This is part 2 the article 1974 Super Series of Motocross Revisited. If you wish to start with part 1, click here.

Houston Astro-Cross

When Bailey arrived at the Astrodome a day later, the place was already filled with dirt because the stadium had just finished hosting the epic Houston Livestock and Rodeo Show. Then he noticed the terrible smell of the soil—three weeks of barnyard animals will do that!

“I was trying not to think of all the cattle droppings and horse manure out there, but it was really hard not to,” Bailey laughs. Undaunted, he built a massive track, highlighted by a big over-under tunnel jump. “We didn’t have any doubles—we hadn’t even thought about those at that point—but we did have some big jumps. The challenge was the fact that we didn’t really know what a track like that should be like. We were learning as we went.”

Because the series was so last-minute in the making, both the Kawasaki and Honda factory teams passed on the Astrodome, which meant guys like Jimmy Weinert—who won a historic Trans-AMA race in Rio Bravo a few months earlier—weren’t there. Also absent was 18-year-old Marty Tripes, the best stadium rider (thanks to his best motocross helmets)in history to that point, who had wisely backed out of a Rickman-Montesa deal. According to Popular Cycling, “The bike couldn’t take such a thrashing from the 200-pound rider.”

Houston would cover two nights, each with a pair of twenty-minute motos with thirty riders per class. The jumps took their toll as contenders like Gary Jones, Jim Pomeroy, and Steve Stackable couldn’t keep their bikes together for all four heats.

De Coster would only race on Friday night after tweaking his knee in practice. He also had a previous commitment to attend a race back home in Belgium on Sunday, so he flew home after Friday’s race.

Because each race counted as a moto rather than a main event, some of the real standouts don’t show up in the record books. For instance, Buck Murphy, riding a Penton (what we now know as a KTM) won the first 250 moto. And Bryar Holcomb (who now owns Factory Effect) won two of the 500 motos on a Bultaco. The overall 250 winner in Houston was the Bultaco-mounted Pomeroy, with Yamaha’s Hart taking the 500 class.

And when the results were tallied from the series’ seven total motos, Olympic-style, Karsmakers emerged as the 250 Super Series of Motocross Champion with just 15 points. Semics would take the 500 title with a total of 29.

Superbowl of Motocross III

Houston attracted 41,000 fans over two nights in March, which was less than the ’74 Superbowl of Motocross would draw on a Saturday night in July. The L.A. race did a much better job bringing in international talent, including DeCoster, with Czech rider Jaroslav Falta taking the win. The Superbowl also had a corporate sponsor in Olympia Beer, which added to the event’s prestige. West says that when you add it up, the ’74 Superbowl had all the elements of what we now know as supercross.

“Mike Goodwin said, ‘People want to sit down in a nice, comfortable seat, they want to go to a nice concession stand, they want to go to a nice bathroom,” West recalls. “He knew the fans were becoming more refined and it was no longer ‘Bring your blanket, bring your baby, bring your cooler for a day in the sunshine, full of wild, exciting motocross!’ They just wanted to go sit down somewhere and that’ how it all evolved.”

Yet Goodwin didn’t quite get the whole picture at first either.

“Goodwin had big ideas, but he also had a pretty big ego,” Despain says. “Allen Becker was more of a big thinker. He knew that he needed to pull all of the promoters together and work with the AMA to make the series grow, which is exactly what he did.”

Becker, now in his eighties, managed to convince Goodwin to join the fold one year later, and soon all was good between West and the AMA. In fact, he collaborated with Goodwin that year on a Superbowl of the South in Atlanta, sponsored by Atlanta-based Coca-Cola.

“We could all tell that’s where the future was,” says West, who went on to produce numerous SX races over the next twenty-five years before retiring. “They were so easy to televise, inside a stadium as compared to outdoors, and that was the key to its success.”

Forty Years On

From that modest two-stop tour, the series would rapidly grow—and in doing so it would radically change the landscape of motorsports. Soon rebranded as AMA Supercross, it attracted new events and new promoters, including Mickey Thompson out west and Paul Shlegel at the soft-topped Pontiac Silverdome in Michigan. But as SX proliferated, other series disappeared. The Inter-Arms were done within a year. The Trans-AMAs would only make it to ’82.The Florida Winter AMAs dwindled in stature, as did the California Golden State Series.

In the decades that followed, supercross grew steadily, despite the comings and goings of various promoters, including Goodwin. Becker expanded his promotional business and soon had his sons working with him. In the late nineties, he would join forces with Charlie Mancuso, head of another promotional company called SRO, and streamline operations under one roof.

Pace was the world’s largest privately owned entertainment company when he sold it in 1998 to SFX, which itself was purchased by Clear Channel in 1999. They, in turn, spun off Live Nation Motorsports, which in turn as purchased in 2008 by Feld Entertainment, Inc. Mancuso remains at the helm as president of Feld Motor Sports, which manages every aspect of the series from operations to marketing, sponsorships to television, at every roud—save for one.

Through all the changes and turnover, one race has remained firmly in place: Daytona. After all these years, the first series race remains the centerpiece of what is now the seventeen-round Monster Energy AMA Supercross Championship.—Davey Coombs

Supercross fanatics will face any challenge that will come their way on the race. They also don’t forget to protect their head from serious injuries by wearing the best full face helmets.