If you’ve been reading the entries in our forty-day countdown to the 2015 Monster Energy Supercross Championship, you know that infighting—on and off the track—made up a big part of the sport’s early days. While promoters, teams, sponsors, and sanctioning bodies shuffled around trying to figure out what the series should be and who should control it, riders battled fiercely as well. The only constant was change, with each reign over the race track or box office short lived. But today is the story of 1996, a year of immaculate, singular domination. Off the track, one promotion group was heading toward securing the rights to promote nearly every round. On it, one rider would control them all, too.
(By the way, our man Davey Coombs is buried under magazine deadlines for the rest of the week, so the rest of our staff, all of whom were following the series very closely during these years, will take the controls for a few days here. We’ll do our best to keep the good work flowing.)
You’ll remember from yesterday’s installment that the 1995 season (LINK) ended with a rider boycott on “the night the lights went out” in Las Vegas. That prompted big changes from the promoters, the largest move being Charlie Mancuso and Gary Becker working to bring the series under one promotional roof. Mickey Thompson Entertainment Group was now gone, and Supersport’s Bill West was bought out. Soon, the series would have a united front under the SRO/Pace promotional banner (except for Daytona, of course), and the unified stance would reap huge benefits for the series over the next two decades.
A lot of that growth came thanks to Jeremy McGrath’s incredible accomplishments. Most of his records spotlight his longevity, as marks like most titles and most wins take a lifetime to establish. But 1996 was his greatest play, his zenith—the peak of his powers.
Even more remarkable, the 1996 field was stacked. MC’s primary competitors for race wins in 1994 and 1995 were the Kawasaki teammates of Mike LaRocco and Mike Kiedrowski. Keidrowski retired after the 1995 season, and LaRocco ended the year with major knee surgery and switched to Team Suzuki. It would turn out that LaRocco’s RM was not ready for primetime (McGrath himself would find this out later). Also, McGrath’s old Honda teammate Doug Henry was coming into his own late in 1995 in stadiums, but a horrific crash during the ’95 Budds Creek National left him with a broken back and out for the early 1996 rounds.
A rush of new talent promised to keep the heat on. Damon Huffman, who had dominated the 1994 and 1995 125 West Region Championships, was predicted by many as the new McGrath. Ezra Lusk was Suzuki’s young hope, and they had Greg Albertyn back for year two. Kawasaki had another rookie in Ryan Hughes in its ranks, but its 250 program was anchored around Jeff Emig, who had switched from Yamaha. These riders were ready, but McGrath was in his prime and riding his trusty steel-framed CR250R, which was rumored to still carry the 1993 frame he loved so much.
The series began in Orlando again, and McGrath won with ease. Here’s the footage. A surprising second came from Phil Lawrence, a privateer on the infamous Great Western Bank team. This was a rock-star outfit complete with four great personalities in Lawrence, Buddy Antunez, Denny Stephenson, and Davey Castillo, flying to races in a private jet. Alas, the GW Bank money soon ran dry and the team had to rough it, but Lawrence rode superbly all season long, duplicating some of Larry Ward’s amazing privateer rides from a year earlier.
Perhaps the biggest perceived threat to McGrath was something old that was now new again. Damon Bradshaw was back after eighteen months of burnout-induced hiatus. Still possessing prodigious talent, and actually a year younger than McGrath, Bradshaw finished third and second at the first two rounds and seemed prime to make a title run. He couldn’t make it last, though, suffering from inconsistency the rest of the way without the trademark speed he had years before.
One of McGrath’s few early challenges came from Huffman at round four in Seattle. The expected heir-apparent to the throne went back and forth with the King several times in an exciting main event, only to stall late in the race when his clutch started to go south. Here’s the Seattle race. (The main starts at 1:09.) Unfortunately for Huffman, assorted rookie troubles started to surface, with small crashes and nagging injuries piling up through the sixteen-race campaign.
McGrath ran his streak to five straight at San Diego, matching his 5-0 start from 1995. This time he delivered in Atlanta to make it six straight, tying the all-time series’ record. If he could win Daytona—which had proven vexing for him in the past—there would really be something to talk about. Seeing as McGrath now held the AMA 250 National Championship plate, too, the rough-and-tumble Daytona no longer seemed a bridge too far. Emig scored the holeshot, but McGrath quickly went by and took off for a commanding win. Now things had changed. No longer was anyone even concerned about the championship. Simply, the season would be about Jeremy trying to win them all.
While the 1996 field had plenty of talent, the pressure to end McGrath’s streak was proving overwhelming. At Houston, Emig and Hughes led the way only to crash into each other, and Jeremy sailed by. McGrath suffered a rare bad start in Indianapolis, while Emig again got out front. As McGrath moved through the pack, a furious finish appeared to be building until Emig coughed it up by tipping over in a turn. It was pretty clear at this point that the pressure of ending “The Streak” was putting a hurt on everyone. Here’s a link to the Indy main; go to 10:42 to see Emig’s gaffe.
“The way I look at is this—Daytona was the big race that was going to be hard for me to win,” said McGrath to Cycle News reporter Donn Meada in Houston. “Now that I’ve got that one behind me, the rest are easy. I’m just taking it race by race. Can I win them all? Who knows? But if these guys keep knocking each other down like that, maybe so.” Here’s the Houston race.
The 125 class sprouted two new dominators. In his second pro season, Yamaha’s Kevin Windham showed up a new man. He was a strong seventh on a 250 at the season opener in Orlando, then put it to all the 125ers in an East/West round in Minneapolis. The Ragin Cajun reeled off three straight 125 West wins before breaking his collarbone and missing San Diego, opening the door to Jeff Willoh’s one-and-only career win. Windham later recovered to score the West Region title and even put a YZ250 on the podium during an East Region race at Charlotte.
In 125 East, Frenchman Mikael Pichon was rolling to his second-straight title. He was a notch better than his main rivals, John Dowd (all of 30 years old but still relatively inexperienced in supercross) and Tim Ferry. The most drama was reserved for four races that took place near the middle of the country, which stood as East/West rounds. Windham and Pichon split them with two wins each.
Meanwhile, McGrath ran his streak to an even dozen after winning in Tampa, Florida, and Pontiac, Michigan. By then, he had already clinched an unprecedented fourth-straight AMA Supercross Championship, and while that would indicate a boring season under normal circumstances, this was not normal. Four months into the season, McGrath had still not lost a race. The drama and hype of “The Streak” was building to a fever pitch.
The world started to notice. Mainstream sports outlets began to pick up on this remarkable story, including ESPN’s SportsCenter, which had never mentioned supercross even though all the races had aired on the network for the last seven years. It helped that the united SRO/Pace marketing arm was backing the series, pushing McGrath’s star as high as they could. It could even be said that McGrath became the first rider ever bigger than the sport itself—America wasn’t so much interested in finding out who won a supercross race rather than seeing if “That McGrath guy could win again.”
“The Streak” and the accompanying hype were perhaps too much even for The King. The media and interview requests were getting crazy, and the pressure to not falter was building. The crescendo came at the next-to-last round, the first ever supercross held in St. Louis.
McGrath didn’t get a good start this time, but he soon worked his way forward. Up front, though, he’d find significant resistance in his two most bitter rivals, Mike LaRocco and Jeff Emig. Over the previous years, these were the two who lost the most often to McGrath’s dominance, as they were far too often second-place finishers. They were all too eager to end his run on this night.
Fittingly, they did it in their signature style. McGrath passed LaRocco, but Iron Mike, usually a terrible starter and an aggressive passer, came right back and stuffed McGrath hard to retake second. “I think LaRocco might have blown my momentum a little bit he kind of slammed me hard,” said McGrath to ESPN pit reporter Marty Reid.
LaRocco then tried a similar move on Emig but didn’t quite have the room to make the pass stick, and McGrath took advantage and shot past. Now it was up to Emig to hang on. In Indy, the pressure got him, but the script had flipped by now. With just two races left, the pressure was on McGrath to be perfect, and as the final laps clicked off, with Jeremy making a run but never getting close enough to show Emig a wheel, it appeared too much. Plus, the Kansas-born Emig was riding in front of his home fans and establishing a rep as a clutch player. He didn’t falter down the stretch. Emig won and McGrath’s streak was over.
“What’s that saying? You can’t win them all?” said McGrath to Cycle News reporter Davey Coombs. “I wasn’t going to go down without a fight. I wanted to win bad—real bad. It was just one of those things where I rode the very best race I could ride and this is how it turned out.”
“This was definitely a big win,” said Emig, finally erasing the asterisk of his first supercross win a year earlier, when most of the top contenders didn’t line up. “It feels so good to be the guy who ended his streak. I’ve wanted to do this for so long.”
“I would like to congratulate the guy on his record and his title,” continued Emig. “The guy’s records and wins don’t lie. He didn’t cheat to get here. I don’t know if it was harder for me to win one race or for him to keep the streak going. Every weekend for the last ten weeks all I’ve heard is “You’ve got to beat that guy! You’ve got to beat Jeremy!” And all that time all he’s probably hearing has been “You gotta keep it going. You’ve got to be perfect!” Which would be harder?”
By the way, the race had a listed attendance of 36,000. This year’s event drew 60,000. Supercross was about to go big. Here’s the 1996 St. Louis race in all its glory.
As if to prove what he could do with “The Streak’s” pressure gone, McGrath absolutely dominated the finale two weeks later in Denver, Colorado. He won fourteen of fifteen rounds and finished second in his one loss. In between all this he also captured all four motos of the early AMA 250 National Championship chase, going 1-1 at Gatorback and Hangtown.
On the final night of the season in Denver, the new, united promotion group held its first series “banquet.” It was merely a gathering of riders and teams around a flatbed semi, eating pizza. While far from the huge-budget glitz and glamor affairs that would soon become the season-ending standard, it was a sign that supercross was about to embark on big things. After twenty years of jostling, the sport was on solid ground, about to embark on a rapid upward climb. It would do it on the back of Jeremy McGrath’s remarkable success.
1996 AMA Supercross Championship
- Jeremy McGrath Honda 372
- Jeff Emig Kawasaki 240
- Ezra Lusk Suzuki 215
- Phil Lawrence Kawasaki 202
- Ryan Hughes Kawasaki 202
- Mike LaRocco Suzuki 200
- Damon Bradshaw Yamaha 187
- Larry Ward Honda 178
- Damon Huffman Kawasaki 172
- Brian Swink Honda 156
125 East Region
- Mickael Pichon Kawasaki 232
- John Dowd Yamaha 207
- Nathan Ramsey Suzuki 162
- Scott Sheak Suzuki 137
- Brian Deegan Honda 136
125 West Region
- Kevin Windham Yamaha 170
- James Dobb Suzuki 127
- Kim Ashkenazi Suzuki 101
- Greg Schnell Suzuki 97
- Michael Brandes Suzuki 89
For previous years in the 40 Years of Supercross countdown, click here.