I’m a Life Member of the AMA and I have mixed feelings about that

My AMA Charter Life Member certificate.

I am now a Charter Life Member of the American Motorcyclist Association. All that means is that I just paid my annual dues for the 25th time, so I don’t have to pay dues the rest of my life. It’s a milestone that’s both more significant than I would have predicted 25 years ago and less satisfying than I imagined 10 years ago. There have been some detours in the road over the past quarter century, as there are in any life.

Of course the most significant detour in my case is that I went from being an AMA member, to an employee, and back to being just a member. Some of the things I learned about the association along the way surprised me.

Most AMA members join for one of two reasons: to race in AMA-sanctioned events or because they’ve decided motorcycling is more than just a passing interest and they want to support an organization that represents those of us who ride. Many of the racers join (or rather their parents sign them up) at age 6 or so, when they’re dreaming of winning a spot in the national amateur championships at the Loretta Lynn Ranch as a stepping stone to Supercross stardom, so Charter Life membership comes early, assuming they don’t drop out and let it lapse. For the other group, of which I’m a part, 25 years of uninterrupted membership usually comes with very different life markers. The eyesight is a little less sharp for spotting the gravel in the corner and the lap times at our track days just aren’t getting any quicker.

Like so many others who join as an adult, I signed up when I reached an awareness that riding a motorcycle was more than just a hobby. It was part of my identity, my transportation, my travel, my entertainment, my sport all wrapped up in one. That realization came after a year when I couldn’t ride.

In 1991, I took a year off from my career to work as a volunteer English teacher in Costa Rica. Due to the rules of the program I worked for, as well as practical matters, I couldn’t have a vehicle. So for a year, I neither rode nor drove, and that crystallized my thinking. I didn’t miss the car I sold before I went abroad, but I spent a lot of time missing my motorcycle (and dreaming of a better one). I resolved that when I finished my year as a volunteer and returned to work, I would be a rider first, not a driver.

In fact, I haven’t bought a car since. My next paying job took me to Puerto Rico, where it was easy to go motorcycle-only, and as soon as I had a mailing address, I joined the AMA. That was 1992. In recent months, my credit card got dinged for the 25th time. Thus the certificate you see above.

What I didn’t know in 1992 is that nine years later I’d leave Puerto Rico to move to Ohio to work for the AMA. For seven years, I worked on the association’s magazine and web site before leaving in 2008 to return to freelancing and to escape the turmoil and unpleasant work atmosphere created by AMA President Rob Dingman.

Dingman and the Board of Directors that hired him once talked of having a million AMA members. Instead, under their leadership, the association has shrunk and is now closer to the size it was when I first joined in 1992 than it was when I resigned my job in 2008. Dingman’s litmus test was infamous (more than one employee told of being asked, “Are you going to be loyal to the AMA or are you going to be loyal to me?”) and fear and firings were his management tactics.

As a result, I know people who refuse to be members as long as Dingman remains president. I understand their position. After thinking about it, though, I decided to remain a member for two reasons, one philosophical and one practical. First, while I resolved not to become one of those obsessed and discontented souls wandering the motorcycle industry landscape, I knew I would now and then be critical of Dingman, his hand-picked leadership team and the AMA Board, and I felt that I would have more standing if I were also a member. Second, as a more practical matter, I was getting close to that life membership level. There is a certain satisfaction in knowing they are stuck with me for life.

Back in 2001 when I went to work at the AMA, two things surprised me. I somehow expected that everyone who worked there would be a rider. While most had some kind of tie to motorcycling, motorcycles never outnumbered cars in the employee parking lot on even the most perfect June day, and maybe half a dozen of the 80-some employees always commuted by motorcycle whenever possible.

The other thing that surprised me is that, unlike me, most employees had not been AMA members before they came to work there. In fact, Dingman is one of those who became an AMA member only when he started getting an AMA paycheck, in his case when he went to work in the Washington office not many years after I joined as a member living in Puerto Rico. I had assumed that people who wanted to work there would have been enthusiastic and committed motorcyclists who would have already taken the step of joining. It wasn’t usually so.

I have written before about the demographic and economic headwinds the AMA faces, just like the rest of the motorcycle industry. In addition to those challenges, the association’s current leadership, even though they came in full of swagger and proclaiming that past leadership had been incompetent, hasn’t figured out how to make the AMA relevant to enough motorcyclists. They might have a better chance of succeeding in appealing to people who ride if they understood them better. Maybe they’d understand serious riders better if they were the kind of people who cared enough to join the AMA before they started getting an AMA paycheck.