By Jody Weisel 

See the little kid on this page. You should envy him. He has the world by the tail. He’s not even two years old, and his mom isn’t going to make him get a haircut until he’s six. He’s wearing very fashion-forward plaid coveralls and based on those arms he’s been pumping iron in his crib. His father is a dashing Air Force pilot with a chest full of medals and his mom dotes on him like he is a prince. You should envy him. I know I do, because he’s me.

I envy his innocence, his uncluttered mind, his total lack of prejudice, pride or avarice. He is blessed with what philosopher John Locke called “tabula rasa” in that his mind is a blank slate without rules for processing information beyond his own sensory experiences. He doesn’t want to grow up to be a Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor, Rich Man, Poor Man, Beggar Man, Thief, Doctor, Lawyer or Indian Chief because he doesn’t know what they are. He is free to be the author of his own soul.

As a kid I grew up wanting to be like my father. My dad used to put me on the gas tank of his 1950 Indian Chief, the one with the Indian headdress light on the front fender, and go roaring down the back roads of our small Kansas town. He would ride me out on the runway of his Strategical Air Command base and let me sit in the cockpit of his Boeing KC-97 Stratotanker. All of that had a big impact on a 5-year-old.

Obviously it was more than enough of a sensory experience to shape my life. When I got older my dad bought me a used stamped-frame Puch 125. I stripped it down to ride in the fields around my house. When it blew up, I bought a used Sachs 125MX for $300. They may seem cheap, but it sold brand new for around $600. That was the first bike I raced. I sold it for $300 a year later to buy the bike that every kid in America wanted at the time—a Hodaka Ace 100. It’s retail price was $425. It was ultra-reliable, easy to work on and not too scary for a rank novice to race.

Hodaka played an important role in my life as a motorcycle racer. During the motorcycle boom of the 1960s and early 1970s, Hodaka was the gateway bike for everyone from Brad Lackey to Jim Pomeroy to Gary Bailey to Mark Blackwell to Chuck Sun to Tommy Croft. Although I added an Ossa and CZ to a repertoire, I stuck with Hodaka through the Super Rat, Combat Wombat, Super Combat and even the Thunderdog days. These simple little machine fueled the dreams of thousands of young kids who wanted to ride dirt bikes.

Over time, I got became a better rider. Hodaka’s Marvin Foster and the Bradshaw family from Big R Cycles were good to me—they smoothed my growth from wanna-be to be to a media darling on the cover of Cycle News. Racing motorcycles is a lot like being two-year-old Jody—I had to learn to walk before I could run. When you are trying to make a name for yourself in racing, the sport is a minefield of glad-handers, hangers-on and snake oil salesmen. I turned down offers from, what turned out to be much better motorcycles, in order to be true to the ones who brought me to the dance. I think it is an anomaly that I found my life’s calling on a Super Rat. A smarter man would have taken the better offers and never looked back—but I wasn’t smart and as a peach fuzz-faced kid on a Super Rat I didn’t have ambitions to be on first-name basis with my heroes, travel the world, become a motorcycle test rider or work for a motocross magazine. I just loved riding.

What I learned about finding happiness as a motorcycle racer may have started when I was hanging on for dear life to the tank of my dad’s Indian Chief. It had nothing to do with becoming famous, getting faster, winning trophies, setting land speed records, being CMC Number One Vet Pro, getting lifetime achievement honors and making oodles of money. All nice, in their own way, but they can’t hold a candle to when I was a slower than dirt. In my neophyte naivete I rode with wild abandon. I loved the leather pants, smell of pre-mix, unmuffled sound from stingers, Jofa slapping against the side of my helmet and the freedom from teenage angst. I didn’t care whether I was fast or slow. I just wanted to ride. Years later this was distilled down into the simple, although perplexing, mantra that states— “You are never as fast as when you are slow.”

Finding happiness as a racer is a long and arduous task—that starts with not ignoring the reason you did it in the first place.