Over The Fence Is Not Necessarily Out

The World Speedway Championship is a sort of motorcycle race staged in a different European country each year. The Europeans love it. When the race was held in Wroclaw, 133,000 wild-eyed fans were squeezed like so many Polish sausages into a stadium built for considerably fewer. They jumped up and down on their seats and went frantic when a chap named Jiri Scezakiel became the only Polish world champion in the history of the sport.

Speedway racing does not attract that kind of fanatical following in the U.S. But in Southern California—where else?—it is starting to come pretty close. Last Saturday night 12,714 wild-eyed Californians stormed into the Los Angeles Coliseum like so many American hot dogs and whooped themselves silly watching young men with steely nerves race in the National Speedway Championships, an event that turned out to be as much disaster as race.

The Speedway game hadn't played the Coliseum since 1939, when 85,000 people watched a combined rodeo and race. The sport was so popular during the Depression that in 1937 it spawned an American world champion, Jack Milne, who is now 69 and was a partner in the promotion of Saturday's event. But Speedway racing in America faded away shortly before World War II and wasn't revived until 1968.

Played on small hometown circuits, it has caught on fast the second time around. It was bound to. The vintage Czechoslovakian motorcycles look like 1902 Sears, Roebuck mail-order bicycles and sound like Sopwith Camels, machines that can spring from zero to 60 in three seconds but have trouble getting back to zero again because they have no brakes. They smell like burning castor oil because the lubrication system circulates oil through the engine and then dribbles it on the track. At most stadiums, the track is a dirt oval about as big as a do-nut, and the trail of oil gets so slippery that the bikes only steer properly when they are sliding sideways. The situation calls for a racing technique whereby the rider uses his inside leg as a sort of training wheel. Except when the competition gets fierce.

It gets fierce on the dirt ovals all the time. The riders quickly figured out that one way to slow down an opponent was to jam a steel-toed boot into another bike's spokes. Moreover, to the delight of the crowd, most of the racers think it is neat to spend as much time as possible with their front wheel flapping a couple of feet in the air. They crash so often that it is not unheard of for a standard four-man, four-lap race to have no finishers at all.

A promoter from San Clemente named Harry Oxley put the Coliseum show together after seeing such things occurring on the out-of-the-way run-down tracks. In Los Angeles he added touches like wooden walls that rippled when the riders crashed into them and intermission shows featuring thriller footraces between fans. There was Captain Stickie, for one, a 250-pound giant whose spectating attire consists of black leotards and a gold lam� cape. There was the Czar of Speedway, a gentleman of only slightly less portly dimensions who suddenly roared in his best Shakespearean voice, "My loins are steaming!" Average speedway fans like that.

Promoter Oxley also hired an announcer named Larry Huffman. Huffman is fond of riding to the races on an elephant while wearing a tuxedo and top hat. He usually treats the announcer's table like a trampoline as he shouts his own special sobriquets for the riders: "O.K., folks, let's hear it for Wy-uld Buh-ill Co-dee! Yaaah! How about Dane-gerr-uss Dubb Ferrell!" And so on. Until they got used to hearing him, the neighbors at the country tracks had complained about the noise created by Huffman's ebullient announcing, never mind that the machines made the whole neighborhood sound like Pearl Harbor. But the result of such shenanigans was that this raucous roundelay on wheels became the largest weekly motor sport event in the country, regularly selling out the 9,500-seat Orange County stadium at Costa Mesa. Many of the hard-core fans professed they didn't even like motorcycles.

Still, a lot of the success must be credited to the remarkable charisma of the riders. Take Slidin' Sonny Nutter, for example. Slidin' Sonny would be more appropriately named Smilin' Sonny, for his face is highlighted by a perpetual toothy grin that would shine through an attack of rotten tomatoes. It is also a handsome face.

There is Billy Gray, who went from playing Bud on Father Knows Best, to a film career highlighted by having his arm torn off by the leading beast in The Navy vs. The Night Monster, to becoming a professional speedway racer. He's 37 now, and he was at the National Championships as a color commentator for a TV pilot film about speedway racing.

Even the villains have appeal. Most notorious are the Bast brothers, Mike and Steve, frequent targets of Bronx cheers, as well as empty beer cans and such. Steve was the 1974 national champion. Mike has won the host races every season for the past four. These hard-earned, well-deserved accomplishments unfortunately contribute less to the Bast image than incidents such as the time Steve and another rider crashed into each other at the finish line after a race. Mike, following closely behind them, dropped his bike and pounced on top of the other rider to defend brother Steve's honor. Only thing was, the other rider happened to be still tangled up under his motorcycle.