Rennie Scaysbrook | October 19, 2017
Cycle News Lowside
COLUMN
On Any Monday
Life has been, shall we say, rather hectic of late. The previous four months have been a blur of diapers and smiles, tears and a touch of fear, as my wife and I get used to the responsibility of raising our little boy, Harvey James, on our own while the rest of our family (and therefore, anyone that can help with babysitting) are on the other side of the world. Australia, to be more precise.
Sleep has been in extremely short supply, we are down to one wage so money is tighter than it’s ever been and I’ve noticed a shift in my demeanor. And I’m not the only one. The ever-observant Jean Turner, our super-sub here at Cycle News and the lady who tidies up my ramblings, said to me after one particularly brutal 15-hour deadline day, “Are you okay? You don’t seem your usual self.”
Truth is, I wasn’t. Travel, writing and riding can take their toll on your mind, especially when you’re feeding the never-ending hunger of the internet with the best motorcycle content my feeble brain can come up with.
I can’t complain too much. I realize that. The job and honor of working at Cycle News is a dream of many and the reality of very few. As the late, great, Nicky Hayden once said of racing in MotoGP, “It’s not like I’m digging ditches.”
When the CN team and I concluded that particularly taxing deadline day a few weeks back, the first thing on my mind was I needed a drink. I try not to drink too often during the week, because I find when I start drinking it’s hard to stop, so I try not buy any more than one of those three pack of big Coors cans at a time.
When I arrived home, Del Taco and Coors in hand, the wife and the baby were asleep, their bed times of 7:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. not conducive to a life of Cycle News deadlines. One thing about deadline day is your brain is going like it’s on speed for a while after it finishes, so sleep for me was not in the cards for a few hours. We don’t have what I guess people call normal TV—no cable, only subscriptions to HBO, Netflix and Amazon Prime TV—so I began perusing what was available for an hour’s wind down. I absolutely did not want to watch anything that had motorcycles in it. Maybe a documentary on “African wildlife” or the rise of “Stalin in pre-WWII Russia.” Then, in that little “something you may like” section, or whatever Amazon calls it, pops up On Any Sunday.
I’d seen the original On Any Sunday only a couple of times in the past, but I’ve seen On Any Sunday II the best part of 1000 times because as a child we had it on video cassette in Australia. I can recite that movie word for word even now. I was so in love with that film that, when I became quite sick as a seven-year-old and had to spend a year in hospital, my friend Martin bought me a huge blonde teddy bear that I named Bruce after speedway star Bruce Penhall, one of the three main characters in On Any Sunday II alongside Kenny Roberts and Malcolm Smith. I still have Bruce.
Don’t ask me why, but even though I didn’t feel like watching something with motorcycles in it, I still pressed play to watch Bruce Brown’s seminal 1971 classic late that Monday night. I’m glad I did, because the film gave me a gentle reminder as to why I have chosen a life dedicated to two wheels, the industry and the people that support it.
On Any Sunday has a charm to it that’s absolutely impossible to recreate. Scenes like the lady watering her plants as the field of the Elsinore Grand Prix go skittering past; Malcolm Smith grinning like he’s on happy gas as he effortlessly decimates the day’s best off-road racers in the International Six Day Trials in Spain; and the classic cool of Mert Lawwill as he loses the number-one plate in the GNC to a young hotshot named Gene Romero. The film is shot in such a way that makes you think everyone who rides a motorcycle is a good guy, which, at the time of the increasing notoriety of gangs like the Hell’s Angels, was far from the case.
As I sat there late on Monday night, exhausted from racing, typing, researching, doing all that Cycle News demands, watching On Any Sunday made me realize just how incredibly lucky I am to be able to do the job I love, in a country I admire and surrounded by the people that make the U.S. the biggest motorcycle industry in the world.
Sometimes you just need a little reminder that even though it may feel like you’re swimming against an ever-increasing tide, a good day, feeling or event is always just around the corner. As I went up to bed at 11:30 p.m. that night, I saw my little boy and wife sound asleep, realized I needed to stop feeling pity for myself, man up and take charge of my responsibility towards them. And if I can do that by riding and writing about motorcycles, I am a very lucky man indeed. CN