He runs the U.S. Nationals, the world’s biggest amateur races and the highest profile magazine. Davey Coombs is the American motocross royalty

TAKEN FROM ISSUE 80, JUNE 2012

BY ADAM DUCKWORTH

America is the most important motocross nation in world. It’s the biggest market for off-road bikes, is home to the Supercross series and has the toughest national motocross championship on the planet. The amateur racing is huge, the media exposure is wide and their motocross magazines are bigger.

Apart from mega-money circus that is Supercross, the man in charge of National motocross, the biggest amateur races and the most important magazine is none other than MOTO’s US correspondent, Davey Coombs.

He’s revolutionized the fortunes of the U.S. Nationals by moving them to Saturdays and using his media know-how to secure proper TV and internet coverage. If you’re a pro rider, big team or have any aspirations of a career in top-level US motocross, then Davey Coombs holds the keys to your future success.

If you’re an amateur rider who dreams of racing on the best tracks, with the biggest number of the fiercest competitors, then Davey’s your man, too.

And everyone from a spectator to industry insider to top pro knows the power and influence that Racer X magazine has globally. Plus, of course, it’s monstrous Twitter and Facebook followings. Coombs is the svengali of that too.

Where DC is different from certain other insular Americans is that he has respect ad knowledge of the world motocross scene, too.  He visits GPs and gives respect to the men who race world championships, as well as having a deep respect for the history and heritage of the sport in Europe.

We caught up with the true powerbroker of American motocross on the eve of the first U.S. National of 2012. The National where James Stewart made his comeback. These are Davey’s thoughts on his life, the future of motocross and more.

Davey Coombs: I really didn’t have a plan to get me here today

I was just lucky enough to grow up in a family where my parents loved motorcycling, so it’s in my blood. My dad discovered motocross too late to be a pro, but he was a hard worker who liked to think big, and he decided that organising dirt bike races was better than his previous jobs, which included coal-mining, musician, farming, selling vacuum cleaners, painting houses and teaching school.

His name was Dave Coombs and he and my mom Rita built a few big races from scratch, including Loretta Lynn’s, the Blackwater 100, the GNCC Off-Road Series, and outdoor nationals like High Point at Mt. Morris and Steel City, both in Pennsylvania.

Throughout my whole childhood, I worked alongside them, as well as my brother Tim and sister Carrie doing whatever it took: picking up, rocks, caution-flagging, cleaning up the garbage, pounding in stakes, selling programs, hanging banners…  That was the price to get to race as a kid in a family in West Virginia.

Like a lot of people I now work with in the motocross industry, I really just wanted to be a racer. I gave it hell, won some big minicycle and amateur races, but the writing was soon on the wall, and in real big letters. It said: “COLLEGE.” I really thought that since I wasn’t fast enough to make it as a pro, I would become a history teacher or maybe a lawyer.

I studied literature and history throughout school, but I paid my tuition by writing for magazines like Dirt Rider, Cycle News, Dirt Bike and even Dirt Bike Rider in England—the old “Radio America” columns were my first overseas work! By that point I was shooting photos too, having learned from the very best in the business back then, Fran Kuhn of Inside Motocross fame.

While in college I stared a newspaper called The Racing Paper. It was different from all of the big California magazines in that we tried to have a lot fun with it, writing about our road trips, parties, girls and other misadventures in motocross. People liked it, I guess, and pretty soon it was nationwide.

I changed the name to Racer X Illustrated and turned it into a magazine. I even got a gig being a commentator for Supercross and Motocross on ESPN, so I figured, Okay, this is what I will do with the rest of my life….

But then my dad died. It was August 3, 1998, and the magazine was exactly three issues old. I was at the Washougal National on the other side of the country when he lost his battle with leukemia. He had gotten the outdoor nationals turned around—they were in danger of being swallowed up by Supercross—and built Loretta Lynn’s into the biggest amateur motocross race in the world, and then he was gone, just like that.

My mom, who was his business partner throughout their entire lives—was devastated, and my brother and sister and I all had to pitch in and help out with the family promotions business.

There was extreme growth through the eighties and nineties, and then some real decline. Then the AMA decided to get out of the business of racing, putting the outdoor nationals out for bid. The series was in danger of falling apart in 2007. Riders like Jeremy McGrath, Mike LaRocco, Chad Reed and even Kevin Windham were going “supercross-only”, with James Stewart about to join them. So my sister and I came up with a plan to take over the commercial rights for the series that my parents and other promoters had been working on since 1972.

We had to put together a package and a program with our company MX Sports that would keep the series from being taken over by Youthstream or some other outside entity that might outbid us and then dissolve the series into something else. In the end Daytona Motorsports Group bought it, and then did the deal with us to take over motocross.

Fortunately, we had been paying attention all our lives as we worked at the races. We figured out the secret to getting it on live TV, which was simple: move the races to Saturday, rather than the traditional “On Any Sunday,” because the American sports landscape is filled with big Sunday events like the NFL, NASCAR, golf, and baseball.

We also joined forces with an action sports company that specialised in sponsorship, marketing and television: Alli Sports, which is part of the NBC television network.

Davey Coombs: We made US Nationals exciting again

We started tweaking the schedule, improving the tracks, helping the athletes market themselves better. We got some very good people to work alongside of us, and they are still here. We worked to improve pretty much everything about the series—the TV package, the free online viewing, the facilities, the look and feel of the racetracks, everything. Pretty soon the top riders started coming back, beginning with Chad Reed. And the top riders from the rest of the world started to really become excited about racing in America again, and now even James Stewart is back.

The work is not even close to finished, but it’s been pretty damn cool to get to do not only what I wanted to do—publish a magazine—but also do what my dad did, which is to organize big motocross races.

But you have to pull your own weight because there are too many people that would love to have your job. It doesn’t pay nearly as well as most real jobs, but it’s such a great group of people that it becomes the fabric of our lives. It’s good work if you can find it, but it’s hard work.

You shake the same hands going down that you shook on the way up, never forget that.

We will always do our best to follow in their wake, help keep the grassroots of the sport healthy through amateur racing, and work with the motorcycle industry and especially the factories to give them a proper place to show off their products.

It’s not an inexpensive sport by any means—and we should never forget that. There are other members of those families who don’t race but come along anyway, and we should do our best to make them feel comfortable, feel important and know that we appreciate their presence as much as we can. That’s what helps make Loretta Lynn’s such a great motocross vacation, and we should think that way more about our professional races too.

Our sport’s dirty secret is the lack of education in many kids as they try to become a pro. Schooling is so much more important in the whole big scheme of things, and the fact that so many people forget the “school” part of the home-school equation is something we need to fix.

Motocross will never be as big as some people want it to be, but it can also be much bigger than it is right now. We just need to make sure that we don’t sell our souls and lose our deep passion for the sport on the way to trying to expand these horizons.

I get way too much credit for the work of a lot of good people, whether it’s Racer X Illustrated, Racer X Online, MX Sports or all of the other stuff we do. Everyone at the company, plus my mom, my sister and my brother work just as hard, but for much less credit, maybe because I am lucky enough to be named after my dad, Dave Coombs. He did the real work; we’re just trying to keep it going.

Being a race reporter was a hell of a lot easier when Ricky Carmichael was racing, because we pretty much knew exactly who was going to win, and we looked smarter for it! Now, it’s more interesting, and more puzzling.

I still like to write about motocross more than anything (except raising my own little family with my wife Shannon, and my kids Vance and Sloane). In fact, I am writing this on the eve of the Hangtown National, the series opener. I have a lot of other things to do right now but I learned early on that you never let your editor down—he can be a real bastard!