Midwest is Best?

Are you East Coast or West Coast? What about No Coast? Little known and often ignored, some of the nation's hottest sportbike scenes are popping off thousands of miles from any ocean on the quiet cul-de-sacs and strip mall-lined boulevards of America's Heartland. Case in point--Kansas City, Missouri. More than just the home of the nation's best barbecue, Chiefs games and macho sculpture, Kansas City is also home to hundreds of bored suburban dwellers looking to set it off on sportbikes. Stunting, dragracing, street customs--every facet of Super Streetbike culture is kicking it in K.C., sometimes all under the same roof.

Steve Smithers operates Smithers Customs, one of the most versatile sportbike performance shops in the country, in the Kansas City suburb of Olathe. Smithers paints cars by day, so he brings both his veteran painting skills and his eye for a clean line with him when he clocks in for work at his burgeoning custom sportbike shop. Smithers knows speed: He and his wife, Patti, successfully campaign a six-second, 200-mph Kawasaki Pro Mod in the AMA/Prostar dragracing series. And when this performance junkie befriended Olathe-based wildman stunter and 2003 XSBA Stunt Riding Champion "Crazy" Dan Jackson at a Prostar race in '03, stunting suddenly became an important element of Smithers' business, too. Smithers Customs seems to be a microcosm of the extreme streetbike world located in a quiet, landlocked Kansas suburb--who says the Plains States are dull?

Wild in the streets
On any given Saturday night in Olathe the local Sonic drive-in is loaded with trick sportbikes, a good number of which were built and/or painted by Smithers Customs. Of course, Smithers is at Sonic making the scene. This weekend he's leaning on a crutch. You see, 37-year-old Smithers recently broke his leg stunting--that's right, at an age when most men are getting serious about their 401(k)s and seldom do anything riskier than GUI (golfing under the influence), Smithers decided to learn how to stunt.

The drive-in crowd swells to 100 sportbike riders, and then everybody moves en masse to a nearby Amoco to gas up. The plan is to ride to Kansas City's Plaza, a quaint shopping and residential district that seems to be the polar opposite of sportbike aggression. While taking a chaos-friendly route to the Plaza, the group manages to pick up one of Olathe's finest, which cruises along right in the thick of the pack. This does nothing to faze the leaders, who huck a quick U-turn on a low-traffic boulevard and loft up some high-speed wheelies past the cop in the other direction. As Buford T. Justice lights the rollers and initiates hot pursuit, the group hooks a sharp right at the next intersection, only to run smack-dab into cross-bucks coming down for one of K.C.'s many freight trains. In seconds, the group has U-turned again and is speeding past Buford in the opposite direction, zipping back through the intersection like a swarm of angry bees. Buford tries to block the road and catch stragglers, but the riders split around the squad car and speed along on their merry way.

The group dispersed from there and no one ever made it to the Plaza. Instead, they took the bikes home and then hit their local pub with one heck of a story to tell. A few weeks later Jackson and Smithers put together a massive charity ride around Kansas City that attracted many of the same stunters. Despite a flaming, plastic-busting pileup just a few short miles into the ride, the hooligans still managed to raise more than $4000 for local Ronald McDonald charities."They were the only people who would take our money!" Smithers laughs.Boning up
Smithers met Jackson at exactly the same time as he was opening Smithers Customs. And while many in the dragracing community look down on stunters as irresponsible cretins who hate and abuse motorcycles, Smithers actually appreciates the energy and style of the stunt community, especially the good people such as Jackson who he's met through the sport.

"Crazy" Dan Jackson isn't so crazy when he's at work--in truth, he comes off as serious and shy. His day job is actually a nighttime gig working as a systems analyst for SBC Communications. A typical night at work sees Jackson sitting in a mission-control-style room plastered with huge wall monitors, staring at a computer screen and waiting for a software fire to put out. Like Smithers, when we visit, Jackson has a set of crutches within easy reach.

Jackson shattered his femur when a dirtbike jump went horribly wrong (Jackson is also an avid freestyle motocross practitioner) and he fell more than 35 feet from the sky. A serious break on a vital bone, his leg has been slow to heal. "Some days it feels better, some days it doesn't," says Jackson plainly. "It's been a rough year. I broke my elbow in February, then this. I'll be getting back on there, but I've gotta get healed and know I'm 100 percent. I'll be back on the streetbike before the dirtbike. I'll be 100 percent before I get on the streetbike, but you have to be more than 100 percent to get on the dirtbike." Jackson hopes to sandwich some snowboarding in between sportbikes and dirtbikes, and of course he plans to capture it all on video for the next installment of his famous, Xtremey-winning A Few Loose Screws DVD series.

"I'm actually pumped for it right now," he says about returning to perform in front of both the cameras and judges. "Last year I didn't really want to ride that much. Now I've got some tricks to catch up on, and some new ones to think up."

Jackson started racing motocross at age 15, "late by today's standards," he says. Jackson took to dirt immediately, moving up a class a year in motocross. "I turned pro when I was 19 and raced two and a half years. My dad raced dirtbikes, but my parents split up when I was about 5 so I wasn't really around it all that much. I guess it was in my blood, though. I grew up being a typical daredevil--skateboards, BMX, motocross."

Indeed, Jackson is more daredevil than disciplined racer. Take, for instance, his famous stunt of skitching out the door of his pick-up at highway speeds. It's one thing to think, "Wouldn't it be neat if,..." but quite another to actually climb out of the truck at 80 mph and do it. What ran through Jackson's mind the first time? "I didn't think anything of it. I figured if you can steer from the inside of the truck, why not from the outside? It's just like holding the steering wheel when you're in the passenger seat." Whatever, Jackson.

"Being a stuntman would be simple because they calculate in the risk factor," he says, hobbling away from his desk on his crutches. "Maybe that's what I need to do."

Kansas City's Most Wanted
"He's gotta finish ours first," Greg Sunday says when Jackson starts talking about the release of his next video. Jackson's Crazy Dan Productions (along with Smithers Customs) sponsors Sunday and the rest of the K.C.'s Most Wanted stunt team, which includes Sunday's brother, Grant, Mike Hysom and Johnny Seals.

"A lot of help on our new video has come from Jackson," Seals tells us. "He played a major role with K.C.'s Most Wanted for some time. Even though we're not teammates, we're like a team. We're totally supportive of each other."

And with stunters getting hurt the way they sometimes do, this support is important. "I crashed a stoppie and lost my spleen," says Seals. "That was a major turning point for me. It made me choose whether to continue or stop. Inspired by Dan, I got back on the bike. I was taking it to a higher level than I'd ever dreamed of and I knew I'd done exactly the right thing.

"I'd like to see the stunt guys try to support each other and take this sport to the highest level possible. Without each other's help, we'll never get there. Even though we ride with different teams, we all need to work together. It's so much like a roller coaster. There've been high highs and low lows."

One of the highs was the previous night out on the streets of Olathe. "I had a blast rockin' the street the other night," Sunday says."Just tearin' it up," added Hysom."I know I'm probably not supposed to say that," added Sunday. "But it was fun."The streets are fun, of course, but not really the best place to stunt. "I'd rather stunt down along the riverfront parking lot," says Sunday. "It's a nice lot and the police are real friendly. The streets are fun, but there's always a trail of police behind you."From street to strip
One weekend the members of K.C.'s Most Wanted didn't have to worry about the trail of coppers was the one they spent performing during the Soul Brothers motorcycle dragrace meet at Kansas City International Raceway. Despite occasional friction between the two tribes, stunting and motorcycle dragracing go together like rubber and asphalt. And retired wheel-plater turned promoter Darwin "Mr. B." Barnett, the man behind the Soul Brothers shindig, is doing his damnedest to establish a foothold for both sports at KCIR. Despite Barnett's efforts, though, a small racer turnout that weekend allowed K.C.'s Most Wanted ample showtime and made it easy cash for the dragbikers who did show up. "They missed out on a whole bunch of money," tuner Tommy Bolton said about Midwestern racers who skipped the event. One rider who really racked up the bucks was local hotshot Glen Nickelberry, who won the Quick 16 competition riding his Bolton-tuned Kawasaki Funnybike, the world's quickest gasoline motorcycle.

Smithers might have given Nickelberry a run for his money on his own 200-mph, nitrous Kawasaki Pro Mod were it not for that stunt-induced broken knee. Smithers still saw some action at the track, though, when Baldwin, Kansas' Scott Hermreck won the streetbike Quick 16 on a 1984 Suzuki GS1150 Smithers helped to build. Hermreck earned the win despite a backfire that blew the Sidewinder megaphone clear off his GS. "I guess I had it tuned a little too rich," laughed Hermreck. Smithers actually met his wife at KCIR, and it's been a racing partnership ever since. Working together, the two of them won the 8.90-index Super Comp class in International Drag Bike Association competition before stepping up to the 7.90 Top Sportsman class and then eventually onto racing Pro Mod in the AMA/Prostar series. This season Smithers finished runner-up twice in the four Prostar races he attended, losing both times to Charlie Farrar's dominant Cycle Works Kawasaki. But with stunting and customizing expanding in popularity quicker than Kansas City's suburbs sprawl outward, the Smithers have less time for racing, as the motorcycle shop puts an ever-increasing demand on the two of them. "It's worth it, though," says Smithers. It was only lunchtime and Smithers had already painted three cars before heading down to the motorcycle shop. "Once I get this sportbike business up and running, then I can get back to racing 100 percent." What about stunting, you ask. "Nah, I'm done with that," Smithers says. "I'll leave the stunting to the young guys."

But don't be surprised if you see Smithers cutting slow circle wheelies on his XR50 on the street in front of his shop, enjoying a few minutes of well-earned downtime. It beats the hell out of golfing or babysitting an investment portfolio. Besides, that's just how they do it in K.C., thousands of miles away from the O.C. or N.Y.C.