Cycle News - Archive Issues - 1990's

the basement of Bokleman's Milwaukee home and laboratory. It was an engine a tuner builds but once in his life. And it was a pounder. When it blew off Gary Nixon 's No.1 Triumph by 15 mph across the Daytona banking. Nixon wondered whether he had just been passed by an airplane. Other motorcycles merely blasted, but Freddy Nix had th is one roaring in some previously unknown stratosphere. You could hear it coming over the top of even the other K's. One quality that had made Resweber the most spellbinding of all K men was ' the way, no matter what, he could depart from the starting blocks and develop an advantage of ZOO feet on any opening lap. It was possible to equal his speed after tha t, but not to erode his lead of 200 feet. Nix could do the same thing. But he had the added advantage in 1968 of Bokleman's engine. There was just no catching that thing once it caught and ran. . Winning a pair of dirt track Nationals and all four of the season's miles made Nix the American Motorcyclists Association's new hero. His exploits in the miles of Portland, Santa Rosa and Sedalia amounted to runaways. Sacramento was somewhat strenuous. FoUowing a few laps of practice, Nix rolled to the infield pits wearing the pained, inquisitive look that Bokleman knew meant trouble. Deep inside the engine a bearing had melted, so a fast change to one of Bokleman's less powerful spares was mandated. This backup engine was all right, but perhaps Nix missed the feel of the original. In any event, he made a ridiculous and slow start, arriving almost last in the first comer. The story circulated later that he overwhelmed a dozen enemy riders on his harrowing first trip across the back straightaway. "That is incorrect," sa id Bokleman later , a stickler for accuracy. Nix had passed 13. His effort catapulted Nix into third position. Then he burned a pair of exploratory laps discovering how fast Sacramento's leaders, LawwiU and Markel, were going. saw that it wasn't fast at all by his standards, and went ahead to win in another rout. Next, he used the explosive force of his good engine to su rm oun t the dry slick and a leading Triumph to win high off the last comer at Oklahoma City. Nix's rule ended, big time, at Ascot Park in the 1968finale, the National race that haunted him for the remaining eight months he had to live. He selected the wrong tire, one that chunked its tread. And then for additional punishment members of the Triumph tribe raced up to smother him and cost Nix and Harley-Davidson the Grand National title by a fistful of points . Roy Bokleman's big engine had been heard, however; it had been heard too damn well. For in 1969, a claque of Brits had come to power within the AMA and, simmering from years of resent- . ment and defeat, they voted to avenge themselves on the flathead K's by granting overhead valve Triumphs and BSAs with identical 750ccdisplacement. Extraordinarily, the K briefly held off the Queen of England's avengers. First Bokleman's K beat the Redcoats on the long mile of Nazareth. Then it won in a lashing rainstorm at Loudon. But then came the fall. For the next two seasons, 1970 and 1971, the English had their way, with Triumphs and BSAs winning so many Nationals they drowned out the memory of the K. But paybacks, it is said, are a bitch. Harley-Davidson by 1972 had its alloy XR fuUy operational at last. And the Brit ish had overspent themselves, or were in th e process of do ing so, into oblivion. So for the rest of the Seventies, the new XR avenged itself by winning better than 100 Nationals. It didn't sound like the old freight-train K, but at least it sounded like something. Then came the Eighties and the Nineties - and castration by muffler. The most ominous K of them all, the Bokleman I<, gradually lost its pedigree, and its ability to win National races. It ended up in regional skirmishes, but finally couldn't win there either. Fatally, its smooth cylinders received their last over-bore. This was one of the many drawbacks of the antique K: the ports are part of the cylinders. Upon reaching maximum bore, there was really noth. ing to do but discard them . The engine got sold as damaged goods to a Harley-Davidson dealer in Knoxville, Tennessee, who bartered it to a friend who owned an immaculate K model he licensed for street use. In the streets is where the Bokleman K ended up and presumably died. Freddy Ni x died in the summer of 1969 . As the sovereign of the mile tracks, he played the role of cool dude by racing wearing dark sun glasses: In reality he was a shit-kicking Okie - a farmer's son from unworldly Lawton. He was a good guy, and deserving of a better fate than to get into a head-on wreck while driving a cheesey-sounding dune buggy - he, the maker of the hottest motorcycle sounds of the Sixties! - on a winding mountain road in California's southern San Joaquin Valley. The undertaker who came down from Bakersfield to help out with the autopsy was an interesting case in his own right. His name was Digger Helm, a former flat-tracker who in his years as pa rt of the mob at Tom Sitton's cycle shack in San Jose had been responsible for making some noise of his own. -, ~ 25

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