My phone rang recently and on the other end was Kristen Simony, a producer for the A&E Television Network. Her chirpy voice cut quickly to a request that I appear as an "expert" on an upcoming documentary about motorcycling. Why not? I'd done plenty of TV interviews in the past, spending a week-after Pittsburgh Steeler quarterback Ben Roethlisberger rammed a car with his Hayabusa and unhelmeted head-appearing on ESPN broadcasts, CBS news programs and anywhere else willing to book an opinionated, pro-helmet advocate.
But Simony wasn't after me to speak about the dangers of riding without a helmet. No, she was onto something far more deadly: outlaw biker gangs. "We need someone to talk on camera about outlaw biker gangs and their effect on motorcycling," she said. At which point I began to lose all interest in becoming a TV star. If certain motorcyclists want to ride around looking and behaving like the Vikings from the Capital One credit card commercials, that's their business. I myself have spent much time riding with biker clubs of all sorts, and know that a back-patch does not an outlaw make.
What bothered me about this invitation to visit Planet Boob-Tube was how eagerly the mainstream media embraces the dark side of motorcycling. Simony's show was to focus on the sort of biker gangs that kill, extort, rape and stab their way across the landscape-which sounds like a story we're all tired of hearing.
Cable TV is rife with seamy documentaries about outlaw biker gangs; for example the FX Network's Sons of Anarchy, which follows the two-wheeled shenan-igans of a gang of meth-dealing outlaw Harley riders. Airing a Sopranos-on-motorcycles series is an odd choice considering the heyday of outlaw biker gangs is more than a generation past. Sure, there may be a few ex-con graybeards who manufacture pharmaceuticals out of cold medicine, snarl all day and greet each other with automatic weapons fire, but that has even less to do with motorcycling than Ben Roelithsberger.
For some reason, Hollywood hasn't figured that out. While I had her on the line, I turned Simony on to several stories about contemporary motorcycling that could make far more interesting and relevant documentaries. But she wasn't hearing me. "Did you know that most people who ride motorcycles are neither gang members nor criminals?" I asked. Most motorcyclists enjoy their machines as transportation or weekend recreation, not getaway vehicles for drive-by shootings. I told her about the struggles and euphoria of amateur roadracing. I offered to help produce a documentary about the brave, sometimes reckless world of motorcycle couriers-guys who display more guts during an eight-hour shift dueling with traffic than most gangsters do in a lifetime.
I told her about Graham "G-Force" Hicks, a British rider I met a couple of years ago who holds a Guinness World Record for riding his Honda Blackbird-powered quad to 133 mph. Hicks, by the way, is both deaf and blind.
I even gave her my best pitch for a Hollywood tear-jerker about 26-time Isle of Man TT winner Joey Dunlop. His story is tailor-made for the movies, having won a hat-trick of TT victories at the creaky old age of 48 while spending his free time (and money) assisting the poor of Eastern Europe. But I might as well have been pitching sitcoms during the writers' strike. Personally, I plan to tune out Sons of Anarchy until the Powers That Be wise up and start offering honest, accurate portrayals of biking on the tube. But I won't be holding my breath...