Short Comings

If you haven’t already, please lower your flag to ½ staff, remove your flat-billed hat, and let’s have a moment of silence in honor of Shorty and his very unfortunate injury…

By: Moser

Photos: Mama Moser

It is only a small setback, but it’s upsetting nonetheless. To quote Mrs. PulpMX, aka Pookie; “Why do bad things happen to good people?”

The recent injury to Shorty got me thinking and feeling a bit nostalgic about my own injuries over the course of my riding and racing “career”. Let’s step into the time machine, and take a look back at my own Shortcommings with injuries.

I remember my first really big get off like it was yesterday. I was probably only 7 or 8 years old, and my bike at the time was the classic mini bike. A lawn mower engine in a rusty steel frame, with 3 inches of seat foam held together with duct tape, providing the only suspension. I had a friend over and was showing off my riding skills. An old dirt road with a small uphill provided me with an adequate jump to show my friend I knew how to catch big air. I hit the jump at a higher speed then ever before, and promptly looped out knocking the wind out of myself so badly I was certain I was going to die. Just when I thought I was choking to death, my burning lungs would allow me to take just one heaping breath. I don’t recall if my friend was impressed, but that was the biggest jump I had done to date. I doubt both tires even left the ground but I felt like I was 6 feet in the air.

It was several years and bikes later before I had any memorable crashes or injuries. In 1997, I had started racing locally and beginning to ride fast enough and jump high enough it was only a matter of time before I hurt myself. Although I was a pretty smooth rider and didn’t ride outside my comfort zone, I still managed to accumulate a list of broken bones that is nothing to shake a stick at. Starting with a local pro Eric Waunch having a riding school, this was the next logical step to gain some speed. I learned a lot that day and by the end of the day was jumping the largest double on the track 3^rd gear wide open on my 1997 CR80. Even by today’s standards, this was a big jump… It was even called the Motion PRO double, so I felt like a pro after I jumped it. Pro doubles do not have a forgiving landing, which I soon got a first hand account of. At the end of the day, overconfidence and/or a lack of concentration had me grab 4^th gear instead of 3^rd gear headed towards the double, and once I realized my mistake, there was no turning back I was committed and came up “just short” breaking both my ulna and radius clean through. When I opened my eyes and looked down at my arm, my hand was obviously not in the right place, but luckily the bones didn’t break the skin. A pit board served as a splint to get me to the ER, and at the time, I thought it was pretty cool I had my broken arm on a Pro riders pit board. I spent that summer in a plaster cast up to my shoulder, but at least it didn’t require any screws or plates, and once they set the bones, they grew back together just fine.

My first broken bone didn’t deter me in the slightest from my racing aspirations. Shortly after my comeback from my broken arm, I hit a kicker off a small double, went over the bars and broke my collarbone. Ironically, this was only 10 yards from where I had broken my arm. I still remember my mom climbing over the 8’ tall chain link fence to get onto the racetrack. The collarbone was pretty uneventful, it didn’t require surgery and healed fine. Sleeping with a broken collarbone sucked though, I remember several sleepless nights in a lazy boy recliner I borrowed from my Grandpa.

Stepping up to a CR125 went pretty good for a couple years with no significant crashes or injuries, only some sprains. Although some of those sprains hurt worse and took longer to heal than a broken bone. In 1999 at a race under the lights at Seattle International Raceway, I was coming out of the inside of a corner, got whiskey throttle off some acceleration bumps leading into a double, and I lost the bike in the air and face planted onto the hard-pack. At the time, I wore plastic knee cups and no matter how tightly I strapped them on, they always seemed to slide down when I was riding. So when I face planted, the knee cup had slid down and actually broke my kneecap in half. Initially I didn’t realize anything was broken, I was too busy dodging bikes and riders that ignored the yellow flag and were landing on my bike and all around me. I told my dad I wanted to try and race the next moto, but my knee started swelling and my kneecap had this weird puss bubble developing. My dad convinced me to sit this one out. It was a clean break and healed by itself without surgery. I didn’t wire my kneecap together to try and race the following weekend, like Alessi.

We decided to race our first amateur national that summer, Ponca City. From Washington State to Ponca City is a long drive and big expense, so you can imagine our disappointment when I broke my thumb in a first turn pile up in my very first moto. All that way to race for less then 100 yards. We went to one of the “doc in the boxes”, a walk-in clinic in a strip mall. It was great, in and out of there in less then 30min with an X-ray and a splint, the ER could learn some things from those walk in clinics. It could have been worse though, I took a peg to the groin and I’m not exaggerating when I say it couldn’t have come any closer to castrating me, I still have a scar, I’ll show you if you want to see it.

I was injury free in 2000, which resulted in my best year of racing, and in hindsight, that’s probably the fastest I’ll ever ride a bike. I’ll stop getting melodramatic and back to my injuries. In 2001, I got a CR250 and started racing both the 125cc and 250cc classes. Again I was a pretty smooth rider and didn’t ride over my head, but that CR250 kicked my ass. At a local race the second to last whoop was just big enough to cause everyone problems. It kicked me hard one lap, and I rode the front tire as long as I could, but ran out of track and endoed into the bermed corner. There was no where to go and the bike just drilled me from behind breaking the front of my helmet and splitting open my upper lip. I had to get stitches, which isn’t a big deal, but damn they hurt getting a needle in your lip, and worse yet, the scar doesn’t grow any hair so I can’t grow a mustache. I can only grow an inverse “Hitler stash”. Did I mention this was on the same section of the track that I broke my arm and collarbone only 25 yards away?

At this point of my riding career I was no longer attending the Eric Waunch motocross school. I would only help him run it when he was in town. It was an early misty morning, cold so I was wearing a sweatshirt, again at my “lucky” home track. I was on my CR250, it was my first lap so I was just rolling around warming up. There was a small single jump coming out of a corner, I rolled on the throttle from the inside I was barely even moving the bike started to slide out as I was going up the jump face so I just stepped off of it and let the bike slide away. I landed on my feet without falling or even losing my balance. It was slower than a walking pace, I wouldn’t even call it a crash more of a tip over. When I tried to put weight on my right leg I could feel the bones moving around, at this point of my racing career, I was more or less an expert in broken bones and I new my leg was broken. My buddy Krad, who witnessed the entire crash, rode up laughing and didn’t believe me when I told him my leg was broken. He started my bike for me so I could ride it back to the pits.

Once it dropped down into a lawn chair the first order of business was getting my boot and pants off before my leg swelled, no way I was going to let those scissor happy nurses cut off my boot or pants. Eric walked over to help remove the boot, I tried to support my leg while Eric tried to pull the boot off. When my boot and lower leg twisted independently of my upper leg, Eric turned a shade of green, gently set down my boot, turned and walked away without saying a word. I found this humorous more than anything, my body was in shock, so my leg didn’t really hurt yet. I turned to Krad, who didn’t hesitate to give it a try and with the precision of a surgeon removed my boot and pants. I had a spiral fracture of my Tibula; the Fibula was fine. It took forever to heal, I spent all summer in a cast that went from my toes to my balls. The irony is that I broke my leg in the same place on the track that I broke my collarbone. The track design and direction had changed a number of times in the years in between, yet I managed to hurt myself yet again in the same part of the track. I put so many laps in on that track, I suppose the odds were just against me to crash there.

The high speed big crashes never seemed to injure me; I’d jump up get my bearings, find my bike and keep racing. It was the stupid little crashes that seemed to do me in, as is the story with my last big injury. I didn’t even crash, I came up just short on a triple at an arenacross and immediately felt something wrong in my back, so I rode up to the edge of the stadium, leaned my bike against the wall and laid down on the ground. Getting strapped to the stretcher hurt more than my back. I don’t think there is anything more uncomfortable then being tied down to a stretcher.

I had a compression fracture in my L4 vertebrate. Back injuries are always scary but I was lucky, no loss of feeling or anything like that, I just had to wear a turtle shell back brace for 6 weeks. The broken back was the beginning of the end. I wasn’t getting any younger and while attending college full time, I probably wasn’t going to get any faster so I hung up my racing boots. I don’t have any regrets, I’d do it all over again, I have friends who haven’t been as lucky and have had life changing injuries. Is there another sport that consistently has this many serious injuries? I have some cool X-rays to show my kids, and when I’m sitting around a campfire and someone starts telling a story about a broken finger or toe, I tell them I remember my first beer.

Thanks for reading, please send complaints to jasonw@racerxill.com