Quotes

[on working hard and his current success] I'm a businessman, so I'm gonna make hay while the sun's shining. I've been self-employed for 23 years. That's an accomplishment in itself. You gotta be out there hustling. If you're not, you're not gonna make it. ... Everything has an expiration date. I'm a realist. Do I think I'm Pickin' Jesus? No. That's ridiculous.

[on his first bike] It was a Kawasaki 100, a little Enduro. It was sitting in a friend's garage, kind of beat-up and rundown. He had a couple older brothers who had moved on and left the bike. I traded him my stereo speakers for it. I never took it home, though, because my mother would have absolutely killed me if she knew I owned a motorcycle, so I kept it in different friends' garages. Motorcycles keep me on the road. All the other stuff is gravy.

[on racing bikes competitively] I started racing pretty heavy, from like '89 until '98. I did road racing and criteriums. I was a Cat 4 rider, and then I moved up to a Cat 3 for a little while, and then I kind of got out of it. When you run a bike shop, you never really get out of it, though, because you're around it so much. ... I liked the Italian stuff. I rode Bottecchias. My first really high-end bike was a Viner and that was my first handmade frame, and I always rode Campagnolo. Even when I was in high school, I had a Super Record Campy bike, which was a very expensive bike back then. I had an Atala, which is another Italian bike. I raced that quite a bit, did really well on that one. When the balloon-tire craze was hot, I was buying Phantoms and Panthers, anything with a horn tank. I love the Schwinn stuff. But I was a purist. I grew up watching these pros and they were all riding handmade Italian Colnagos and Medicis and all that stuff. And everything was Campagnolo, and it was all exotic and amazing and beautiful. I wanted that, so when I started racing and had my own shop, those were the kind of bikes I rode.

[on his first pick] I was walking to school one day and saw all these bikes in the garbage. I was just amazed because I didn't have one and I found it incredible that anyone was throwing them out. So I gathered up as many as I could and put them all in our garage. They were mostly banana-seat bikes from the '60s, maybe one was a Schwinn. There was a girl's balloon-tire bike, too. That was the first bike I learned to ride because there was no bar in the middle-I was little, so I would ride it almost right above the cranks. ... Then I sold one. It didn't take much to get it going. I put air in the tires and cleaned it all up and stuff, and then I sold it to an older kid down the street. I think I was six then. I was always fascinated with bikes because when I was young I was very small and slow, but I could go fast on a bike.

[on seeing a motorcycle for the first time] I was 13 when I saw my first motorcycle. I was walking down the sidewalk when this guy who was like the high school champion stud-he was the team quarterback, got all the chicks, everything-did this incredible burnout on his Honda 900. I can remember the day so clearly, how warm it was, and him looking at me as I walked by. I thought, "Oh, man. That is the coolest thing in the world." That's what started me on my journey of wanting a motorcycle.