A look back at the 1972 Superbowl of Motocross

THE
A look back at the 1972 Superbowl of
Motocross — conceived by promoter
Mike Goodwin, held in the legendary
Los Angeles Coliseum and won by
Marty Tripes — through the lens of
17-year-old high-school student,
photographer and racer Greg Owen
FIRST S
T
he first super Bowl — held at the Los Angeles
Memorial Coliseum on January 15, 1967 —
was a lopsided affair, the Green Bay Packers
dousing the Kansas City Chiefs 35-10 on the brilliant
passing of Bart starr, who racked up 250 passing
yards and threw for two touchdowns on his way to
earning the game’s MVP award.
the first superbowl of Motocross, held at that
same Coliseum five and a half years later, was
significantly more hard-fought. sixteen-year-old
Marty tripes, a local boy from san diego, went 2-22 in the three-moto format that evening, snatching
the overall win from a trio of very fast European
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Words: Mitch BoehM
Photos: GreG oWeN
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T SUPERBOWL
And they’re off! torsten hallman grabs the
holeshot, with Lackey (#7), Bob Grossi (#6),
John DeSoto (hidden) and moto winner Arne
Kring (#21) right behind.
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The First Superbowl
Above: The rumors of Superbowl I winner
Marty Tripes being underage — not yet sixteen
— are easy to understand when you look at
the kid in this photo. He could be 14 or 15
here. Announcer Larry ‘Supermouth’ Huffman
tries not to notice. Right: J. Weinert flies past
Owen’s camera, his pre-monoshock Yamaha
about to thump the dirt-covered plywood and
plastic put down to protect the Rams’ football
turf. It didn’t work.
moto-winners — Swedes Torleif Hansen, Arne
Kring and Hakan Andersson. But consistency
counted in Tripes’s dramatic win, which set the
stage for a superb career and, maybe more
importantly, helping set the motocross — and,
eventually, Supercross — hook firmly in the
mouths of American motorcycle fans.
But even the most prescient observers of
motorcycle sport couldn’t see the dramatic
scope of what lay just around the corner, in
motocross or motorcycling in general. Folks
were simply having a great time on motorcycles
and enjoying the two-wheeled explosion then
taking place in America — the bikes, the racing,
the enthusiasts, all of it captured so wonderfully
in Bruce Brown’s On Any Sunday, which debuted
less than a year before Tripes’s dramatic
Coliseum victory.
One of those thoroughly enjoying the scene
was Greg Owen, a typical So Cal teenager who’d
been introduced to motorcycling at a young age,
had been hooked badly like so many of us, and
who’d integrated motorcycles firmly into his life.
“We were on a Boy Scout outing in the mid
1960s,” Owen tells me. “I was 10 or 11. One of
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