BIKER BOYS
Motorcycle-manipulating stunt riders seek to cast off their outlaw image and make their death-defying sport legitimate.

Big Shot magazine, May 2003

words: Sam Polcer / images: Phil Knott

Here, in the parking lot behind a Home Depot in middle Long Island, all I smell is gasoline and burning rubber. A Honda CBR 900 accelerates through the lot, and I feel my hat about to fly off. I don't even consider trying to cling to it; my hands are too busy holding on for dear life. As quickly as we have sped up to what feels like 70 mph (but what is probably more like 30), Anthony D'Orsi slams on the front brake, and our back end lifts up off the ground. As instructed earlier, I put my hands on the gas tank and do a push up. The bike is balanced for a moment on its front wheel, and I am looking straight ahead at the ground before we drop back down, returning to safety. I dismount, put my hat back on, and it's a good ten minutes before my heart rate returns to normal. Around me, representatives from some of the best sport bike crews in the country continue honing their death-defying skills.

Today's outing is not a showcase- these riders are the performers and the audience. The handful of spectators gathered here are the close friends and family of various crew members. While media attention is not entirely uncommon at organized events, a reporter covering a stunt practice session seems to be a rare occurrance. Within the first few minutes, a few bikes whiz by my face, a sort of warning to those who might step off the curb at the wrong time. My steps hardly falter from that point on.

Everywhere I look, bikes and bodies are being pushed to their limits. 12 o'clocks (a wheelie with the tail bar dragging on the ground behind the back wheel, the nose of the bike pointed to 12 o'clock), burnouts (keeping the front brake on while the back wheel spins, creating a big cloud of burned-tire smoke), rolling endos (front side wheelies like the aforementioned one), and spectacular variations on the time-tested wheelie are being performed in every direction. From the way these bikes are handled, it's easy to forget their impressive size and weight. These are marvels of modern technology and construction capable of propelling a human being to eye-popping speeds. Here, they are tossed around like BMX bikes in your parents' driveway, only a hell of a lot louder, and much, much faster.

For the first time, stunt riders on $10,000 racing motorcycles are making a serious bid for professional legitimacy—no small feat considering the sport promotes such unsafe riding. At this demonstration, I saw few helmets, yet almost everyone I talked to has had at least one serious injury. So, it's no surprise that manufacturers and police alike want no part of it. Practicing their dangerous moves at illegally fast speeds down local highways has made the bike crews few friends in the eyes of the law. "Where we're from," says G-Nice, a rider for Brick City's Ruthless Tactics, "the cops are trying to knock us off our bikes. They got a task force and everything. The way we ride," he adds, "it's serious."

New moves are invented, perfected, copied and improved on as a rule, much like in the more mainstream arenas of professional extreme sports. "I came up with two moves today that I don't know of anybody doing," says Ronnie Giovelli, the lone rider from Reality Racing, whose black, white and orange bike matches the tiger tail that is attached to his silver helmet. "This sport progresses so fast, by the time people hear it, in two or three days, somebody's going to do it, and that move is old news. You got to keep coming up with new ones."

So how do these darevils, whose societal status has been relegated to the lunatic fringe, expect to be respected and taken seriously by the general public, and ideally, make money from it? The solution, according to Giovelli, is for them to keep a low profile. "I think we ought to a act a little bit more professional, get these little riding spots like we have here, and not let anybody see what we do. Then they'll come to the shows, and everybody wins."

"Yeah, now everyone's trying to go professional with it," G-Nice tells me. "But where it started was right in the streets, it started for us there." Money aside, it takes a certain type of person to do a wheelie with his legs draped over the handlebars of a 400-pound, 120 horsepower motorcycle going 75 mph. Rommel Dollabaile from the Mirror Image Stunt Team, can't get on a street bike and ride it normally, like an everyday person. "I got to do tricks. I got to do a wheelie, or an endo, something," he says.

Some of these moves are risky. Tales of violent crashes abound. Dollabaile recently came off a big accident in which he almost lost his leg, and a nasty blend of various types of scar tissus is there to prove it. But, as D'Orsi (also from Mirror Image) puts it, "That's the name of our game. You don't stop playing pro football becasue you broke your collarbone. That's just the way it happens out here."

In pursuit of mainstream acceptance, stunt riders are well aware of the allure of danger and that the power of their status as outlaw rebels might just give them the momentum they need. Ultimately, it may also prove to be their undoing. "It's such an illegal, dangerous thing," says Drew Stone, a documentarian of the stunt bike scene whose film Urban Street Bike Warriors is selling well in specialty shops all over the country. "But if they put the bikes in a controlled environment, and they do a freestyle type of thing, I can see it happening, X Games style. every summer it gets bigger and bigger."

Dreamworks' Biker Boyz, released in January, while not primarily a film about stunt riding, contains scenes that could only be performed by expert riders. In contrast to this film, being a stunt rider is not about drag racing as a member of a "motorcycle club." The only code of behavior these bikers care about is the unwritten one dictating that when someone pulls of a hot trick, the next rider has to take it to the next level. This same ethic propelled freestyle skateboarding, BMXing and snowboarding into the multi-million dollar industries they are today.

Dedication, however, hardly distracts attention from motorcycling's history of lawlessness. Parents and police alike have had nightmares about large groups of bikes gathering in one place ever since Marlon Brando's gang overtook a town in The Wild Ones. The Hell's Angels killed a fan at the Rolling Stones' concert at the Altamont Speedway in '69, arguably bringing an era of peace and love to an end. Today, DMX's Ruff Ryders are the toughest, most intimidating bike gang on MTV. Cops and bikers may never get along. Harlem's Go-Hard Boyz get chased almost every time they go riding. "If you're riding around, and it's kind of boring, and they chase you, it kind of puts the fun in it," says Huggie, their apparent front man, who was there at the filming of the Ruff Ryders video.

On top of the chorus of street bike engines is the chainsaw buzz of the Go-Hard Boyz ' dirt bikes, which dart around, seemingly teetering on the edge of disaster with every wheelie. This crew also brought with them a few "quads" (wide, off-road vehicles with four wheels), normally associated with dirt trails, and more specifically, teenage white boys from the country. Somehow the daughters of the Go-Hard Boyz look a lot more badass on them, even if they are little kids in bright jackets.

A security officer arrives, apparently uninformed of what was happening on his normally peaceful expanse of asphalt, and logs a call to the local police. The crews pack up their vehicles with the speed of an efficient criminal organization, loading them into u-hauls and trailers. "What's happening, Daddy?" one of the little girls asks. "Police are coming, baby, we have to leave," her father answers.

Though they still have to flee from the police, the thrills delivered by these groundbreaking stuntmen are slowly working their way into the public consciousness. And if these crews have it their way, by the time the little girls are old enough to legally race their own bikes down the highways, stunt riding will achieve the legitimacy for which it yearns.