Big Sky Country
RACE WATCH
Big Sky Country
Who is Mike Metzger, and why is he doing those awful things on his motorcycle?
JOHN BURNS
MY 8-YEAR-OLD BOY KNOWS ABOUT MIKE METZGER: “HE’S only the Tony Hawk of freestyle motocross, Dad. Duh...” Tony who?
They’re just two of the brightest stars in the extreme-sports galaxy, is all. 1 lawk rides a skateboard, and Metzger is the first man to master the backflip on a motorcycle, one result of which is that his phone never stops ringing. Between calls, the sprog and 1 managed to spend a couple of hours with the great one at his new fiveacre hilltop spread at the end of a bumpy dirt road in Menifee, California, the day after Metzger returned from a freestyle motocross exhibition in Japan. In Menifee, on the edges of the desert northeast of San Diego, you don't have to mow the grass ’cause there isn't any. The upside is that the neighbors don't complain if you build an FMX track in your backyard with more launch ramps than Cape Canaveral.
Tattooed, pierced of ear and gaze, slightly built but highly confident, Metzger made his first mark on MX culture with his role in the critically acclaimed Crusty Demons of Dirt video, following more than a decade of none-too-successful motocross and Supercross racing. Then came X-Games celebrity and the evolution of freestyle into a legitimate sport-or that’s what they tell me (skateboarding is one, too, apparently).
For years, what were called “expression sessions" took the form of half-time shows at Supercross events, until some marketing-type or other wised up. and in 1998 freestyle took on a life of its ow n.
Mike Metzuer had found his niche.
“We never really expected freestyle to be its own sport, or foresaw the X-Games or anything, but now that it's here, it’s good," he understates.
On July 2, 2002, Metzger aimed a Honda CR250 at a nearly vertical take-off ramp in his backyard, hit the gas, pulled back on the handlebars and sailed into history. He repeated the act later last summer, this time with a network television audience of millions glued to the tube-and then proceeded to melt minds by launching into a second consecutive backflip! When you stop and think about it, and particularly when you go stand next to the ramp, you understand that this was indeed a pretty ballsy move. When you consider that Mike’s been flying through the air on motorcycles since age 3, and didn’t pull off the Big Move until year 26, you begin to understand the gravity of the situation:
JB: What took you so long, Mike? MM: There are a couple different reasons. I really studied, did my homework ever since Carey Hart attempted it at the 2000 Gravity Games. Then he tried in the ’01 X-Games, but was riding hurt and didn’t quite make it. I did the homework, figured out exactly how to do it. JB: What was the secret?
MM: Nothing, really-just confidence, just building up to it, knowing mentally I was gonna pull it. I took this ramp, an Evolution backflipper ramp, out to Dumont Dunes, and did it into a sand dune. July 2 was about a week after the sand dune trip, when I did it in my backyard for the first time.
JB: The ramp is important?
MM: Yeah, it’s a bit steeper, a different angle of transition-we jump 70 to 80 feet with a normal freestyle ramp, but with the backflipper ramp I’m jumping about 45 to 55 feet (in a higher trajectory). JB: Was that scary the first time? Son: Well, duh... MM: You don’t do stuff like that scared. Soon as you put yourself in a fearful state of mind, you’re setting yourself up for disaster. It’s very controlled and I know exactly what I’m doing. Out of over 300 backflips now, I’ve crashed eight times,
Uh-huh... That’s like “only eight plane crashes” from where I’m standing. Danger is no stranger to an airborne ranger like Mike, though. He quit professional motocross in ’98 after an injury that “ripped my back apart and gave me third-degree burns,” and took six months to heal. Metzger’s broken his back three times, both femurs, his right forearm, has screws in both wrists and in back of his right knee.
“I’ve had at least three surgeries on each knee. I don’t know how many surgeries I’ve had altogether but, urn, a lot,” he says.
Two weeks ago, at an exhibition in Germany (in the middle of a six-country tour), something went wrong during a backflip: “Sometimes you make mistakes, and I ended up getting knocked out, not knowing where I was for about an hour. It’s all a part of the game, I guess.”
Speaking of crashes, I asked Metzger what’s new with his pal Seth Enslow, famed long-distance desert dart from Crusty Demons?
“Yeah, Seth just called. He wants me to be in his new video. He crashed not long ago doing a big jump and broke himself up pretty bad.”
Who underwrites these guys’ medical insurance is the question I should’ve asked. They seem to collect fractures the way most guys brag about new cars and golf clubs and things. Meanwhile, my son-no fan of pain-is next to me on Mike’s couch taking notes for a story in Cycle News' new Moto Kids magazine. I monitor the queasy expression on his face out of the corner of my eye as Metzger goes through the litany of injuries-his graffiti-inspired artwork and tattoos adding to the effect. Excellent. Tennis lessons for the boy are my goal, but it’s too early to show my hand...
The Metz, too, is beginning to feel the effects of fatherhood, with a cute little blonde baby girl patrolling the premises and a baby boy on short final approach, judging from the looks of Mrs. Metzger, any day now.
“For sure,” Mike says, “having the kid definitely makes me smarter on the road. All I can think about is getting home safely and hanging out with the wife and child. I don’t want to go to the hospital, I want to come home safe.”
And therein lies the crunch for this next-generation Evel Knievel: You’re no better than your last jump, and the older and wiser you get, the tougher it has to be to aim your front wheel at that monstrous, near-vertical take-off ramp. Professional motocross isn’t going to pay Mike’s bills, and an effort to break into roadracing led to a burned-to-theground Yamaha R1 : “To me, crashing is learning, but that’s really expensive with the road bikes. I was leading my race (at Willow Springs), and lost the front end in Turn 6.
When we stopped sliding,
I looked over and my bike was burning itself up-S 15,000! You can’t crash ’em like motocross bikes...”
And freestyle-wise, _ y now that the backflip Ä ; has been done, what’s m next? (I have to ask a few times before I get an answer.) The forward flip looks impossible, as does the cartwheel and the round-off.
“Well, there’s variations of the backflip that can be done, but I’m not in a hurry to push myself and get hurt. I’ll eventually do a heel-clicker backflip, a one-hander backflip, a double-can backflip-and I feel like if you can do a 720 on a bicycle I should be able to do at least a 360 (that would be a horizontal spin) on a motorcycle. Watching the BMX guys do double-backflips-that was one thing that made me say, hey, I can do a backflip on a motorcycle.”
From there, Mike and my boy began discussing the finer points of the “Indian Air,” the “Seat-Grab,” the “Superman,” the “Double-Disco Can,” the coolness on wheels that is Tony Hawk, etc., while I stared into the mental halfpipe of old age.
Like Knievel, Metzger is nobody’s fool. Self-promotion got him this far, and the constant ringing of the phone has to do with a music/MX-fest being lined up for the coming weekend, as well as a supermotard event Mike’s helping put together in the parking lot of Lake Elsinore’s minor-league baseball stadium. Then there’s the cash cow that is the video business.
“Everybody wants me to be in their video these days,” says Mike, and his tone of voice implies he knows it will not always be so.
Like so many showmen before him who’ve parlayed lighthearted antics into successful careers, MM has the focus. There’s Red Bull but no beer in the garage refrigerator, and physical training is a top priority-mountain biking, BMX, skateboarding, and Mike fires up the CR nearly every day for a session at his practice track.
Well, I have to ask, what are you rebelling against, Mike? In return, I get a blank look. Metzger doesn’t watch movies or TV, he says; the big-screen in the living room is for MX videos and that’s about it. The dirt culture depicted in Crusty Demons isn’t really in opposition to anything except boredom and the laws of physics.
“It’s just the way we live,” he says, searching for an answer. “I’ve always been an artist, and if I wasn’t a motor-
cycle rider I’d be working in a tattoo shop or at Disneyland. I’m an artist and it comes out when I ride my bike. It’s just what I love to do, and I consider it artwork.”
Mike is a fine young man. Fle’d said on the phone that he probably wouldn’t ride today since he’s just back from Japan and jet-lagging, but spying my son’s KTM 50 in back of the pickup, he says “Hey, let’s go ride around for a half-hour.”
Coming down off a Red Bull rush, tired out from several thousand reps on the skateboard half-pipe, taking in Mike’s scars and the eerie Stonehenge effect of all those take-off ramps, my son, hat backwards, respectfully declines. Yesss... □
