PERSPECTIVES

By Mitch Boehm

Maybe it’s been a while, but remember waiting for your favorite motorcycle magazines to appear in the mailbox each month, or watching the local newsstand for the latest edition? Remember tacking pages from those magazines on your bedroom walls as a kid? You know, those oh-so-cool images of Marty Smith or Kenny Roberts or Gene Romero or Malcolm Smith?

Yeah, me too. My walls were plastered with those pages, right along with a billion holes from the stick-pins – which my Mom just loved. Copies of Cycle and Dirt Bike and Popular Cycling and others weren’t just scattered all over my room, but tucked into my middle school binder, too, so I could sneak peeks during Math or English class.

For this then-12-year-old growing up in Northern Ohio and just getting into motocross racing, magazines were a literal portkey to a very special world. Editors such as Cook Neilson, Gordon Jennings, Paul “The Bazzer” Boudreau, Rick “Super Hunky” Seimen and others made motorcycling an almost religious experience, just as On Any Sunday had done in 1971.

And when I’d go to Mid-Ohio Moto Park with my Dad to watch a TransAMA or USGP race, there my heroes would be, in the flesh, just over the snow fences I’d be hanging onto — Smith and Roger DeCoster and Jim Pomeroy and all the rest. Epic doesn’t even come close.

Sadly, and for a whole bunch of reasons, that experience is quickly disappearing from our two-wheeled world. We’ve lost a lot of inkand-paper, for sure, and from a conservation standpoint that’s not a bad thing. But along the way in this whole digital/website movement we’ve lost a lot of the great storytelling that came with all that paper.

“Neuroeconomist Paul Zak,” writes author and PhD Brené Brown, “has found that hearing [or reading] a story — a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end — causes our brains to release cortisol and oxytocin. These chemicals trigger the uniquely human abilities to connect, empathize, and make meaning. Story is literally in our DNA.”

I think author Brown and Zak have it absolutely right. It’s more than simply inspiring words creating vivid images in our brains; there’s actually a chemical component, which is one more reason I believe what I call the Traditional Magazine Experience was so powerful for so many for so long.

And that, I think, pretty well explains why the magazine you now hold in your hands is what it is — and why we featured 80-year-old Malcolm Smith on the cover. Having grown up with this experience, and having done it professionally for more than three decades now, I’m convinced that classic storytelling about the people and the machines and the travel and the history and the racing and the outof-this-world thrills of motorcycling is what all of you — our esteemed members — are craving.

And whether it’s done on paper or digitally, it’s gotta be good, gotta be real, gotta be compelling, and gotta be memorable. And starting now, it will be, on every page and in every single issue, and on our website. Please let us know what you think at Letters@ ama-cycle.org.

We have a new editorial team and a fresh outlook, and we’re hoping you enjoy the Malcolm Smith piece along with the rest of the content. It’s a look at where we’re going with American Motorcyclist. And maybe, just maybe, you’ll feel the need to stick-pin some of it on your walls.

Mitch Boehm is the Editorial Director of the AMA.