Game Over 
Sports
Unsung Hero
Austin’s Kevin Schwantz is one of the world’s most famous and highest-paid athletes, and no one in Texas knows who he is.
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The physical courage and skill motorcycle racers possess are equally difficult to imagine. Since, unlike race cars, Grand Prix motorcycles have no roll bars or driver-protection cages, in a crash a padded leather suit is all that stands between a rider and death by high-velocity abrasion. A mistake means the rider falls, at anywhere from fast to horrendously fast. When Schwantz hit the pavement at Phillip Island in Australia last September, he had been accelerating through sixth gear, which is a bit over 160 miles an hour. On the video replay, he is flung the length of a city block, spinning like a beer can tossed from a speeding car, in two and a half seconds.
“To get the hang of high-level pavement racing,” Jim Schwantz observed, “you have to have been at it fifteen or twenty years. The majority of racers in the U.S. started skidding around vacant-lot dirt tracks when they were kids. Nobody else in the world does that.” Kevin, true to form, started at age six, with the fine art of motorcycle trials—a two-wheeled contest of balance played out across terrain too rugged to hike.
Motorcycle competition came as naturally as Little League to the Schwantzes, for Jim (an acquaintance of mine from the pavement tracks we both raced during the late sixties) had been Texas’ 350cc champion. He was also part owner of Hurst Yamaha in Houston, which he and Shirley ran together with her brother, Darryl Hurst, a flat-track racer. Given the family’s expertise, it was inevitable that Kevin would start racing early. When he attended St. Mark Lutheran elementary, he did trials riding; during his tenure at Spring Branch High he switched to motocross. But it wasn’t until he tried racing on pavement that he shone.
Vernon Davis, who has hung out with Schwantz for years, remembered the first time he saw Kevin on asphalt. It was at the 1985 Austin Aquafest road races, when Kevin was 21. As Davis told it, “This kid from Houston had dragged out one of his uncle’s old flat-track Yamahas and was leading the rest of us into the bend past City Coliseum on that dirt-tired dog. Then, bam! The Yamaha goes flying up the road, and I’m looking down at this skinny dude sliding along on his back.” Davis’ eyes were as big as they were at the time. “We’re still doing about fifty, and I’m just on the brink of running over the kid’s outstretched arm when he looks up from the pavement, pulls in his hand, and waves me by.”
During the pause to clean up the ensuing mechanical carnage, the riders moved into the shade next to Town Lake. All but Kevin. “He was sitting there by himself, so I went over. I was going to apologize for almost killing him, but then”—it is the highest compliment Davis can bestow—“I saw there was this insane person inside, so I leaned down and whispered, real loud, ‘This where I get the drugs?’ Cracked him up.”
It was a meeting of the minds. Vernon, in fact, may be the only person who really understands Schwantz. He built Kevin’s first serious racer, a 1,000cc Yamaha V-twin, and on it, right from the start, Schwantz was on fire. Why? “Kevin seems to have escaped an emotion most of us learn in early childhood,” Davis deadpanned. “Fear. Kevin never had a problem with authority, either,” Davis mused. “None whatsoever. He simply ignored it.”
Fearlessness set Schwantz apart, though, and right off the bat it fomented a kind of mythology. During a six-hour endurance race at Texas World Speedway the year after Austin’s Aquafest race, Kevin was slogging along on an outpowered street bike when it started to rain. Then it poured, stormed, and deluged. Low-water crossings formed on the track, two feet deep and sixty feet wide, but the riders soldiered on. “We were pretty serious-faced, tiptoeing through those ponds trying not to destroy ourselves and our equipment,” Davis recalled with a shiver, “right on the edge of adhesion.” Not Schwantz. “Kevin was way beyond adhesion. He had his face-shield open, and he’d come flying by on the outside at a hundred miles an hour, steering with one hand and looking back over his shoulder, waving us on. In the low spots he’d stick his feet up on the bars and aquaplane across like a jet-ski. That’s when we knew he wasn’t like everybody—like anybody—else.”
Just now, though, back at Laguna, Kevin’s crew is mired in its season-long dilemma, trying to offset the high-tech advantage of what they ruefully term the Evil Empire—the $10 million steamroller of an organization known as Marlboro Yamaha. Its top rider is the current world champion, Wayne Rainey, and its owner is Kenny Roberts, the richest team owner in motorcycle racing. Even more extravagantly armed with the latest technology is the Honda squad, sponsored by Rothmans. Its pair of Aussie riders—former world champ Wayne Gardner and quiet, Tom Cruise—handsome Mick Doohan—enjoy solid-state wizardry so elaborate and so protected by security guards that only the magnetic sensors mounted here and there on wheel rim, fork leg, or swingarm hint at its presence.
“Electronically programmed suspension,” mutters Suzuki team manager Taylor. On Friday, 21-year-old Kid Kocinski, the hot new rider on the Yamaha squad, had posted a time five one-hundredths under Kevin’s best. Easing into the heart of the enemy camp, I stand for a while behind a bank of beige computer monitors, watching Kocinski’s performance on the track. The blue cursor on the screen indicates his throttle, the yellow and green ones his suspension loading. As Kocinski rips around Laguna’s hilly bends, his bike traces jagged lines of force across the screen. For an instant, the shock lines dip, indicating that Kocinski’s machine is at the peak of the track’s hilltop crest, just short of lift-off. “Corkscrew,” says one of the technicians. “Watch.” A second later both suspension lines nose-dive under the force of hard braking, just before Kocinski goes into the downhill dogleg of turn nine at ninety miles an hour. Watching his wrenching vectors on screen is as scary as seeing the Kid on the track.
Over in the Suzuki tent, bereft of computers, Kevin is also transmitting data, only his receiver is Simon Tonge. Exactly Schwantz’s age, Tonge is one of the top tuners in Grand Prix, though he seldom handles a wrench. His tools are pen and clipboard, and the reason he’s risen so far is his ability to communicate with racers. Especially to listen.
After each session, Kevin mentally re-rides the course, feeding Tonge his impressions with sound effects, body language, and gestures. “Had to tip it in too early there,” he groans, right wrist twisting an imaginary throttle. “Brrrrrup! No way to keep it on past the bump.” Tonge nods in understanding, grimacing when the bike’s rear end steps out, his pen flying across the page as he mentally streaks with Kevin around Laguna’s every bend and rise. Faceting Schwantz’s impressions into the mechanical solutions that will smooth the machine’s progress is Simon’s half of the bargain.
“After the dip it really crosses up,” Kevin continues, his torso doing a sideways hula to show how much. “The rear shock damping,” Simon asks, “better there, or worse?” Kevin scowls, trying to recall. Impressive in its intensity, Schwantz and Tonge’s debriefing is the same phenomenon Tom Wolfe, author of The Right Stuff, observed among test pilots, another group of wild-man perfectionists who routinely put their lives in the hands of engineer-confessors. In a moment, Schwantz has finished and is gone, back onto the track with his alternate bike to test another of Tonge’s mechanical recipes.
While he’s away, I prowl the paddock, struck by the contrast between the Suzuki camp and competing teams. Other pits are separated into corporate tiers: expansive team owners, celebrity riders, executive-level managers and tuners, and near-anonymous, wrench-spinning mechanics. Not the Suzuki bunch. They’re a family, one whose closeness is much of the reason for Schwantz’s success.
Shirley and Jim are the kind of parents who got married early, had their children, then remained so slim and athletic into middle age they seem like their offsprings’ slightly older siblings. Now Shirley arranges Kevin’s international travel, answers every one of the five-hundred-odd letters he gets each month, and with Jim as Kevin’s business manager, goes on the road from May to September, living in the forty-foot Bluebird motor home they steer from Spain to Czechoslovakia.
“No way I ever expected such a thing,” Shirley sighed, folding a pile of quilts that had just been used by her son’s squad of Suzuki mechanics when they stayed with the Schwantzes earlier this year. “After John Ulrich wrote about Kevin at Texas World Speedway and made him famous, Suzuki invited us out to Yoshimura for a tryout. We raced three seasons for them in the U.S., and now it’s Europe. Half our year.”
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