When it comes to screwing folks over, forget Internet real-estate brokers, Nigerian financiers and even porn stars.
If you really want to jack somebody around, sic a television news producer on 'em. I should know; I've been a part of the news media for the past 14 years, working first as a reporter and now as a newspaper columnist. I know exactly how to set up a sucker interview that will have the victim--er, subject--swearing they'll never speak into another microphone as long as they live (not that I'd ever do such a thing...). That said, I should be able to recognize when I'm being set up myself. But apparently I'm not that smart.
Last fall I received a phone call from Jason Sickles, an ambitious young news producer from CBS. He wanted to know all about the wild world of sportbike freestyle and masterfully drew me into conversation by repeatedly praising a book I'd written on the subject.
Sickles sounded sincere--and what the hell, he had a cool name--so we spoke for several hours over the next few weeks about the topic of stunting. I sent him several stunt-riding videotapes and passed along phone numbers from some of the better-known freestyle crews and riders I know. I did so hoping he'd grant these folks some well-deserved (and fair-minded) national media coverage, which, as motorcycle riders of all sorts--not just stunters--will tell you, is extremely hard to come by. I might as well have asked Barbara Walters if I could borrow her hairpiece.
I guess I shouldn't have been surprised when Sickles and veteran CBS reporter Bob McNamara hit the airwaves a few weeks later with a breathless, ultra sensational report that painted riding sportbikes as the most dangerous recreational activity this side of juggling hand grenades. Sickles didn't bother to interview a single professional stunt rider, show organizer or official at the Xtreme Sportbike Association (XSBA), as I'd suggested. Instead, he tracked down a crew of sportbike-mounted Cro-Magnons from Texas who, all too thrilled to show off in front of the camera, happily flipped the bird, made numerous "f**k the police" statements and rode their motorcycles like people expecting to end the evening in the emergency room. Following the timeworn dictum "If It Bleeds, It Leads," the story's focus--not surprisingly--was the bereaved mother of Kelly Howard, a 23-year-old woman who died when she crashed her recently purchased sportbike on a Dallas-area freeway.
What any of this had to do with the sport of professional freestyle that Sickles and I had spent so many hours discussing is anyone's guess. Howard was reportedly a novice rider lacking formal training, much less the skills to crank wheelies and stoppies. Still, Sickles' report cut in a few scenes from a freestyle video to create some sort of loose connection between professional stunting and Howard's death. The words "death" and "danger" were used repeatedly during the promo spots for Sickles' story, and CBS News anchor Dan Rather set up the piece with a stern-faced warning about "killer cyclists on the roads." Jeez, Dan, at least buy us a drink first...
Angry that a renowned news source would run such a hatchet job on a sport struggling for credibility, I phoned Sickles the next morning and demanded an explanation. I wanted to know how the legitimate freestyle sport you see portrayed on the pages of this magazine could, through the eyes of a veteran news team, be made to look more deadly than a mine-clearing mission to Baghdad. Sickles claimed the story covered "all the important points," saying, "I think the girl being killed and people riding stunts are one and the same. These kids watch movies like Biker Boyz and think they can do stunts, and a lot of them are getting killed."
Excuse me, but in five years of covering stunt riding, attending shows and getting to know the riders, I haven't exactly noticed a deluge of newbie riders attempting stunts and dying in the process. Sickles, of course, knows this. His news team had a hard time tracking down actual stories of death and dismemberment related to stunting. Instead, they had to focus on a novice rider who died in a highway crash.
Certainly, Howard's is a tragic story, but it has nothing to do with stunting and does nothing to prove that sportbikes are intrinsically deadly. In this respect, Howard's death is not appreciably different from an untrained, middle-aged dude on a cruiser dying in a crash or a speeding soccer mom rolling her SUV on an interstate offramp. A tragedy, but not a reason to condemn an entire sport.
The worst part of this whole debacle is the damage this piece has done to professional street freestyle riders everywhere. It's a shame to see the scene being used as a scapegoat for failures in basic rider training while teams are making fat paychecks from staging closed-course shows, pro riders are banking full-time in movie and video work and even motorcycle manufacturers and other decision makers are finally waking up to the positive realities of the more colorful side of sportbiking.
But what else can we expect from "evening news" slant-masters like Sickles and Rather? They've already demonized heavy-metal music, Hollywood movies and video games--it's little surprise that sportbikes were next.