The newsroom at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review daily paper (where I do my "real" job when I'm not rattling on about motorcycles) was absolutely buzzing when I walked through the door that Monday afternoon, with the various reporters and editors more worked-up than I'd seen them since the hometown Steelers won the Super Bowl a few months earlier. Usually, when I stroll into the office dressed in my leather riding gear, some wiseacre makes a weak snap about me resembling a lost member of the Village People, but today, they all wanted my "expert" opinion on all that protective gear I had strapped onto my carcass. All this excitement, it turns out, was in fact related to the Steelers' Super Bowl victory: Earlier that morning the team's star quarterback and the 2005 NFL Offensive Rookie of the Year, Ben Roethlisberger, used his tricked-out Suzuki Hayabusa to center-punch a late-model Chrysler New Yorker driven by an absent-minded 62-year-old woman. Roethlisberger's ill-timed fender blitz landed him in the hospital with multiple serious injuries, including a broken jaw, broken left sinus cavity, a nine-inch laceration on the back of his head and a bunch of missing teeth. As you might have guessed from that roster of injuries, Roethlisberger was not wearing a helmet when he crashed.
Big Ben, as he's known to my fellow Pittsburghers, is a confirmed motorcycle nut who owns both sportbikes and cruisers, and he's gone on the record plenty of times waxing about his preference to ride helmetless. Ironic that as a professional football player Big Ben wouldn't dare hit the turf at Heinz Field without first donning a helmet and full pads, but he didn't think twice about jumping on a 600-pound, 186-mph rocket protected by nothing more than his smile before hitting the mean streets of Pittsburgh-and clearly his smile was no match for that Chrysler's front fender.
While football fans staged candlelight vigils outside the hospital Big Ben was staying in, I got my 15 minutes of fame as a talking head on a bunch of TV programs to discuss the notorious crash. Apparently, a web search on "Roethlisberger" and "helmets" turned up an open letter that I wrote to Roethlisberger in my newspaper column last year, urging him to think twice before riding without a lid. In the next few days, I found myself propped up in front of audiences on TV news programs, political chat shows and even a spot on ESPN's nationally syndicated sports talk show Quite Frankly With Stephen A. Smith. Although I've always found TV talk show debates about as interesting as pedal bikes, I figured this exposure would be a good opportunity for a motorcyclist to set some stick-and-ball sport fans straight about our favorite pastime, motorcycling. You probably won't be surprised to hear me report that, after two weeks of immersion in the mainstream media fishbowl, the folks who spend their weekends cheering 300-pound NFL linemen and 7-foot NBA forwards know less than squat about motorcycling and the relative dangers involved in the sport.
The TV hosts that I had the pleasure of sharing the screen with (to say nothing of the callers) thought pretty much unanimously that motorcycling was a downright dangerous and stupid pursuit, and they couldn't imagine why a million-dollar star like Roethlisberger would risk his future career riding a bike. I shared panels with sports agents, coaches and trainers-folks who, ironically, make their living in a sport where players can be crippled from slamming into each other on the field-and even they couldn't comprehend that motorcycling could be a safe activity with proper preparation and protective gear, just like football.
After the umpteenth attempt at explaining that motorcycling is safe if riders A) learn how to operate their sportbikes properly and safely, and B) wear the right gear while doing so, I started to feel like the guy tasked with teaching ballet to line dancers at a country-western bar. None of them wanted to hear that all motorcyclists didn't have a death wish. They didn't want to hear that it wasn't the motorcycle that jeopardized Roethlisberger's career, but, rather, his lack of judgment and his decision to ride bareheaded. Instead, they preferred to fall back on the same old tired clichs about "death machines" and "horrible injuries" caused by motorcycles. That said, the experience wasn't all bad. My time with Stephen Smith on his show Quite Frankly was aces, and he provided me with a rare opportunity to demonstrate just how well a good helmet works by showing his viewers a dissected Arai that had had it's shell thoughtfully ground down to the cords in multiple spots by SSB contributing photographer/budding roadracer Joe Appel. Smith graciously gave me several minutes to preach the "good gear" gospel to his ball-and-stick audience and even gave me a chance to plug my new riding school (details at www.seateonthestreet.com) that I'm launching this fall to help newbies stay safe on the road, without any of the condescension that the other hosts couldn't avoid.
We take it for granted, sometimes, how cleverly designed and effective modern motorcycle safety gear is, and how good of a job it does protecting us when we use it correctly. It's a real eye-opener, in light of the fact that motorcycles and riding gear have become safer than ever, that the folks in the peanut gallery still think we're just a bunch of suicidal thrill-seekers flirting with disaster every time we twist the throttle. I guess it's our responsibility to wear our gear, ride well and prove them all wrong.
It's clear that our stick-and-ball sports heroes can't be trusted with that task.