McGrath the Prime Dog : Murrieta Rider's High-Flying Supercross Acrobatics Thrill Fans, But Might Be Damaging to the Sport

By SHAV GLICK

Jan. 23, 1996 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Supercross, the Americanized stadium version of outdoor European motocross, has been taken to such heights by Jeremy McGrath that the young man from Murrieta might be hurting the sport.

He’s just too good.

McGrath’s high-flying acrobatics have thrilled supercross fans from Anaheim to Atlanta, from the Coliseum to the Silverdome, and in Paris, Geneva and Tokyo, wherever a stadium can be transformed into a motorcycle gymnasium.

“I like to show off, winning is showing off, and winning is what I like best,” he says. “And if the winning is easy, I think I owe it to the crowds to give them a show.”

Course designers, in their efforts to make tracks more challenging to McGrath with their double and triple jumps, have a tendency to make them so technical and so difficult that only the 24-year-old Honda rider with the No. 1 plates can negotiate them successfully. Or safely.

“Jeremy makes it look so easy that the men who build the courses try to invent new hazards,” a prominent American Motorcyclist Assn. official said. “That’s fine, but it’s making the gap between McGrath and the others that much wider.”

Roger DeCoster, the five-time world outdoor champion from Belgium who came to the United States and managed American riders to a dozen world team championships, puts it another way:

“From the opening lap, it seems that the field accepts the fact that they are all running for second place.”

It feels that way to McGrath too.

“I think it gets to the other guys that when they challenge me, they know I can step it up another notch,” he said. “That frustrates them, so then they come to the track just to see if they can run second.”

Before McGrath rode his first 250cc supercross three years ago, no one won more than eight events in a season. McGrath won 10 his rookie year, nine in 1994 and 10 last year.

DeCoster, now coach of the Suzuki team, is not ready to say that McGrath is the greatest of all riders in the sport’s 23-year history, however, because he feels that the competition is not up to par.

“Jeremy is right up there among the best, but it’s not a runaway,” DeCoster said. “The level of the other guys is not what it was when [Bob] Hannah was riding against a lot of good guys and Ricky [Johnson] and [Jeff] Ward were riding against each other.”

But is it the level of competition, or is it that McGrath, who has done more in three seasons of high-level supercross than all the others did in their entire careers, is just that much better?

Since he won his first supercross at Anaheim Stadium in the third race of his rookie season in 1993, McGrath has won 31 events--two more than his teen-age idol, Ricky Johnson--and three national and two world championships.

It took Johnson seven years to win 28 races and two championships, Hannah nine years to win 27 races and three championships, and Ward eight years to win 20 races and two championships.

Jeff Stanton also won three championships, but never won more than five races in a season.

Saturday night, McGrath will be going for his fourth consecutive victory at Anaheim Stadium in what motorcycle people say is the most important race of the season because all the manufacturers have their U.S. headquarters in the area.

“I like Anaheim,” McGrath said. “It’s where all my friends can come and see me. I get pumped up there.”

His friends should leave happy. McGrath was a runaway winner in both events this season, at Orlando, Fla., and Minneapolis last Saturday night.

A natural showman, McGrath seems to have a touch of Dennis Rodman in his soul.

He wears jaunty earrings, a beard that changes from black to blond or from full to stylishly trimmed, and his hair may as likely be orange or red as its natural brown, and it may be clipped short or streaming out from beneath his helmet.

He also has a nipple ring.

“That hurt like hell,” he admitted to Donn Maeda of Cycle News.

Pain, or at least serious injury, is something McGrath has avoided on the race track. In a sport in which broken or sprained wrists and torn knee and shoulder ligaments are a way of life, he has been virtually injury free.

“You rarely find Jeremy in a tangle with someone,” DeCoster said. “He seems to have an instinct to get away from trouble. He is very smart in his racing. Even when he’s riding so fast he looks like he’s on the ragged edge, he always seems to keep from going over that edge.

“The other thing remarkable about McGrath is his ability to win so many races each year and never lose his enthusiasm, his dedication. Nobody else has done that. It’s very easy, after a year or so of winning a lot of races, to take it easy, relax and kind of back off. Jeremy has never shown any signs of that, and that is very impressive to me.”

It may not last forever, however.

McGrath won’t pinpoint a date when he will ride his last race, but the future is in the back of his mind. Taking a cue from former motocross stars Johnson and Ward, McGrath recently took a three-day competition course at Skip Barber’s racing school at Sears Point Raceway, driving a 130-mph open-wheel formula car.

“I’m pretty sure I’ll be riding motocross for a couple more years, at least, but you know, if I quit right now, I’d have accomplished enough to satisfy me,” McGrath said. “I don’t know if I’ll get into four-wheelers or not, but it was a lot of fun. And Ricky and Jeff are doing pretty well.”

Johnson, who won the Cajon Speedway stock car title last year, will be driving a NASCAR SuperTruck this season and Ward is scheduled for another season in Indy Lights as a prep for moving up to Indy cars. Four-time world road-racing champion Eddie Lawson is another two-wheeler who moved on. He has an Indy car ride this year with Rick Galles’ team.

The Jeremy McGrath saga began behind his parents’ home in Murrieta, a farming community in Riverside County where his father, Jack, has a repair shop. When Jeremy was about 10, he and his dad built a BMX--bicycle racing, motocross style--track where he learned the jumping tactics that later became his supercross trademark.

After winning several state BMX titles, Jeremy got a motorcycle--he was 14--and the bicycle track was turned into a supercross training ground.

“I still go and bum around on my BMX bikes to have some fun between races,” he said. “The secret to winning, I believe, is timing, and that’s something I can work on on a bicycle as easy as a motorcycle.”

During the Paris rounds of the World Championships last November, former world 125cc champion Pedro Tragter was spellbound watching McGrath.

“It’s as if he were riding a BMX and the rest of us were on motorcycles,” he said. “The way he jumps is not like anyone I have seen.”

McGrath’s bicycle background made him an instant winner when he turned to supercross. He won two western regional 125cc championships riding for Mitch Payton’s team before he signed with Honda.

On natural terrain, however, it was a different story. Instead of athleticism, he needed endurance and he was short on that. In his first two seasons, the best he could do was third place.

Critics called him a one-dimensional rider, more of an acrobat who could conquer the technical stadium tracks, rather than a true motocross rider capable of high speeds on dusty or grassy or sandy tracks.

“I didn’t like what I heard, so last year I hired myself a trainer [former rider Gary Semics] and got myself in really good shape,” McGrath said. “Outdoors, the races are much longer and you need to be in better condition. I got really motivated.”

The result: He won seven of 12 races, including the last three in a row, and made a runaway of the series.

“Hey, I kicked a little [butt], didn’t I?” he said with a mischievous grin. “I’d like to do more of the same this year.”