Rough Riders

His friends took him first to Dan Jackson's house, then to the emergency room. Doctors told him he had ruptured his spleen. The organ was so badly shredded that it had to be removed.

It took him two months to recover. Two months walking with a cane. Two months carrying a pillow to muffle sneezes, afraid that the staples holding his insides together would come undone.

I need to take this seriously or quit, he thought.

A few months earlier, Seales had formed a riding group called the Devil Boys with Yowell and another friend, Charlie Herbert. They headed to Daytona Beach, Florida, for Bike Week, the world's largest motorcycle event. Herbert, an Amoco mechanic, brought his family. "It's a serious big deal," Seales says.

One night the Devil Boys got their pictures taken with Derrick Deagle, a sport-bike pioneer and cult hero known as D-Mann. The next night, Herbert went off on his own, practicing wheelies down a straightaway at night at 100 miles an hour. At that speed, you can go 1,000 feet -- a distance slightly longer than three football fields -- in 6.81 seconds. On one wheel. With no lights. Herbert put the front wheel down and ran out of road.

The road forked left or right, and Herbert didn't have time to turn either way. He jammed the breaks but crashed into a guardrail and flew over his bike. As it turned out, D-Mann, a onetime Chicago firefighter, was among the first on the scene. Herbert had broken his neck. He had a pulse but was brain dead; his body gave out an hour or so later. D-Mann turned Herbert's helmet over to police -- it had a hole punched in the back.

Seales and Yowell were out riding that night and saw the ambulances. They knew somebody was in a bad way. They were close enough to see a yellow bike on the side of the road. But Seales knew lots of riders rode the same kind of bike, the same color. Anyway, Herbert was a safe rider. He rarely clowned around. He'd probably be waiting for them back at the motel.

Seales swallowed his apprehension. When he didn't see his friend's motorcycle at the motel, he reminded himself that Herbert sometimes kept his bike in his room so no one would steal it. A few hours later, he heard the phone ring in Herbert's room next door. Then he heard Herbert's wife scream. He stayed in his own room.

"What could I say or do to make things better?" Seales says. "It was rough." The next day, he and Yowell went to the crash site. They had to leave Herbert's bike behind -- it probably wound up in a salvage yard. That still bothers Seales. He turned to Sunday to help get Herbert's truck back to the Midwest. Whatever rivalry might have been brewing between Sunday and Seales evaporated.

After that Yowell and Seales stopped riding together. Yowell all but gave up riding.

"I didn't want to stop," Seales says. "This was what I wanted."

From the wreckage came KC's Most Wanted.

West Coast guys do fast tricks, like high-speed wheelie passes. East Coast riders prefer slower, choppier moves -- lots of stoppies and burnouts.

Jackson, the best rider in Kansas City, does what hardly any other rider is doing.

Like sitting up on his tank doing a high-speed stoppie with no hands, relying on his right ankle to control the front brake lever. Or doing a handstand on the bike while it's moving.

Or doing a burnout sitting backward.

"It's completely foreign," Ken Abbott says of Jackson's talent. Abbott, who oversees the XSBA from its headquarters in Aurora, Illinois, has seen what Jackson can do. "You have to use the throttle and brake in your left hand, clutch in your right hand, and you're backward."

Jackson comes from a family of nonriders in Keokuk, Iowa -- he got all the crazy genes. As a kid he raced and jumped bicycles. At fourteen he was riding dirt bikes. For the most part, he did it alone. Sure, he had people to ride with, but they were never as good as he was; they didn't push him. In his late teens, Jackson rode motocross -- the sport in which riders race their bikes over tracks of huge dirt ramps -- across the Midwest. He was riding nearly every day and competing every weekend.

"Doing it all by myself, that's why I burned out," he says. By the time Jackson was twenty, he was ready to try something new.

But after Jackson stopped competing in motocross in 1998, the sport started filing up arenas around the country. He doesn't plan to make the same mistake twice. Jackson started competing seriously only last year, but among the small number of riders who make up the XSBA's professional circuit, he's ranked third in the country -- at least until the new season begins in March.

Jackson has an innate feel for how to balance and control a bike. When he first started hanging out with riders in Olathe, he wasn't sure he could pick up the tricks. Now there's no doubt. "That stuff they were doing is weak," he says.