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not what made the sport so popular in the first place. Of course things change, culture changes, but it’s kinda funny -- if you step outside the line, you still have to be careful about how you step outside the line. It is nice to see somebody with their own views, and not afraid to show that they’re different than the other guy.
There are four dirt-track disciplines: short track, TT, Half Mile, and Mile — is there one specific layout that sticks out to you as your favorite?
Well, if you look at my race history I won more half miles than anything else, but comin’ into the sport what I raced the most of was short track; that’s what I grew up on. That’s probably why I won Houston, and I’ve won
a lot of Daytona short track races -- I won
the national there in 1980. I just enjoyed competition and I loved all the different disciplines, and I think that’s what made the Grand National series so appealing. At least when I started, it actually combined road racing as well, so you had to be able to be diverse in your skills and things, and that’s what made it so much fun for me. Because there was a mix of them all year long, I kinda looked forward to all of them equally. I felt like I won two mile races: one in Duquoin in ‘94 and the other in Indianapolis in 1986. But they didn’t have a finish line camera or anything, it was just whoever was sitting at the finish line. No knock on them, but it was just the little old ladies that the AMA had sitting at a table on the inside of the start/finish line on the infield. At Duquoin, I went by Ricky Graham and the photo that came out the next week in Cycle News actually showed that I had won, but
he was on the inside so they saw him and they gave him the win. Even Ricky thought that I had won. After the checkered flag, he was congratulating me goin’ around the track and then we came around, they handed him the flag, and he looked at me like “What do I do?” Anyway, the point being that I won short tracks, I won TT’s, I won half-miles, and I felt like I won a couple of miles -- but I just loved racing all the varying kind of tracks that we rode.
Out of the ten victories that you have throughout your career, is there any single race that sticks out as the best?
Well, there were some that just kind of blended in -- you know, the first one in Houston on the short track was pretty big, of course it was my first one, and it was in the Astrodome where I’d always gone every
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