RESPONSIBILITY
By Shawn McDonald
For the last 10 years teacher Betsy Seidel has invited me to speak to her 8th grade English class students at Hoquiam Middle School in Hoquiam, Washington, for their week focusing on disability. The students watch videos of people discussing their lives without arms; without sight, and other seen or unseen disabilities; then they choose a disability and live it for a day. If they choose to be blind they are blindfolded and led around by a helper, and so on for other disabilities.
I go into the classes with a loose agenda covering four main topics. No conversation is ever the same as I banter back and forth with these 13-year-old boys and girls. I get them to laugh to break down any mental barriers they have between the DA (Dis Abled) and the AB (Able Bodied). I try to make them forget there is a difference, at least in their mind.
Betsy tells me these conversations make an impact on the kids’ lives in the future. They remember it years later and tell their family and their little brothers and sisters, who then look forward to seeing me when they hit 8th grade.
After the visit I get letters from them, written as part of their English class, asking me even more questions. I always answer every question. Every time I’m done with these conversations I roll away feeling I am the one who got the best of the deal.
In his latest book, Travel Team, sports reporter Mike Lupica talks about the connection between life and sports. I guess I am also a sports reporter in this magazine, and I certainly link life and racing lessons in my replies to the kids. The following are four of my ideas on how racing translates to life, or how life translates to racing. I always forget which comes first. The first topic I talk about is:
RESPONSIBILITY
A question I’m always asked is, "Are you mad at the guy who hit you in the head?"
No. He wasn't trying to hit my head. It wasn't like an X-Box game and you get 1,000 bonus points for crushing a spine. As a matter of fact four months earlier I was racing at a famous British Columbia, Canada, track called Westwood – or, for us north-westerners, Wetwood. Something to do about it raining up there. It was the third corner of the first lap in the 600 production class and we had just come out of a right hand bowled corner that stood you up at the exit for a short straight, and then a 90 degree left under heavy braking.
Westwood was a homey track and all the locals practiced there every Wednesday night. They had it dialed in super freaking tight. So I was happy to be in the top 10 off the start.
Then "Boompphhh!" there was a rider's helmet and head sliding three feet in front of my tire at 80mph. I was already braking as hard as I could for the corner. Any more pressure on the brakes and the bike would have gone down, with some 40 more bikes still coming strong and no advance visibility of bikes and riders lying on the ground.
There are no atheists in fox holes. I was praying as fast as I could, "PLEEEASSE, PLLEEAAASE! Move your head. Move NOW! Now!" Just at the apex of disaster the bike and the rider slowly skidded off into the infield. Not even a quarter of a lap into the race and my heartbeat and adrenaline were sky high. If it hadn’t been so scary, that was a lot of fun.
So how could I blame an experienced racer for doing something I had come within a small hair’s-breadth of doing myself? I couldn't, because it’s my fault I am in the situation I am in today. Fault isn't the correct word either, because that suggests error or blame.
There were no errors, just decisions. Like links in a chain, it was one of a series of my own free will choices I have made in my life.
I found out later that in the practice session before my practice a Suzuki GSX-R had blown its lower end on the racing line in the entrance to a right hand corner. They didn't tell us about it before we went out on the track, and there were no debris flags flown on the course.
I don't remember any of this at all. In most really serious accidents your brain kicks into safety mode and blanks out your memory. So I can't remember about a lap and a half before the crash. I have to go on what I heard from the racers and spectators who were at the accident, telling me about it some eight years afterwards when I went back to Kiwi country for a visit.
I was just warming up at the Levels racetrack in Timaru, New Zealand, which was brand new to me, and on the second lap – as I was trail braking into that right hand corner – the front tire hit the oil patch and I was down like Ali. A situation that would typically have put down 99 per cent of racers. It was only a 40mph corner at best, and I barely scratched my leathers and the bike’s fairing.
But speed does not equal disaster in proportion. Most of the team didn’t know it, except Captain America Bruce Lind and his wife Edie, but within minutes I was given the last rights twice, and was unconscious.
Yet was one of those crashes in which you couldn't even get up enough anger to swear. More of a "Whoops!" crash that I think only broke a foot peg and clip on handlebar. The bike was so good that my buddy Steve Dahlstrom raced it two days later, and proceeded to tell everybody how much more powerful it was than his identical bike.
So you’d expect everything to have been just fine. Except that life happens.
You all thought I was going to say something dirty didn't you? Well, there was another racer behind me who was probably praying very fast going, "PLLEEASSE MATE, PLLEEASSE MATE! Move now you bloody Yank!"
I didn't move as the Canadian racer had and there was a "Whack!" in the back of the helmet which left a six inch long rubber mark where the tire hit.
The front of the helmet was pile driven into the track, an impact severe enough to break a hole the size of a fist in the carbon fiber shell and the inner foam liner.
When the doctors told Bruce they were more concerned I’d be brain damaged than paralyzed, his typically racer response was "It's too late for that, doctor."
I tell you now that when I woke up at Burwood Hospital in Christchurch some four days after the crash I did what all racers do after a crash. I looked for the bike to see how bad it was broken up, and whether I had enough time to get it ready for the next race. Oh, that's right, I'm on some seriously heavy drugs at the moment.
Focus your thoughts, Shawn. The room is white, I have an oxygen mask on and there are a bunch of tubes stuck in my arm. Arms move, fingers move, legs? LEGS? They don't seem to be moving. Nope, not at all. I guess it's my turn finally. Oh well. I wonder if they have something on TV other than cricket.
I got on with the job of recovering in Christchurch, New Zealand, and Seattle, Washington, and as I did so people told me I should sue the motorcycle club, the track, the rider, the New Zealand Auto Cycle Union: they said I could become a rich man for the injustice and wrong that was done to me.
In America’s litigious society it is an inherent right to sue somebody or something when bad things happen to you, but I refused.
The place you find yourself in today is the result of the choices you made. It was my decision to go out in the second practice session instead of the first. It was my decision to race at the Levels race track. It was my decision to race in New Zealand. It was my decision to road race motorcycles. It was my decision to motocross race. It was my decision to ride dirt bikes as a kid, and so on and on. No-one forced me to make any of those decisions.
Before you come up with the argument, "What if they put a gun to my head?" You still have a choice of taking the bullet. I didn't say all the decisions would be easy and pleasurable.
To succeed in life more often than not you must choose the bullet.
You also have to take responsibility if you cause injury to another person. Whether you get them pregnant or drive your car into theirs while drunk, say “It was my fault and no one else’s, and I will do all I can to make things right for the rest of my life.”
I knew taking all those mandatory philosophy classes at the Jesuit Seattle University must have been worth something.
I remember back around October 1974 at the Startup MX track, on a very nasty day when the clay mud was particularly slug-slimy. Some high school friends of my racing buddy John Bernier wanted to come to the races and watch. I was pitted with John, and all these guys were milling about like bees. My only words to them were, "Just stay over there and don't get in my way."
They kept pestering me to let them help me out as my pit crew. To get them off my back I told them they could scrape the mud off the bike and clean the number plates. Grunt work. Oh, and also fill up the gas tank. I was racing my Montesa 250 VR at the time, and it has a gas cap made up with two 'O' rings on a tube that acts as the gas cap. Just push it in and twist it like a wine bottle cork.
I took off in the first moto of the 250 Pro class and just before the first corner the gas cap popped into the air like a Champagne cork, and a flume of pre-mixed gas arched straight towards that part of my leathers in which my wedding tackle was nicely placed. You want me to say this, so here it comes.
Great balls of fire! That hurt for a long time. As my world was turning into a fiery hell I put my left hand on the gas tank filler and rode back to the pits. Handed the bike to one of the aforementioned pit crew, grabbed a bottle of the nearest liquid – which happened to be Gatorade – unzipped the leathers and poured it on. Real relief would not happen for a few days.
Two strips of duct tape on the filler opening and I was back racing, a few laps down. Now I had to go searching for a black gas cap in the mud before the next race. Found it.
Some people, including the pit crew, thought I was going to seriously Tazmanian Devil the pit crew and I had every right to do so. Didn't say one word.
It was my decision to allow people to work on my bike without watching them, or checking their final work. My finger could only point at me.
One of the reasons I like motorcycle racing is that you can arrive and leave the track alone, without a pit crew. All rewards and failures are yours alone. The one thing I have noticed about championship racers is that they don't have excuses.
There was this Australian road racer named Craig Trinder. He was blazingly fast in the short amount of time he was in the country before being chased out by creditors. He finished third in one race he would usually win. I asked him what happened, and he just replied "I finished where I finished." Craig could have found a ton of plausible reasons why he finished third, but none were forthcoming.
Winners don't make excuses. They take responsibility for how they finished.
Losers, on the other hand, can never stop with their improbable scenarios and propositions. Elvis appeared to them on the track and told them to slow down because if they went any faster the Martians from the county Zubia would reveal to the world that the leaders of the world are vegetable clones they created to take over the world and then make into a nice salad with some tomatoes and blue cheese dressing. You see they don't have cows on Mars to make cheese.
You always hear it from the guys in the back of the field, "If only I had the factory tires, the factory tuning, the factory shocks, the factory bike." And if it's local racing the excuses are more bizarre, "I was never breast fed, he has a better-looking girlfriend, he actually has a girlfriend, he actually has a friend, I ate too many tacos last night, the paint color on my bike slows me down, I'm at the wrong elevation to race at my fastest. I kick ass at over 20,000 feet." The finger always points to somebody or something else to explain why they failed. Never to themselves or, more importantly, their right wrist that is unable to pull the throttle back. Just like in the movie The Empire Strikes Back when Luke says to Yoda "All right, I'll give it a try." Yoda angrily tells him, "No. Try not. Do… or do not. There is no try."
So if you find yourself in a place in life you feel you shouldn't be and decide somebody must have mixed up the maps someplace. You should be rich, educated, ruling the world and married to Cameron Diaz. There are no excuses why you are not in that place. You cannot blame your parents, teachers, where you were born or lived, your friends, the government or anybody except yourself.
Look back and you will find all the decisions were yours to make. When you take responsibility for where you are today, you start to take control of where you are going in the future.
By Shawn McDonald
For the last 10 years teacher Betsy Seidel has invited me to speak to her 8th grade English class students at Hoquiam Middle School in Hoquiam, Washington, for their week focusing on disability. The students watch videos of people discussing their lives without arms; without sight, and other seen or unseen disabilities; then they choose a disability and live it for a day. If they choose to be blind they are blindfolded and led around by a helper, and so on for other disabilities.
I go into the classes with a loose agenda covering four main topics. No conversation is ever the same as I banter back and forth with these 13-year-old boys and girls. I get them to laugh to break down any mental barriers they have between the DA (Dis Abled) and the AB (Able Bodied). I try to make them forget there is a difference, at least in their mind.
Betsy tells me these conversations make an impact on the kids’ lives in the future. They remember it years later and tell their family and their little brothers and sisters, who then look forward to seeing me when they hit 8th grade.
After the visit I get letters from them, written as part of their English class, asking me even more questions. I always answer every question. Every time I’m done with these conversations I roll away feeling I am the one who got the best of the deal.
In his latest book, Travel Team, sports reporter Mike Lupica talks about the connection between life and sports. I guess I am also a sports reporter in this magazine, and I certainly link life and racing lessons in my replies to the kids. The following are four of my ideas on how racing translates to life, or how life translates to racing. I always forget which comes first. The first topic I talk about is:
RESPONSIBILITY
A question I’m always asked is, "Are you mad at the guy who hit you in the head?"
No. He wasn't trying to hit my head. It wasn't like an X-Box game and you get 1,000 bonus points for crushing a spine. As a matter of fact four months earlier I was racing at a famous British Columbia, Canada, track called Westwood – or, for us north-westerners, Wetwood. Something to do about it raining up there. It was the third corner of the first lap in the 600 production class and we had just come out of a right hand bowled corner that stood you up at the exit for a short straight, and then a 90 degree left under heavy braking.
Westwood was a homey track and all the locals practiced there every Wednesday night. They had it dialed in super freaking tight. So I was happy to be in the top 10 off the start.
Then "Boompphhh!" there was a rider's helmet and head sliding three feet in front of my tire at 80mph. I was already braking as hard as I could for the corner. Any more pressure on the brakes and the bike would have gone down, with some 40 more bikes still coming strong and no advance visibility of bikes and riders lying on the ground.
There are no atheists in fox holes. I was praying as fast as I could, "PLEEEASSE, PLLEEAAASE! Move your head. Move NOW! Now!" Just at the apex of disaster the bike and the rider slowly skidded off into the infield. Not even a quarter of a lap into the race and my heartbeat and adrenaline were sky high. If it hadn’t been so scary, that was a lot of fun.
So how could I blame an experienced racer for doing something I had come within a small hair’s-breadth of doing myself? I couldn't, because it’s my fault I am in the situation I am in today. Fault isn't the correct word either, because that suggests error or blame.
There were no errors, just decisions. Like links in a chain, it was one of a series of my own free will choices I have made in my life.
I found out later that in the practice session before my practice a Suzuki GSX-R had blown its lower end on the racing line in the entrance to a right hand corner. They didn't tell us about it before we went out on the track, and there were no debris flags flown on the course.
I don't remember any of this at all. In most really serious accidents your brain kicks into safety mode and blanks out your memory. So I can't remember about a lap and a half before the crash. I have to go on what I heard from the racers and spectators who were at the accident, telling me about it some eight years afterwards when I went back to Kiwi country for a visit.
I was just warming up at the Levels racetrack in Timaru, New Zealand, which was brand new to me, and on the second lap – as I was trail braking into that right hand corner – the front tire hit the oil patch and I was down like Ali. A situation that would typically have put down 99 per cent of racers. It was only a 40mph corner at best, and I barely scratched my leathers and the bike’s fairing.
But speed does not equal disaster in proportion. Most of the team didn’t know it, except Captain America Bruce Lind and his wife Edie, but within minutes I was given the last rights twice, and was unconscious.
Yet was one of those crashes in which you couldn't even get up enough anger to swear. More of a "Whoops!" crash that I think only broke a foot peg and clip on handlebar. The bike was so good that my buddy Steve Dahlstrom raced it two days later, and proceeded to tell everybody how much more powerful it was than his identical bike.
So you’d expect everything to have been just fine. Except that life happens.
You all thought I was going to say something dirty didn't you? Well, there was another racer behind me who was probably praying very fast going, "PLLEEASSE MATE, PLLEEASSE MATE! Move now you bloody Yank!"
I didn't move as the Canadian racer had and there was a "Whack!" in the back of the helmet which left a six inch long rubber mark where the tire hit.
The front of the helmet was pile driven into the track, an impact severe enough to break a hole the size of a fist in the carbon fiber shell and the inner foam liner.
When the doctors told Bruce they were more concerned I’d be brain damaged than paralyzed, his typically racer response was "It's too late for that, doctor."
I tell you now that when I woke up at Burwood Hospital in Christchurch some four days after the crash I did what all racers do after a crash. I looked for the bike to see how bad it was broken up, and whether I had enough time to get it ready for the next race. Oh, that's right, I'm on some seriously heavy drugs at the moment.
Focus your thoughts, Shawn. The room is white, I have an oxygen mask on and there are a bunch of tubes stuck in my arm. Arms move, fingers move, legs? LEGS? They don't seem to be moving. Nope, not at all. I guess it's my turn finally. Oh well. I wonder if they have something on TV other than cricket.
I got on with the job of recovering in Christchurch, New Zealand, and Seattle, Washington, and as I did so people told me I should sue the motorcycle club, the track, the rider, the New Zealand Auto Cycle Union: they said I could become a rich man for the injustice and wrong that was done to me.
In America’s litigious society it is an inherent right to sue somebody or something when bad things happen to you, but I refused.
The place you find yourself in today is the result of the choices you made. It was my decision to go out in the second practice session instead of the first. It was my decision to race at the Levels race track. It was my decision to race in New Zealand. It was my decision to road race motorcycles. It was my decision to motocross race. It was my decision to ride dirt bikes as a kid, and so on and on. No-one forced me to make any of those decisions.
Before you come up with the argument, "What if they put a gun to my head?" You still have a choice of taking the bullet. I didn't say all the decisions would be easy and pleasurable.
To succeed in life more often than not you must choose the bullet.
You also have to take responsibility if you cause injury to another person. Whether you get them pregnant or drive your car into theirs while drunk, say “It was my fault and no one else’s, and I will do all I can to make things right for the rest of my life.”
I knew taking all those mandatory philosophy classes at the Jesuit Seattle University must have been worth something.
I remember back around October 1974 at the Startup MX track, on a very nasty day when the clay mud was particularly slug-slimy. Some high school friends of my racing buddy John Bernier wanted to come to the races and watch. I was pitted with John, and all these guys were milling about like bees. My only words to them were, "Just stay over there and don't get in my way."
They kept pestering me to let them help me out as my pit crew. To get them off my back I told them they could scrape the mud off the bike and clean the number plates. Grunt work. Oh, and also fill up the gas tank. I was racing my Montesa 250 VR at the time, and it has a gas cap made up with two 'O' rings on a tube that acts as the gas cap. Just push it in and twist it like a wine bottle cork.
I took off in the first moto of the 250 Pro class and just before the first corner the gas cap popped into the air like a Champagne cork, and a flume of pre-mixed gas arched straight towards that part of my leathers in which my wedding tackle was nicely placed. You want me to say this, so here it comes.
Great balls of fire! That hurt for a long time. As my world was turning into a fiery hell I put my left hand on the gas tank filler and rode back to the pits. Handed the bike to one of the aforementioned pit crew, grabbed a bottle of the nearest liquid – which happened to be Gatorade – unzipped the leathers and poured it on. Real relief would not happen for a few days.
Two strips of duct tape on the filler opening and I was back racing, a few laps down. Now I had to go searching for a black gas cap in the mud before the next race. Found it.
Some people, including the pit crew, thought I was going to seriously Tazmanian Devil the pit crew and I had every right to do so. Didn't say one word.
It was my decision to allow people to work on my bike without watching them, or checking their final work. My finger could only point at me.
One of the reasons I like motorcycle racing is that you can arrive and leave the track alone, without a pit crew. All rewards and failures are yours alone. The one thing I have noticed about championship racers is that they don't have excuses.
There was this Australian road racer named Craig Trinder. He was blazingly fast in the short amount of time he was in the country before being chased out by creditors. He finished third in one race he would usually win. I asked him what happened, and he just replied "I finished where I finished." Craig could have found a ton of plausible reasons why he finished third, but none were forthcoming.
Winners don't make excuses. They take responsibility for how they finished.
Losers, on the other hand, can never stop with their improbable scenarios and propositions. Elvis appeared to them on the track and told them to slow down because if they went any faster the Martians from the county Zubia would reveal to the world that the leaders of the world are vegetable clones they created to take over the world and then make into a nice salad with some tomatoes and blue cheese dressing. You see they don't have cows on Mars to make cheese.
You always hear it from the guys in the back of the field, "If only I had the factory tires, the factory tuning, the factory shocks, the factory bike." And if it's local racing the excuses are more bizarre, "I was never breast fed, he has a better-looking girlfriend, he actually has a girlfriend, he actually has a friend, I ate too many tacos last night, the paint color on my bike slows me down, I'm at the wrong elevation to race at my fastest. I kick ass at over 20,000 feet." The finger always points to somebody or something else to explain why they failed. Never to themselves or, more importantly, their right wrist that is unable to pull the throttle back. Just like in the movie The Empire Strikes Back when Luke says to Yoda "All right, I'll give it a try." Yoda angrily tells him, "No. Try not. Do… or do not. There is no try."
So if you find yourself in a place in life you feel you shouldn't be and decide somebody must have mixed up the maps someplace. You should be rich, educated, ruling the world and married to Cameron Diaz. There are no excuses why you are not in that place. You cannot blame your parents, teachers, where you were born or lived, your friends, the government or anybody except yourself.
Look back and you will find all the decisions were yours to make. When you take responsibility for where you are today, you start to take control of where you are going in the future.
