Rough Riders
It’s a summer night. After an evening out at Danny’s Bar and Grill in Lenexa, Tech N9ne and a few of his pals pile into a black van emblazoned with Tech’s screaming, red-haired image. As the hip-hop star turns onto College Boulevard, a rider on a red Honda sport bike follows.
The rider pulls up alongside the van and pops a wheelie. But he’s just getting started. He jumps off the bike and holds onto the rear seat, his feet skiing along the road. Bike and van are doing 40, maybe 45 miles an hour down College Boulevard between Pflumm and Quivira; fortunately, there’s no traffic for a block. The van slows, its driver waiting to see if the rider will wipe out. He never does.His bike still moving, the rider stands on top of it, keeping pace with the van. With one outstretched arm, he knocks on the van’s window.
The guys in the van go nuts.
“Rough rider!” they shout, a nod to a popular black motorcycle group out of New York. High props indeed for a white rider.
“He scared the shit out of us,” Tech tells the Pitch later.
Then Dan Jackson is gone.
Jackson is the third-best sport-bike rider in the country. Two other Kansas City riders are trying to catch up with him.
On a sport bike, as in life, it boils down to this: If you¹ve got a big enough set of marbles, you can do a lot of shit. On a warm December weekend in an Olathe industrial park, Johnny Seales, Grant Sunday and their pals are trying to figure out whether they have the marbles.
The riders belong to a sport-bike “team” called KC’s Most Wanted, and they have to find a place to practice. Time is critical. The first week in March, they head to Florida to compete in the inaugural event of the 2003 season in an upstart league called the Extreme Sport Bike Association. The XSBA is backed by media giant Clear Channel, and Seales and Sunday think they’re on the ground floor of the next underground sport to hit the big time.
Jackson is on hand, too, and he leaves no doubt about the size of his marbles, ripping into a “twelve o’clock.” First he roars a few yards down the long side street framed by one-story concrete buildings and pops a wheelie. Keeping his front wheel up, Jackson decelerates until he’s moving at less than 30 miles an hour, less than 20, less than 10 — at the same time, he takes the wheelie higher, past 45 degrees, past 60 degrees, until it seems as if he’s going to topple backward off the bike. Then he goes higher, keeping the rear brake tight so that the 400-pound bike doesn’t somersault with him on it, until the bike is vertical and comes to a standstill balanced on a flat metal bar in back.
Seales and Sunday roar back and forth practicing “stoppies” — wheelies for which the rear wheel rather than the front comes off the ground — and “burnouts,” for which the rider locks the front brakes and spins the rear tire until the friction creates a plume of smoke. Sunday always rides in a pair of jeans; Seales always listens to an MP3 player that dangles under his jacket and hooks into a huge speaker mounted on the side of his helmet, shrieking Korn or Judas Priest. “Something to keep my blood pumping, my mind on a fast track,” he says.
For every basic move the riders master, there are a dozen more advanced variations to learn. This is especially true for wheelies.
“You do a wheelie, and that’s all you do. That’s all you can think about,” Sunday says. “It’s like crack.”
Only more expensive. A good bike costs $10,000, and it’s not made for what these guys will do with it, which is why they prefer the durability of Hondas. The bikes are scraped up from countless encounters with the asphalt. Seales’ CBR 900 RR looks like a metal Frankenstein’s monster, with mismatched body molding and zip ties holding the pieces together like stitches. Maintaining the brakes, engine and other parts usually runs a couple grand a year.
Fearlessness is a given. Fame is not, though the XSBA offers a sort of Holy Grail to these riders. They could get paid to travel the country performing these crazy tricks. It would be money to live on, money to keep their bikes running. After all, street lugers and skateboarders are respected athletes. (One estimate puts skate star Tony Hawk’s annual income at $60 million.) Extreme sport-bike riding requires at least as much skill and a lot more nerve.
“I see guys go past on a skateboard,” Sunday says. “Come on, this is way more exciting than that.”
Grant Sunday grew up in Overland Park, riding anything on two wheels. He was playing around on dirt bikes by the time he was ten. Since the 24-year-old started riding motorcycles three years ago, he’s bought and sold a dozen bikes. Like Seales, Sunday rides a Honda CBR 900 RR, the Levi’s 501 of sport bikes.
Sunday, his brother Greg and their friends ate their first asphalt on Walcott Drive, near Lakeside Speedway in Wyandotte County. But the streets of Olathe were where guys went to show off their stuff. Crowds of riders 75 strong would meet at the Sonic off Santa Fe late at night, fuel up at a nearby Amoco, then tear up the double-laned city streets and play keep away from the cops.
Stunt riders were rare. Sunday was in awe of the handful who could keep a wheelie going for an eighth of a mile or lean into a 100-foot stoppie. Before long, he could do stoppies that long, too. Then he could do a wheelie for a quarter mile. And just like that, Sunday was blowing by other riders, who were in awe of him.
“Everybody’s good at something,” he says. “This is what I’m good at.”
The wheelies became old hat. Beginners could do them. Anybody could do ’em fast. These days, good riders can maintain wheelies for 30 or 40 miles. But not many riders can throw in the variations — the high chairs (kicking the legs over the front windshield) or flamingos (standing up on one leg and holding the other leg out and back). Sunday practiced the twelve o’clock relentlessly for two weeks before he had it.
He had blown away virtually everyone — except for Johnny Seales, a machinist who worked in Lee’s Summit.
Seales never planned on being a rider. He wanted to play guitar. It took him until his late twenties to realize he was “going to have to be some god from outer space” to stand out as a guitarist. He’d bought his first sport bike in 1995. Back then, all he’d wanted was a ride that looked good and had power to burn.
In late 2000, Seales was at his friend Jeremy Yowell’s house when Yowell showed him a video of a group of Ohio riders called the Star Boyz, who were popularizing sport-bike stunts across the country. Seales had never heard of them. Yowell tried his first stunt — sliding onto the gas tank and slinging his feet over the windshield. Seales followed his lead.
“Once I discovered this, I knew this was it,” Seales says. Each new trick, he says, “was like a new drug you’ve just discovered.” As he adjusted to each new move, he upped his tolerance and moved to a newer, tougher trick. “You know you’re one of only a few people who have done it, and that just boosts your adrenaline even more.”
At 32, Seales is the oldest rider on the scene, so several times a week he runs a mile and lifts weights to keep his edge. He carries Vicodin to ease the pain of minor tumbles.
When they first met, Seales thought Sunday talked more trash than he could back up. Sunday found the older rider patronizing. One night in July 2001 they decided to meet in Olathe to see who was better.
An hour before the showdown, Sunday was working on his stoppies. He went into a slow one, and for a moment the bike was about to reach perfect stillness. Then the back tire leaned, the front tire turned, and the bike catapulted into the air, launching Sunday headfirst. He landed on his back.
Sunday’s femur was smashed where it joined the hip socket. Surgeons stuck a flat metal plate in his hip, which now pokes out an inch farther on the right side than on the left.
Sunday was in the hospital almost a week. The first day, he considered giving up motorcycles for good. The second day, he told himself he would just ride and lay off the stunts. The third day, he decided to take stoppies out of his repertoire.
But Sunday enjoyed the admiration he had earned from other riders. He liked pulling wheelies down the highway, giving weary car passengers a flash of entertainment. A few weeks after the crash, with his leg in a cast, his friends helped him onto his bike and they went riding. “When we stopped at McDonald’s,” he remembers, “they’d carry me in.”
The physical recovery was easy compared with the personal one. Sunday was laid up for three months. He’d been making $60,000 a year as a mechanic at a Lincoln-Mercury dealership. It had been easy to buy and sell new bikes whenever he wanted. But now he couldn’t walk. He says the dealership fired him. Money got tight. His credit went downhill. His girlfriend walked out, demanding partial custody of their young son.
“It was really shitty breaking my leg,” he says.
A year later, in the summer of 2002, Seales got hurt, too. He had just come back from a Star Boyz competition in Ohio, where he’d placed second in the freestyle stoppie competition and won $300.
Seales knew he had to practice harder to match the best riders. It was about midnight on July 3, on 119th Street near Metcalf in Overland Park, when Seales tried to do a stoppie while sitting on his tank, one hand off, his feet over the handlebars. Another rider in front of him stopped suddenly. For a second, Seales would later say, he could have bailed. He could have thrown himself off the bike and walked away with only a few scratches. But a rider’s first instinct is to save the bike. “I was worried about the bike,” he says. “It was the only one I had.”
The bike emerged unscathed — it fell on top of Seales, pinning him. He felt as if a couple of linebackers had knocked the wind out of him. Friends directed traffic as he struggled up from underneath the bike. What he knew: He felt dizzy, with hot and cold flashes. What he didn’t know: His stomach was filling with blood.
His friends took him first to Dan Jackson’s house, then to the emergency room. Doctors told him he had ruptured his spleen. The organ was so badly shredded that it had to be removed.
It took him two months to recover. Two months walking with a cane. Two months carrying a pillow to muffle sneezes, afraid that the staples holding his insides together would come undone.
I need to take this seriously or quit, he thought.
A few months earlier, Seales had formed a riding group called the Devil Boys with Yowell and another friend, Charlie Herbert. They headed to Daytona Beach, Florida, for Bike Week, the world’s largest motorcycle event. Herbert, an Amoco mechanic, brought his family. “It’s a serious big deal,” Seales says.
One night the Devil Boys got their pictures taken with Derrick Deagle, a sport-bike pioneer and cult hero known as D-Mann. The next night, Herbert went off on his own, practicing wheelies down a straightaway at night at 100 miles an hour. At that speed, you can go 1,000 feet — a distance slightly longer than three football fields — in 6.81 seconds. On one wheel. With no lights. Herbert put the front wheel down and ran out of road.
The road forked left or right, and Herbert didn’t have time to turn either way. He jammed the breaks but crashed into a guardrail and flew over his bike. As it turned out, D-Mann, a onetime Chicago firefighter, was among the first on the scene. Herbert had broken his neck. He had a pulse but was brain dead; his body gave out an hour or so later. D-Mann turned Herbert’s helmet over to police — it had a hole punched in the back.
Seales and Yowell were out riding that night and saw the ambulances. They knew somebody was in a bad way. They were close enough to see a yellow bike on the side of the road. But Seales knew lots of riders rode the same kind of bike, the same color. Anyway, Herbert was a safe rider. He rarely clowned around. He’d probably be waiting for them back at the motel.
Seales swallowed his apprehension. When he didn’t see his friend’s motorcycle at the motel, he reminded himself that Herbert sometimes kept his bike in his room so no one would steal it. A few hours later, he heard the phone ring in Herbert’s room next door. Then he heard Herbert’s wife scream. He stayed in his own room.
“What could I say or do to make things better?” Seales says. “It was rough.” The next day, he and Yowell went to the crash site. They had to leave Herbert’s bike behind — it probably wound up in a salvage yard. That still bothers Seales. He turned to Sunday to help get Herbert’s truck back to the Midwest. Whatever rivalry might have been brewing between Sunday and Seales evaporated.
After that Yowell and Seales stopped riding together. Yowell all but gave up riding.
“I didn’t want to stop,” Seales says. “This was what I wanted.”
From the wreckage came KC’s Most Wanted.
West Coast guys do fast tricks, like high-speed wheelie passes. East Coast riders prefer slower, choppier moves — lots of stoppies and burnouts.
Jackson, the best rider in Kansas City, does what hardly any other rider is doing.
Like sitting up on his tank doing a high-speed stoppie with no hands, relying on his right ankle to control the front brake lever. Or doing a handstand on the bike while it’s moving.
Or doing a burnout sitting backward.
“It’s completely foreign,” Ken Abbott says of Jackson’s talent. Abbott, who oversees the XSBA from its headquarters in Aurora, Illinois, has seen what Jackson can do. “You have to use the throttle and brake in your left hand, clutch in your right hand, and you’re backward.”
Jackson comes from a family of nonriders in Keokuk, Iowa — he got all the crazy genes. As a kid he raced and jumped bicycles. At fourteen he was riding dirt bikes. For the most part, he did it alone. Sure, he had people to ride with, but they were never as good as he was; they didn’t push him. In his late teens, Jackson rode motocross — the sport in which riders race their bikes over tracks of huge dirt ramps — across the Midwest. He was riding nearly every day and competing every weekend.
“Doing it all by myself, that’s why I burned out,” he says. By the time Jackson was twenty, he was ready to try something new.
But after Jackson stopped competing in motocross in 1998, the sport started filing up arenas around the country. He doesn’t plan to make the same mistake twice. Jackson started competing seriously only last year, but among the small number of riders who make up the XSBA’s professional circuit, he’s ranked third in the country — at least until the new season begins in March.
Jackson has an innate feel for how to balance and control a bike. When he first started hanging out with riders in Olathe, he wasn’t sure he could pick up the tricks. Now there’s no doubt. “That stuff they were doing is weak,” he says.
Jackson usually wears an Evel Knievel-style race suit with stars stitched down the sleeves and pant legs and flames printed on his shoes. When he practices moves, he’ll finish with a raise of his arm, as if signaling the end of his run to the judges, even if there are no judges and even if he messes up. He lifts weights nearly every day.
Jackson broke thirteen bones during his motocross days, but on the bigger, heavier sport bikes he has yet to toss it. This has earned him a reputation as one who rides with the angels. One afternoon late last year, he was the only rider practicing with no helmet. “Aw, man, that’s kind of crazy,” Jackson says he tells himself when he dreams up a new move. “Then I think, screw it.”
Jackson didn’t become friends with Seales and Sunday until last summer, months after the two had helped start KC’s Most Wanted. Jackson had already founded the one-man Team XMX. There’s been no talk of the two teams joining, though they’ll probably travel together. It’s clear Jackson is used to working alone — everybody is content to hang out and practice together, but for now, extreme sport-bike riding is still an individual sport.
Jackson, 25, really wants to be a stuntman — take a fall, jump out of a building, crash a car, even set himself on fire. He says he just missed a chance to audition as a stunt rider for the recent movie Biker Boyz. Clear Channel has tapped him to perform at a National Hot Rod Association drag strip in Gainesville, Florida, after Bike Week, and he’s lined up a few sponsors at a motorcycle trade show in Indianapolis.
“I just need to get out of Kansas,” he says.
Stunt biking is as old as motorcycles. Helmet manufacturer Hirotake Arai stood on a moving cycle in the 1930s. Steve McQueen jumped a bike over barbed-wire fences in 1963’s The Great Escape. British riders Gary Rothwell and Doug Democa popularized modern variations in the late 1980s when they performed at road races around the country.
The current scene, though, started in Cleveland.
In 1996, Scott Caraboolad and two friends, Kevin Marino and Joe Frazier, used to race on country roads to see who was fastest. But everyone who jumps on a bike eventually wants to balance it on one wheel. Back then, only a few guys could do it. Caraboolad used to practice by setting distances with landmarks — could he ride a wheelie from this telephone pole to one a block up? “If you kept a wheel up for a city block, about 100 feet, you were considered a crazy-phenomenal rider,” Caraboolad tells the Pitch, laughing.
European riders had been doing the same sort of stunts for years, but those guys ran on closed courses like drag strips and airport tarmacs, they wore heavily padded gear and their bikes were loaded with safety equipment. Caraboolad and his pals were just three kids kicking the hell out of their bikes.
Word got around town. Saturday rides drew ten people, then twenty, then thirty. “Soon after, people were talking about what we’re doing on our bikes,” Caraboolad recalls. Video cameras were becoming affordable, too, and the riders started taping their moves so they could prove who was the best.
Marino and Frazier thought they could sell their footage, so they paid a guy in Akron, Ohio, $500 to edit some of their riding tapes into a video with music. Caraboolad says he didn’t want to spend the money. “I was totally against it,” he says.
The video, titled FTP 1 (for Fuck the Police), sold fifty copies around Cleveland. But when the trio made the rounds at a big bike show in Indianapolis a few weeks later, the tape went through the roof. The guys sent a couple of copies to some distributors in Los Angeles who sold motocross videos, and money started flooding in. “Holy shit? Royalties?” Caraboolad says. “What the hell’s a royalty?”
The guys began hitting drag races to get their names out. They always wore Vanson Leather jackets with big red stars on the back. An announcer once referred to them as the Star Boys from Akron, Ohio, and the name stuck.
FTP 1 is a cult classic now, and like most cult classics, it’s not very good. “I can’t even watch it,” Caraboolad says. “The music is terrible. The footage is shaky.” But it didn’t matter. The Star Boyz had opened up a whole new game. Within a month, another new crew of riders, the Las Vegas Extremes, came out with its own video. It sold more than 10,000 copies.
Today, two dozen teams are making — or trying to make — videos. Set to grinding rock music and marked by less-than-steady camera work, the tapes are more or less the same. Some feature spectacular moves — a guy standing on the back seat of his bike jumps onto the fuel tank without causing so much as a wobble. But they’re also full of guys trying stunts and wiping out, and what emerges is a kind of Jackass aesthetic. On one tape, a rider on a four-lane arterial crashes his bike, hits the asphalt, tumbles across two lanes, over a median and onto the other side of the road. The next shot shows the guy in an ambulance, his arm covered in blood. A friend provides sterling off-camera commentary: “Damn, dude….”
“The problem with what we’ve done, we basically started a new sport,” Caraboolad says. “We pioneered a new sport. It’s borderline illegal. That’s the biggest thing we’ve been dealing with all along.”
When the Boyz started riding at drag strips and visiting trade shows, other motorcyclists and manufacturers saw them as outlaws and punks. “People were looking down on us. [But] we were, like, ‘Take a hike.'”
Any professional sports league needs corporate sponsorships. But when it comes to stunt riding, motorcycle manufacturers don’t want to endorse activities their bikes weren’t designed for. Helmet manufacturers don’t want to risk the liability. Meanwhile, apparel companies are “all over it,” Abbott says, and the tire companies are interested, too. “I think there is a future in it,” he says. “The XSBA as we see it is ready to explode.”
XSBA’s backer, Clear Channel, operates more than 1,200 radio stations across the country and is one of the largest live-entertainment promoters in the world. The company has already helped turned motocross into a big-time arena sport and attracted sponsors.
Compared to motocross, extreme sport-bike riding should be easy. All you need, Abbott says, is a parking lot and some catch fencing to protect spectators. As a sanctioning body, Clear Channel’s league takes on liability for safety, letting manufacturers off the hook. Riders know they have a professional, coordinated series of events where they can compete and earn money, maybe even make a living. Beyond that, everyone hopes the sport snowballs. That the X Games, the premier televised showcase for alternaculture sports, gets involved. That maybe a competition pops up on ESPN. That local dealerships get in the mix and Red Bull signs on as sponsor. Ratings jump. Television revenues rocket. People start getting paid.
A good game plan, except that Clear Channel nearly wiped out in the beginning. In 1998, during a dealer show in Indianapolis, Caraboolad met Cliff Nobles, who’d been hired by Clear Channel to launch a league. “They wanted to contract with us to participate, do shows,” Caraboolad says. Over the next two years, both sides discussed ways to put on an event. “We met with this guy a couple times, and I started putting together an event,” Caraboolad says. But, he explains, Clear Channel was on a tight budget, and the company wasn’t planning to sink a lot of money into this new endeavor.
Nobles never returned calls. Months went by with the Star Boyz unable to get hold of him. In 2000, Caraboolad finally got a note from Nobles inviting the Star Boyz to an inaugural XSBA event in early 2001 at the Pocono Cycle Festival, outside Philadelphia.
“They give us an invitation to an event that we basically gave them all the ideas for,” he says. Instead of being partners on the deal, the Boyz were just another team.
“They drew the first blood on the issue,” Caraboolad says. The Star Boyz quickly struck back.
“The Star Boyz thought they were of a status where they should be paid to go, rather than just going,” says Abbott, who took over from Nobles in August 2001. “The Star Boyz basically said, ‘Screw it.’ They did their own show in Ohio. They tried to draw some other people over there.”
Before the XSBA could get any momentum, the biggest names in the sport had staged a successful competing event. In 2002, the XSBA hosted four competitions, in Pocono as well as in West Virginia, Wisconsin and Oregon. Meanwhile, the Star Boyz continued to hold their own events. The payout for riders in either series is minimal. Still, Caraboolad tells the Pitch that fewer than 1,000 people are coming to XSBA events, but Star Boyz events are drawing between 6,000 and 7,000 spectators.
“Riders are suspicious of corporations,” D-Mann says of the dilemma for riders when it comes to the XSBA. “This is a sport that started in the street. Riders feel they have ownership in it.” Yet the riders also want to get paid.
Peter Jones, editor of Motorcycle Street and Strip magazine, likens this stage of professional sport-bike riding to the beginning of rock and roll. Like early musicians, the riders and teams can’t make it big on their own. But, he asks, “Are corporations going to come in and take more than they give?” Riders like the idea of being backed by the deep pockets of Clear Channel. They’re just not sure they like the company.
Some riders say the Boyz won’t compete in the XSBA because they’re no longer the best and they know it. “If you talk to a lot of the riders, their skills are not as highly tuned as some of the riders on [the XSBA’s] series,” Jackson says.
Caraboolad says that’s crap. Nevertheless, the Star Boyz aren’t going to Bike Week.
KC’s riders believe the league will succeed. “There’s no question the XSBA will take off,” Sunday says. “That’s what I’m hanging in there for. I have the potential to be a competitor.”
“We know it’s going to work out. That’s why we’re so committed to doing what we do,” Seales adds. “Everybody feels this is a new career. We’re trying to put everything we can into it now so it will pay off.”
Last month, Jackson and KC’s Most Wanted traveled to Florida’s Lakeland Drag Strip, midway between Tampa and Orlando, to compete in Stunt Wars, another non-XSBA event.
Sunday says it was one big party, and he loved being around the other riders. But he hadn’t practiced or ridden in more than a month, and he struggled with the adjustment to the slick, greasy surface. In the slowest wheelie competition, Sunday went up against two dozen to three dozen top riders, many of whom are consistent top-ten finishers. “We weren’t going out there to win, just to get our name out,” Sunday says. A day before the competition, he’d seen a rider jump his sport bike off a freestyle motocross ramp. Sunday did the jump himself the next day, sailing a good 15 feet from takeoff to landing.
Still, against the best he didn’t compete as well as he had hoped. “Most of my stuff didn’t look so good.”
Seales struggled, too. He was on a new Honda, and he just never felt comfortable. He says the track was at once too sticky and too slick — burnouts were practically impossible. On the side streets near the track, he’d been able to combine an Iron Cross wheelie — a wheelie with his legs spread out to either side — with a flamingo, but when he got on the track, the surface gave him fits. He couldn’t pull the move in competition.
Jackson hadn’t ridden since mid-December.
During the Sickest Trick event, he tried to pull off what he calls a switchback rev-limiter burnout. Sitting on the tank facing backward, he locked the front brake and gave so much gas to the rear that his tachometer hit its limit and smoke billowed everywhere. The motorcycle was wide open — if he had eased off the front brake, the bike would have shot off like a bullet.
But the rear tire, which needs to spin freely against the road, stuck to the asphalt. The bike hopped a few times, then took off in the air at 45 degrees, flipped over and landed nose first on the track. Jackson was thrown in the air backward, feet first. He landed on his knees and arms, but the momentum flipped him onto his feet. He ran toward the crowd, untouched and pumping his fist.
“They probably thought I did it on purpose,” he says.
Later, though, Jackson mastered the no-handed stoppie and won the event. He shows off the trophy, but he has hundreds of trophies back in Iowa. For a moment he feigns a kind of indifference to the sport’s prospects. He says the events are just places to ride without worrying about the police. “I can go out there and do whatever I want.” A moment later, the showman has a more selfless impulse. “If I can go out and make someone’s jaw drop, I’m having a good time.”
Jackson’s bike sits in his garage, next to an old sofa, a motocross bike and a slick blue-and-silver Yamaha. The front end is smashed, and the plastic covering, already broken and stitched together, is beyond repair. The ignition is ruined, too. The repairs will run about $500, he thinks. He looks up at two leather jackets he won last year for qualifying. One is still sheathed in plastic, and neither looks like it’s been worn. He’ll probably sell them to raise money for repairs. He still hasn’t gotten his bike fixed, but he says he’ll have it ready for Bike Week.
With less than a month to go before Bike Week, Seales and Sunday are trying to get ready for the return trip to Florida — and the first time they’ve been back to Daytona since Herbert was killed a year ago.
Seales wants to make up for his weak showing at Lakeland. His goal for 2003 is to start stringing moves together. He figures he can take on riders who are above him if he can put together a program of moves rather than just a cool trick here and there.
The Web site Stuntlife.com lists Seales as an amateur. Some good showings — starting at Bike Week — could get him reclassified as a pro.
Sunday, meanwhile, says he’ll have to install a new sprocket to slow the gearing of the bike to compete in longest-stoppie contests. Only in the last month or so has Sunday gotten back on his feet financially. Yet just a few weeks ago, his girlfriend, who also has struggled to make ends meet, sued him for child support. His plan to buy a new truck and set aside some money to compete on the XSBA circuit now must be weighed against the expense of hiring a lawyer.
On a warm February Sunday that smells of spring, KC’s Most Wanted practices on Union Street — a little-used road at the eastern edge of the West Bottoms, next to the train tracks, sandwiched between the viaducts.
Of all the riders in town, 28-year-old Eric Neugebaur looks least likely to take to stunt riding. Tall and gangly, his friends say he came to the sport with neither coordination nor mechanical skills. He didn’t start riding motorcycles until he was 24. “He was not that good when he first started,” Sunday says. “He scared all of us.”
But Neugebaur, a truck driver, doesn’t lack persistence. He rides a beat-up white-and-yellow Honda with no plastic covering up front — it looks like half a bike. He’s been working on his twelve o’clocks for months. On his tank he’s scrawled the words “Scrape it Bitch” — a challenge to himself to bring the rear bar of his bike down to the ground and scrape the asphalt. By January he was starting to get them down. But he doesn’t have them licked.
Neugebaur pops his bike until it’s nearly vertical when it veers to his left, then lurches back to the right. Neugebaur’s right foot comes off the peg and hits the ground — he’s trying to find some balance, trying to save it. But the foot is a sitting duck when the bike slams down on it, breaking it and lacerating it in three places.
At the hospital, a nurse tries to stem the bleeding — all this is on tape — and blood pours from his foot like dark syrup. Doctors insert two screws into Neugebaur’s foot and staple up his cuts. He’ll be off his feet for three months. His truck-driving job demands footwork.
A day after the wreck, Seales thinks Neugebaur will face the same gut check he and Sunday have passed: Do you continue to pour your money into these bikes and tear up your body for an outside chance at glory? “Somebody’s going to need to let him ride a 50,” Seales muses. (The small 50 cc bikes are the motorcycle equivalent of a BB gun. You can do tricks on them, but you’re only 2 feet off the ground.) “It’ll give him confidence. It’ll give him something to do.”
Two days later, Neugebaur is out of the hospital, his foot wrapped up. He watches the video of his crash. His teammates and friends pass around his sliced-up, bloody shoe. “I know I’m going to get back on the bike,” he says. “Absolutely.”
The promise of a new sport keeps Neugebaur enthusiastic. His foot will heal.
“It’s the possibility of being famous, people knowing us,” he says.
Later in the evening, Neugebaur grows more contemplative. He’s trying to reach competition level. This is already going to set him back. And competitors pull this move all the time. “It’s fun to do this,” he says, “but you can lose your life.”
“We’re retarded how much we’re into this,” Sunday says.
