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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There was never any doubt they would go: The efforts of Shirley, Jim, and Kevin’s girlfriend, Amy Martin, are what lets Schwantz tend to business on the track. Free from the logistics of customs, foreign food and hotel reservation hassles, mountains of race entries, motor vehicle registry forms, and television interview schedules, Schwantz can devote every bit of his intensity to wringing milliseconds of momentum from hundred-mile-an-hour bend-and-chicane sequences. It’s the only way he can go up against the big factory teams. They have technology; the Schwantzes have each other.
Kevin, especially, draws much of his strength from the family home, set deep among the pines and post oaks of Bastrop County, where his parents now ranch. White-blotched Longhorns amble past a dirt practice track that circles the low brick ranch house, winds through a dozen acres of pasture and woodland, and finds its finish line in front of Jim’s bike barn, where rows of motocross and enduro racers wait in various levels of tune. After this spring’s Australian Grand Prix, Kevin brought the whole Suzuki pit crew—a quintet of hip young Brits and a genial, balding Italian—back to the ranch.
“None of the other riders would have invited their mechanics home,” observes Amy, who knows her paddock protocol, having met Schwantz at the 1988 Japanese Grand Prix, when she was seventeen. Protocol doesn’t count with the Schwantzes, though. Between late-April hailstorms, Kevin had his guys out on some of Jim’s off-road bikes, ripping through their wobbling pack with his every sweeping lap. It was a motocross rodeo, but it was more than just play. At Schwantz’s level of performance there really is no room for play: His dad’s track is where he gets the kind of loose-surfaced, low-traction training that can gain him fractions of a second per lap over his competitors when dicing on rain-swept European tracks.
Those fractions are eked out in a global arena unknown a decade ago. Until then motorcycle racers were, for the most part, as lean and hungry as bronc riders. Then, in a spin-off from Formula I car racing, they were discovered by European television marketers, and for the top riders nothing has been the same since. Grand Prix auto racing is now the world’s largest spectator sport, delivering to its backers hundreds of millions of television viewers over the course of an eight-month racing season. (Only soccer—plus a few once-a-year spectacles like Wimbledon, the Indy 500, and the Tour de France—come close.)
That season-long car-racing audience was simply too big not to exploit further, so promoters tried broadcasting a parallel set of Grands Prix for motorcycles, competing on the same glamorous circuit as the automobiles. To everyone’s surprise, the bikes made an even better show. Festooned with all the banners, bravado, and high-heeled babes of the F-1 scene, motorcycle riders added the thrill of out-in-the-open, ass-on-the-line performance. Cycles slid, reared, and banked way over. They skidded into corners, their pilots visibly fighting for control, and when they lost it, the riders ricocheted off the track alongside their machines. Audiences stayed tuned, called their friends, and every month new national stations joined the net-work. Laguna Seca would be seen in 24 countries.
It was worldwide theater, but by the weekend’s last practice, the Schwantzes were struggling to maintain their leading role in it. Kevin’s best time was still 1:26.58, eight tenths of a second behind Rainey’s fastest lap. And there was a new threat. Doohan, rock-steady and running consistent laps in fourth position, had lowered his times to within a few tenths of the three leaders’ times.
Race day: ten o’clock. By the time I’d made my way down from the helicopter landing pad, passed the Swiss satellite uplink, and reached the Suzuki camp, Kevin and Simon were lost in their analytical world. It was their last chance to get things right. With the rest of the Suzuki crew, Shirley and Jim stood patiently off to the side. She looked drawn, but Jim was fine. “I’ve got a lot of faith in Kev,” he told me quietly. “He knows when to stay with the bike, and when—if it gets in trouble—to abandon it. There’s a point, you know. How to get off, too: to slide without tumbling.” He paused. “I just have a lot of confidence in him.” Then Amy arrived, resplendent in a high-fashion toreador outfit. Flashbulbs froze Kevin and Amy standing side by side, and in a blink Schwantz was out of the tent and on his way to the grid, a public figure once more and well aware of it.
Under the glistening parasols of the Umbrella Girls—Lucky Strike’s answer to the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders and the Laker Girls—Kevin pulled off his old red, white, and blue helmet and tugged on a new one: a Desert Storm special that had been specially painted in camouflage, with a billowing Old Glory emblazoned across the back. The crowd was hushed for only a second.
“Stormin’ Kev!” one kid yelled.
“Stormin’ Kevin Schwantz!” came an echo.
“Schwantzenegger!” someone shouted, to cheers.
Push-started by their mechanics, eighteen engines snarled to life, the riders swept once around the track warming their tires, then took their positions behind the start line. At the flag, engines screaming at redline revs, the pack shot forward toward the hill, Kevin in the lead. By the time they had reached turn three, the announcer had picked up the Desert Storm theme and 80,000 spectators—plus Lord knows how many Swiss, Germans, Malays, and Indonesians—heard how Stormin’ Kev had led the pack through the first two bends, then lost the lead to Rainey on the computerized Yamaha coming out of three. Kid Kocinski was up there too, running in second for three laps until he spun his rear tire and was flung off the track, unhurt. Schwantz, meanwhile, throttle control as smooth as he could make it, kept hanging on.
“Without Kevin, Suzuki would be nowhere near these guys,” Taylor shouted over the roar of engines. “But he can only compensate up to a point.” It was a point approaching rapidly in the form of Mick Doohan. His dark blue Honda, shod with electronically spin-controlled Michelins, was knifing across the ripples in turn six. Six was the bend Schwantz’s compromise suspension couldn’t handle, and its bumps churned the Suzuki’s front wheel into a side-skipping blur. Lap after lap Kevin fought to control his bike, losing a little ground with each go-round until, just past the race’s halfway point, he saw it was hopeless and calmly moved over, handing the fast lane to Doohan, who squirted through into second place. Far in the lead, Rainey nodded to the crowd on his final lap, then lofted his front wheel in triumph across the finish line.
Down on pit lane I was prepared for Schwantz’s defeat. Except that it never happened—at least not in the eyes of the crowd. Kevin shot past the checkered flag in third, giving the high sign to a flurry of wildly waving spectators. He caught Rainey—who was standing on the foot pegs—and shook his hand. Good race. Then Schwantz dropped back for Rainey’s victory lap.
It was a California track, with a blue-eyed, golden-haired, native-son winner riding the fastest bike in the race. Kevin hadn’t even been close. But he was still Schwantzenegger. All around Laguna, “Schwantz” placards still bobbed over fans’ heads, and the cheers that greeted Rainey from bend to bend accelerated to a crescendo as, fifty yards back, Kevin drove into view. Doohan, in second place, might as well have still been Down Under.
At the finish, Amy took it all in with a veteran’s perspective. “This crowd is great,” she said. “But you ought to see them in Europe!” A few feet behind us, under the Suzuki banners, Simon and the Lucky Strike lads were starting to pack their gear. What lay ahead was all that mattered: the midnight flight to home base in Kent, England, a complete rebuilding of each of the machines, then testing them the following week in Italy at Misano. Next came Spain, nine more races in Europe, then Asia. It would be a tedious road through a tough, labor-intensive season that wouldn’t end until late September.
As he stepped from the podium and headed for his motor home, drenched with celebratory champagne, Kevin caught my eye. “Hey! You’re comin’ to Spain with us, aren’t you?”
Epilogue: After mechanical problems in Spain and Italy, Schwantz won the Grands Prix of Germany and Holland. Then Suzuki came through, and for the British World Championship, provided a computer-suspension race bike. Schwantz won the race, but the new equipment had come too late for 1991. As of September Schwantz remained third in the world standings, but for 1992 no one looked stronger.
Alan Tennant is an Austin freelance writer.
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