Memories of the Mile

A century of Americana played out on horse tracks at fairgrounds around the country.

By Dave Despain | Photos by Mark Wernham, Marc Urbano and Tim White

July 2009

Photos: Memories of the Mile >>

The Mile. Pile on the gearing and tighten up your gut. Imagine hitting the end of a 130-mph straightaway—eyes big as dinner plates, engine screaming for mercy and hay bales dead ahead—surrounded by a dozen like-minded maniacs packed tighter than a fat man's lunch bucket. Bar banging is likely. Together you pitch your 350-pound dirt-trackers sideways into a corner so vast you can't see its exit. And no one even thinks of letting off.

Welcome to dirt-track racing's toughest test—vehicular and testicular.

Dirt-tracking is a uniquely American sport, nurtured on our nation's multitude of county fairgrounds horse tracks. But like farm kids herding blue-ribbon heifers and hogs, racers were irresistibly drawn to the state fairs, with their giant mile ovals, crown jewels of the sport. From Syracuse to Sacramento, fairgrounds miles are steeped in dirt-track motorcycle lore, none more so than the Springfield Mile.

With due respect to Daytona, from 1937 to 1953, the Illinois State Fairgrounds hosted the most important motorcycle race in America, a madcap 50-mile showdown that crowned the national champion. Win Springfield and you were Number 1 for the whole year! The Springfield Mile traces its roots to America's first bike-racing boom; at the turn of the 20th century, fairgrounds mile races were all the rage.

For example, on Independence Day in 1911, "Cannonball" Baker on an Indian beat Merkel's man John Sink at the Indiana State Fairgrounds in Indianapolis while U.S. President William Howard Taft looked on! Unfortunately, economics and politics—rarely the racer's friends—conspired over time to make fairgrounds racing an off-and-on proposition. Chris Carr's breathtaking victory in this past September's Indy Mile was at least the fourth reincarnation of that Indiana classic, and one of its previous rebirths in the summer of '69 is a landmark in my own motorcycling life.

Clueless pups, my buddies and I arrived a full day early, slept in the 38th Street cemetery, then goose-bumped as the fairground's announcer hyped the night's big match race: "It's Joe Leonard versus A.J. Foyt in a two-wheel battle of the Indy 500 superstars."

Never mind that they raced Kawasaki minibikes, "Smokey Joe" was a motorcycling icon long before he became Indy Car champion. Fifteen years earlier on that very track, Joe won the Indy Mile en route to the inaugural Grand National Championship, the first AMA crown based on a series of points-paying races rather than a single victory at Springfield. To this aspiring Iowa dirt-tracker, Leonard in the flesh was tantamount to a devout parishioner seeing the Pope in person. That night, I made a life-changing vow: I would someday announce the Indy Mile. Sure enough, by 1975, I had parlayed poor dirt-track results and a bit of radio experience into P.A. gigs at the nationals, and I was on the microphone for Kenny Roberts' Indy Mile masterpiece.

The story is famous. Desperate to keep up with the all-conquering Harleys, "King Kenny" rode a two-stroke TZ750-powered Yamaha dirt-tracker, a shrieking hellhound of a motorcycle, wicked-fast but unwilling to turn. Roberts' death-defying solution was to change direction by bouncing off the hay bales at each end of the giant oval, simultaneously creating the longest possible straightaways for a bike capable of 190 mph on the banks of Daytona Speedway.

After knifing through the field, he caught the Harleys of Jay Springsteen and Corky Keener on the last lap, the latter recalling, "I heard that screamin' SOB coming and I knew we were f*^cked."

Indeed, Roberts banged the bales one last time, drafted past and won by inches. In the winner's circle, the right side of his bike stuffed with straw, he famously proclaimed, "They don't pay me enough to ride that thing."

Such feats inspired the legendary Dick "Bugsy" Mann to proclaim, "If I'd had Gary Nixon's eyesight and Bart Markel's courage, I could have been Kenny Roberts." That is superlative praise. Many consider the '60s, the decade prior to Roberts, to be the "Golden Age" of dirt-track, and the colorful trio of "Bugs," Nixon (the keen-eyed "Little Red") and courageous-to-a-fault "Black Bart" Markel were its biggest stars.

Among that triumvirate, Markel was special, a Marine Corps boxer-turned-tough-as-leather dirt-tracker who rode his factory Harleys to three titles in six years. And though he was no great shakes on the mile (the big tracks often rewarded grace and finesse while Merkel was all elbows and aggression), he triggered a geographical revolution that spawned the greatest miler ever.

Bart was from Michigan, which before him produced only a couple of dirt-track greats. But his stardom inspired a torrent of talent, and "Michigan Mafia" members have since won 200 Grand National races and 14 championships.

Revolutionary! The superstar of that lot was Scott Parker, who hailed from Flint just like the progenitor he called "Markel Man." Following in Bart's footsteps, Scotty became the most accomplished dirt-tracker of all time.

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