Insight: Back to the Future

Built in the style of an ancient Roman coliseum, with massive pillars surrounding a spacious lowered floor, it was set on Figueroa Street, adjacent to the upscale USC campus, and offset by working-class Black and Latino neighborhoods. The Coliseum quickly became a source of civic pride, hosting a wide variety of concerts, speeches, and sporting events. It became an NFL stadium when the Cleveland Rams moved west (1946), followed by baseball’s Brooklyn Dodgers (1958), both of whom called the Coliseum home until they found their own stadiums.

While primarily configured as a football field, the Coliseum holds the attendance record for the most fans at a baseball game for a 2008 exhibition game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and Boston Red Sox, at over 115,000. Rock bands ranging from Pink Floyd to U2, the Rolling Stones to the Who, Metallica to Guns N’ Roses have all headlined at the Coliseum. Martin Luther King Jr., Pope John Paul II, and Nelson Mandela all spoke there, though the biggest crowd ever came out for a 1963 appearance by the Reverend Billy Graham: 134,254 of the faithful in all.

There was even an Army-Navy Air Show in the middle of World War II, when the US Armed Forces and Hollywood teamed up to recreate a battle in the South Pacific, gladiator-style. And of course, we would be remiss if we didn’t mention the fact that Evel Knievel once raced down the Peristyle and onto a ramp to jump a record 50 crushed cars on his Harley-Davidson for ABC’s Wide World of Sports.

The Coliseum became a Federal Historical Landmark in 1984, the same year it hosted its second Summer Olympic Games. Its website calls it “the Greatest Stadium in the World.” For a time, that was certainly true.

Supercross as we now know it was rolled out on the Coliseum floor on July 8, 1972, the brainchild of a big-thinking, fast-talking music promoter named Mike Goodwin. He said his inspiration came when he stumbled across a magazine featuring another type of motorcycle race—short track racing—that was held on the concrete inside Madison Square Garden.

“It was a sellout,” Goodwin told the Los Angeles Times’ legendary sports reporter Jim Murray for a 1984 newspaper column. “Now, here was a race that’s about as exciting as watching paint dry and it’s in New York City, which is not exactly the speed capital of the universe. But it sold out.”

Goodwin was an opportunist, and he knew a good idea when he saw one. He became singularly focused on building a motocross track in a stadium, complete with jumps, bumps, banked turns, and high-speed straightaways. Upon arriving home, he made some quick calls and set up a meeting with the L.A. Coliseum’s Bill Nicholas. It was his first of many lucky breaks—Nicholas had a kid who raced motorcycles. According to the Times’ Murray, “They repaired to a restaurant and drew up the sport of Supercross on a cocktail napkin.”

The big race was going to be called the “Superbowl of Motocross,” as the promoter cleverly dropped the space between the words Super and Bowl, thus skirting any copyright issues with the NFL, which had held its first Super Bowl on the same field just five years earlier.

Over the years the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum has hosted some of the most legendary riders of all time, including ’75 winner Jimmy Ellis (5), ’74 runner-up Roger De Coster, and ’74 High School MX winner Marty Smith, and of course first-ever winner Marty Tripes (14). And that’s De Coster (2) leading ’74 winner Jaroslav Falta, the Peristyle paddock of ’82, and a rock band for intermission.          

It should be noted that a very similar idea to the Superbowl of Motocross had been put into place in Eastern Europe in the 1950s as a way to celebrate the end of World War II in the old communist country of Czechoslovakia. In the capital city of Prague they would build a motocross track on the infield of Starhov Stadium around May 8 of each year, known as Victory Day in Europe. It was technically a motocross race with a couple of artificial jumps on a track built inside of a stadium, but it lacked all of the trappings of what would become the American invention of modern supercross, which is mostly held under the lights on obstacle-filled tracks, with slick production and ceremony.

What they did in Europe in any major race was attract thousands upon thousands of fans, and that’s primarily what the Superbowl of Motocross promoter wanted.

“In Europe, 200,000 people turn out for a motocross in which they see vehicles once every twenty minutes,” Goodwin exaggerated (wildly) to the LA Times’ Murray. “Americans want more action, but I thought if we could compress the thrills of canyon jumps and hairpin turns into a quarter-mile, we’d have a winner.”

Convincing the actual racers, most of whom were traditionalists, proved a little more difficult. Motocross as we know it was born in Great Britain 100 years ago, not long after the First World War in Europe. A closed-course off-road race known as the Royal Scott Trial was held on Camberley Heath in Surrey, Great Britain. It was won by a man named A.B. Sparks, aboard a Milwaukee-made Harley Davidson, ironically enough. This form of racing was soon dubbed “scrambles” by the British, but as it grew across the continent, the French would rename it “moto cross.” But the concept remained the same: Racing across natural terrain, up and down hills, on a closed course that included a jump or two, or many, many more…

The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum’s Peristyle made for the most iconic backdrop in the history of the sport. It also allowed track-builders to in- corporate it as a climb up and out of the stadium, and then back down—multiple times in some years. Future champions Mike Bell (right) and Mark Bar- nett (above) each got their first career SX wins at the Coliseum.

By the 1950s motocross had crossed the Atlantic Ocean and began to find a foothold in America, mostly in New England, where there were lots of people, and the southwest, where there was plenty of open land. Within a few years a San Diego-based motorcycle importer named Edison Dye organized the first-ever professional motocross series that would stretch across the country. Dye was looking for a way to showcase the Swedish-made Husqvarna motorcycles he was importing, so he invited top Swedish stars like Torsten Hallman, Bengt Aberg, and Gunnar Lindstrom to compete in what he called the Inter-Am Series, pitting the visiting international riders against the less-experienced Americans. Needless to say, the Europeans dominated at first, but the Americans were fast learners.

It was in the middle of the 1972 version of the Inter-Am Series that the first Superbowl of Motocross was planned for the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. In early July track builder Vic Wilson and his crew from Saddleback Park, a popular riding facility in nearby Irvine, had started hauling 6,000 cubic yards of dirt onto the same field where O.J. Simpson’s football career took off as a USC Trojan. By the evening of July 8, the LA Coliseum was set to host what Goodwin was calling the Superbowl of Motocross,

By all accounts, it was a success. Some 27,000 curious Angelenos showed up to watch a (just barely) 16-year-old Marty Tripes put his yellow Yamaha in front of the older European riders on hand as part of their summer Inter-Am tour. The Europeans, in turn, thought that Goodwin’s big idea was anything but a motocross race, and they weren’t alone.

“It was advertised, promoted, and presented not as a serious motocross race but as a spectacle—something that was designed to appeal and attract the non-race fan,” snarked one Cycle News scribe. Another op-ed joked, “Only in America would someone convert a football field into a motocross course!” And British participant Dave Bickers called the course “miniature.”

One year later, the Superbowl of Motocross returned to the Coliseum, with the same winner, only this time the 17-year-old Tripes would win on a Honda. The bigger news to Goodwin and the industry was the fact that 38,000-plus people showed up. The crowd went up another 10,000 in ’74, by which time new promoters were joining the sport. Houston-based Pace Motorsports was now holding races in the Astrodome, and they combined forces with the Daytona race (established in 1971) to hold the first AMA-sanctioned Yamaha Super Series of Stadium Motocross. The name of the series would soon be shortened to what we know it as today: Supercross.

Soon, the balance of power in the motocross world was shifting from Europe to the U.S. The AMA Pro Motocross Championship, which was also founded in 1972, was growing in popularity as well as competitiveness. American riders like Brad Lackey, Marty Smith, and Bob “Hurricane” Hannah were taking the fight to the Europeans, driven in large part by the influence of supercross. It was changing the way the Americans rode their motorcycles, replacing sheer strength and stamina with an approach that was more technical as well as aggressive.  

More supercross races came soon after, some as close as nearby Anaheim and Pasadena, others across the country in Atlanta and Philadelphia. The success of supercross soon put the old Inter-Am tour out of business, as advertisers and sponsors turned their attention indoors. The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum remained the centerpiece, though not for long. The race would not be held in 1983 as the Coliseum was getting a makeover while Los Angeles prepared to host the 1984 Summer Olympic Games. It returned to the schedule in November of 1984, by which time the races in Anaheim and San Diego were out-drawing the old stadium.

Despite an aging infrastructure, the Coliseum race would remain the centerpiece of AMA Supercross through 1992, by which time Goodwin was gone from the series he’d helped invent.

Supercross would not return to the Coliseum until it was forced to in 1997-’98, as Anaheim’s Angel Stadium was undergoing renovations. The last winner in ’98 was almost as big a surprise as the first: French rider Sebastien Tortelli, in his first 250cc AMA Supercross, snatched the victory from Doug Henry on the very last lap. So, while an American teenager had shockingly won the first Superbowl of Motocross way back in 1972, a French teenager would win his first supercross in what would be the last supercross held in the Coliseum. 

Over the next two decades, the Coliseum would host a few other motorsports events, including the X Games and more recently the NASCAR Clash, but never a round of the Monster Energy AMA Supercross Championship it spawned in 1972. But major renovations have already begun as the 2028 Olympic Games are set to return to the Greatest Stadium in the World.

Remember that company called Pace Motorsports that started hosting races in the Houston Astrodome back in 1974? It would eventually become a part of Feld Entertainment, which has organized Monster Energy Supercross since 2009. Coincidentally, 1974 is also the first year that MX Sports Pro Racing—organizers of AMA Pro Motocross—hosted their first round of that series. With a combined history of more than 100 years in the motorcycle racing business, when the time came to find the perfect place to hold the Finals of their new collaboration, the SuperMotocross World Championship, they knew that it was time to go back to the future, and back to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.

Jeremy McGrath (1) on his way to a 125 class win in ’92, and debuting his new Suzuki ride in ’97. Ron Lechien (4) on his way to a close second in ’88. And the #4 at far right is Damon Bradshaw in the epic ’92 finale when he lost the title to Jeff Stanton (2). Suzu- ki’s Greg Albertyn (standing) was an upset winner at the Coliseum in 1997, and that’s Marty Tripes (14) on the way to his second straight Superbowl of Motocross win in ’73, this time on a Honda.