Rough Riders

It's a summer night. After an evening out at Danny's Bar and Grill in Lenexa, Tech N9ne and a few of his pals pile into a black van emblazoned with Tech's screaming, red-haired image. As the hip-hop star turns onto College Boulevard, a rider on a red Honda sport bike follows.

The rider pulls up alongside the van and pops a wheelie. But he's just getting started. He jumps off the bike and holds onto the rear seat, his feet skiing along the road. Bike and van are doing 40, maybe 45 miles an hour down College Boulevard between Pflumm and Quivira; fortunately, there's no traffic for a block. The van slows, its driver waiting to see if the rider will wipe out. He never does.His bike still moving, the rider stands on top of it, keeping pace with the van. With one outstretched arm, he knocks on the van's window.

The guys in the van go nuts.

"Rough rider!" they shout, a nod to a popular black motorcycle group out of New York. High props indeed for a white rider.

"He scared the shit out of us," Tech tells the Pitch later.

Then Dan Jackson is gone.

Jackson is the third-best sport-bike rider in the country. Two other Kansas City riders are trying to catch up with him.

On a sport bike, as in life, it boils down to this: If you¹ve got a big enough set of marbles, you can do a lot of shit. On a warm December weekend in an Olathe industrial park, Johnny Seales, Grant Sunday and their pals are trying to figure out whether they have the marbles.

The riders belong to a sport-bike "team" called KC's Most Wanted, and they have to find a place to practice. Time is critical. The first week in March, they head to Florida to compete in the inaugural event of the 2003 season in an upstart league called the Extreme Sport Bike Association. The XSBA is backed by media giant Clear Channel, and Seales and Sunday think they're on the ground floor of the next underground sport to hit the big time.

Jackson is on hand, too, and he leaves no doubt about the size of his marbles, ripping into a "twelve o'clock." First he roars a few yards down the long side street framed by one-story concrete buildings and pops a wheelie. Keeping his front wheel up, Jackson decelerates until he's moving at less than 30 miles an hour, less than 20, less than 10 -- at the same time, he takes the wheelie higher, past 45 degrees, past 60 degrees, until it seems as if he's going to topple backward off the bike. Then he goes higher, keeping the rear brake tight so that the 400-pound bike doesn't somersault with him on it, until the bike is vertical and comes to a standstill balanced on a flat metal bar in back.

Seales and Sunday roar back and forth practicing "stoppies" -- wheelies for which the rear wheel rather than the front comes off the ground -- and "burnouts," for which the rider locks the front brakes and spins the rear tire until the friction creates a plume of smoke. Sunday always rides in a pair of jeans; Seales always listens to an MP3 player that dangles under his jacket and hooks into a huge speaker mounted on the side of his helmet, shrieking Korn or Judas Priest. "Something to keep my blood pumping, my mind on a fast track," he says.

For every basic move the riders master, there are a dozen more advanced variations to learn. This is especially true for wheelies.

"You do a wheelie, and that's all you do. That's all you can think about," Sunday says. "It's like crack."

Only more expensive. A good bike costs $10,000, and it's not made for what these guys will do with it, which is why they prefer the durability of Hondas. The bikes are scraped up from countless encounters with the asphalt. Seales' CBR 900 RR looks like a metal Frankenstein's monster, with mismatched body molding and zip ties holding the pieces together like stitches. Maintaining the brakes, engine and other parts usually runs a couple grand a year.

Fearlessness is a given. Fame is not, though the XSBA offers a sort of Holy Grail to these riders. They could get paid to travel the country performing these crazy tricks. It would be money to live on, money to keep their bikes running. After all, street lugers and skateboarders are respected athletes. (One estimate puts skate star Tony Hawk's annual income at $60 million.) Extreme sport-bike riding requires at least as much skill and a lot more nerve.

"I see guys go past on a skateboard," Sunday says. "Come on, this is way more exciting than that."

Grant Sunday grew up in Overland Park, riding anything on two wheels. He was playing around on dirt bikes by the time he was ten. Since the 24-year-old started riding motorcycles three years ago, he's bought and sold a dozen bikes. Like Seales, Sunday rides a Honda CBR 900 RR, the Levi's 501 of sport bikes.