The surprising battle between Davi Millsaps and Ryan Villopoto for the Supercross title this year reminds me of the time I was wrong.
OK, truth is I’ve been wrong more than once, as my wife and several former employers will be happy to confirm. But on the positive side of the ledger, the surprising emergence of Millsaps as not just a contender, but a steady points leader in this year’s Monster Energy Supercross season, suggests I wasn’t as wrong as I thought I was.
Davi Millsaps
Let me explain.
One of the surprisingly enjoyable jobs I had a decade ago was covering the AMA Motocross Amateur Nationals in the backwoods of the Loretta Lynn Ranch in Tennessee for the AMA website and magazine. Every day for a week, from 7:30 a.m. to early evening, I breathed Tennessee dust and turned crispy in the August sun while my ears were assaulted by zinging two-strokes and the flatulent blast of four-stroke singles. Then I worked into the night writing it up for the website.
That wasn’t the fun part.
The fun part was seeing these talented and dedicated and competitive young riders progress up the ladder of competition each year and trying to predict which ones would go on to succeed at the professional level. In 2001, the first year I went to Loretta Lynn’s, as everyone calls it, James Stewart was in the final days of his amateur career and the ease with which he literally left competitors (even older and more experienced ones) in the dust, in all six of his motos, made it clear where he was going.
The future was less clear about three other riders who are now at the peaks of their careers in Supercross. Davi Millsaps (2003), Mike Alessi (2004) and Ryan Villopoto (2005) each won the AMA Horizon Award, which goes to the most promising amateur at the motocross nationals. Of course the inevitable bench racing game is speculating on which one would be most successful as a pro.
And that’s where I made a prediction that looked very wrong, up until this year. I told a colleague of mine, who happened to be an amateur off-road racer himself, and thus more knowledgeable about motocross than this street rider, that I thought Millsaps would prove to be a tougher and more successful competitor than Villopoto. He looked at me in a way that suggested he was skeptical but was too kind to dispute the point.
Of course Villopoto has since gone on a hugely successful run, from his brilliant Motocross des Nations performance to multiple championships, including the last two years in Supercross. Meanwhile, Millsaps won a regional Lites title and a single race at the top level. My prediction seemed proven to be ridiculously off the mark.
My prediction had been based not on pure riding skill. It was more based on mental toughness, and lessons drawn from my own childhood in tough small towns where we often had grade school playground fistfights but never heard of an “anti-bullying campaign,” and maybe 10 percent of my high school classmates went on to college. I remember other boys who had that flat-eyed stare of self-confidence and a big chip on their shoulders. They always seemed to do better than me at sports and playground brawling, while I was the one perpetually overthinking things, letting self-doubt creep in just when I needed to make a key free throw to save the game.
As a teen competitor at Loretta Lynn’s, Millsaps had the eyes of a shark. Nothing seemed to scare him. Those were the days when some in the Alessi camp were wearing “Believe the hype” T-shirts and were methodically building a groupie fan base for the Alessi brothers as if they were already stars, not middle school students, and it seemed to me that Villopoto sometimes did believe the hype. Alessi would get one of his signature holeshots, Villopoto would track him down and pass him, and then, as if feeling too much pressure from being in front of his rival, he’d make a mistake, crash, and Alessi would motor by. It seemed to me that Millsaps had mental armor that Villopoto didn’t. Thus my prediction.
My two mistakes were not having a sufficiently sophisticated understanding of motocross to recognize Villopoto’s skill (heck, all these kids were far more talented on the dirt than I could imagine being) and forgetting how fast kids change at that age, and how quickly they can gain mental toughness when going from boys to men, as fast as hot steel plunged into cold water.
My wife works with college students, and I’ve seen several who appeared to be on the verge of throwing away their opportunities but instead found a spark of motivation and turned themselves around in what seemed like an instant, no doubt hugely changing the course of their lives. I’ve seen my best friend’s son transform overnight from listlessly wandering through his education to a knuckled-down A student. My wife’s oldest nephew, an unmotivated high school student, blossomed when he realized how college could give him so much more, but he had to earn his way in. I remember it in my own transition from a boy to a man.
My point is this: Kids on the cusp of adulthood can turn their lives in a new direction in an instant. The hope and lesson in that for us as adults is not to give up on them, because the potential is always there.
So much of success in Supercross comes from not making mistakes and not getting hurt. Millsaps is finally having a year where he’s healthy and prepared, and that’s why his mental toughness is shining through in the form of success. Meanwhile, Villopoto has long since proven his skill, his talent, his desire and his dedication.
It should be a fun Supercross season.
