Nothing Left To Prove
NOTHING LEFT TO PROVE
RACE WATCH
After 10 years of domination, Jeremy McGrath calls it quits
JIMMY LEWIS
WE WEREN'T SITTING UNDERNEATH A TREE thinking Bud Light, reminiscing about the old days. In fact, the only time I could get with the King of Supercross was a brief phone call late at night, which came at the exact minute promised.
Jeremy McGrath was in the middle of having his bigmoney Bud Light sponsorship deal pulled out from underneath him, looking for new jobs for key members of
his team and wondering why these first few weeks of re tirement were more hectic than racing had ever been. It was like talking to someone whose dog had just died. I didn't want to do this interview, at least not now. I'd have rather gone riding with the guy, had some fun, not forced it. But this is news and it's happening right now.
McGrath ushered ini~he modern era of Supercross, in the process winning seven championships, an astounding 72 Supercross main events, doing it his way the whole way. And as quickly as he hit the Supercross scene and took over, he left. He dropped the retirement bomb just prior to the first round of the series in January, and it made the whole ongoing AMA vs. Clear Channel fight-forSupercross-control debacle seem like a petty bag of peanuts.
Back in 1993, I wrote a McGrath story for this very section, in this same magazine. We were both rookies, Jeremy having just won his first SX championship and me with my first interview as a young assistant editor for CW. I got a much better feeling from McGrath doing that story, as he was looking to the future with open eyes and tons of anticipation. In fact, Jeremy’s tuner at the time, Skip Norfolk, put it best: “Jeremy wants to be the best, maybe the best of all time. I think that’s his next motivation. Some people do it for the money, and that’s a big factor, but he’s young, and he does it because it’s fun and he likes it.”
Truer words were never spoken. Norfolk has been with McGrath since the beginning, having worked for Kawasaki on the West Coast at the same time McGrath started riding for Team Green.
“We were both new at Kawasaki and I just started helping him out. It just grew from there,” says Norfolk. “I liked him because he was riding for the right reason: to win. The McGrath family was respectful and focused, and they fostered that in their kids.”
And when Norfolk, who was back tuning for McGrath after a few years off in the middle, was told, for real, “Jeremy is retiring,” he took it personally.
“I got a little upset feeling, almost like a sick feeling for a few days,” Norfolk says. “But then I realized Jeremy had nothing left to prove. And when one door closes, another opens. I got over it real quick. At the level we do this, you end up living it. It drives you. It gets personal.”
Like Norfolk, a lot of people are taking McGrath’s quitting personally. How can someone who can still cruise around and easily place in the top 10 at a Supercross just up and walk away? Hell, he could still win! Maybe all it takes to retire is one more act of courage?
From the beginning, McGrath has always done it his way, and this retirement is no different. He has proved he wasn’t in it for the money, because he could have ridden around in seventh and collected a seven-figure income for doing so.
“I’ve always said that when I’m not 100 percent into it, it’s time to quit,” says McGrath, who has had these thoughts for a while. “1 don’t want to push it too far and grow to hate the sport. This is what I love.
“Last year, I was thinking about it a little bit when I was struggling,” he continues. “I worked my butt off training, and I still got my butt kicked hard.” Yet he was definitely rejuvenated when he signed a new deal to race for KTM in 2003. McGrath would ride for two years himself, then run a KTMbacked team for another two.
Things were going good until a practice crash left the 31-year-old with an excruciatingly painful dislocated hip > and several hours to think about it while he awaited medical relief.
Norfolk said of the period right after the crash, “I’ve known Jeremy for a long time, and that really hurt him. It brought emotions to him that I’d never seen before.”
After recovering and winning on the first night of a two-day pre-season Italian Supercross race, a mid-air collision with another rider left McGrath with a concussion.
He just couldn’t shake off those injuries. Physically healed but without all the testing time he’d expected, Jeremy was nonetheless on the line at the opening round of the World Supercross series in Geneva, Switzerland.
“At the first races, I was disappointed in my finishes, but I was more concerned with where my head was,” McGrath says. “I wasn’t into it. I didn’t feel that fire.”
He knew it was time to quit.
“Some people are happy for me, but there are a lot of people who seem to > feel cheated because they know I can ride and I could still be up front. I didn’t know what to expect. Should I ride until I get smoked?”
But Jeremy has clearly made the right decision, because everyone close to him with whom I spoke is very happy for him. Especially his father, Jack: “He’s gone, seen and kicked ass, and came back in one piece. Now it’s time to start a new chapter.”
This coming from a father who definitely wasn’t your regular semi-crazed minibike parent.
“We didn’t do things typical,” says Jack. “We just rode motorcycles because it was fun.”
Still, the fans want to know: Can Jeremy McGrath still win? When I ask him this, can he beat Ricky Carmichael and the rest, Jeremy hesitates and starts describing other riders’ techniques, slowly moving the discussion away from the topic. The championship drive that fueled him is still inside, hesitant to concede defeat in any way.
Pointedly, I ask again, “Can you beat those guys?”
McGrath takes a deep breath, laughs a bit, knowing full well what he was doing, and then says, “Well, maybe. They’d say no, but I say maybe. The days of me dominating are done.”
And that is why McGrath is calling it quits. His competitive nature only lives at one place on the track: in the first position. To ride around in third, a spot that many would work a lifetime to achieve, doesn’t cut it for him.
“They’ve kicked up the level,” he says. Barely, the tone of defeat is evident.
I had personally picked McGrath to win a few rounds this year. I still think he’s the smartest rider on the track. And if something were to happen to > any of the other faster, lessexperienced riders, McGrath would be there. I think he still could win another championship. His pioneering style of flying low across the jumps catapulted him onto the victory podium and kept him there for a long time.
But McGrath’s consistency was the metal from which his championships were cut. He started every 250cc main event since he moved to the class in 1993. His nickname of “Showtime” wore off just about the time his signature Nac-Nac was breeding a nowexploding freestyle-motocross movement. By then, he was the “King.” Not one to follow, he did the unthinkable among motocross racers, and stopped racing the outdoor nationals
after winning the 1995 SX and MX championships, focusing exclusively on Supercross thereafter. He won for factory teams, won on a private team, and then finally put the show on his shoulders and ran his own team. Not being the least bit cocky, he says, “I’ve structured my career.”
Retirement is just his next step. But the newly married McGrath isn’t going to disappear.
“People think I’m going to quit riding or something,” he says with a spark of excitement in his voice. “No way! I love riding. I’ll still race, just not at the same level. I’ll do Mammoth and fun events, maybe try some other things. Plus, I want to start a family, and I have some TV and video projects I’ll be doing. And now my Mom and Dad can just be Mom and Dad-no more reading contracts!”
Still, there’s one more Supercross season for McGrath. He will attend all rounds of this year’s series, being there to sign autographs as a final thank-you to his fans.
“I want to say something to the fans: As much as I’ve impacted them, they’ve impacted me,” he says. And he truly > means it. “I didn’t miss being out there (at Anaheim), and that was strange because I thought I would. I really enjoyed being a fan. It’s been a long time since I’ve watched a 250cc main event!”
Father Jack tosses in his own 2 cents: “I’m bored at the races,” he says, meaning it just isn’t the same when your kid’s not out there. “We McGraths need to find someone to root for now.”
While Jack likes Timmy Ferry (“He’s a good kid and he works really hard.”), Jeremy has his eye on Chad Reed, whose riding style reminds McGrath of himself. “They all have my jumping technique, and now Ricky has brought an ‘outdoor’ technique to Supercrosshe rides 110 percent everywhere, on every piece of track. But I don’t see Chad riding that hard yet, and he is going just as fast. I hope someone starts beating Carmichael to keep my records intact!” McGrath jokes.
As for McGrath Racing, Team Manager Larry Brooks is busy putting the pieces back together.
“We’re rebuilding,” he says. “First we have to figure out where we are, then we can start doing something. Most likely, we’ll just jump to the third year of the program with KTM where Jeremy moves to the team-owner position and we go get a top rider. A lot of riders are available next year.”
But not long after Brooks told me this, the Bud Light deal fell through, which Brooks now says, “changes everything. Apparently, they were sponsoring Jeremy and not the sport of Supercross. They only wanted Jeremy.”
Which explains why McGrath’s 250SX will bear Hot Wheels decals for the remainder of the farewell tour. And why this journalist is drinking Pabst again. In our camp, we called that other brand “Jeremy McGrath beer.” Not anymore.
Sure, we’ll all get over this retirement thing pretty quickly. A lot of fans will have to root for someone new. But while a lot of riders fade away and disappear, Supercross and McGrath are intertwined so tightly that Jeremy will not vanish so easily. He’s got his health, some money and a happy group of friends and family surrounding him-what more could a guy want? And at the end of it all, Supercross will still go on, bigger and better than ever, thanks in no small part to Jeremy McGrath. □
