9/11 memory

On September 11, 2001 I was in London, England on the way to the Isle of Man.

I spent part of the day walking around the West End, killing time. I entered a used book shop -- as always, keeping an eye peeled for Mike Hailwood's road racing book. I noticed that the clerk was riveted to a small TV. He barely noticed me coming or going. I caught a glimpse of the screen and assumed he was watching some low-budget takeoff of the Die Hard movies.

But as I walked back into the street, every pub I passed was packed, and everyone was silently staring at the television. I squeezed into one, and suddenly it dawned on me: this was really happening. Then, the second plane smashed into the second tower. I think I stayed in that pub until the first tower fell. Then, I walked back out into the street, and took the tube back to my sister's house.

Some time in the next few days, I called my mom and, of course, the subject of those terrorist attacks came up. And my mom told me a kind of triste but funny story...

You see, my dad spent all day, every day, staring at the TV in their condo. By the fall of 2001, he was in the last year of his life. He had lost all of his short term memory, so every time a plane flew into a building on TV, for him, it was happening anew. He called her over to watch it, and wondered what the hell was going on, time and time and time and time again.

I don't know if television caused his dementia, but it sure as hell didn't help it.

My initial reaction to the events of 9/11 was that the terrorists had hit two home runs clear out of the park in New York, had scored a solid double in Washinton and a single in PA. An amazing run of luck for four at bats. If they tried it 100 times in 100 parallel universes, the other 99 attempts would have been far less successful.

But, on that day, they won.

And then we showed it over and over again on television. We could have snatched victory from the jaws of defeat by leveraging world opinion that, for the first time in decades, briefly swung back into our favor. But instead, the defense budget was doubled, an enormous fortune was wasted on security theater, two wars -- one of which was embarked upon under obviously false pretenses -- drag on in countries that are if anything less stable and more dangerous for their own citizens, and more likely to polarize them against us.

"We will never forget" became a catchphrase. And we won't, because the media will continue to use 9/11 as an excuse to sell advertising and the military-industrial complex will keep using it as an excuse to profit from an ill thought-out and unstrategic 'war on terror.'

I don't know if television caused this dementia, but it sure as hell didn't help it.

The French have a great expression for, well,.. everything

I was reading a post on Hell for Leather earlier this morning, about the implications of the 'frameless' Ducati MotoGP bike's failure on the soon-to-be-released 1199 production bike. It was better than the average motorcycle blog post, but one sentence stuck out...

Michael Czysz credits himself for perfecting this arrangement on his stillborn C1 GP bike...

You know, the French have a great expression that, loosely translated = The only things that are new are those that have been forgotten.

I can't possibly know what part of this design Czysz claims to have invented, but 'frameless' motorcycles have been around a long time. Phil Vincent's famous twins used the engine as a stressed member and had only a rudimentary 'spine' bolted across the tops of the cylinder heads.

More recently, John Britten's V-1000 was a frameless design. So there's nothing particularly new or innovative about cantilevering the steering head off the motor. At the other end, the MZ Supermono Cup race bikes pivoted the swing arm through the cases. And my friend James Parker has designed bikes that are even more frameless than any of those examples. So what's the innovation here? Building that front subframe as a monococque and using it as the air box? Maybe, but quite a few very conventional bikes draw engine air through the castings of the steering head, so the idea is only as big as expanding the volume of that channel, to make it a resonating chamber.

Is there something about those electric motorcycle entrepreneur types that makes them especially prone to claiming to have invented ideas they've, at best, repurposed?

 

America gets its Monaco, shame it will never get its TT...

According to this great New York Times piece, Baltimore had a very successful launch of it street race for Indy cars last weekend. Getting a race downtown in a major city is a huge deal for open-wheel car racing; it exposes the sport to lots of people who would otherwise never attend a race.

Obviously, it's a hell of lot easier to put on a(n acceptably safe) car race on streets lined with barriers than it is to put on a(n acceptably safe) motorcycle race in an urban setting. This was no Macau Grand Prix. But as there gets to be more and more Airfence available, it's fun to fantasize about an urban motorcycle race that would thrust our sport in front of a whole new group of potential fans.

That was part of the promise of Supermoto. Its most successful events were the ones staged in Reno, and around the Queen Mary dock in Long Beach. But the whole sport basically imploded before those events could really build a franchise. And a few Backmarker readers will remember the ill-fated attempt to hold a Cape Breton (Nova Scotia, Canada) TT. The organizers couldn't pull that off, even though it was to be held in a remote, impoverished area where locals would have supported anything that brought in revenue.

Is there a Backmarker reader out there old enough to have seen the races in Montjuic Park, in Barcelona? That's the sort of thing I'm fantasizing about. The best place to pull that off in North America would be in Montreal, at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, which is certified by the FIA for F1 car racing. What American cities have a downtown park that could hold a world-class race?

A mea culpa, with qualifications...

I can't tell you how I know that 'Elbowz11' is not really Ben Spies, but I can tell you that I know for sure it isn't Spies -- unless he's carefully crafted an entire second identity in England, complete with another name and address!

So my pot-stirring post about Elbowz11 dissing Valentino Rossi last week -- which, in my limited defense acknowledged the possibility of the post coming from a faux-Spies -- was just pot-stirring. Hey, I'll do almost anything for 1,000 hits.

The larger point though, is still worth mulling. I admit that I'm one of the rare motorcycle racing fans who's not particularly in love with Valentino Rossi. Don't get me wrong; I totally acknowledge his dominant riding skill over a long period. His comeback from a nasty injury also earned him a couple more points in my book. A win on the Isle of Man (which will never happen) would push him into Mike Hailwood territory in my books. And since I've never met him, I can't say that I really dislike him. I just don't love him.

As a writer, I can say that from a literary point of view Rossi the man is far more interesting than Rossi the superman, and I've watched Rossi's (and Ducati's) struggles with a little more interest this season. I never expected to read press releases from Ducati in which they expressed satisfaction with the fact that their star rider was finally catching up to the third group. I feel a little bit sorry for Ducati, a company with an admirable passion for racing. But I also feel a bit vindicated; there were people who'd written off Honda once and for all, and that's something you do at your peril.

Speaking of things done at peril, it's clear that anything that could possibly be considered a public slight of Rossi will still trigger a vitriolic response from his fan base (a group only slightly less protective than Sarah Palin's base.)

I guess than it will be a while before I ask the most provocative Rossi question...

Willie McCoy!

The epic Springfield Mile win by series part-timer Willie McCoy brings to mind only one thing, Jim Croce's great '70s song You Don't Mess Around With Jim.

Uptown got it's hustlers
The bowery got it's bums
42nd Street got Big Jim Walker
He's a pool-shootin' son of a gun
Yeah, he big and dumb as a man can come
But he stronger than a country hoss
And when the bad folks all get together at night
You know they all call big Jim "Boss", just because
And they say

You don't tug on Superman's cape
You don't spit into the wind
You don't pull the mask off that old Lone Ranger
And you don't mess around with Jim

Well outta south Alabama came a country boy
He say I'm lookin' for a man named Jim
I am a pool-shootin' boy
My name Willie McCoy
But down home they call me Slim
Yeah I'm lookin' for the king of 42nd Street
He drivin' a drop top Cadillac
Last week he took all my money
And it may sound funny
But I come to get my money back
And everybody say Jack don't you know

And you don't tug on Superman's cape
You don't spit into the wind
You don't pull the mask off that old Lone Ranger
And you don't mess around with Jim

Well a hush fell over the pool room
Jimmy come boppin' in off the street
And when the cuttin' were done
The only part that wasn't bloody
Was the soles of the big man's feet
Yeah he were cut in in bout a hundred places
And he were shot in a couple more
And you better believe
They sung a different kind of story
When big Jim hit the floor now they say

You don't tug on Superman's cape
You don't spit into the wind
You don't pull the mask off that old Lone Ranger
And you don't mess around with Slim

Yeah, big Jim got his hat
Find out where it's at
And it's not hustlin' people strange to you
Even if you do got a two-piece custom-made pool cue

Yeah you don't tug on Superman's cape
You don't spit into the wind
You don't pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger
And you don't mess around with Slim

Croce released that song in 1972. Is it just me, or was that just a better time for songwriters?

That year, Mark Brelsford won the GNC, but the it was a tumultuous time; Kenny Roberts went on to win the #1 plate in '73 and '74. Those were the first overall championship wins for a Japanese manufacturer.

The real reason Indy deserves a MotoGP race

The news (perhaps unexpected?) that Indy has renewed its MotoGP contract means that for the foreseeable future, the U.S. will host three MotoGP rounds.

With Indianapolis, Austin, and Laguna Seca nicely scattered across the country, that gives a lot of U.S. fans access to a race in their region. The country may not be motorcycle-mad, like Spain or Italy, which also have multiple rounds, but the sheer size of the U.S. market easily justifies three events.

I have to say that while Laguna Seca seems to put on MotoGP out of a sense of noblesse oblige, IMS has really done a lot of heavy lifting, in terms of raising the profile of the sport in the U.S. They generate a steady stream of press releases about MotoGP all season long, and work tirelessly to get traction with non-endemic media. I don't get the feeling that the MotoGP paddock really appreciates the work IMS does.

So far, that work's been pretty thankless, but IMS deserves a lot of credit for approaching the challenge of building a mainstream U.S. audience for MotoGP in a rational, realistic way. IE, IMS appreciates the fact that this is a multi-year challenge.

Creating a national audience in the U.S. for MotoGP is not like getting a new franchise for an established sport; it was comparatively easy to introduce the Diamonbacks to Arizona, or the Rays to Tampa. Everyone there new what Major League Baseball was; they had winter league play and farm teams already. It's more like the challenge faced by Major League Soccer here.

We're finally at a point where American soccer fans no longer need to plaintively explain to their friends that, everywhere else in the world, 'football' = soccer and it's hugely popular. We're finally at a point where pretty much any sports fan in a city with an MLS franchise can, at least, name his local team. Here in KC, Sporting has become a real hot ticket (although that may reflect the shaky performance of our other major league teams.)

The thing is, it took MLS nearly 20 years to reach this point.

I think -- at least, I hope -- that part of the faith MotoGP has shown to IMS in renewing that contract stems from a recognition of IMS' hard work promoting MotoGP, not just its own event. I hope Austin's organizers are willing to take a page from IMS' play book, too.

In eight years, the U.S. has gone from no MotoGP events to three. If they work as tirelessly down in Austin as IMS does -- and if Laguna Seca improves its media game -- in another eight years, we may not have to explain what MotoGP is when it comes to town.

SBK and MotoGP: Is any town big enough for the two of them? Don't worry, they don't even know they're in the same town

I'm reading news that Bridgepoint Capital has acquired InFront Sports, which effectively means that the company that owns Dorna (holder of MotoGP's media rights) now also owns the rights to the World Superbike Championship.


Even before this development, SBK and MotoGP have operated at, at best, a sort of uneasy truce. The latest source of tension, of course, is MotoGP's creation of Claiming Rule Teams, which blurs the 'pure prototype' status of MotoGP by allowing the use of modified production motors. Colin Edwards has openly discussed his 2012 season plans now, and has said he hopes to get Yamaha World Superbike-spec motors -- and that he wants to poach Yamaha's top SBK engineer -- for his CRT.


The implication in most of the reporting about Bridgepoint's acquisition of InFront is that the change in ownership status might trigger some kind of rationalization at the top level of motorcycle racing.


Don't count on it.


Leave aside the fact that anyone with big-business experience will tell you that -- not withstanding the Tea Party's idiotic kowtowing to the so-called free market -- it's unwise to expect businesses to operate rationally at all.


The real reason that it's unlikely any kind of rationalization will result from this deal is that it's unlikely it will really occur to anyone. Dorna represents about 5% of Bridgpoint's portfolio. And the acquisition of InFront can only be about one thing, really... FIFA. 


You see, in addition to SBK and a range of sports properties from show jumping (that's horses, not Evel Kneivel wannabes) to curling, InFront also holds the media rights for the Federation Internationale de Football Association. This is the giant, famously corrupt governing body of soccer, and the World Cup. As much as MotoGP and World Superbike are big deals for us, the global audience -- and attendant commercial opportunities -- for motorcycle racing are trivial when compared to soccer. Sony alone spends about $50M/year on FIFA sponsorships. And in a weak global economy, soccer's relative strength is enhanced by the facts that it costs almost nothing to participate in the sport at the (literally) grassroots level, that it has vastly better terrestrial/free TV packages in place, and that there are far more events in total with lower average ticket prices, making it more accessible to cash-strapped fans.


When Bridgepoint's board reviewed the due diligence on its InFront acquisition, I doubt that more than a minute was spent discussing SBK. And most of that minute was occupied when one old boy asked, "Really? We own motorcycle racing." At that moment a young assistant leaned in, whispered something in his ear. The old boy raised his eyebrows, muttered "Frightful things," and went on to ask, "How's Sepp Blatter doing these days?"


Still, it's fun to speculate about how an informed, intelligent owner could rationalize SBK and MotoGP. I'll get around to that soon. But right now I have to go the farmer's market. Don't want to miss the last of the summer's corn and fresh Missouri peaches, tomatoes...