Cycle News - Archive Issues - 1990's

R.~ . tb.e .Remarkable By Joe Scalzo Photo by Dan Maho ny was Ascot Park by d ay: a grim stand of vacant parking lots, tumble-down build ings, and empty bleachers spread on top of an an cient garbage pi t a t th e bottom end o f Los Angeles am idst the gambling lairs of Gardena. And this was the same woebegone racetrack by night: fantasyland. Ascot Friday nights made for a dazzling spectacle. Everything sped up, includ ing the drama , anticipation, adrenaline. And the sense of danger? Of course. Danger, at Ascot, sometimes existed in equilibrium to pleasure. "Nights, it's like flypaper; days, it' s just li ke . waxpaper," went Gene Romero's perfect aphorism de scribing Ascot's tantalizing, notorious, intimidating clay surface. And the sounds of Ascot! The hopped-up pumpers of the BSA Wrecking Crew, the fastest Gold Stars in the world...Bart Markel getting violent with a Harley-Davidson KR, really making an iron-barrel flathead echo ...Ungainly Dick Dorresteyn, never missing on e shift, playing a Triumph 40-incher like a musica l ins tr ument for all 100 laps of the spring steeplechase classic...Mark Brelsford doing almost the same thing a decade later, but with a mastodon Harley Sportster of 883cc that was later banned...The neurotically-overrevving and top-heavy vertical twih of Kenny Roberts...All the ever-warring Harleys and Hondas of the '80s... Friday night after Friday night, for all the decades that Ascot stood fast , the same voice - just as potent as any motorcycle - spoke through the din of battle, gave coherent reports of what was going on, and faithfully called attention to the wonders and the mysteries of the evening. It belonged to Roxy Rockwood and, as Ascot's announcer, the message he im p a r ted week after w eek wa s always th e same: the excellence of dirt track motorcycle racing. Rockwood died suddenly in the sum mer of 1990, the same year that Ascot did. Aged 61, he had been at the microphones for 31 of those years . Exactly like Joe Leonard, Markel, Bubba Shobert, Scott Parker and the other champions he so admired, he routinely accomplished things none of h is announcer peers could. Spontaneously describing combat as it occurred - sometimes before it occ u rred - Rockwood was, re a lly, a bew ildering paradox. There he was, the most knowledgeable, op inionated, constantly in teres tin g fan alive, a m an ob se ssed with motorcycle racing, an encyclop ed ia of stat istics who had an ou t-of-th e-ord inary memory for tri via and lore. Bu t somehow, despite all this passion and know ledge, Rockwood had the wisdom to shut up when necessary and let the racing sp eak for itself. H is famous voice was alwa ys under control. He never screamed. He ignored hyper- . . bole. Painstakingly, he described th e races using the clear, lucid, authoritari- TI an to n e o f a p olic e office r which for a long time he was. And yet' at un expec ted momen ts h e could be m oving , e ve r poignant. For a man committed to dirt track racing as much as he was, Ro ck w ood over ti me carne to appreciate road racing, too, particularly when he was in Daytona for Speed Week. For a man like that, Rockwood had a good , satisfying ru n . Through th e decades, h is reputa ti on as an announcer nonpareil carried him to every precinct of th e Camel Pro Series theater, an d it was generally his voice calling the big Nationals of the last quartercentury, dignifying all of them. But Los Angeles was w here he lived , so Ascot was his horne. Clim ate dictated that the majority of th e Na tional dirt track campaigns con clude under California 's October s un - or m oon, in Ascot's case. Rockwood got to tell of su ch dramatic fights for ownersh ip of the number-one .plate as Dick Mann's coupe de main of 1963; the 1968 EightMile National duel between Gar y Nixon and Fred Nix, when Nixon won and collapsed and Nix lost and wep t; the hairraiser of 1976 between Kenny Roberts, Gary Scott, and Jay Springsteen , when Springsteen, bar ely 19, obliterated a 17Nationals-in-a-row win streak by Californians and won with a broken finger and a molten stomach; and 1981, when Hank Scott and Mike Kidd arrived at Ascot in an unprecedented deadlock for the points lead. Probably, Rockwood was at his vocal best from the late '50s through the '70s, the years when Ascot often conducted flat track racing every Friday. That early milieu was rich with interesting, fanatical people and truly wild racing. Ascot was totall y brakeless and without cushioning hay bales, and the best of Friday evening flier s had reputat ions as riskseekers that were not altoge ther disagreeable. But there's no d en ying ·it: catastrophes occurred that chilled the blood : the night Don Hawley sent Elliott Schultz catapulting higher into the night than the back straightaway billb oards; the summer when three (or was it fou r) Novices met their ma ker, and the insurance ca rrier afterward went crazy, so Ascot ma ndated that no more Novices race full-size motorcycles (tracks aroun d the cou n try all foll owed suit); or the 1965 demise of the brillian t Black racer Clemmie Jackson, unavoid ably struck by Dwayne Keeter, who years afterward also became an Ascot statistic. In every case, Ascotphiles mourned, agoniz ed, rationalized. But every Ascot Friday, and Rockwood 's voice, seemed to prove tha t Ascot affirmed life, not the reverse. . . Rockwood in th o se yea r s w as a dynamo. Before Frid ay nigh t's ra cing even began, he went on th e air, an d Ascot's pits and grandstan ds heard his up-to-the-se cond ass essmen t of d oing s ou on the National tour. Rockwood had contacts everywhere in the U'S; and it was imp ortant to him to compile all the racing new s and goss ip, then deliver it fresh every Friday. He a u tom atica lly assumed all of us were as interested as he was, and, over time, he made us so. He mad e us desperate to corne back for the next Friday, He was the best press agent the likes of Carroll Resweber and Markel ever had . Wh en he an nou nced that one or both of the m would be coming in for next week 's racing, he had us lining the fences 10 deep. The same was true for George Roed er, whose wheelbarrow handleba rs hadn 't seen west of the Rockies. A typical Friday hosted time trials, heat races, trophy dashes, consolations, and main events for all three rider divisions. To Rockwood, every Ascot race was incised with importance. If he thought Junior Bob Kircher was going to out-qualify all the Experts, he put it on the air. If the hot Novice, Dean Noggle, was about to win his 10th heat race in a row, Rockwood spread the word. If the erratic Joe Koloko seemed destined to take another pratfall, Rockwood cautioned him beforehand. If it was a TT steeplecha se, and Ronnie Nelson was goin g to be gunning for long-distance rec ords pl u nging off Ascot's infield ju mp, Rockwood prepared the audience . An d if in the course of a race, somebod y made a worthy pass from deep in the p ack, Rockwood a lw a ys no tic ed, and sent up public address cheers. With h is cop 's eyes, and ears, Rockwood was naturally, inquisitive - a real gumshoe. He was devoted to collecting and spreading the news. But the '50s, '60s and '70s wer e d ecades that don't give a da m n abo u t pub li c relations. Ascot's blac k lea ther jacke te d racers were in sul ar, a cult of happy nonconformists who raced the way they wanted to and d idn't particularly care if anyone carne to watch them or not. Rockwood was among the first to hum anize them ov e r the p u blic address and in the columns he w rote for this newspaper. He revealed what tuner had the fastest motorcycle, what rider was in a slump, and wh o was going to be hard to beat in the future. He really, knew everything: what rider was cheating the rules with an oversized motor; what rider was popping pills to overcome the infamous Ascot terror; which riders w ere feuding; even who was hitting on whose girlfriend or wife. He co u ld have written the grea t Ascot soap opera had he chosen. But motorcycle racing, to Rockwo od , was pure and sac re d . He ke p t u n toward news to himself. Pr obably he knew more about th e history and statistics of d irt track racing than the AMA did , itself. His few detractors call ed him a seeno-evil optimist who shameles sly exaggerated racing' s non-existent financial rewards and sugarcoated its problems. It was fair criticism, but Rockwood couldn't help himself. Another charge named Rockwood a chauvinist regarding racers from Ascot. This, too, was fair. Ascot, after all, had been the horne track of the California national champions Mert Lawwill, Gene Romero, Mark Brelsford, Kenny Roberts, Gary Scott, and Steve Eklund; Rockwood had public-addressed their careers from the time they were Novices . So, naturall y, he was partia l. . Undoubtedly, Sammy "Flying Flea" Tanner was his favorite racer of all. One of Rockwood's first gigs was at Ascot's Eight-Mile National of 1959, won from the last row by Tanner in a mad upset. For all the years and nights that followed, Rockwood documented Tanner's 400-heat, trophy-dash, main-event, and National victories in almost 3600 miles of Ascot racing . In addition to his announcing, Rockwood was for 15 years a member of the Los Angeles Police Department, and he sometimes played the cop's card hard. With his insinuating walk, light voice, and loaded pauses, he managed to give the impression that members of the outlaw Motorcycle Racers Inc. were all fit subjects to be locked away in a penal institution. This was during the early '60s when MRI was threatening a wildcat strike of Ascot unless prize money was raised. One of the ringleaders was Al Gunter, an amazing racer and Gold Star wizard who despised all humanity but Roxy Rockwood particularly. Rockwood, for his part, went on delivering electric accounts of Gunter's triumphs in the Eight-Mile Nationals of 1960, 1962, and 1963. He was also announcing the Friday night race, better than a decade later, where Gunter, worn out and depressed, crashed, broke his back, and was forever paralyzed. As the last irony, it was Rockwood who delivered a sentimental eulogy for his old enemy at the San Jose Mile following Gunter's 1976 passing. As the original track announcer to approach motorcycle racing as if it were a sports contest, Rockwood sounded as if he w ere a di sciple of, sa y, baseball, with all it's pla y-by-play patter. In fact, he despised baseball , and almost everything else but motorcycling. His announcing career was launched by chance. One early nigh t at Ascot, th e regul ar motorcycle announcer fell in , and Rockwood was ask ed to substitute because nobody could think of anybody else. From modest beginnings do giants grow. Ascot owed him a still greater debt. He w as o ne of the ind ividuals who invented the place. This was in May of 1959, when he and some others, includ-

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