn't tell which was screaming louder, Terry or the RM. The pair exploded in a cloud of smoke and dust when they impacted the roadside guardrail. Terry's resulting swan dive could've made Olympic history; Greg Louganis would've shed a tear. The bike slapped and bounced around on the ground like a Brahma bull that just chucked a cowboy. Finally the angry beast stalled again.
Terry and I approached the bike with the trepidation of a seven-fingered terrorist bomb maker. On the first kick the bike started and idled happily like nothing had ever happened -- go figure. Terry and I looked at reach other in shock; the prolonged man-stares spoke volumes of what we dared not say... 'I won't tell anyone if you don't... deal?' Lucky for us, modern dirt bikes don't dole out random beatings caused by sticking throttle slides anymore. As Mr. Know-It-All from Dirt Bike magazine would’ve said, "You should have known."

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  2 Wheels and No Sense Posted:

  4/29/2008 2:07 AM

  Motorcycle crates are just as dangerous as the bikes inside. I was throwing one out and the corner caught me in the forearm. Live and learn I guess
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  mason78 Posted:

  4/24/2008 1:26 PM

  Hit me up if you come to the wick for the national this year...........
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  lukaitis9 Posted:

  4/18/2008 12:47 PM

  Nice work Mike-
  Are you getting to Jersey at all this season?
  
  Scott
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  MXgirl517 Posted:

  4/13/2008 6:47 PM

  Thank you!
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  Homey Posted:

  4/9/2008 2:02 AM

  David is that your polite way of saying Michael is old??
  
  
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  RonnyJackson633 Posted:

  4/8/2008 4:39 PM

  Thanks! let me know when your script is done, I might need a job!
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  GuyB Posted:

  3/4/2008 9:02 AM

  Back in my BMX days I rode for Rick's Bicycle City (Fontana, CA), RRS and Malcolm Smith Products (Riverside, CA), SE Racing, and Pro Neck/Bicycle Source.
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  MoNdA Posted:

  8/24/2007 12:48 AM

  Hey Mike,
  I have been to just about every local Michigan Tracks. and my favorite is of course RED BUD!!!!!!!!!
  
  Later, Ryan.
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  dv12.com Posted:

  7/20/2007 2:19 AM

  USGP was a long time ago!!! It's cool that you remember those days!