Cycle News - Archive Issues - 1980's

falling; Lawson was then still. He would tell me later that he couldn't move, that he was certain he had turned himself into a quadriplegic like our mutual friend Bruce Hammer: But, he said, by the time the ambulance arrived, he could move again. They took him to Monterey Hospital, examined him, and sent him home. Kawasaki issued press releases saying that Lawson had been bruised and was materially unhurt. Lawson flew home to Ontario, California, carried his two suitcases to his mother's car, and put them in the trunk, in agony. His back hurt so much that he lay down on the couch at his mother's house and refused to move. His alarmed parents took him to the local hospital, where X-rays showed that Lawson had cracked his C-7 vertebra, the same vertebra that Hammer had smashed earlier in the year. The temporary paralysis, the doctors said, was caused by the broken vertebra hitting the spinal cord, pinching it; and all that saved Lawson from a wheelchair for life was whatever force made the piece of vertebra move back away from the spinal cord, back into its normal position. Lawson was fitted with a neck brace and told his riding for 1982 was finished. . A few months later, after missing two Superbike races, Lawson won three straigh t races and took the U.S. Superbike Championship away from Team Honda's Mike Baldwin. Asked about the crash, Lawson recently offered the opinion that Fleming and his watches must have been wrong, that he hadn't been going through Turn Two any harder than Roberts or Spencer or Mamola, that those three guys ride pretty hard, and that a poor front tire choice-too soft-had caused the crash. ••• To win his 1982 title, Lawson had to race as tough a field as he raced for his 1981 Superbike Championship: Baldwin, Wes Cooley, Freddie Spencer at some races. When Lawson won the· Formula Two (25Occ) Championship in 1980 and 1981 on the KR250, Lawson raced and beat Spencer, Rich Schlachter, Anton Mang, Randy Mamola and dozens of lesser known riders. There are several fairly astonishing facts about all this that emerge when somebody like me starts researching a story on Eddie Lawson. The first is that, looking through old issues of magazines and newspapers and through piles of photographs taken at the races, is that the names of Baldwin, Cooley, Spencer, Mamola, SchJachter, et. al. show up years before the name Eddie Lawson. Long before Lawson had ever been on a Superbike or a Formula One machine, the men he raced against in 1980-1981-1982-1983 were racing and winning on TZ750s, Superbikes, RG500s, 250s. Lawson may be one of the few American stars never to campaign a TZ750. He also started professional racing reg-ularly relatively late: He was 22 in 1980, his first full season of r<~ad racing, and he's 26 now. The second amazing fact is that Eddie Lawson has spent his entire career in Freddie Spencer's shadow, even when Eddie's results were better. Spencer raced for Honda in the Superbike Championship in 1980and 1981; Eddie beat him both years (although Wes Cooley took the title in 1980more on that later). Yet judging by Honda's effective public relations and promotional efforts, the average spectator or reader would have thought Spencer was the champion. Honda's public relations firm cranked out dozens of press releases at a constant pace. Kawasaki's over-wo~ked public 21

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