Cycle News - Archive Issues - 1980's

Interview:wes Cooley Getting F!RD. off theground How much of an increase are we talking about? Well, at some of the bigger races now the purse is $47-50,000. We are asking that the four major Nationals Daytona, Loudon, Laguna Seca and Elkhart Lake - increase the purse to $100,000. Now, Daytona has already done that, they are already over $100,000. By David Edwards P. R. 0., the Professional Riders Organization' is the brainchild of road racers Wes Cooley, Roberto Pietri and Ed Mullineaux. The group was formed to improve the lot of the professional road racer in America. Perhaps fueled by accusations after the tragic accident at Brainerd, Minnesota, tha t took the lives of Hugh Humble and Mark jones, and the allegedy indecisive officiating at Willow Springs that saw Honda rider Mike Baldwin laying on the track after a high-speed get-off with no red flag shown to stop the race, P.R.O. has won widespread rider acceptance and should be a major influence on the U.S. road racing scene in the future. We recently had a chance to talk with Cooley about P.R.O. 14 Let's start off by talking about how P.R.O. came about - its inception - and how you became involved with it. Actually, it's an organization that I realized the motorcycle industry and especiall y the riders really needed. I say organization because I don't like the word "union" really, but that's basically what it is. I thought it was necessary to have one solid voice. I never really thought that we would get it going as well as we have; a couple of years ago, in fact, Roberto Pietri and I decided to sit down and see what it would take to do something like this. It's a big, bige[fort, that's for sure;· there's .a lot you have to take into consideration. We decided it was something we wanted to do, but the time wasn't right. How did P.R.O. get from that point to where it stands now? As I said, it was an idea that Roberto and I had. I started talJdng to people - letting them know that we were thinking about starting this thing up, and asking what they thought about it - and, boy, everybody was behind it; really, really interested. Then Ed Mullineaux, he's an assistant district attorney for the state of North 111 r 1~:. "")·1\(_, Carolina and motorcycling happens to be his hobby, was really interested in getting things going. We asked him to do all the legal mumbo jumbo as far as finding out what kind of organization we could utilize arid how we should go about setting things up. He wrote .the first letter (to the riders) and handed out all the (information) cards. He had just started the ball rolling and then he had a bad' accident in North Carolina, and that kind of set us back. I What do you hope to accomplish with P.R.O.? P.R.O.'s goals are three·fold. The first is increased purse money. That way, riders, even if they don't make a profit, can at least make ends meet. A lot of guys now go racing and end up spending a lot of their own money to go out and ruin their bikes, while the guy who's promoting the race is sitting up in the o££ice watching all this a.nd putting dollars in his back pocket. He may have risked his neck financially, but physically, no wa -)., l . i . ~' ~ ~. -: (~. I ' J i. What do you propose (or the lesser Nationals that don't draw as many spe.ctators? Obviously, we want to continue those races, we don't want to throw any promoters out of the saddle, so to speak, because we need them. We need a 15-race series so the fans and racers have something to follow. At the smaller races the purses on an average run around $~5,000, and we'll be asking for an increase to 50,000. At the Pro-Am races we want to go from 8-10,000 to 16,000. You mentioned P.R.O. had three main goals. Increasing the purses is one; what about the other two? Track safety. That's another goal. We would like to change things so we don't have another Minnesota accident happen or another fiasco like the one at Willow Springs. For example, (AMA Competition Director) Bill Boyce goes to new tracks a month in advance, looks at them and decides what's good about the track and what's bad. As much as I like Mr. Boyce, he's not a racer and his per· spective is not the same. When it comes to that and things like approving safety changes to a track, we'd like to be able to send myself or one of the other guys to look it over and see what we feel about it. I think if P.R.O. had been in e££ect a year before the Brainerd accident, and we would have been at that race track a month before (for a safety check), we could have averted the accident. That's what ~e are Tl~ally tr inlf to do, make II f ._ I • , J. , I, I U. 1.1 1 sure the tracks are safe. The third thing that we are trying to do is what we've called enhancement of the sport. That involves trying to get a little bit better publicity out of what we are doing. We'd like to see if we can initiate a kind of central media organizer. The AMA doesn't have anything like that now. All the media work that was done for the races last year that I know of was done through the factories - either Kawasaki sent me or Honda sent their people around to all the different TV stations and newspapers. That's maybe five percent of the racers out there. We'd like to see a central media organizer, hopefully run by the AMA through P.R.O., send out information on all the riders to the local TV stations and local newspapers. Maybe one of the racers was from that town when he was a kid, and that might spark someone to write a special article or something. That way we can get a little more media exposure. I had a meeting with the R.j. Reynolds people (sponsors of the Camel Pro Series) and they seem to be very much behind us, especially the promotional aspect of it, because it makes their dollars go a lot farther. What kind of feedback have you received from the riders? Do you expect every rider to join? So far we have 100 percent. Do you think it will stick? Basically we're talking about a union here, and if we look back at history, for the most part, it's taken a boycott or strike to bring about changes. If push comes to shove, do you think everyone will still be behind P.R.O.? Well, I hope we never have to boycott a race. I hope we can resolve the situation in other ways. And if anything, you will see a boycott because of a lack of safety more so than a disagreement over purse money. My comment about boycotting is that when I originally started talking about P.R.O., I said that if we have to boycott and 100 percent of us don't do it, then I don't want anything more to do with it because we've lost our effectiveness. I hope it never comes to thaI. But at this particular time and I may be a little bit presumptuous - I think that we've got 100 percent or everybody. I haven't heard any negative comments about it at all. Have you met with any resistance from the AMA in your efforts to get P.R.O. off the ground? No, none whatsoever, which really surprised me. We want to work with the AMA. we always have. We're trying to improve the whole sport; to work against them would be detri· mental. They are our sanctioning body and I think at this particular time we can work within the AMA's framework. I think we have to. When we formed this organization, it was not done to create problems in the name of the sport. We just want to make things better for everybody in general.t c.t.' ;.! I t ( (~ ••. f ( J I .1 " • ) ) ) ! t, .J

• Cover