It All Started With a Crash (Part I)
Note: This is the first in a three-part series about the events that shaped my entrepreneurial journey. Parts of this story have never been shared, but as a father of 3 and business leader for others, I felt that these words might be inspiring or helpful to those around me.
St. Patrick’s Day 1991 was shaping up to be a typical Sunday. My usual crew and I were riding our motorcycles around Laguna Beach, CA — chasing each other, racing each other and going way faster than we should be.
It was the type of recklessness you’d imagine seeing from a bunch of 10-year-old kids , only we were 20-somethings on motorcycles going 130+ miles per hour. And because this was the pre-Helmet Law era, most of us were only wearing shorts and tank tops. No helmets, no gloves, but yes, a pair of colorful Nike Airs.
On that Sunday afternoon, we were on one of our favorite routes: starting off in Newport Beach, then heading south on Pacific Coast Highway to Laguna Beach and stopping at the Top of the World, where you could see miles of coastline. I was riding my Honda CBR 600 that day. While we were stopped alongside the road, our chat turned into “ribbing” each other about riding skills. At one point, one of my comrades dared me to ride my street bike onto an off-road, hilly trail section with a jump, there next to the road. I had spent my childhood on a motocross track, so I accepted and conquered the challenge. The suspension on the motorcycle I was riding was designed for street, and didn’t respond well when I went off the jump,but I handling it with style gave me a boost in confidence nonetheless. At that moment I felt a bit invincible, which feeds the daredevil mentality that drove me to make bad decisions at times.
I always looked at risky decisions with an attitude of, what could possibly happen? I could have fun! Or I might crash my bike, hurt myself, be embarrassed, etc.
Ever since I was a kid, my mind has been fixated on “what ifs.” I’m always thinking about how to do things better; shooting for the upside in every scenario. I guess it’s the entrepreneur in me. Even today, when I’m faced with a huge challenge, the first thing I do is play out the “worst case scenario” as a way to prepare for and fix problems before they happen. So it wasn’t anything out of the ordinary when, after capitalizing on my off road riding skills that St. Patrick’s Day in 1991, I started to think about how I could use my skills on the street if the worst-case scenario struck.
What would I do if a car pulled out in front of me while at high speed? I let the situation play out in my mind as my buddies and I tooled around Laguna.
If I had no time to turn to get away from the car, what would happen? I wondered, feeling my brain kick into the next gear. If I hit the brakes too hard and slid the bike on the ground, I would hit the car like a brick wall and probably not walk away from the crash. No, I thought, I probably wouldn’t want to slide the motorcycle out. Instead, I’d control the motorcycle and stay upright. If I hit the car in the hood or the trunk, which would probably be only three feet tall, I could go over the car without touching it. I’d fly through the air, and just skip and hop when I landed. On the other hand, if I was forced to strike the driver or passenger area, which would be much taller, it would again feel like hitting a brick wall and my riding days would end.
As I worked out the scenario in my mind, we pulled into our lunch spot in Laguna. The thought left my mind as quickly as it had appeared.
The crash
A few hours later, the crew had gone our separate ways. I was at a stoplight at Pacific Coast Highway and Dover, on my way back to Newport Beach.
If you’ve ever driven along PCH, I don’t have to tell you that everyone speeds and races along that highway. Plus, half the fun of riding a motorcycle is accelerating quickly. So when the light turned green, I guarantee you I was going faster than I should have been.
But a few seconds later, I saw something that made time stand still. A four-door sedan had pulled out of the McDonald’s driveway, crossing the first lane and stopping in the second lane — right where I was. My mind was shouting, Get out of the way! I can’t turn; I can’t get around you!
It seemed she was stopped in my lane just staring the other way the whole time and not even caring that I had nowhere to go. She could have pulled all the way into the center divider, but she didn’t.
Months later, I would learn that the driver had heard my motorcycle but couldn’t tell where it was coming from. But in that moment, all I knew was this: her car was dead stopped in my lane, and I was going 65 miles per hour.
I was suddenly facing the exact scenario that had played out in my mind just hours earlier.
I knew that if I turned the bike and tried to go around the car, I would hit the traffic to the right of me. To the left was the center divider, and there was no guarantee that she wouldn’t pull forward. If I turned and braked, I would crash and slide into the car like a brick wall.
At this point, it wasn’t if I would hit her car, but where. I turned my motorcycle just enough so that I would hit the hood, and then stood it straight up again to maximize my braking ability and minimize the chance of the bike sliding out from underneath me. I clamped on the front brakes as hard as I could without locking either wheel, weight back to keep as much traction as possible on the rear, as if I was entering a corner on the motocross track.
I stood with the tips of my toes on the foot pegs — just as I had imagined earlier. Then, I waited.. just less than a second or two.
As soon as the front wheel touched her car’s fender, I jumped like a frog. My bike hit the car. I launched like Superman. I remember thinking that 1) this was really going to hurt and 2) I wished there was something soft, like a mattress, for me to land on. Unfortunately, we know that wish #2 came from some cartoon I saw when I was a kid.
I tried to break the fall with my arms and do a “tuck and roll”, something I excelled at in high school gymnastics. But regardless of my hopes to “style this out,” I hit the ground hard. Both my arms and my head suffered serious blows. I’ll never forget how the workers rushed out of the McDonald’s that I crashed in front of, trying to sop up the blood next to me with hand towels. I remember seeing the hand towels and recognizing them, I used to worked at McDonald’ just 5 years prior.
I still vividly remember the paramedic staring down at me. I asked him, “Am I doing to die?” When he said no, I responded, “Then give me some drugs, because this hurts like hell!”
A few minutes later, I was in the ambulance. The driver told me that he couldn’t give me any drugs because of my head injury. I was not happy as I had made a “deal” earlier with the paramedic, so I thought.
Before we started rolling, I could hear the driver on the radio talking about landing a helicopter on-site. It turned out that the hospital, just down the street, didn’t have a head trauma department that could handle my injuries and they thought they could fly me to another hospital.
They decided against the helicopter for some reason, which meant I was in for a 25-minute ride to Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo. I was in so much pain that I was kicking the side of the ambulance the entire ride.
The recovery
When I arrived at the hospital, the carnage was so bad that the police were convinced I had been drinking. It would be no surprise given the holiday. They even questioned me while I was screaming in pain. I couldn’t believe how cold-hearted this was. Here I was on the edge of being alive and all they cared about was giving me a ticket. Little did they know I was a risk taker, but never dumb enough to drink and ride. One officer stayed for hours until the doctor finally showed him my blood test and asked him to leave.
The same doctor asked me who they should notify. I said, You don’t need to call anyone, I’ll be out of here soon. The doctor looked at me and told me that I could die and they needed to call someone.
But unlike the cop, I wouldn’t be leaving any time soon. Both of my arms were shattered, one in so many pieces that they couldn’t put it back together. My head had suffered such severe trauma that my face essentially broke off. It was cracked from one eye socket all the way across my skull to the other one. Due to a brain hemorrhage that might result in the need for surgery, the doctors couldn’t do much more than medicate and observe me for 5 days. Once they determined that the internal bleeding had stopped, it was time to start patching me together. One of my arms was shattered in so many pieces that they couldn’t really do much to fix it. The other hand and wrist was pinned together and the hardware stuck out of my arm like an erector set.
The most frustrating part was the morphine button they gave me. You had to depress a plunger to get more pain killer. The problem was both of my arms were in casts so there was no way to push the button when the nurse wasn’t around. I would try to position the plunger between the two casts but I had to get it just right, and it would slip out most of the time. I’ll spare you rest of the gory details, but let’s just say that the two weeks I spent in the hospital were just the tip of the iceberg in terms of my recovery.
I had seven surgeons, including a cosmetic surgeon tasked with reattaching and reconstructing my face. By the end of the ordeal, they had put 13 screws and three metal plates in my head. Through it all, my mouth was wired shut, and I had to be fed through a tube.
I had gotten my first motorcycle at nine years old, but I managed to evade major accidents until age 23 — and somehow lived to tell the tale. It was the first, and worst, crash of my life, even if it wouldn’t be my last. Recovery took nearly six months.
While I was healing and unable to go back to work at the car dealership, I remember thinking that I was really lucky to survive the crash without a helmet. My 23-year-old self simply thought it was cool that I played out that exact scenario — and that trick of launching over the car — just hours before the accident happened.
It was years before I realized it was more than just luck; that I’m still alive today for a much bigger reason.
The idea
Somewhere, I have a video of me riding my second motorcycle with a cast on at least one arm; maybe even both. I can still remember going out to my carport and asking my roommate to take some footage to memorialize the first time I got back onto a motorcycle after the accident. I couldn’t wait to get back to riding.
But no matter how anxious I was to start riding again, there were still lots of things to sort out in the months after the crash. One was dealing with the insurance company.
When I told a riding buddy that they were offering me $600 for my wrecked bike, he told me to keep the bike instead. He’d give me the $600 and take the motorcycle.
I thought about my motorcycle, which at that point was a big pile of junk. Then, I asked him simply, “What are you going to do with it?”
I didn’t know it at the time, but the answer to that question set off a chain reaction that would impact me even more than the crash itself. Read more in Part 2 of this story.
Clint Lawrence, founder of Motorcycle Shippers. Helping give riders more freedom to enjoy the bikes they love.
