Cycle News - Archive Issues - 1990's

;' TI~"E REMEMBERED . By Joe Scalzo e was always gettin g into crackling emergenci es - wars, battles , feud s - and then . depending on grit and scar tissue to get him ou t. Circling the globe, from Oklahoma Cit y and Da ytona and England, and on to Japan, Germany, Spain, Holland and South America, Gary N ixon n e ver won or lo st a championship without squeezing out the last drop of emotion and beating h im self in to a physical and mental wreck. His resilience could be frightening. No matter how bad the beatin g he absorbed, he put awa y the memory of it like yesterday'S news and plunged on resourcefully and recklessl y to the next challenge. Not surprisingly, he insp ired an army of admirers . Watching Gary Nixon became far more than ju s t watching somebody racing motorcycles. It was watching somebody set examples for surviving life its elf : demonstrating to the rest of us how to get th rough all the unfa irness, the unhappy endings, the monotony and depression and frustration that define everyday existence. How do you learn to do all that? By stand ing up and being brave, Gary Nixon seemed to say. Born in the oil and Indian quarter of upcountry Oklahoma, he desired two things: for life to be a never-ending adventure, and for himself to grow overwhelmingly rich. These ambitions, it turned out, were inherited fro m his male ancestors. A grandparent on his fa ther's side, another rebel profiteer, was sufficiently motivated at the tum of the century to participate in the great land-grab across the state. No such world ex isted by the late 1950s . About the last opportunity in Am er ica to become a swashbuckling fortune hunter was to join the Grand National tournament of p rofessional racing . At 17 Nixon was a nervous, scared, dues-paying, campaigning sold ier engaging in brakeless mile and half-mile flat tracking against the genius Resweber; leaning into road racing hairpins in wonder next to Leonard; picking up the mod upshifting-downshifting drama of the 'IT steeplechase from Dorresteyn ; and studying the art of survival looking over the shoulder of Mann. But if you were really going to hack it in the league of Mooch, Gentleman Joe, and Bugs, if you counted on being part of that tribe, you needed an identity all your own . Nixon de veloped one. He talked in str eet language, speakin g so fast he either swallowed his words, or when grammar itself failed, lapsed into elaborate profanity; Nixon's command of swear words was great, and he never lost it. In winter he freaked out the squares scampering 20 stories above the ground pressing window panes into the sk yscrapers of Washington, D.C.; this was fast, easy, off-season bread. Out on the tour, he was a bachelor, drank too much beer, chased girls and sometimes got into trouble, and was one of the originators of the practice of riding a motorcycle off the roof of a house into a swimming pool. Much latez for a tra veling companion he took on a great white German shepherd which patrolled the racing pits casually pissing into the tool boxes of other riders. All of this is part of Nixonia. By his own admission, Nixon was a slow learner with mediocre gifts who li 28 had to work very hard for everything he achieved . Psyching himself up for a perfect performance wa s qu ite an ordeal. Over time he discovered that his unique talent for fighting battles to the bitter end, an ability that most of HarleyDavidson' s great ch ampions - being facile and dominant and accustomed to eas y victories - perh ap s ne ver we re forced to learn. A watershed occurred in 196 3. Nixon' s tutor, Mann - just like Nixon, an und erdog redhead of infu ria ting resilience and stubbornness - upended Harley-Davidson. Mann, in the year's penultimate National , crowned himself earned $38,000 in purses, Nixon was, by prevailing motorcycle standards, absurdly rich. But in 1968 he blundered in to a clever trap set by Harley-Davidson . In a ra ge a bou t lo sin g another championship, Milwaukee mobilized a swa rming six-man squad to set on Nixon. And so thorou ghly did' they chase, harass, an d beat up the underpow ered Triumphs that by the season's second half, Nixon 's nerv es and stomach were gone and he was semi-existing on a diet of cigarettes and bab y food. He sank rapidly from bad to worse, un til at last Harley-Davidson rose and the modern era 's first non-HarleyDavidson seasonal titlist. In .the hard campaign of 1964 which followed, Mann fell at Sacramento, fell again at Ascot, and became the fourth champion of the American Motorcyclist Association in a decade to go down either while defending the No .1 ranking or attempting to win it back again. Nixon, too, was destined to join this brotherhood of the fracture ward. By 1967 Nixon was 26 and peaking. He had ma rried (he and his Englishexpatriate spouse Mary reached 30 years of wedlock this summer); was settled in a nice home in Maryland; and w as a fully sponsored employee of th e east coast distributors of Triumph: He carried off five road race and dirt Nationals, including the Daytona 200, where he and Dick Hammer fought a war that is one of the wonders of motorcycling. Nixon's inauguration as professional racing's newest champion was to occur in hi s home, Oklahoma, whose sta te fairgrounds was hosting 1967' s fin al National. But Nixon succeeded in fracturing his thumb the prio r Sunday, exposing himself to the rev italized Ha rley-Dav idson threat of Ge orge Roeder and his sad-eyed associate Fred Nix. To help sweep the groove ahe ad of him clean, Nixon strategically imported to Oklahoma as Triumph allies, Hammer and Sammy Tanner; and Nixon also got Dr . Neil Keen, the self-taught bone quack. Meanwhile, the late Dick Bender sprung the throttle to jam wide-open so Nixon could thumb the kill button instead of flex the wasted wrist. Nixon was in a state of searing pain until the National started; rocketing through its nine miles, he felt nothing. He finished second, losing to Nix but pummeling Roeder. And after a decade of remarkable effort, he was the seventh hero to become No .T , He 'd experienced the great adventure he ~ as seeking. And, having forced him into a last fight at Ascot Park. Nixon's subsequently turning on all the Harleys and breaking their best rid er Nix, was something Harley-David son hadn't counted on. Again he was champ ion and in a state of exhausted but happy ruin. The happiness, however, faded in the bitter summer of 1969. Nixon, with one leg hanging from the ceiling of a hovel of a hospital in 100-degree Santa Rosa, California , was brooding about the destruction rate o f his peers. 'In just three we eks, accidents around the country had d isposed of two fully licensed Experts and one Novice - all friends of his . And Fred Nix, with his sad eyes, had gone and gotten himself killed in a ridiculous road accident. Nixon' s own debilitated state hinged on two th ings, neither one his' fault. First, his Triumph's gearbox had malfunctio ned on the Santa Rosa mile track, putting him into neutral and ins tantly on the ground at 100 mph. Second, he'd next pulped his leg on an unguarded fence post - the promoter of the race, to save pennies, had defied the rules and neglected to place cushioning hay bales there . . For the remainder of 1969 and into 1970, Nixon labored at rehabilitation. He worked into the lead at Daytona, but the motorcycle broke down. Judged to still be infirm by Triumph, the tearn demot-. ed him to second-string status and slow equ ipment. Nixon took this as a betrayal. "You dirty - -," he lashed out at Triumph. "You - -." It took him several minutes to run out of epithets; He took revenge at the final National road race of 1971, playing all ends against the middle by pitting Triumph's east coast team against its west coast team, then even getting the mother factory in England involved too - a massive and clever triple-cross whose witty outcom e found Nixon on the back of the world's most succulent three-cylinder Trident-at Ontario Motor Speedway. He used it to win Ontario's opening loD-miler in a rout - his first victory in 18 months. But while leading the second he was brought down in a vast oil slick that trapped dozens. Attemp ting to refire the heavy Trident, his Santa Rosa leg gave out; seeing it was Nixon, scores of spectators, screaming support, scaled two sets of fences to push-start and save him. Too much time was gone for him to overtake John Cooper and Kel Carruthers, the leaders. But Nixon knew he'd proven his point. Afterward he celebrated so enthusiastically at Ontario's restaurant/bar he had to be carried out bodily. . He abandoned Triumph and for 1972 got onto a poisonous green Kawasaki. No wins occurred. Getting out of the dirt track racing business, Nixon then formed a road racing partnership with the tuner Erv Kanemoto. Kanemoto, who thought that racing had been simple while living in California tuning up the go-karts of his sister, the U.S. Kart Champion, soon learned how difficult racing with Gary Nixon could get. They experienced one wonderful year together, 1973, which was an $80,000 year. They won three straight road Nationals at Loudon, Laguna Seca, and Pocono; took runner-up at Dallas and Ontario; and Nixon got going 186 mph at Talledega but blew up . He also broke down again while leading Daytona . Around this time Nixon also formed a friendship with Barry Sheene, right when the rocker Briton was warring for the world pavement championship in Europe and his Suzuki masters regarded him as close to a god. Sheene approved Nixon 's reorienting his affiliation away from Kawasaki to Suzuki. In June, 1974, Nixon won Suzuki the 75-mile National at his favo rite haunt, Loudon. Two days later he was in Japan. On Suzuki's tree-shrouded test circuit he was shaking down one of the square-four Grand Prix models the factory wanted he and Sheene to introduce in the corning world points meets of Belgium and Holland. The cylinders leaned out and seized just as Nixon was banking into a fifthgear corner. Another Suzuki collided with him and everything flew out of control: Nixon's pinwheeling Suzuki butchered in half various tall trees; crash-landing again, it did a further number on itself by smashing into three pieces. Nixon got beaten up just as badly; his carcass was hammered into dog meat. Now Nixon's grit was given its severest test. Abed with a fractured leg, two mashed arms, and a violently twisted back, he was wasting away in spectacular fashion until Barry Sheene arri ved telling him that was no way to act, and giving him something to eat. The two were soulmates; the following year at Daytona, when Sheene had a tire blowout at top speed and had to get a steel shaft inserted in one leg, it was Nixon doing the consoling. Pushed around in a wheelchair, Nixon gradually started showing up at U.S. races again. Over beers he jokingly would offer his arms for people to twist and hear the bones popping. A career as martyr was thus opened up for him against his will; sympathy wasn't what he wanted, just more racing . Race again he did . Barely eight months after his Japanese melee, reunited with Erv Kanemoto at Daytona, he was leading the 200 as usual. Then the steel screws in his throttle arm pulled loose, he couldn't hold on, and he almost flew out of control at 170 mph. "

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