by Don Mann
Owing to my long years in service and my career in extreme adventure sports—which has included seventy-five thousand miles of running and three hundred thousand miles of biking—I’m also known on the teams as the high-mileage SEAL.
Over the years I developed a reputation for being one of the ST-6 commandos who liked to push the envelope. Rip it apart if I could.
Like the time I decided to beat the biannual SEAL physical-readiness test record in Panama on a black-flag day. Black flag means “dangerously high heat.” According to base policy, military and civilian personnel weren’t allowed to exercise or work outside on a black-flag day. I said, The hell with that, and set out to beat the course record.
In the hundred-degree, high-humidity heat, I performed 120 push-ups and 120 sit-ups, swam a half a mile, and followed that with a three-mile run. During the run, less than three hundred meters from the finish line, my vision started to blur to the point that I couldn’t tell the people from the trees. I kept pushing harder. Woke up on my back looking up at the timekeeper—a senior chief petty officer in a khaki uniform.
“Did I break seventeen thirty?” I asked him, referring to the course record of seventeen minutes and thirty seconds.
“Seventeen twenty-eight, you maniac,” he answered.
“Then I’m okay.”
Most people have no idea of what their full potential is. One of my mottos is Blood from Any Orifice. Because I figure that if you don’t push beyond what you think your limits are, you’ll never know your true abilities.
I’ve always tested limits. People who know me say that despite my intensity, I appear to be soft-spoken and relaxed. Truth is, over the years I’ve learned to manage the almost uncontrollable fire burning inside me.
But I put my parents through living hell growing up.
I was a bad kid, and I’m not proud of the fact that I was a lousy role model to my younger brother, sisters, and friends. My parents were good, kind, loving people who deserved better than what I gave them.
My dad loved his country so much that the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor he quit high school to join the Navy. He became a distinguished stunt pilot. On the last day of World War II, an officer ordered him and fifteen of his fellow sailors to stand on the platform of an aircraft carrier so that they could be ceremoniously lowered down to the dock.
But the platform mechanism broke and they fell sixty feet. My dad broke his back. One sailor died. Since then he had a soft spot for disabled vets—volunteering long hours at the local VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars) and serving as the state commander of the VFW in South Carolina. He ended up working as an executive in large insurance companies, and he still liked nothing more than to make other people laugh and have a good time.
My mom was a Limestone, Maine, homecoming queen, the valedictorian of her class, and the salt of the earth—totally dedicated to her family in every way. She was born premature, weighing three pounds, in an early February blizzard. Her parents didn’t think she would survive, but they put her in the kitchen oven to keep her warm until the storm eased up enough for them to get her to a hospital.
She had a quick, sarcastic wit that made all of us laugh. She and my dad were like a comedy team at parties—the local Stiller and Meara.
And I was their first son—a bat-out-of-hell, shit-kicker motorcycle punk. I popped out of my mother’s womb with a wild, crazy energy that has never let up.
We lived in various spots throughout New England—Limestone, Maine; Orange, Connecticut; Nashua, New Hampshire—but I consider Methuen, Massachusetts, to be my childhood home (it’s also where my dad was born). It’s situated in the northeast part of the state, right across the border from Rockingham County, New Hampshire. Back in the 1970s, Methuen and nearby Orange were considered Mafia towns. Methuen was rough but bucolic, with ponds, streams, the Merrimack and Spicket Rivers, a bird sanctuary, and lots of forested land.
I was into giving myself impossible challenges from the start. Beginning in second grade, one of my favorite activities was to go into the woods and walk for hours in a random direction, then try to find my way home.
By fourth grade, I was sneaking smokes on the school playground and building go-carts out of shopping-cart wheels and scraps of wood. My buddies and I would slip out at night and meet at the cemetery, which had this wicked long hill. We’d fly down it in the dark, screaming and often crashing into headstones. Part of me knew what we were doing was wrong, but I was young and filled with wild, anarchic energy, and it was so much damn fun.
By fifth grade, I’d graduated to minibikes, which led to dirt bikes and motorcycles. Then I was really gone.
I loved the smell, the roar, the power, the promise of the track, open trail, and road. For me, nothing matched the excitement of riding fast and hitting the jumps hard so I sailed high in the air. The suspense that occurred during flight was incredible.
My dad, bless his heart, tried his best to keep me under some kind of control. Because I was too young to get a license, he told me to stick to riding on the track or on the trails in the woods behind our house. But I couldn’t resist the lure of the streets—where the big kids rode their choppers.
I craved danger, action, and adventure, and it won’t surprise you that my hero growing up was Evel Knievel—a man who wasn’t afraid to look death in the face.
Imitating my idol, I’d roar down the streets on my Kawasaki 175 doing wheelies, scaring old ladies, and getting into fights.
I studied Evel’s life and knew he failed as many times as he succeeded. When he attempted to jump the fountains outside of Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, his bike malfunctioned on takeoff, causing him to hit the safety ramp and skid across the parking lot, which resulted in a crushed pelvis and femur, fractures to his wrist and both ankles, and a concussion that kept him in a coma for twenty-nine days.
In ’68 he crashed while attempting to jump fifteen Ford Mustangs and broke his right leg and foot. Three years later, in California, while trying to jump thirteen Pepsi delivery trucks, he came down front-wheel-first on the base of the ramp and was thrown off his bike. He broke his collarbone and suffered compound fractures of his right arm and both legs.
He ended up in the Guinness book of world records for suffering the most broken bones in a lifetime—433. But through it all, he never backed down from a promise. I considered that important. Evel said, “When you give your word to somebody that you’re going to do something, you’ve gotta do it,” and when he promised an audience he would make a jump, he did it, even when he realized that it was impossible.
Years later, and with both of his arms in casts, Evel Knievel flew out to California and confronted a promoter named Shelly Saltman who alleged that Evel had abused his wife and kids and used drugs. Evel attacked Saltman outside Twentieth Century Fox studios with a baseball bat and shattered his wrist and arm.
He also told kids to stay in school and not do drugs.
I listened to him, even though drugs and failure were becoming more and more common all around me.
Another big influence was the Hells Angels, which was a paradox, since Evel regularly criticized them for dealing drugs.
Motorcycle gangs were big in our neck of New England. Besides the Angels, we had the Huns, Evil Spirits, Hole in the Wall—and given the environment I grew up in, it was probably inevitable that the guys I hung out with started stealing motorcycles and cars. They targeted kids who they thought didn’t deserve them. For example, if they heard that some rich kid’s father had bought his son a fancy new Honda motorcycle or a Camaro, one of them would say, “That douche bag doesn’t even know how to ride; let’s go rob the sucker.”
No wonder the area I grew up in eventually became one of the stolen-car capitals of the United States. In the early to middle 1970s, many of the stolen vehicles were driven to a place called the Pit, located in a heavily wooded part of Methuen, Massachusetts, where the cars and motorcycles were stripped for parts.
Even though I drew the line at stea
ling, I got a kick out of driving a stripped car up a steep hill, putting it in neutral, riding down, and jumping out before it crashed into the other cars and trees below. I also liked to fight, ride, and get crazy.
By the time I was in sixth grade, the kids around me were drinking and doing drugs. Our drink of choice was something we called a Tango—orange juice and lots of vodka. We also drank our share of Boone’s Farm wine, which to our unsophisticated palates tasted fantastic.
I became a ringleader. I was the only non-Italian in our group, the Flat Rats—so named because we lived in a suburban part of the town called the Flats. Many of my friends had dads and uncles who were members of the Mafia. We had long hair and wore black leather jackets, jeans, tight-fitting T-shirts, and black boots.
Total hell-raisers.
One summer afternoon I was out on the road riding motorcycles with my buddy Greg. I said, “Hey, Greg, if you see the cops, take off. Because if I get caught, my dad will kill me.” I was maybe fifteen years old. Too young to have a driver’s license. Trying to outrun the cops was always a good time.
We were cruising up a local two-way back-country road north of Methuen when we came to a stop at a four-way stop sign, and I spotted a cop car to my left. I yelled, “Greg. Cops. Take off!”
He pulled back on the throttle but flooded out and stalled.
I hung a right on my Kawasaki 175 and took off. WFO (wide fucking open), we called it. To my mind, WFO was the only way to go.
My bike could only get up to about seventy-two miles an hour max, so on the straight stretches of road, the cop car got right up on my tail. I braked, downshifted, and turned right onto somebody’s lawn. Because the grass was wet, I did a quick one-eighty, spitting up a rooster tail of mud and grass.
The cop surprised me and turned onto the lawn too.
This guy wasn’t going to be easy to shake.
I peeled off back in the direction I’d come from, thinking that maybe I’d catch up with Greg. My Kawasaki screamed, the cop’s siren blared, and adrenaline raced through my veins. Approaching the four-way stop sign, I saw another cop cruiser light up its flashers and join the chase.
Now I had two cop cars on my tail.
I tore through one town after another, running through my repertoire of tricks. My favorite was to stick my right arm out like I was pulling over, then, when the cruisers passed me, gun the bike and scream by, shooting the cops my see-ya smile.
But nothing seemed to work. After forty-five minutes of being chased, I began to worry. None of my previous escapades with the police had lasted this long. I was actually more worried about my father than the cops.
My long hair flying out of the back of my helmet, I tore down country roads with the cops on my tail. Approaching cars had to swerve off to the side to give us room to pass. I was a small kid—maybe five seven at fifteen years old—and the bike was too big for me, so I was bouncing up and down on the seat and gas tank, which hurt.
One police car inched up to my back wheel, and, determined not to get caught, I zoomed faster, past a large farm where some of my buddies and I had worked. Some of the Puerto Rican workers out in the fields picking corn recognized me and started cheering. They yelled words of encouragement.
Salem, New Hampshire, was just ahead. I saw the light at the five-way intersection turn red. To my right was a Dairy Queen parking lot crowded with pickups and station wagons filled with families and kids going out to get a summer afternoon sundae swirl or shake.
I made a split-second decision and turned into the crowded lot.
People panicked. Mothers screamed, “Watch out!” and grabbed their children. They wrapped them in protective hugs while their husbands cursed me: “Lunatic!” “Asshole!” “Hoodlum!” “Stupid punk!”
I wove my way through the maze of vehicles and people, braked when I absolutely had to, and skidded my way through.
The cops had to steer around it, which meant that I gained a little time, but they quickly caught up with me on a long, straight country road. My bike was screaming hot and I was running low on fuel.
One of the cop cars—the one that was aggressively staying near my back wheel—passed and cut in front of me. I braked hard, downshifted fast, and faced two options: One, slam into his car broadside. Two, cut left into unknown terrain.
I chose the second and was immediately confronted with a five-foot-high stone wall. Sudden death. At the last second I spotted a tiny opening and miraculously squeezed through.
Whew!
A second or so later I hit something that stopped me and almost caused me to fly off the bike and do an endo (end over end). A large root had lodged itself between the frame of my bike and the engine.
I tried pulling the root out. No luck.
Looking back, I saw the cops running toward me with their sticks and pistols ready.
I cut the engine and asked myself: What do I do now?
Before I could think of an answer, one of the cops grabbed me by the hair sticking out of the back of my helmet and yanked me off seat and over the back fender. I hit the ground and immediately felt a nightstick crash into my ribs.
I felt a sharp pain. Then another. Then dozens in succession from multiple cops.
They beat the living hell out of me until I passed out. I woke hours later on a bench in a local jail, badly bruised and hurting.
I called my mom, who was extremely upset but managed to remain calm. She came and got me released on bail.
I said, “Mom, I’m really sorry.”
She looked at me sadly and shook her head. “When your dad comes home tonight, make sure you tell him everything that happened.”
Most weeks he was away from home four out of five nights, traveling for work. But because this was a Friday, my dad returned for the weekend at around eight.
When he walked in the front door, I was still wearing the same tank top that I’d had on all day. It was ripped and spotted with dried blood. My bottom lip was badly swollen and I had big black-and-blue bruises covering my ribs, arms, and shoulders.
He asked, “What happened? You have an accident on your bike?”
“No, Dad. I got caught riding on the road.”
“You were riding on the road?”
“Yes,” I answered. “But look what the cops did to me. I was unconscious by the time the cops hauled me to jail.”
I couldn’t tell if Dad was angrier at me or the cops. He wanted to know the name of the arresting officer.
“Officer Phil Smith,” I told him. “Of the Salem, New Hampshire, police department.”
Seconds later he was on the phone saying, “This is Arthur Mann. You arrested my son this afternoon for riding on the road, but you had no right to beat him up the way you did.”
I watched the expression on his face change from outrage at them to anger at me as he listened to Officer Smith describe chasing me through four towns and two states, the cars that had been run off the road, and the scene in the Dairy Queen parking lot. I heard the officer explain, “We would have shot your son, but he looked too young.”
My father’s face was red when he turned to me and said, “You’re never riding that motorcycle again as long as you live in this house! You understand me?”
I nodded and said, “Yes, Dad.” But I was thinking, Where am I going to live?
I mean, I had to keep riding and racing motorcycles.
I stashed my Kawasaki in the basement and worked on it at night. For a couple of weeks, I obeyed my dad, but I knew it was just a matter of time.
One Saturday afternoon a couple weeks later, my dad asked me if I would go pick up my brother at his friend’s house.
“On my bike?” I asked, knowing that where we lived, kids were allowed to ride on the back-country dirt roads without a license.
He said, “Okay. I’ll make an exception this time.”
Excited, I passed through the kitchen where my mom and my sister Wendy were washing dishes.
Minutes later I was screaming down a dirt ro
ad, enjoying the wind in my face and the smell and the feel of my Kawasaki. I knew that I’d be passing the house of my girlfriend, Jody, and I wanted to impress her. To let her know that I was back.
She lived on a dirt road by a lake. The lake was on my right; her house was on my left. I did a second-to-third-gear wheelie as I swerved around the corner.
It just so happened that a friend of mine was on his bike speeding in my direction. He was in the process of passing a car around that same corner, and we smashed into each other head-on.
My girlfriend, Jody, was looking out her bedroom window, and she heard a terrible crash and saw both bikes fly in the air. She said they rose as high as the telephone lines.
I hit the ground and broke all the ribs on my right side so severely that bone fragments stuck into my liver. I also broke my arm and several bones in my face and suffered a concussion. I was in a coma for almost a week.
The doctors told my parents that I wasn’t going to survive.
I woke up hovering near the ceiling of a hospital hallway. Below, I saw my dad in his suit and tie holding my mother, who was crying. They were watching a gurney being wheeled past by several orderlies. A bloody sheet covered a body.
Months later, I realized that I had had a near-death experience.
I was looking at myself.
It look me months to recover from my injuries, and between visits from my hoodlum friends, I made a decision to dedicate my life to something, and I chose the only thing that really excited me at the time: motocross racing.
