Rough Riders

Jackson usually wears an Evel Knievel-style race suit with stars stitched down the sleeves and pant legs and flames printed on his shoes. When he practices moves, he'll finish with a raise of his arm, as if signaling the end of his run to the judges, even if there are no judges and even if he messes up. He lifts weights nearly every day.

Jackson broke thirteen bones during his motocross days, but on the bigger, heavier sport bikes he has yet to toss it. This has earned him a reputation as one who rides with the angels. One afternoon late last year, he was the only rider practicing with no helmet. "Aw, man, that's kind of crazy," Jackson says he tells himself when he dreams up a new move. "Then I think, screw it."

Jackson didn't become friends with Seales and Sunday until last summer, months after the two had helped start KC's Most Wanted. Jackson had already founded the one-man Team XMX. There's been no talk of the two teams joining, though they'll probably travel together. It's clear Jackson is used to working alone -- everybody is content to hang out and practice together, but for now, extreme sport-bike riding is still an individual sport.

Jackson, 25, really wants to be a stuntman -- take a fall, jump out of a building, crash a car, even set himself on fire. He says he just missed a chance to audition as a stunt rider for the recent movie Biker Boyz. Clear Channel has tapped him to perform at a National Hot Rod Association drag strip in Gainesville, Florida, after Bike Week, and he's lined up a few sponsors at a motorcycle trade show in Indianapolis.

"I just need to get out of Kansas," he says.

Stunt biking is as old as motorcycles. Helmet manufacturer Hirotake Arai stood on a moving cycle in the 1930s. Steve McQueen jumped a bike over barbed-wire fences in 1963's The Great Escape. British riders Gary Rothwell and Doug Democa popularized modern variations in the late 1980s when they performed at road races around the country.

The current scene, though, started in Cleveland.

In 1996, Scott Caraboolad and two friends, Kevin Marino and Joe Frazier, used to race on country roads to see who was fastest. But everyone who jumps on a bike eventually wants to balance it on one wheel. Back then, only a few guys could do it. Caraboolad used to practice by setting distances with landmarks -- could he ride a wheelie from this telephone pole to one a block up? "If you kept a wheel up for a city block, about 100 feet, you were considered a crazy-phenomenal rider," Caraboolad tells the Pitch, laughing.

European riders had been doing the same sort of stunts for years, but those guys ran on closed courses like drag strips and airport tarmacs, they wore heavily padded gear and their bikes were loaded with safety equipment. Caraboolad and his pals were just three kids kicking the hell out of their bikes.

Word got around town. Saturday rides drew ten people, then twenty, then thirty. "Soon after, people were talking about what we're doing on our bikes," Caraboolad recalls. Video cameras were becoming affordable, too, and the riders started taping their moves so they could prove who was the best.

Marino and Frazier thought they could sell their footage, so they paid a guy in Akron, Ohio, $500 to edit some of their riding tapes into a video with music. Caraboolad says he didn't want to spend the money. "I was totally against it," he says.

The video, titled FTP 1 (for Fuck the Police), sold fifty copies around Cleveland. But when the trio made the rounds at a big bike show in Indianapolis a few weeks later, the tape went through the roof. The guys sent a couple of copies to some distributors in Los Angeles who sold motocross videos, and money started flooding in. "Holy shit? Royalties?" Caraboolad says. "What the hell's a royalty?"

The guys began hitting drag races to get their names out. They always wore Vanson Leather jackets with big red stars on the back. An announcer once referred to them as the Star Boys from Akron, Ohio, and the name stuck.

FTP 1 is a cult classic now, and like most cult classics, it's not very good. "I can't even watch it," Caraboolad says. "The music is terrible. The footage is shaky." But it didn't matter. The Star Boyz had opened up a whole new game. Within a month, another new crew of riders, the Las Vegas Extremes, came out with its own video. It sold more than 10,000 copies.

Today, two dozen teams are making -- or trying to make -- videos. Set to grinding rock music and marked by less-than-steady camera work, the tapes are more or less the same. Some feature spectacular moves -- a guy standing on the back seat of his bike jumps onto the fuel tank without causing so much as a wobble. But they're also full of guys trying stunts and wiping out, and what emerges is a kind of Jackass aesthetic. On one tape, a rider on a four-lane arterial crashes his bike, hits the asphalt, tumbles across two lanes, over a median and onto the other side of the road. The next shot shows the guy in an ambulance, his arm covered in blood. A friend provides sterling off-camera commentary: "Damn, dude...."