Cycle News - Archive Issues - 1990's

much and when it did it was seI£satisfying." La wson didn 't win the race th at day , but he did say o n Sunday morning th at it wa s better and it was good enough to keep race-wi nner Kevin Sch wan tz in sig h t for most of the race. It was a lso good enoug h to give both La wson and Erv th ei r fourth World Cha mpionship. If you listen to Gary Nixo n , it was act ua lly Erv's fifth Wo rld Ch am pi onship. Nixon had cam paigned Erv's TZ750 to what he tho ught was a win in th e Formu la 750 World Cham pionship, only, in Nixon's words, to " get f---ed o u t of it. I know we won the World Championship. Everybody else did, too ." Like anyone that's worked with Erv, Nix on speaks of him with reverence but in a sort of manic mumble tha t confuses dates, tim es, p laces unti l you 'r e not sure where exactly it was · the y won, th rew a rod, or seized. " Greatest guy in the world. Hardest working gu y in the world. Erv wo rks on tha t son-of-a-bitch unt il the thing's right. In Venezuela (a round of the F750 Ch ampionship) it broke a rod and threw me on the ground. Everybody 's partying that night . He's out there with a ligh t. Twenty mi n utes to the line and it's liS degrees. The head had 7.5 compression ra tio and we needed 6.3. He go t a generator and lo wered it. I won the race and got f---ed out of it. " Nixon remembers. Nixon had been to ld abo ut Erv in 1971 by Walt Fulton, J r., on e of -th e tunit y to give you op tio ns and maxim ize the optio ns. T ha t's wh y I th ink it's kind of basic. T here are no secrets. You ut il ize th e time to th e be st ad vantage and surround yourseI£ wi th the best people." In 1989 one of the people working wi th Erv was Edd ie Lawson. La wso n came to Erv armed wit h three World Cha mpio ns hips and a wealth of in formatio n o n ho w to make Yamahas go very, very fast. Obviously, much of tha t inform ation wa s universal a n d, thoug h ap pre hensive at first, Erv was anxio us to pu t it to work. " Ittoo k me a little time to understnd Eddie," Erv now says. "For me, with Freddie, or wh oever in the past, th ere are problem s. With Eddie, it was to understand how he rode. " I was lu cky with him , he had a real open mind. I'v e seen other riders that if they felt th ere was a problem and they gave me an an swer, th ey were co mmitted to making it work. H e'd say 'This sho u ld work, let's try this.' And if it didn't work, one of hi s stro ng points was saying, 'I'd hav e swo rn this would work.' Once you get to th e point that you th in k you're rea lly smart, someth ing will prove you're really stupid." T he high for Erv comes not fro m ' wi n n in g races , but i n testing o r pract ice, becau se, h e beli eves, " 1£ everyth ing is right, a win is always poss ible. . , " T he self-sa tisfyin g hi gh comes o nly in practice. It co u ld be a tire sometimes. It 's a h igh for 10 seconds or so whe n you' re faster than anybody . Just one th ing; a corne r or a lap. Not necessarily winning th e rac e. The actua lrace is not th e main thing. It 's .you against them , like the two-minute drill in basketball." . T he season-ending Braz ilian GP was Erv 's most recent example of this. " All week we were having trouble and it seemed like things were not working like when we tested th er e at the j back on Kawasaki. I know we won the World Championship. In '77, Yam aha was kissing Rob ert s' ass and the y weren 't gi ving us the stuff. Laguna Seca was my last race. I was out of sh a pe : Ma yb e G od's tell ing me so methin g." " 1£ somebo dy gave me a million dollars and Erv 's second bikes I'd do i t again," Ni xon says wishfully. " He made me better than I was." Despite not having raced for a dozen years, Nixon still keeps in touch with Erv and h is fa ther, Harry , a retired lo w crop farmer and avid fisherm an. " He still ca lls here today," Harr y said. "Says he wishes he was 30 years old. H e's really a wonderful fellow." arry oto and his wife, Mar Hjorie,Kan emof Orient al two choicesboth descent and living in California, had wh en J apan bombed Pea rl H arbor in 1941. They could be forced into a co nce ntratio n camp in Utah or they could volunteer to relocate. They chose th e latter. "We went to the p la ce when it was the dead line to get out of · California ," Harry rem em be rs. "Stayed in Utah for seven years. Started farming there. Lettuce, all kinds of vegetables." . Erv was born May 7, 1943.Two-anda-ha lf years later his pa rents would give him a young er sister, Dian. A few years after th at th ey moved back to Ca l if o rn ia . L ike h is father, th e younger Erv was a good fisherman. " H e was four- and -a-half years old. Nobody could tou ch his pole. He 'd (Above) " H e made me better than I was," says Gary Ni xon of Erv Kanemoto, who's seen here working on Nixon's Kawasaki at the controversial 1974 Venezuelan round of the World Championship F750 Series. (Right) Kanemoto's first full-season stint in Europe came in 1981 when he worked for Barry Sheene on the GP circuit. beginning of the year. Every practi ce we were trying different th in gs. Sat urday night I said, ' Let's cha nge th e swingann and sus pension.' " Wh at had prompted Erv to put in the longer swi ngarm was a year 's worth of infor mation. "A ll year there were certain thing s the bike would n 't do. I said. 'Let 's forget about these prob lems.' It was like, most of the year ru nning wh at I th ought was that th e th in g was not getti ng eno ugh gri p . That 's wh y it was slidi ng aro u nd. I started to look at the co mbina tio n and th ought maybe it was getti ng too much grip. Maybe give away a little bit , smoothen the ride out, whi ch , in turn, would make it easier on Eddie. " J ust putting a longer swingarm in means you have to change various things. You get more leverage. I told the Showa guy it would come back th is first racers Erv had worked wit h . Fulton ha d said Erv was the " fastest guy in th e world." Nixon cont inues : "Kawasaki shi t-can ned me after '72 beca use everything ' fell off. I didn 't have any thi ng to ride. I fin al ized a deal with Erv on the ph on e that was 5050. I went to h is house in San J ose and there was this little, bitty shed with so mu ch shit and a beautiful motorcycle in it. I led Daytona a nd a pi ston broke. Atlanta, it was a rod. T all adega was a p iston. Won La conia. Erv went to th e races to win. He lik es to win mor e than any one else I kn ow." Nixon offers a brief chro nology of th eir time together. " In ' 73 Kawasaki offered us $500 to race the next year and $150,000 for Duhamel. '74 go t hurt in Japan . End of '75 second behind Rober ts and ignition fell off. Fastest bike ever was. Sent it to England. '76 throw it on h is back and run 'up the hill. I don't know if he'd like me to say this, but he'd never like to pu t the worm o n his hook. His sister was j ust. the opposi te." H arry raced drag boat s in the early 1950s and Erv would race th e same boat in th e Juniors. From th ere, he moved to go-kar ts, bu ildin g engi nes . for his sister. "She was someth ing," H ar ry says. " Raced with th e best of the men in the whole of Cal ifornia. Sh e won about 500 tro phies over six, seven years. Erv did them all. She even tr ied drag racing." Even then the father kn ew what was best for the 'so n . " He wasn 't cut out to be a racer. He hates that I say that. H e was cut out to be a tuner. He wasn 't aggr essive. Somebody would cro wd him off and he'd let them go ." . Erv moved to motocycles, went to 23

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