Just one look at the bikes that had pulled up outside my hotel room told me most everything I needed to know about the owners. They were mostly old-school Kawasaki Z1s with crushed-velvet seats and open megaphone headers, plus a few late-model Honda sportbikes tricked out with outrageously long swingarms and lots of bling. This was almost certainly an African-American bike club out on an organized run. A few minutes later the club president strolled out, and I asked him whether his crew was in town for the AMA Superbike round at nearby Mid-Ohio Raceway (like I was). He had no idea what I was talking about. "You know, Mat Mladin, Miguel DuHamel, those guys..." I said, realizing that I sounded like a huge fantasy-racing geek. I might as well have been rattling off the names of polo players in New Delhi for all that this guy knew or cared about our country's top knee-draggers. "We come to watch T-Dawg and Big Mane take some stacks on Route 39 later tonight. That's the racing we come to watch," the street-smart biker told me before walking off.
This wasn't the first time I'd noticed how few black sportbike riders share my interest in the twistier side of our hobby. For years, I've tried to persuade some of the urban bikers that I meet back home in Pittsburgh to join me for weekend rides along some of the region's curviest secondary roads, but so far I've had very few takers. For most of these guys, motorcycling is something that happens downtown and in a straight line, or not at all. This should be obvious to anyone who has ever sat on the sidewalk at Atlantic Bike Week in Myrtle Beach and watched hundreds of brothers roll by on slammed and stretched sportbikes that look like they need a flagman just to get around a corner.
It's more than just a lack of cornering clearance, though, that keeps these riders locked out of the knee-dragging scene-a number of forces, some of them economic, some of them cultural, conspire to keep the average African-American rider away from the racetrack. Open-track days and roadracing are expensive hobbies. Just riding on the streets is costly enough considering the way sportbikes go through tires, and track riding is even more cash-consuming. Throw in the outrageous race entry fees, leathers, tires and travel to the race tracks, and the demographic of folks who can afford to participate in this kind of activity starts to narrow significantly. Most of the black riders I talk to say they'd love to try their hand at track riding, but that the money is just too long. Also, roadracing circuits tend to be located in rural areas that are inaccessible to most urban riders. Add it all up, and it's no wonder that Montez Stewart is the AMA's only black rider-rather, was, until last year when he was fired by the series' only black team owner, Michael Jordan. In 2006, the sport of roadracing is still looking all white.
Economics is a big factor, but the lack of fundage isn't discriminatory-this fact keeps plenty of white riders from getting into roadracing, too. There are also the cultural forces that keep many black riders from taking up traditional corner-carving. In the rare instance I could convince a few of the urban riders from my area to join me for a blast along the backroads out in the hinterlands, I couldn't help but notice how genuinely uncomfortable some of those guys got the further out into rural America we ventured. In other words, the parts of the country where the good peg-scraping roads can be found are usually not the kind of places where a black man really feels at home, if you know what I mean. Don't get me wrong, these were hard riders, the kind of guys whose usual stomping grounds are inner-city streets, where sane people wouldn't even slow down for the stop signs. But few, if any of them, had ever traveled anywhere outside an urban center, and the very idea of venturing out into the countryside just to get their rev on was unthinkable. Of course, they had all heard "stories" about what happens to black folk out in redneck America (no matter how removed from reality these stories were). Just like you'll never see minivan full of NASCAR dads venturing into Bed-Stuy to watch a streetball tournament, you'll grow old and gray waiting for an urban bike club to plan a rally at a place like Deal's Gap.
There are some upsides to this divide. The long, straight avenues of the inner city have proven to be a very effective training ground for urban-bred, African-American drag racers like national champions Rickey Gadson, Keith Dennis and dozens more. The urban fear of backroads has also helped spur the whole customized sportbike scene. Those slammed, chromed and lowered machines you see plastered across the pages of SSB are direct descendents of the bikes seen tearing up the inner city highways late at night. But still, I can't help but think that some of the urban guys out there-guys who have never experienced the thrill of tagging the asphalt with their knee, or the excitement of watching Superbike jockeys battle elbow-to-elbow at 180 mph-might really dig some of this corner-carving stuff if they just gave it a chance. Don't let your crazy uncle's wild stories scare you off-it's perfectly safe (and sometimes fun) to lean your bike more than 10 degrees off of center, use your front brake to stop, and get gas in a town with under 2000 citizens-take my word for it!