3 events led to me being a dyed in wool MC enthusiast for life.
When I was 16, my brother came back from flight school w/ a 250 Kawasaki enduro. I learned how to ride on that bike, barely getting out of first gear on a deserted back road and some easy trails to get acquainted with riding. From then on, whenever I could steal his bike away from him, I would go cruising the streets and back roads with it. That was the bait...
The nibble came in a form of a movie released around that time.
If you've never seen "On Any Sunday", you need to watch it. As a motorcycle nut who was just learning to ride, that stoked the fires of desire to own a bike so much, I went out and bought my own Yamaha DT1 enduro bike and proceeded to strip it down to make a lightweight trail bike. Weekdays in high school was just dead time to get to the trails on the weekends to ride with my brother and his friends.
The hook came when there was a motocross race held at the local marine base in Kaneohe. A track was carved out of a hillside on base and before the race I was doubtful the riders would even be able to scale the sheer hills and drop offs that was marked as the course. Well, world class riders were in attendance that day and I watched in amazement and was absolutely blown away by the riding talents of motocross legends. Roger Decoster, Joel Robert, Bengt Aberg, Sylvain Geboers, Ake Jonsson and Hawaii's own John "The Flying Hawaiian" DeSoto, to name a few, were there tearing up the course on their factory prepped Husqvarnas, Maicos, CZs, Suzukis and doing unimaginable riding on such impossible terrrain at speeds that were downright terrifying to me at the time. I don't know how they got those riders to come to Hawaii for that event as there was never anything like that ever again in the islands.
I was hooked and hooked for good.
