Rough Riders

Stunt riders were rare. Sunday was in awe of the handful who could keep a wheelie going for an eighth of a mile or lean into a 100-foot stoppie. Before long, he could do stoppies that long, too. Then he could do a wheelie for a quarter mile. And just like that, Sunday was blowing by other riders, who were in awe of him.

"Everybody's good at something," he says. "This is what I'm good at."

The wheelies became old hat. Beginners could do them. Anybody could do 'em fast. These days, good riders can maintain wheelies for 30 or 40 miles. But not many riders can throw in the variations -- the high chairs (kicking the legs over the front windshield) or flamingos (standing up on one leg and holding the other leg out and back). Sunday practiced the twelve o'clock relentlessly for two weeks before he had it.

He had blown away virtually everyone -- except for Johnny Seales, a machinist who worked in Lee's Summit.

Seales never planned on being a rider. He wanted to play guitar. It took him until his late twenties to realize he was "going to have to be some god from outer space" to stand out as a guitarist. He'd bought his first sport bike in 1995. Back then, all he'd wanted was a ride that looked good and had power to burn.

In late 2000, Seales was at his friend Jeremy Yowell's house when Yowell showed him a video of a group of Ohio riders called the Star Boyz, who were popularizing sport-bike stunts across the country. Seales had never heard of them. Yowell tried his first stunt -- sliding onto the gas tank and slinging his feet over the windshield. Seales followed his lead.

"Once I discovered this, I knew this was it," Seales says. Each new trick, he says, "was like a new drug you've just discovered." As he adjusted to each new move, he upped his tolerance and moved to a newer, tougher trick. "You know you're one of only a few people who have done it, and that just boosts your adrenaline even more."

At 32, Seales is the oldest rider on the scene, so several times a week he runs a mile and lifts weights to keep his edge. He carries Vicodin to ease the pain of minor tumbles.

When they first met, Seales thought Sunday talked more trash than he could back up. Sunday found the older rider patronizing. One night in July 2001 they decided to meet in Olathe to see who was better.

An hour before the showdown, Sunday was working on his stoppies. He went into a slow one, and for a moment the bike was about to reach perfect stillness. Then the back tire leaned, the front tire turned, and the bike catapulted into the air, launching Sunday headfirst. He landed on his back.

Sunday's femur was smashed where it joined the hip socket. Surgeons stuck a flat metal plate in his hip, which now pokes out an inch farther on the right side than on the left.

Sunday was in the hospital almost a week. The first day, he considered giving up motorcycles for good. The second day, he told himself he would just ride and lay off the stunts. The third day, he decided to take stoppies out of his repertoire.

But Sunday enjoyed the admiration he had earned from other riders. He liked pulling wheelies down the highway, giving weary car passengers a flash of entertainment. A few weeks after the crash, with his leg in a cast, his friends helped him onto his bike and they went riding. "When we stopped at McDonald's," he remembers, "they'd carry me in."

The physical recovery was easy compared with the personal one. Sunday was laid up for three months. He'd been making $60,000 a year as a mechanic at a Lincoln-Mercury dealership. It had been easy to buy and sell new bikes whenever he wanted. But now he couldn't walk. He says the dealership fired him. Money got tight. His credit went downhill. His girlfriend walked out, demanding partial custody of their young son.

"It was really shitty breaking my leg," he says.

A year later, in the summer of 2002, Seales got hurt, too. He had just come back from a Star Boyz competition in Ohio, where he'd placed second in the freestyle stoppie competition and won $300.

Seales knew he had to practice harder to match the best riders. It was about midnight on July 3, on 119th Street near Metcalf in Overland Park, when Seales tried to do a stoppie while sitting on his tank, one hand off, his feet over the handlebars. Another rider in front of him stopped suddenly. For a second, Seales would later say, he could have bailed. He could have thrown himself off the bike and walked away with only a few scratches. But a rider's first instinct is to save the bike. "I was worried about the bike," he says. "It was the only one I had."

The bike emerged unscathed -- it fell on top of Seales, pinning him. He felt as if a couple of linebackers had knocked the wind out of him. Friends directed traffic as he struggled up from underneath the bike. What he knew: He felt dizzy, with hot and cold flashes. What he didn't know: His stomach was filling with blood.