Adrink with
Giacomo
Agostini
By Art Friedman
.By the time that John Huetter and
myself had made seven or eight trips to
the ninth floor of the Marnot Hotel,
knocked on half the doors on that floor,
asked aU over creation for messages, and
made about six phone calls, J was
happily ready to call it off. We were
about 20 minutes late for our meeting
with perennial world road racing
champion Giacomo Agostini and
Yamaha's European road racing team
manager, Rod Gould and J figured that
we'd missed them. That didn't really
bother me any because I'm so awful at
conducting interviews. One or two
minutes into the thing, I
run out of
interesting questions and tend to resort
to the "Well, what did you have for
lunch, Champ?" sort of query. I was
just breathing a sigh of relief when we
r/J71 into them as we started for the
door. Oil, well.
Agostini apparently wouldn't have
minded missing us, either. He was in the
middle of a three-continents-inthree-days tour, had just spent a long
day which started at rwe 0 'clock and
had included several meetings, a press
conference and luncheon, and a trip to
Buena Park to visit Yamaha. His horror
at discovering that there were two more
turkeys asking for half an hour of his
time flared briefly into irritation before
he calmed down and consented to have
a drink with us and Gould, who is a past
world champion himself. The following
is what J can remember or make out
from the tape recorder.
AF: Why did you d
