Cycle News - Archive Issues - 1990's

eALOOK BACK ~ ~ By Joe Scalzo Photo by Walt Mahony rom 1965 through 1978, it seemed that the path to Europe for America's aspiring World Champions of road racing was patrolled and hexed by bad luck. Anybody who took up the quest for the grail suffered disaster. Iody Nicholas, with the purest technique of them all, go t drafted into the Vietnam war and vani shed into limbo. Dick Hammer, the man with the most raw speed, chilled down following a rending dirt track spill. Cal Rayborn astonished the globe with victories on British sh ort circuits he'd never seen before, then fell and died in the Antipodes just one winter afterward. Pat Hennen, first American to win a Grand Prix in the glamor 500cc class, collected a mauling on the Isle of Man. Gary Nixon pulverized 17 or 18 separate bones in seven startling but bitterly unsuccessful campaigns., And Steve Baker, so tiny that he looked totally lost on the back of a powerhouse fourbanger TZ Yamaha, at last was crowned a champion - in the controversial 750cc division - but got fired by Yamaha as a strange reward. At last it was 1978. Kenny Roberts took ' ma tt ers firmly in hand and started the U.S.stranglehold. Refl ecting back now, per haps the story of the superlative Nicholas is the oddest of them all. Today he exudes an almost scholary air with his neatly trimmed beard, precise way 'of speaking, and old-fashioned manners of a southern gentleman (although he has resided in California for decades). At the time he arrived in racing he looked like an innocent 10year-old, yet possessed more than enough of the ferocity that the Sixties demanded. He and his colleagues and rivals weren't a body of homogenous risk-seekers but were radical and inspiring free spirits and individualists; when not busy with motorcycles they led private lives as soldiers, flower children, beatniks, starving artists, palm-readers, crop-dusting pilots, classical violinists, song-belting crooners, and one of them was even a mortician. Jody Nicholas was the violinist. In point of fact, he was equally proficient at the euphonium, tenor, tuba, and wind instruments generally. He was - and remains - the one great American motorcycle racer reared with the sensitive and well-bred talents of mus ic and language. And this led to a sensitive yet whimsical approach to racing. Thalia and Melpomene were his beautiful and fickle girl friends . So intimate did his relations with them become that he painted their enticing faces right on the front of his crash helmet, Thalia laughing, Melpomene weeping. Who the hell were these mad females? The ancient Greeks recognized them as the arbitrators of all human comedy and folly. And, they certainly arbitrated over the racing of Nicholas. Beginnings? Nicholas was the overeducated son of a pair of passionate musicians and educators from what remained of antebellum Tennessee, linguists well-known in the higher centers of learning among the cultural quarter of Nashville. But in the seventh grade'or so he acquired a motor scooter, a crude and dangerous Doddlebug. All his horizons shifted. He found the joy of operating F 22 Tmte Remembered such a contraption equal to the complicated pleasure of, say, working the valve trombone. His mother and father, sensitive to creativity of any sort, didn't interfere. The subsequent rise through the ranks of Nicholas was unusual. On a borrowed bike, he participated in his first race, a scrambles field meet, winning a trophy. This helped attract the interest of the area di stributor for the models .of BSA, one Lonnie Martin, a • confirmed drag racer. Martin was the inventor and custodian of a real beast of the quarter-mile; a barren Gold Star frame accommodating a radically preened 40-cubic inch alcoholic twin. The hybrid we ighed an austere 260 pounds, and the p ow er-to-w eight advantages of Nicholas, who weighed 115 pounds dressed in a set of leotards, resulted in the then-nearly-phenomenal speed of 120 mph. Matters moved rap idly. Nicholas went through the crash-and-burn schooling of the professional novice dirt tracker. As a second year Junior (nee Amateur), immediately showing his blacktop intuitiveness, he captured three road racing Nationals. He also was aided and abetted by Thalia and Melpomene. That summer at Springfield, where Carroll Resweber was wrapping up the prestigious 50-mile National, Nicholas had been lagging behind in the companion main event for Amateurs. Thalia smiled at him and Melpomene wept for the others; there occured a multi-leader crash, and suddenly Nicholas was the afternoon's precipitous and unexpected victor. It was now 1962 and Nicholas was a card-carrying freshman Expert in the cross-eontinent Grand National tournament. His traveling companions were Goethe, Schiller, Hegel, and other grea t German thinkers; finding nothing peculiar about combining the rigors of advanced education with those of racing, Nicholas, in the midst of earning a Bachelors Degree in German while on emergency leave from the College of the South at Sewanee, Tennessee, simply did his exam-cramming inside his motorcycle hauler, which was a clapped-out, retired, but still relatively mobile Cadillac hearse. At Daytona , he qualified sixth fastest out of 107 starters, and his Gold Star had the technical and financial blessing of BSA's national distributors. But its throttle stuck wide open. And for almost 200 ragged miles Nicholas had to bulldog for control by jabbing the kill button: it was shorting out, and a jolt of electricity racked him with each jab. Not surprisingly, he spent every lap almost crashing, and at one point he nearly brought down Dick Mann with him . It was the most graceless pavement performance Nicholas ever experienced and he still came in seventh. That June he was in Los Angeles at Ascot Park, home of the werewolf BSA Wrecking Crew, where the radical Gold Stars of the exotics Gunter, O'Brien, Morley and Keen put his own to shame; And later that same summer, on a solemn Illinois day at Lincoln, Nicholas was one of just 11 Experts readying for practice laps around a dust bowl. He The Vietnam War interrupted the promising career of dirt tracker/road racer Jady Nicholas. was supposed to be in a group of riders that included Resweber but was late getting started. And so Nicholas missed being in the subsequent accident that passed into notoriety and history for its maiming of Resweber. All the comedy, folly and adventures of the 1962 campaign helped convince Nicholas that flat tracking and steeplechasing really weren't for him, but road racing was. And the road racing of this era was still untainted by European influence. It was just as exciting as dirt tracking. That is to say, whenever the National circuit's corps of HarleyDavidson heroes left dirt tracks for paved ones, it was to fit their KR models with weak brakes, marginal rubber, handlebars like . those on the wheelbarrows of George Roeder's farm, and to deposit black tire marks all over the comers. The KR brutes were big bastards, tough as tanks, and seemingly as heavy. And their ancient flathead engines were practically museum pieces. But that antediluvian roar! It was like an out-ofcontrol cement mixer, and the analogy was apt, because the factory KRs faithfully ground up most Triumphs and BSAs. And if the machinery wasn't intimidating enough in its own right, there was the Harley-Davidson personnel. Nicholas, who used to lean into comers next to them in wonder, came to the uncritical opinion that the factory Harley riders themselves, merely from the force of their warring personalities, were responsible for the KR acquiring its grotesque reputation as a malevolent, evil-handling motorcycle. Bart Markel, for one, road raced in an unending speed wobble. During a notorious Sunday at Bossier City, the fast road course in Louisiana, Markel, in a road National of only 130 miles, fell off a total of seven times. All seven were gruesome wipe-outs, and four took place on the same comer. Spills and all, and with his mased KR ready for the scrap heap, and himself feeling as if he were back in the Golden Gloves, Markel still finished in fourth place. Dick Hammer, out of southern California's spectacular scrambles tradition, was the fastest Harley man. And George Roeder, or perhaps Ralph White, was second. But Roeder, well scarred from road and tire bums, was easily first in the pain-absorbing sweepstakes. "A real hard-ass," Markel once described him, in praise. In June, 1963, Roeder, on Resweber's former KR, and Nicholas, on another works Gold Star BSA, went on a rampage in New Hampshire. The National started and Nicholas led away, quickly lapping everyone but Roeder on Loudon's climbing and falling dozen comers. And then Roeder came off at the hairpin on the last lap and surprised himself by finding Nicholas sprawled on the pavement, victim of his own rare pratfall. Nicholas had a lap to overtake the cannonballing Roeder on the HarleyDavidson that had won four No. T's. He did it in even less than that, and Loudon became his first victory at a National. Nicholas had depended on dirt-track handlebars and occasionally had his boot down hot-shoeing the hairpins. Inwardly he rebelled at such crude, untidy technique. The classical musician in him demanded balance, form, symetry, elegance. As with music and language he turned to the Old World for guidance, settling on the stiff-lipped Englishmen like Alan Shepherd who hurtled around the Isle of Man. And his other favorite was the incredible Tarquinio Provini, who up-ended factory four-eylinder Hondas for the glory of Italy while aboard his little one-cylinder Morini. Their artful moves thrilled Nicholas, and he began to imitate their styles. At Meadowdale, Nicholas and Dick Hammer fought a war of totally opposing worlds; Hammer grappled with his bellowing KR like a be-bopper blowing jazz riffs: sliding, skidding, careening, constantly improvising. Right behind him, Nicholas and his BSA authored Bach fugues and other rigidly controlled rhythms, nailing perfect comer lines. Nicholas was getting the better of it until Melpomene pitched a fit and sent him into the pits for emergency refueling. But then she turned her lachrymose attentions on Hammer, too, who suddenly flattened a tire. Nicholas won again. Certain connoisseurs of road racing now began thinking "World Champion!" and imagining Nicholas becoming the long-overdue first U.S. king of the international road. Or, at least, Bob Hansen, patron of Team Hansen and its immaculate G50 Matchless squad, so imagined. Rumors flew that Nicholas, even though he won no 1964 Nationals, was to be shipped abroad in 1965. And so it was. Unfortunately, it wasn't Team Hansen doing the shipping, but Uncle Sam. Nicholas got inducted into the armed forces. A patriot, Nicholas offered no public complaint. And during the seasons that followed he never got sent into the Vietnam jungles, but instead performed choice tasks like catapulting E-l Reconnaissance aircraft off the decks of carriers, and once he helped pluck an Apollo crew out of the Pacific. But from the standpoint of the history of motorcycle racing, the effects of the interruption were terrible. Nobody, in fact, will ever know how far Nicholas's racing would have taken him without the armed forces detour. And when he did at last rejoin the sport again on a full-time basis in the Seventies, almost four years had disappeared. an

• Cover