The Tale of Mike Brown vs Grant Langston

Every so often in sports, you get a championship battle where the combatants are willing to go there. Mike Brown and Grant Langston went there.

Clichés are beautiful, because they reflect us, and we are beautiful. They only become taboo once they become too powerful.

What I am about to tell you is perhaps the most cliché story you will ever find on my Sports Passion Project. In fact, it rolls several clichés into one. It’s the old vs the young. The ascending vs the descending. It’s David vs Goliath. It’s triumph. It’s tragedy. It’s an unfair loss. It’s a well-deserved win.

It’s the story of Mike Brown vs Grant Langston in the 2001 AMA 125MX season. The story of two riders that were willing to go there, in order to beat each other.

In case you don’t know (I suspect many of my readers won’t), AMA stands for the American Motorcyclist Association. They are the NASCAR of dirt-bike racing, but we are not dealing with the equivalent of the Cup Series. In many ways, 125cc motocross (short form, 125MX), is a long way from the limelight.

First of all, nobody really cares about motocross. This is true of the world in general, my readership, and even the racing world. Motocross is the outdoor dirt bike racing season, which happens at purpose-built tracks in the summer, from May to September.

There’s a reason most sports don’t have any part of their schedules in the summer. It’s hard to garner an audience in the summer, especially hard when your sport is bike racing. Additionally, motocross racing is subject to rain, wind, poor track conditions, and many other things that make it much less pretty and glamourous, which is why all the money in this sport is in supercross (indoor stadium shows at temporary tracks), which runs in the winter time.

These two disciplines of riding require different skillsets. It is possible to be good at both, but immensely difficult to pull off. For instance, the undisputed GOAT of indoor racing, Jeremy McGrath, has just one outdoor championship. Everybody knows the name Jeremy McGrath, because he picked the right side of the fence to sit on. Supercross is just much more valuable than motocross.

Which makes this a perfect story for me to cover, because I’m talking about two humans who will spend their entire lives perpetually underrated as motorcycle riders, because both spent their careers being much better outside (which nobody watches) than inside (where all the money is).

The first is Mike Brown, who by 2001 has been around forever.

Nobody thought it would be this way for Mike. Part of a stacked amateur class, most thought Mike was going to skyrocket to the top of the sport like his amateur peers did, but it just never came together for him. He got his chance, getting a ride alongside McGrath with Mitch Payton and Pro-Circuit Honda for the 1992 season, but he blew it.

For all my friends out there who are not familiar with the dirt world, when you see the name Mitch Payton, read Rick Hendrick. Read the Red Bull F1 team. Read the Kansas City Chiefs.

If you have to pick a team, this is the team to be on, but when Mike Brown got their bike for an indoor-only deal in 1992, it was a total disaster. Poor results combined with a poor work ethic got Mike kicked to the curb before he ever even got a chance to show what he could do outside (where he certainly would’ve done much better).

First chances are rare enough, and a second chance was not forthcoming. After getting his chance at one of the top teams in the sport in 1992, it was over for Mike in 1993. With nobody beating the door down to offer a poor supercross rider a contract, Mike fell out of the world of racing and got a real job in 1993, and at this point it could’ve been over.

Bike racers are like NFL running backs. The clock starts early, and runs fast. Most elite riders in this time period get into the sport around age 19, and if they make it to 29 before they’re out of it they can consider themselves very lucky. The aforementioned GOAT Jeremy McGrath was still competitive at 34, but won his final championship at 28. That’s the kind of timetable we’re dealing with here.

By 1993, Mike Brown is already 21 years old, which does not seem that old, but the clock is ticking in this sport. Looking back on it, it feels ludicrous to say Mike Brown could’ve been done in 1993, but it’s not an unrealistic scenario to believe that we never would’ve heard his name again.

Luckily for us all, Mike tired of working a real job very quickly, and as a last ditch effort to get back into the sport, he took up something he’d never done before.

Regularly training.

To this day, Mike insists that had he trained in 1992 to the level that he will for the remainder of his career, things could’ve gone a lot differently for him. Running his own privateer bike in a select few races in 1993, he realises that he’s much more fit than he had been before, allowing him to take his speed further into the races, which entirely changes the game, and gets him a ride for 1994.

Mike even won a supercross race in the 125cc support class in Pontiac, Michigan in 1994 (something nobody thought he could do), but his true stomping grounds were still outside. He impressed much more there, but then would fall victim to a rule that (largely because of Mike Brown) no longer exists.

It used to be that, because 125cc is in theory a support class, if you scored 100 points in three consecutive seasons you had ‘pointed out’ of the series, making yourself ineligible to race in it. Think about Formula 2 (the final step before F1), which has a similar advancement rule, barring its champion from ever racing in the series again.

Now ineligible for the 125cc support class, and with no team wanting to give a struggling supercross rider a full-time bike in the premier 250cc class, Mike was expelled from racing in America. The AMA would make haste to quickly eliminate this rule, but not before Mike Brown could take the pain. He must spend two years racing in Europe.

Being a good old boy from Tennessee, spending two years with a home base in England is tough on Mike mentally, but in these two years in Europe racing for the world championship (like many sports America has colonised, the world championship in bike racing is less prestigious than the American championship), Mike truly finds who he is as a rider. He learns the European corner speed-centric riding style that Americans haven’t caught onto yet, but are soon going to find out is much faster than the American way.

You would think with the way I’m talking that Mike won the world championship, but he didn’t. He comes close in 2000, but loses to a hot shot 17 year old South African named Grant Langston.

There’s no way to say this that isn’t extremely awkward. Grant Langston is a white kid born in Apartheid South Africa. That’s not his fault, so I’m going to move on, saying nothing further on the subject.

Considering we meet him at only 18 years of age, his story is much shorter than Mike’s, but that doesn’t make it any less engaging. First riding a dirt bike at the age of six, there’s a rather famous video (that still exists) of a six year old Grant Langston proclaiming that he will be world champion one day. Extremely quickly, he becomes the best rider in South Africa, and at the age of 16 moves abroad to chase a world championship.

The world championship is second tier to the American championship, but this is still an extremely big leap. It’s a very high level of competition, and Grant promptly fails to qualify for his first moto. Much like Mike Brown, it becomes very easy to quit for Grant. Upon this failure, Grant looks at his dad in tears and says he wants to go home, and his father’s response sends chills down the spine to read.

“You have no home. I sold it to get you here.”

There is no going back. For a sixteen year old kid used to dominating competition in hot sunny South Africa, to hear that from your father in a one bedroom apartment in cold, rainy Belgium after failing to even qualify for the race must have been soul crushing. Grant struggles with being homesick, and with not knowing the French language, and with having no friends, and with having no money, but one thing he gets dramatically better at is riding a bike.

He’s a young phenom that’s so blindingly fast he comes onto the tour as its fastest rider. After one season of becoming accustomed to his new surroundings and getting his first race win in 1999, Grant blitzes the field in 2000, coming from the relative obscurity of being the new kid on the circuit to being the world champion all in one season, all at the young age of 17 years old.

This brings offers from America.

Most world champions do not immediately bolt for America, feeling at least some compulsion to defend their championship for their team, but Grant Langston is not most world champions. This is a man who knows he has the stuff to win an American championship right now, and therefore feels no need to waste any time defending his championship. He’s going to America.

Mitch Payton (the same Mitch Payton from earlier) angles hard for Grant Langston to come ride for him for the 2001 125MX season, but Grant (a factory KTM rider) is in a tough contract situation, with KTM having right of first refusal on anything he does. Grant informs the team that he’s going to America. They inform him that he may do whatever he likes, but it’s going to be on a KTM. Mitch Payton (and his works Kawasaki bikes) is not going to happen.

So it’s done. Grant Langston is going to spend the summer of 2001 riding a 125cc KTM on the AMA circuit, but what about Mike Brown?

Mike Brown was going to spend the summer of 2001 doing just that, riding a factory KTM in America, until all the Grant Langston contract finagling happened. Once it’s finally decided at the last minute that Grant is not going to be switching to Kawasaki and Mitch Payton, they pivot to Mike Brown, who couldn’t have been happy at being signed as a last second stand-in, but who finally, after all this time, at the way-too-old age of 29, is going to get another shot at the big time.

It’s an unprecedented European invasion into the American racing scene. This European invasion is being conducted by a South African and an American, but it’s thought of as a European invasion nonetheless.

As the riders are sitting at the starting gate for round one of the 2001 season at Glen Helen, viewers are thinking one of three things about how this season is going to transpire. The three commonly held viewpoints are that:

1. Defending champion Travis Pastrana has lost his main competition from last season (Stephane Roncada), and will run away with his second championship in a row. This is view is most commonly held by the more America-centric observers, which is most of the observers, but there’s a reason his name is not on the title.

2. The European riders (neither of whom are European) are for real, and we’re going to get a fantastic three-way championship fight. This view is the most common amongst commentators, and other people in the know about the sport.

3. America is lagging behind, and the riders off the European circuit are going to decide this championship amongst themselves. This is not a commonly held viewpoint, but not an unseen one either. As we know because it’s now 2024, this viewpoint would win out, and Europeans (real ones) would take over the sport in the years ahead, but in 2001 this view is most commonly held by both spectators and pundits who put a great deal of their time into the world championship.

Watching the TV broadcast from the opening round at Glen Helen Motocross Park in San Bernadino, California, it’s immediately clear that nobody thinks Mike Brown is going to win the championship. He almost exclusively gets mentioned alongside Grant, as the two riders who could conceivably be a threat to Travis Pastrana, but this is not equal billing. Charitably, I can phrase it that they’re treating Mike as a 1B, but realistically they’re treating him like a long-shot.

The Americans know Mike Brown. He’s won races in America before, but has had trouble finding sustained success. Mike will claim (and it’s the truth) that other than that one half-season all the way back in 1992 he’s never had a top bike to show what he can do, but unless people have seen you fight at the front consistently before, they tend not to go for that.

The Americans do not know anything about Grant Langston, other than last season over in Europe he wiped the floor with Mike Brown, as just a 17 year old. They can see he won seven races to Mike’s three, and beat him by 50 points (that’s two full races) in the championship. This is the next phenom coming to challenge Ricky Carmichael. He’s not going to get tripped up by old man Mike Brown.

That’s another part of this story that is not remembered enough. Coming into this season aged 29, it would be generous to say Mike Brown is still in his prime. It would also be a bit far to say that Grant Langston has entered his prime, aged 18, but in the aging curve of this sport, Grant is closer to his prime than Mike is.

What I’m trying to tell you is that although Grant and Mike are making this pilgrimage to America together, they’re not making it as equals. Mike is older, on a second chance because he couldn’t make it in the premier 250cc class, and has already gotten trounced by Grant in the world championship. Meanwhile Grant is younger, on an upward trajectory to the premier class, and is expected to run over everybody, with the possible exception of Travis Pastrana. If there were betting odds on 125 motocross in 2001, Mike Brown would’ve been +500 to win the championship, at least.

In the first race of the season, nothing happens to disprove this viewpoint. Mike gets off the line better than Grant, which is crucial because passing in motocross is just as hard as passing in F1, if not slightly harder, but gets hung behind an even faster starting Michael Brandes, long enough for Grant to catch them both.

As soon as Grant gets there, he immediately dispatches of both Mike and leader Brandes and goes on to easily win this race, by 11 seconds. After what feels like the whole race, Mike also clears Brandes, but has lost too much time behind him to be any factor towards the win. However, in typical Mike Brown fashion, he tries as hard as possible anyway, which is where I must take another detour into the specifics of motocross.

In MX racing, there’s riding, and then there’s pushing. In other motorsports, pushing can gain you maybe half a second per lap over regular pace. In motocross, you can gain seconds doing this, because with the physical nature of this sport, the riders (in literal terms) cannot take the optimal line around the track every time. If they do, they will tire, and being tired in this sport means your risk of crashing (and therefore, risk of injury) increases exponentially.

Therefore, in most races, once the positions are solidified, everybody shuts it down and just runs out the laps and tries not to crash, going well slower than their peak capacity. The GOAT of the sport, Jeremy McGrath, was famous (perhaps infamous) for going fast for about ten laps and getting so far ahead that he could just ride for the back half of the race.

Not Mike Brown, and not Grant Langston.

Mike pushes all the way to the end, without any reason to do so, other than to force Grant to do the same thing. Considering Grant got a 15 second head start, it was not a terribly difficult win to pull off, but he noticed. He reveals in his post-race interview:

"I knew he was going to push the whole way, and at one stage he actually started to close. That made me a little worried, because I was pushing…”

This reveals something to me about Grant Langston. As an 18 year old, has he just never had anybody be quicker than him in a race before? To me, it doesn’t seem worrisome that a 15 second cushion narrows to an 11 second one, but in this interview he goes on to mention how scared he was riding hard on some of the gnarly Glen Helen downhills.

You don’t admit to being scared unless it’s the truth.

This may have looked like an easy win, but Grant Langston himself knows, even before the rest of us, that Mike Brown is here to win.

The second race (MX events are one day, two race shows) is also eventful. It features Grant, Travis Pastrana, and Mike (in that order) running nose to tail for the first time, in a preview of events to come. This ends with Travis (the defending champion) being so shocked by Mike’s attempted passing manoeuvre that he drives off the track on his own, with no contact, and falls way back in the field.

From here, it looks a lot like the first race, except this time with Grant hung behind a slow rider in the lead. Mike catches up to the two of them, but unlike Grant in the first race, cannot blow by the riders in front of him, giving Grant all the time he needs to figure a way to take the lead. Mike follows him through the slower rider, but has lost his chance to get by.

When you’re up against a rider as good as Grant Langston, you do not simply pass him. Not in this sport. Something has to happen to let you get by, and nothing does. Eventually, Mike shuts it down, and Grant Langston sweeps Glen Helen, winning both races, leaving Mike to finish the event with a 2-2.

There are two main revelations coming out of Glen Helen. The first is Mike Brown. This is the fastest he has ever ridden, bar none. Nobody is shocked by the success of Grant Langston, but he didn’t run away from the field, and that his main competition was Mike Brown, and not Travis Pastrana, has got everybody talking, which leads us to the second revelation.

Our two riders were so far ahead of Travis it’s difficult to believe he’s the defending champion here. In terms of positions, not so much (Travis ended with a 3-4), but in terms of time, Travis was way behind. Much further behind than almost everybody expected. It’s only been two races, but it’s looking like the Europeans are going to rule the sport after all.

Legendary TV announcer Art Eckman says it best signing off the ESPN broadcast:

'“It’s looking like a great season.”

However, this threatens to go belly up really quickly, as these are the (truncated to the top three) points standings after round three at High Point:

Grant Langston - 131

Travis Pastrana - 122

Mike Brown - 80

80? That’s 50 points behind. It pays 25 points to win, so Mike Brown is already two full races behind. How could it possibly have gone so badly for the man who looked so good at Glen Helen?

Three letters. DNF.

At round two in Hangtown, Mike Brown is not able to finish either race, scoring no points, while Grant Langston sweeps it again, taking another 1-1. It’s also looking like Travis (a well known lover of softer Eastern soil) is going to be real competition after all, having won both races at muddy High Point, with several other East coast tracks coming up.

All these storylines converge on each other in Southwick, Massachusetts for the fourth round of the season. Believing his main competition to be Pastrana, Grant guarantees victory on the sandy Southwick course, to which Travis responds in kind, issuing a guarantee of his own.

In this instance, both men figure out why you don’t do things like this in motocross.

Grant and Travis both crash hard in practice, with Grant separating his shoulder. The chatter is whether he will even be able to ride in the main event. Surely if he were more than nine points ahead in the standings, there’s no way he’d be riding in this event, but with such a close championship he has to try it.

Normally I have very little sympathy for sports people trying to gut it out through injury like this, because most of the time their resulting poor performance hurts their teams more than it helps, but in an individual sport like MX racing, it’s a lot more laudable, and even in his worst performance of the season, I gain a lot of respect for Grant’s performance in Southwick.

In the first race, he unbelievably gets off the line in second place, but riding with one arm he quickly falls through the field and ends up finishing ninth. The second moto is even more impressive, perhaps one of the most impressive performances I’ve ever seen on a bike.

In the second race, he does not drop like a stone the way he does in the first. He finds himself in the front late, failing to win the race due only to a magical charge out of the defending champion.

This is a heroic effort. MX racing is an extremely dangerous sport. As an 18 year old, it would have been easy to think big picture. Just pack up the tent, get surgery, and come back in a few weeks well behind in the championship. It will be impossible to win the championship at that point, but he can go right back to winning, and the point will be proven, even without the plaque.

That’s not enough for Grant Langston. He doesn’t like to lose, so he guts it out, tries his best, and (in the second race) nearly wins with one arm. While the results show that this round is only a 9-4, it impresses me more than any sweep ever could. This is proven even further when Grant shows up to Budd’s Creek for round five ready to go, but finds the pain is just too much. He can’t ride the bike, and is forced to (reluctantly) take a round off.

Mike Brown finishes Southwick with a 1-9 to close up in the championship a little bit, but it’s Travis Pastrana who comes through on his promise to win the event, finishing 2-1, and taking advantage of Grant’s bad day to pull into the points lead. However, the man who truly takes advantage of Grant being gone is Mike Brown.

Mike dominates Budd’s Creek, enduring no competition at all (from Pastrana or anybody else) on his way to his first 1-1 of the year, and Grant’s missing of both Budd’s Creek races basically evens him up with Mike’s double DNF in Hangtown, with both being short two races’ worth of points. This means the points standings by the time Grant comes back look like this:

Travis Pastrana - 203

Mike Brown -167

Grant Langston - 161

Now that both our men are on even footing, you can see that Grant wasn’t so far ahead after all. In fact, (with a boost from Grant’s forgivably poor participation at Southwick) Mike is actually ahead in the points once the DNFs are made even between the two, but both riders having scored no points in two full races leaves both hopelessly far behind Travis Pastrana.

At this point you may be wondering about the elephant in the room. Why is the title what it is? Why isn’t Travis Pastrana mentioned anywhere?

The answer to that question comes in round seven at Unadilla. Remember when I told you that pushing hard exponentially increases your chances of crashing, which is why the second place rider tends to push all the way to the end?

Travis Pastrana had led every lap of both races at Unadilla, and was well on his way to another 1-1 and a commanding points lead, but Grant (partially recovered by this time from the shoulder issues) kept pushing him all the way to the final lap of both, hoping that Travis would make a mistake, and finally, on the final lap of what could’ve been one of the best days of Travis Pastrana’s MX career, it comes.

An unbelievably hard crash. Travis goes over the bars, faceplants into the ground, and is KO’d. He lays on the side of the track, and keeps laying on the side of the track, motionless. Grant goes by, Mike goes by, all the while he’s not moving. It’s extremely uncomfortable. As a MX rider, you want your rivals to crash, but you don’t want them to crash like this. Eventually Travis does get up, but it’s concussion city.

He will never be the same rider after this. He will never win another race, and despite a rather sizeable 22 point lead (25 points is a full race), Travis will play no part in this championship battle moving forward, which gets us back to our two protagonists.

Mike Brown vs Grant Langston.

Grant has 249 points. Mike has 227. Travis has 271, but is not the same rider today as he was yesterday, meaning Mike is officially back to being within one race of the point lead, for the first time since the second round of the season. At this point, everybody knows Mike can compete with Grant, but excluding Southwick, Mike has only beaten Grant in two individual races, both at High Point back in round three.

That’s two out of 14 total races that’ve been run so far, and even one of those was a seventh place over a tenth place. Not terribly impressive. It’s great that circumstances (mainly going 1-1 in the two motos Grant missed for injury) have colluded to put Mike into the position of being a real points contender despite never being able to beat Grant straight up (not last season in Europe nor this season in America), but unless that changes, he’s not going to win the championship anyway. He’s going to have to beat Grant at some point, elsewise this entire journey back to America has been for nought.

That brings us to round eight in Troy, Ohio, where finally we see a serious bobble out of Grant Langston.

It’s easy to forget that Grant himself has only won two races since round two in Hangtown, and that includes the gift in Unadilla. Opening the season with four wins in a row really helps in a points battle, so he’s been able to coast on that all the way to this point, but he hasn’t been winning lately.

What he has been doing is staying really consistent. Even including his obviously hobbled performance in Southwick, he’s only posted two finishes outside the top five. This is a valued skill in motocross, because it’s a discipline where riders often can specialise in one type of track (sandy, soft, loose, hard, etc.). Only the truly great riders can run at the front everywhere. Even championship rival Mike Brown has finished outside the top five more than twice as often as Grant has. He’s just a machine. He never takes a week off.

Not until today.

Grant has a disastrous showing in Troy. In the first race, he gets an acceptable start, but not a good one, and as a result spends the whole race as the third bike in a four bike train stuck behind KTM teammate Brock Sellards, and the Yamaha of Nate Ramsey. Eventually, Ramsey falls out, which leads everybody to ponder the whole race over whether there ought to be KTM team orders to get Grant past Sellards, but the order never comes, leaving the championship hopeful to run the whole race stuck behind him and finish fourth.

That was bad, but the second moto is even worse. Grant gets a horrendous start off the gate, running about 20th at the end of the first lap, which forces him to spend the whole race trying to battle back to the front. In the end, he can only get back to eighth, leaving him with a brutal (for a championship contender) 4-8 round.

What was Mike Brown doing at this time?

He makes the first race look easy, only spending about two laps behind the same fast-starting Brock Sellards who was able to hold Grant for up the whole race, and running away with the win.

This is domination we don’t often see out of Mike Brown. He can win, but often his riding style looks as if he’s saving a ten lap long crash, but not this time. He’s able to win while riding smoothly, which is what lets you know that he’s comfortably the fastest, the first time all season he’s been able to say that in a race including Grant.

The second race is much more exciting. Grant being stranded in the back leaves Mike Brown to have a fantastic battle for the win with Ernesto Fonseca, with whom he’s had a running rivalry that I haven’t had time to touch on here, which I highly recommend you watch. Mike passes him fairly clean. Fonseca responds by putting him off the track and in the weeds, but washes himself out in the process, allowing Mike to finish the pass for good and run away with another victory.

Troy could not have gone any better for Mike Brown. He did have a little run-in with Ernesto Fonseca, and therefore had to push for longer than he would’ve liked, but in the end he’s gone 1-1 in a round where Grant went a putrid 4-8.

It’s as close as you can get for round nine in Washougal, Washington. Grant is now sitting on 280 points, and Mike is on 277. That three point difference is the same as the difference between first and second (25 points to 22), meaning the championship really can’t get any closer than this, and all of a sudden Mike Brown (who at one point was two full races of points behind Grant) is the hottest rider on the circuit.

The weird thing about motorsports in comparison to the stick and ball sports is that oftentimes in motorsports you can fight a war without fighting any battles, by which I mean you can be neck and neck in a season-long points battle without ever being neck and neck in any individual races.

If you’ve noticed I’ve not talked about any Mike Brown vs Grant Langston battles for position, that’s because (aside from round one, which I covered) there haven’t really been any. These two riders just haven’t been near each other for any extended period of time in any race since then.

That changes in Washougal.

The first moto sees Mike and Grant running first and second coming out of the first lap, allowing them both to check out on the field, creating a definitive battle between the two. Catching and passing are two different things, but if the pattern of Grant consistently besting Mike is to continue, you would expect Grant to at least catch him, but he doesn’t catch him. He doesn’t get close to catching him.

For the first time all season, Mike has taken on Grant in a straight fight, and beaten him. This is a dramatic turning of the tide in this championship battle, and one that couldn’t have come at a better time.

At this point, one final element of the story comes into play. One that I’ve been selectively withholding from you this entire time.

Mike Brown and Grant Langston truly don’t like each other.

This is Mike’s response in the post-race interview, when asked about the pressure being applied by Grant riding right behind him:

“It wasn’t that bad. I wasn’t even pushing that hard. I was just trying to use good lines. I wasn’t trying to show him all my lines, so once I got away from him, I used some better lines.”

Bad news for Grant?

“I hope so.”

Let me assure you that this is not true. You do not pull away from a rider the calibre of Grant Langston by not riding hard, and not using your best lines. It’s a crafty, calculated, media tactic to try to shake Grant’s confidence. I will remind you one more time that Mike has now beaten Grant in a straight fight once. Ever. He’s trying to play it off like it was a breeze, but I promise you, it wasn’t.

Would you do this to a man you liked? No, of course you wouldn’t. You’d big-up your opponent. Talk about how good he is, and how happy you are that you were able to beat him. This was not that. Mike went out of his way to say how easy this was, downplaying his own landmark win in the process. I don’t believe him, but he’s not trying to convince me. He’s trying to convince Grant Langston, and with an easy win in moto two, this time without even seeing Grant (who finishes third), it’s getting easier and easier.

This is not as big of a points swing as Troy, but with a 1-1 over Grant’s 2-3, Mike has taken the points lead with six races to go, 327 to 322, and the tides have turned to such an extent that all of a sudden it’s Grant Langston who’s desperately in need of a bounce back as we roll into Millville, Minnesota.

From Grant’s perspective, he has been going around telling everybody who will listen that his relatively poor performance since Southwick, and Mike Brown’s hot streak, is all a result of his shoulder injuries. The impact is twofold. The first is obvious, making it much harder to wrangle the bike around the track, but the second is that it has severely limited Grant’s practice program.

In racing, practice has more impact than in stick and ball. You can play without practice in football and be fine (click here for an example of this), but in racing, practice is imperative, mostly for bike setup. If you don’t practice, you end up with poorly configured suspension components, which leads to bike performance that riders don’t like.

Every rider is different, and likes different things. Nobody can do your practice for you, so if you have an ailment (like a separated shoulder) that prevents you from doing your own practice, it does stand to reason that this would impact performance, and considering Grant’s performance in Millville, I’m inclined to believe his version of the story.

Just like back in Southwick, Grant guarantees victory in Millville, but this time, he gets it.

It’s not without controversy, as in the first moto Ernesto Fonseca (well known rival of Mike Brown) gets the holeshot (meaning he comes out of the first turn in first place), but simply lets Grant past. He does not show this courtesy to both championship contenders, holding Mike Brown behind all the way to the line.

If Fonseca was a KTM teammate of Grant’s, this would’ve all been okay. Team orders and holding up your teammate’s rivals are an accepted part of racing, but he’s not a teammate. Ernesto rides a Yamaha, which raises questions as to why exactly this happened. I cannot answer that for you, but what I can tell you is that this looks extremely fishy.

The second race is without as much controversy. Grant gets the holeshot, and runs away with a win. Mike gets a bad start, but this time manages to claw his way back to second place. He rides the whole race like a maniac, but when the leader is the quality of a Grant Langston, that’s not enough. Grant takes another win to finish the day with a 1-1, while Mike can only manage a 3-2.

In each post-race interview, Grant does not miss his chance to gloat about just how much distance he put between Mike and himself, and insists on closing by saying ‘the old Grant Langston is back.’ Mike Brown responds by saying ‘He’s a sand rider (Millville is a very sandy course). He can think what he wants. We’ll see next week.’

This is beginning to get ugly, and personal. It’s very obvious to see that Mike has grown very tired of losing to this brash young kid, and it’s just as clear that Grant feels no need to be humble in his victories over Mike. Mike is a smart guy. He knows Grant is faster, but he still feels he can beat him. Grant also knows Grant is faster, and is acting as if he’s got nothing to worry about in the final four races, despite being ahead by a scant three points (372 to 369).

Round 11 in Binghamton, New York sees these two contrasting points of view collide with each other.

In the first moto, Grant gets the holeshot, while Mike is mired in eighth place. It only takes a few laps for Mike to clear all this traffic, and his extraordinarily aggressive riding style sees him get to Grant’s rear unbelievably quickly, and for the first time all season, Mike is actually able to make the pass.

On the ensuing straight, Mike gives Grant a wave, as if to say ‘come on. Come at me.’ This is wild. I’ve never seen anybody so disrespectful in the midst of a race. This is something only Mike Brown could pull off, and is asking for trouble, in a situation where trouble was already likely to happen. Grant responds by making a T right into the side of Mike, but does not succeed in pushing him off the track, so Mike remains ahead.

Seeing this effort fail, Grant elects to remain right in Mike’s tire tracks all the way until the final lap. On that final lap, he elects to jump the berm and put Mike on the ground, in lieu of passing him. Both were so far ahead that Mike was still able to recover to a second place finish, but is so fuming after this move that the only words he can say in his interview are ‘stupid move.’

Grant, on the other hand, cannot resist, saying with a big smirk on his face:

“That’s aggressive racing. That’s how it goes. We both want to win, as long as it doesn’t get dirty.”

As long as it doesn’t get dirty.

You have to respect the cajones on this kid.

He’s just put Mike Brown on the ground to win a moto, about three minutes beforehand, and now he’s smirking and talking about how he doesn’t want to win dirty. Do you know many 18 year olds with that kind of guts? Something like this would be easy to say after the second race, where everybody would have a week to cool off afterwards, but after the first? That takes some serious stones, because after an incident like this, Grant is going to be lucky not to get put in the first row in the second race.

In that second moto, it’s a reverse of the first. This time Mike jumps out to an early lead, with Grant being stranded in third place behind Larry Ward. Just like Mike in the first race, it takes no time at all for Grant to dispatch this traffic, but he has no luck catching Mike, but remember what I said earlier about just forcing your opponent to push puts them at an increased risk to crash?

Mike goes down, crashing pretty hard. Grant goes by, and while Mike spends the whole rest of the race riding like a crazy person, he cannot close the now massive gap. He comes so close to getting back to Grant’s rear by the end of the race. Just close enough to see Grant look back at him, and then wheelie over the finish line right in front of him.

Grant wins his fourth race in a row, and Mike is stuck with the world’s most heartbreaking 2-2, despite leading almost all of both races. Instead of going into the final round of the season with the point lead, Mike is going into the final two races behind Grant by nine points, 422 to 413.

This nine point gap means that merely beating Grant will not be enough. There is a three point difference between first and second in a race (25 points to 22), so if Grant is just able to finish second in each race, he will clinch the championship. There are many different permutations that see Mike getting nine points more than Grant, but the most realistic version of what needs to happen for Mike is that he needs to win, and Grant needs to finish third or worse in each of the two races.

Grant hasn’t finished as bad as third twice in one day since his disaster in Troy, and has only finished third once since then. Needless to say, Mike is going to need a lot of luck to win this championship.

However, Kawasaki has an ace up their sleeve.

In a terribly convenient bit of timing, Ricky Carmichael has decided that now is the perfect time to go record chasing.

Remember earlier when I said Jeremy McGrath is the undisputed GOAT of racing inside? Ricky Carmichael is the undisputed GOAT of racing outside. This is not like the NBA either, where some people say Michael Jordan and some people say LeBron James. Everybody is in unanimous agreement that nobody is better than Ricky.

Ricky has already clinched the premier (250cc) class championship without having to run the last round, so he’s deciding to drop down into the 125cc class to attempt to take the all-time record for most wins in the class, having moved up to the top class while in a tie for that record with Mark Barnett. This is controversial to say the least, given the nature of the championship battle happening.

Grant Langston and KTM cry foul, because like I mentioned before, it was going to be a stretch for Mike to win with Grant having to finish as low as third twice in a row. All of a sudden, adding another rider the calibre of Ricky Carmichael into the field makes that scenario a lot easier to envision, and there’s even more to this story.

In addition to being the best MX rider of all time, which in itself would’ve been enough to make this controversial, do you know what else Ricky Carmichael is? He’s a Kawasaki teammate (and long-time friend) of Mike Brown, meaning that while some people choose to take Ricky at his word and believe he would’ve moved down for the record regardless of what was happening in the championship, a lot of naysayers choose to believe that this is a hired gun for Mike Brown and Kawasaki, here strictly to wedge himself into second place.

This situation is so controversial that this (a support class race) generated one of the GOAT’s most famous quotes, promising Grant Langston: “I won’t even hit you when I go by you.” The gall it takes for Ricky to say something like this (and to participate in this whole scenario in general) is on another level, but I guess if you’re the GOAT you can get away with anything.

Perhaps if this fight wasn’t so personal, none of this would’ve had to happen. This championship could’ve played out normally, but with how ugly it’s gotten, nobody is apologising for anything.

I have sympathy for Grant. Yes, he’s clearly got a bit of arrogance to him, but here he is, an 18 year old a long way from home, dealing with injury issues, and likely a worse bike than Mike Brown’s Mitch Payton Pro-Circuit Kawasaki. He’s had a dream to become the first human ever to win the world championship and American championship in back to back seasons, and he’s so close to doing it. All he has to do is stay in second place. He does not have to beat Mike Brown. He doesn’t have to put himself in a position where Mike can put him on the ground.

This looks like a pretty good spot, but all of a sudden Mike calls in a favour and gets Ricky Carmichael to come in to try to help, and Grant’s got to deal with the GOAT making glib comments to the media about how he has no intentions to wreck him?

That doesn’t feel fair.

Grant does have to beat either Mike or Ricky Carmichael in at least one of the races to win the championship. Two third places will not do, so all of a sudden he’s got to put himself in at least one dangerous situation somewhere. It’s become unavoidable.

At the same time, Mike Brown has been working ten years to try to get back to this point. Since the last time he had a real chance, he’s fallen out of the sport, gotten a real job, been a beneficiary of some lucky breaks to get back into the sport, but got exiled from American racing due to a silly advancement rule.

Since his exile, Mike has chased Grant Langston around the world trying to beat him, without any success. If not for the silliness in Binghamton, there would’ve been no need to need to bring Ricky in. He would’ve been the leader, but instead he still has to rely on some luck to win this championship.

Mike is facing much more pressure than Grant, for the obvious reason of being behind, but also because he’s 29 years old. He’s about ready to meet his maker in motocross years. Grant will be able to come back and fight again next year. There’s no guarantee of that for Mike, meaning this race should be getting all of the mental and physical energy that Mike can possibly muster, but sometimes real life doesn’t work like that.

Two weeks ago (before Binghamton), Mike and his wife Melissa Brown go through one of the hardest things on Earth to happen to a couple, losing a child to a miscarriage.

Mike admits that this makes it difficult to focus on motocross, and perhaps is a factor in his two last-second losses at Binghamton. It’d be almost impossible for him not to be far from his best coming into an occasion like this, but he needs his absolute best to be able to defeat the electric South African, once and for all.

So there you have it. It’s the young man with a young man’s dreams of conquering the motocross world against the old man with an old man’s problems of not having much longer to try to wrap up a championship and vindicate all of the years spent trying to resurrect his career. Both sides are thrown off mentally, and there’s even a side dish of the GOAT, just to make it that little bit sweeter.

That’s a lot to take in, but it’s all necessary to take in the gravity of one of the most legendary motos in the history of the sport. The twelfth and final round. Steel City 2001.

The tension is palpable, so palpable that the 125 race (in theory a minor league race) gets top billing, over of the 250 class. The whole of the TV broadcast is talking about Mike, Grant, and Ricky, mainly focusing on Grant’s young brash nature, and Mike’s crotchety old man frustrations. ESPN loved their personalities back then too, but they (and I) cannot lean on personality forever. Eventually these races have to actually happen.

There’s almost no way they can live up to the hype, but sometimes in sports it’s just a magical day. Steel City is going to live up to the hype and then some.

Right off the line for the first moto we lose one of our storylines, as Ricky goes down on the start and drops all the way to the back. He will spend the whole race running the fastest times, but will only get back to third. At the same time, Grant gets the holeshot, but Mike is right there behind him, clearing the way for our two protagonists to check out on the field. The legendary David Bailey cannot contain his excitement, proclaiming on commentary:

“This is perfect! This is what fans want to see, a fight! This is fair. I don’t see Ricky anywhere near the front.”

Fair is an interesting word to use to describe what’s been happening between these two, but David is a 3x MX champion. It’s fair to him, and I will also admit how lucky we are that we got to see our guys off the line first and second. I’ve watched every race of the 2001 season in preparation for writing, and I can count on one hand the amount of times this has happened. Even in this race, Mike comes perilously close to allowing Ernesto Fonseca through, a man who would’ve gone out of his way to cause Mike to lose. That could’ve been the championship right there, but thank goodness it isn’t.

From here, we run into a divergence in motivations. With Ricky nowhere to be found, we’re back into the situation we were in before. Grant needs only to finish in second place in order to put himself in a great spot in the points. For Mike, it’s the opposite. He’s going to ride like there is no tomorrow (like he always does) in an effort to get by, and if something is to happen to Grant in the midst of the passing manoeuvre, oh well. Consider it payback for Binghamton.

Experienced champion David Bailey is (in literal terms) yelling at Grant to just allow Mike past, to entirely eliminate the chance of anything untoward happening, because we all know by this point that both riders are willing to go there, but Grant isn’t an experienced champion. He’s 18 years old, and convinced that he’s better than Mike. He’s not letting anybody by, regardless of points implications.

This is a mistake. No question about it, but think back to your your 18 year old self. How would you have handled this situation?

You’re Grant effing Langston. You’re the world champion. Nobody has ever beaten you, especially not old man Mike back there. Would you let him by? Big picture be damned. You want to win, and you want to obliterate Mike in the process.

All of this culminates at the eight minute mark, when Mike comes out of a hairpin aiming squarely for Grant’s rear wheel, not hiding his intention to put him in the weeds. Thankfully he misses, but by now it’s become clear that Grant cannot pull away. Mike is faster. He’s going to get past eventually, but that Langston bravado will not allow him to let Mike by, even when confronted with his very clear intentions.

Around the halfway mark, the inevitable occurs. Grant makes a small mistake, but this might actually have been beneficial, as it makes the pass so easy that it forces Mike to do it clean. From here, instead of just taking it easy, Grant decides to ride right on Mike’s tail all the way to the finish line, and even try a cheeky move in one of the final corners, which results in one of the most famous moments in MX history.

Likely remembering Grant’s wheelie in his face last week in Binghamton, Mike looks back and flips Grant off as he’s going over the line, right there on ESPN, in front of God and everybody, and the two get nose to nose past the line, with the director of the AMA (also standing at the finish line) perhaps being the only thing averting a fistfight.

I talked last week about the level of disrespect, but if there could ever be a clearer sign that these riders have went there, I don’t know what it could be. It’s not an entirely unwarranted gesture. Grant did ride like a nit the whole race when there was no reason to do so, but my goodness. Battles in sports do not often get this personal, and once again Grant shows up for his post-race interview with a healthy amount of shamelessness:

“He flipped me off. I don’t know why. I think he’s frustrated because I put him under pressure. I’ll just come out and beat him in the second moto … I’m not trying to make it personal. He’s the one getting upset all the time. I don’t know what his problem is. I think he’s a sore loser. I’ll come out and ride better in the second moto, and I’ll be able to avoid racing with him.”

Mike responds to an equal degree of deliberate mistruth:

“I tried to race him clean. When I passed him, I wasn’t bumping him or anything. I know it’s racing and he wants to win, but I can do the same thing he does [referring to Binghamton] and I’m not doing it right now. I shouldn’t have got mad about that, but I did. In the second moto, if I get a chance I know I will bump him, but I’m not going to try to kill him. I’ve just had a few more bumps than he’s gotten.”

Grant, he’s not frustrated because you put him under pressure. He’s frustrated because you put him under pressure when there was absolutely no reason to do so, greatly increasing the chance of injury to both of you. You’re not trying to make it personal? That explains why you’ve been downplaying his skills for an entire season, and did a wheelie on him last week. Also, it takes a lot of gall to refer to a man who’s just beaten you as a sore loser.

Mike, are you going to act like we didn’t see you try to put him in the weeds? You tried to stoop to his level. You just failed at it. You don’t get to act all high and mighty because your eventual pass was clean. Your intentions were clear as day. I will agree that he’s hit you more than you’ve hit him, but if you could’ve pulled away at all those rounds there would’ve been no need to worry about it.

We can see now that the gloves are off. These two men are doing everything in their power to get any edge over the other. With Mike’s first place to Grant’s second only narrowing the gap by three points, that leaves Grant six points ahead going into the 24th and final race of the season, meaning that if Mike wins, Grant need only finish third to realise his dream of becoming back to back world and American champion.

Third is key, because that means Mike needs help from more than just Ricky Carmichael. He’s going to need somebody else to also beat Grant, and it’s been a month since anybody (other than Mike himself) has been able to do that. Needless to say, Mike’s odds are long.

It takes only one lap for his odds to go from long to impossible.

Mike goes down halfway round the first lap, and gets up around mid-pack.

The dejection is immediate. What an anticlimax.

After all of that buildup, we’re not going to get a championship fight at all. If even the great Ricky Carmichael could only get back to third place after going down on lap one, what can we expect journeyman Mike Brown to do?

Instantly, the atmosphere goes from one of the most anticipated races in history to that of a funeral. What makes it even worse is that Grant didn’t get off the line that great either. He ends lap one running in fifth place, with one of those in front being Ricky, who even the great Grant Langston isn’t liable to catch. This could’ve been Mike’s chance. He would’ve only needed one other rider to keep Grant behind, and this could’ve been his to lose.

Instead, he’s nowhere, but if you believe that Mike Brown is going to give up, then I’ve done a poor job explaining to you who Mike Brown is. Remember all the way, 7000 words ago, when I told you that you can make up seconds per lap in motocross by committing to push?

Mike is committing to run this entire race like a bat out of hell. It’s the only way.

Trying to do this while dicing through traffic is extraordinarily risky. Remember that Travis Pastrana injured himself in the lead on his own, with no traffic. For Mike there’s even more risk. The risk of serious injury is present on every landing, and in every corner. Not every rider would have the guts to do this. Ricky didn’t, which is why he could only get back to third place earlier, but this is everything to Mike.

It’s championship or nothing.

Luckily for Mike, some people understand his situation, and wave him past, but not all of them. It’s actually somewhat difficult to pass when you’re running seconds faster, because it’s entirely possible that you come up so fast that the other competitors don’t even know you’re there yet, and will turn in on you when you’re alongside, causing a crash. Mike needs to just assume the other riders will get out of the way for his passing attempts, because there is no time to waste. It’s taking a risk of crashing every time, but there’s no time to worry about that.

TV cuts to Mike caught up behind Brock Sellards (KTM teammates with Grant). No time for that. Mike just shoves him out of the way, and pulls away at an unbelievable rate of speed. Eight minutes into the race he’s already back up to seventh, where he now has to go up against the sixth place rider.

Ernesto Fonseca.

Unbelievably, putting all differences aside for the good of the championship fight, Ernesto waves him by. This leaves everybody’s jaw on the floor, but high fives to him. This fight is bigger than Ernesto Fonseca. He can get revenge on Mike Brown another day.

The next rider Mike comes up on is Nate Ramsey, and Mike is so much faster that it induces the legendary Art Eckman to say ‘that was so fast I couldn’t even say bar to bar,’ as he blows straight by. Mike is much faster than anybody else on track, while dicing through traffic. It’s unbelievable. He’s so fast that he goes down, loses two places, and takes only one lap to gain both places back.

He’s so fast that at about the 20 minute mark, we get another confrontation between rivals.

In the meantime while Mike has been making his wicked comeback, Grant has risen all the way to second place. This is exactly the position he needs to be in. He can even let Mike by, finish in third place, and win the championship by one point… and that’s exactly what we see. Mike Brown breezes past, and sets after Ricky Carmichael.

I said everybody’s jaws dropped when Ernesto Fonseca let Mike Brown by, but nobody, and I mean nobody could’ve predicted that Grant Langston was going to do it. We saw in the first race that what’s best for the championship makes no difference to this young South African. He’s going to fight to the bitter end no matter what, which makes this an extremely out of character moment for him.

For about 30 seconds.

Defiant to the end, Grant would never let Mike by. As we see once we get a better TV shot, Grant’s bike is falling apart. One of the spokes on the rear wheel is broken, and has been broken for a long time.

As it turns out, Grant has spent a lot of the race nursing the rear wheel, which explains why he was running so slow, and explains why Mike was able to catch him. Much like a cylinder on an engine, you can run without one, but one wheel spoke being broken means more are going to break, and after Mike goes by Grant starts riding (not jumping) the jumps.

To win the championship with Mike in second, Grant needs only to finish in fifth place, but he can’t do it. His bike has fallen apart underneath him. He pulls over to the side of the track for a DNF, and breaks down in tears.

With the championship won, Mike slows down to let his buddy Ricky get his win record, and that’s it.

It’s over.

Mike Brown has won.

He only gets about one metre over the finish line before stopping himself. He just can’t ride anymore, not one cm further. His wife Melissa joins him (something which is common for some spouses, but never for Melissa Brown), and the two cry together on the side of the track. After all they’ve been through, I can’t say I’m not happy for this result.

Mike Brown has finally made it all the way back. After falling victim to his own lack of work ethic as a young man. After falling victim to the sport’s bias towards indoor riding. After failing his chance at the big time. After falling out of the sport altogether. After taking one last hurrah to get back into the sport, but being forced out of American racing by a silly advancement rule, and after not even being able to win the world championship, stonewalled by a phenom named Grant Langston, he’s done it.

He is champion.

He’s finally beaten Grant. He’s finally made those people intent on calling him a journeyman to eat their words. At 29 years old, he’s not washed up. He’s the best he’ll ever be. He had to dig deep down within himself, and he had to go there, to defeat a rider of Grant’s calibre, but he did it.

Is this the most impressive championship there’s ever been? No. In the end, Mike scored only 458 points, which is one of the lowest points totals for a championship winner of all time. He won only eight races to Grant’s ten, and at one time was 51 points behind Grant in the championship. This was a wild comeback out of a man who (personally and professionally) really needed it.

The final round at Steel City encapsulates all of this. In the first race, Mike fought Grant to the bitter end, and was able to beat him in a straight fight, even if there were some theatrics at the end. In the second, Mike was so hopelessly behind that he had to have known it was over, but he never gave up. He kept riding (risking great personal harm in the process) even when there was no reason to, and in the end fate intervened to ensure that his efforts would be rewarded.

Fate was much less kind to Grant Langston. Fate broke him in half, and my heart is broken for him. In his closing comments, commentator (and three time champion) David Bailey sums it up this way:

“What a weird day. So many people letting people by. Mike Brown [referring to his slowing down on the final lap] is not the only guy to let somebody by today. We saw Fonseca do it. Other riders did it. Everybody gets a gift. Kevin Windham gets a gift in the 250cc class. Ricky gets a gift right now. Mike Brown gets a gift. Grant Langston gets nothing.”

I couldn’t have said it any better myself.

What a cruel way to lose for Grant Langston. It would’ve been one thing if Kawasaki’s Carmichael ploy had worked. That still would’ve felt unfair, but it would’ve felt more fair than this. A mechanical failure (his only one of the season) with five minutes to go in the final race when he was in position to win the championship that he’d been dreaming about is so cruel it’s unimaginable.

Take a look back on Grant’s season. You’re clearly the fastest rider. Winning the first four races in a row proves that, but all of a sudden guaranteeing victory at Southwick believing your competition was Travis Pastrana, only to separate your shoulder in practice, means you’re not the fastest rider anymore, but your mistaken belief in Pastrana means you never even see Mike Brown coming.

Once you realise it’s going to be a battle between he and you, it gets really personal really quickly, but once your shoulder heals you’re once again clearly faster than he is. You were competitive with him even with a separated shoulder. This has you in position to win a championship that’s narrower than it should’ve been, but nowhere on the championship plaque is your margin of victory posted. You’re about to accomplish your dream of winning the world championship and the American championship back to back, but then your rear wheel breaks, and you’ve lost.

Would Grant Langston have won this championship without the shoulder issues? Almost certainly. Would Grant Langston have won this championship without the mechanical failure at the final round? Almost certainly. I have nowhere else to go with that. It just had to be mentioned.

I wonder what he was thinking as he was crying on the side of the track, watching Mike Brown go by over and over. It would’ve been very easy to let the mind wander to Southwick. What if he just hadn’t been so brash with the media? Would he have felt the urge to try so hard in practice? What about Troy? If not for the miserable 4-8 there the gap could’ve been a lot wider, maybe a whole race’s worth.

Was it all worth it? Not bothering to defend the world championship, moving straight to America? Was it worth it to gut through the bad shoulder? Was it worth it to make this into a personal war with Mike?

Only Grant knows the answers to those questions, but I know that it’s heartbreaking as an observer to have all that work be for nothing because of a broken rear wheel spoke.

Because of that broken wheel spoke, Mike Brown gets to be the one with the winner’s circle interview, in which he actually shows some remorse for Grant’s poor luck, and breaks into tears saying that he wished his mom and dad could’ve been there to see him win, but an awesome moment is when Grant busts into the interview, and the two share a hug and cry together.

However, the true closing moment of the 2001 MX season, the main event if you will, is the final thing they show on TV, an interview with a Grant Langston who is still barely able to keep it together.

He refuses to praise Mike. Things have come too far for that, but the interview is conciliatory in tone:

“He won, and he must be really excited. Obviously, I would’ve loved that to have been me, but he was the guy who was there at every race this year. Possibly he had a little bit of luck, but he won. It’s hard to congratulate him, because I honestly feel like the championship is mine, but he won it.”

This is a very fitting response given the nature of this 2001 battle. He stops well short of saying the better man won, or praising Mike in any fashion, but he admits that Mike has won, and congratulates him for it.

I respect Grant for this.

He could’ve been (and has been) a lot more immature than this, but this is the way to take a hard-luck loss like a man. You don’t have to admit that your opponent was better than you. You don’t have to admit that he won fair and square, but you do have to admit that he won, and that’s exactly what Grant did.

Do yourselves a favour. Watch Steel City 2001. Skip the 250cc races. Nobody cares about those, but soak in this legendary 125 battle for yourself.

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Mike Brown and Grant Langston have very different stories and come from very different backgrounds. One good old boy from Tennessee. One kid brought up in Apartheid South Africa. One journeyman who’d botched his chance. One young phenom ready to take the sport by storm, but when they got together, it was electric.

They chased each other around the world trying to win this championship. In the end, both men ended up in tears on the side of the track in Steel City, but that was always going to happen wasn’t it? Mike and Grant matched each other shot for shot, be it in the media or on the track, but there is only room for one winner. It was always going to be the case that one man’s effort would be rewarded with elation, and the other man’s effort would be punished with heartbreak.

Only sport can create a story like this, a story of two men from such disparate backgrounds rubbing up against each other, and of all the fireworks that ensued. Grant and Mike over the years would develop a friendship based on the professional respect that always existed, but for two seasons they were the most bitter of rivals.

These two men would walk very different paths after their legendary 2001 confrontation.

Mike Brown would never advance into the premier class, spending his whole career skirting advancement rules to be the oldest support class rider of all time. Even with this reduced level of competition, he will never be a championship calibre rider again. His two encounters with Grant (in 2000 in Europe and 2001 in America) were the only chances he would ever get to win a championship, and like the legend he is, he was able to convert one of them into one of the most prestigious championships in the dirt racing world.

Barring one hiccup in 2004 stuck on a horrendous KTM, Grant Langston would never again finish a full season without winning a championship. Injuries destroyed his 2002 season, but 2003, 2005, 2006, and 2007 were all championship years for Grant. When the GOAT Ricky Carmichael retired from the premier class in 2007, who was there to pick up the pieces?

Grant Langston. This 2007 championship is ranked the least impressive national championship of the new millennium, but championship plaques hang forever. When Ricky Carmichael was gone, the champion was Grant, proving that he was the phenom that everybody (and himself) thought he was all along, and making Mike beating him look even better in the history books, before losing his career to injury at the young age of 25.

Like I said at the very top. There is a reason things become cliché. American vs foreigner is a story that works. Young vs old is a story that works. David vs goliath is a story that works. A hard luck loser is a story that works. Triumph. Tragedy. Personal insults. Showboating conducted back and forth. All of these work individually, but when you rub them all together, what do you get?

You get one of the best sports stories of all time.

You get Mike Brown vs Grant Langston.

Thanks so much for reading.

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Hey guys! I know. That was really long. I apologize, but great story huh?

I’m not typically one to beg for feedback, but this is my first non-football post that I’ve put a substantial amount of effort into in over a year. I’d love to ask how it went. Did you like my trying to branch out? Or should I just stick to football?

I know. Niche down, not up. Blah blah blah. Please don’t answer that way. I’m a writer. I don’t want to hear about business. I’m legitimately asking. Did this go well? Is it up to my usual standards, quality wise? It’s difficult for me to tell. I’d love any comment you’d be able to leave. Thank you very much!