Cycle News

CN III ARCHIVES BY LARRY LAWRENCE T he AMA Pro Grand National Championship Miles have all been run this season. Bryan Smith won four of the five GNC Miles this sea- son and in doing so moved past iconic flat track legends Hank Scott and Jay Springsteen to take over fifth on the all-time AMA Grand National Mile Wins list. Smith is building a strong case for being considered one of the leading Milers of all time. Smith now has 16-career GNC Mile wins, meaning only Scott Parker (55 wins), Chris Carr (29 wins), Bubba Shobert (25 wins) and Ricky Graham (23 wins) are ahead of Smith in that category. Looking at those numbers you would say that Scott Parker is definitively the best Miler of all time, and while this may be true, I thought it only fair to look at winning percentage as a factor, especially considering Parker raced in an era when by far more AMA Grand National Miles were held as there were in other eras. Racing on the Mile is considered by many the pinnacle of AMA Pro Grand National racing. Most fans and even many riders would say if they were to only watch or race in one event, it would likely be a Mile, and famed events such as Springfield, Sacramento or Indy. When looking at career Mile wins you don't see many stars of the 1950s and '60s on the list. There's good reason for that—for much of the 1950s there were only two Miles per year. So greats of that era such as Joe Leonard, Brad Andres, Carroll Resweber and Dick Mann didn't have that much of a chance to compile large numbers of wins on the Mile. There simply weren't that many races on Miles in those years. The fact that both Leonard and Everett Brashear are both ranked inside the top-10 of all-time GNC Mile victories shows that they were truly among the elites on the big tracks of the AMA Championships. Leonard won eight Miles during a span when there were just 27 Mile Nationals. So that means Leonard had a .296 batting average when it came to winning on the big ovals. Brashear carried a career .241 winning average. Things weren't much different in the '60s. Usually there were only two Miles per year until late in the decade when there were four Miles in 1968 and five in '69. So again the leading riders of that decade such as Bart Markel, Dick Mann and Gary Nixon didn't have a lot of shots at put- ting Mile wins on their resume. But look at the percentage of Mile wins and you'll discover that Carroll Resweber ranks second. Surprisingly it was Fred Nix who was the top Miler of the 1960s having won six. That placed the Oklahoman third on the all-time GNC Mile Wins list at the end of the 1960s, behind only Leonard and Brashear. Nix's Mile winning per- centage during his short four-and-a-half-year pro career? An astonishing .545. That means Nix won over half of the Grand National Miles that ran during his period of racing! That's by far an all- time best winning percentage in Grand National Mile racing and, even though Nix is rarely men- tioned in all-time best Milers, he definitely should be in that discussion. Things really began rolling in the 1970s in terms of GNC Miles. Whereas the 1950s averaged THE BEST MILER OF ALL-TIME P112 Fred Nix: The best Miler ever?

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