10 minute read
COVER STORY WES COOLEY, 1956 – 2021
BY MITCH BOEHM PHOTOS BY MARY GROTHE, GARY YASAKI
It is a sad but unavoidable truth that motorcycling is beginning to lose its legends from the 1960s and ’70s, as we’ve had to say goodbye to the likes of AMA Motorcycle Hall of Famers Dick Mann, Gene Romero, Joel Robert, Yvon DuHamel and too many others over the past few years.
Losing two-time AMA Superbike champ — and two-time Suzuka 8-Hour winner — Hall of Famer Wes Cooley in mid-October at just 65 years of age just adds to the pain, for families and fans alike. For that you can blame the effects of Type 1 diabetes, which hounded Wes most of his life.
What’s particularly depressing about Cooley’s passing, aside from his relative youth, is that he’d been enjoying a bit of a resurgence of late, an emotional upswing in a life and racing career filled with a whole lot of ups and downs. As most know, Cooley rose to prominence in the mid 1970s in the fledgling AMA Superbike division, earning titles in ’79 and ’80 and becoming one of the top road racers in the world, a reputation that two victories at the prestigious Suzuka 8-hour helped buttress.
Wester Steven Cooley (1956-2021) was more than a two-time AMA Superbike champion and a helluva nice guy…he helped build the foundation of the AMA Superbike division.
Goodbye, Wes
And then it all came crashing down in a horrific crash at Sears Point in 1985 that nearly killed him. He rebounded enough to race again in the late ’80s and early ’90s, but it was really never the same and he ended up becoming a nurse, a job he thought about a lot during his youth and one he enjoyed and thrived at for 25-plus years until going into semiretirement in the mid 2010s.
And then something special happened on the motorcycling side of the Cooley ledger. In late 2015 he was invited by the AMA to be Grand Marshal of the 2016 AMA Vintage Motorcycle Days event at Mid-Ohio. He accepted and had a wonderful, inspiring time despite asking on several occasions before the event if anyone would even care. Having organized his participation at VMD while doing some volunteer work for the AMA, I assured him they would, and the weekend — in which he was welcomed enthusiastically and joyously by large crowds of roadracing fans — proved the point.
From there, Cooley went on a string of Grand Marshal and guest appearances at large-scale retro and classic-bike events all over the world, from Barber Motorsports Park
in Alabama to Suzuka, Japan, for an 8-hour anniversary celebration, and then to Europe for a handful of classicevent appearances there.
There were some travel and logistical headaches for he and partner Melody, and he griped about that when we’d talk on the phone to catch up, but he seemed to genuinely love and appreciate rediscovering the motorcycle racing scene and his place in its history — and probably every bit as much as the fans loved seeing him back in the flesh. Cooley had literally disappeared from the two-wheel scene in the mid 1990s when he got into nursing, and fans were beside themselves when he began showing up. I can tell you that, at VMD in 2016, the excitement of having him there was palpable, and he loved it.
As most know, Superbike racing is America’s gift to the roadracing world, a series that morphed from Open Production club racing in the early and mid 1970s to become an AMA National series in 1976 and, eventually, co-dominant worldwide alongside the Grand Prix scene. And Wes Cooley, a young So Cal club racer with a father who ran one of the clubs there, was a formative presence and player in AMA Superbike from the very beginning.
Cooley’s first road race happened at Willow Springs on a Greeves Silverstone (“my mom was freaking out,” he told me), but he soon graduated to midsize production-class twins and, in 1974, a Yamaha TZ250, which taught him about cornering speed and narrow powerbands. He and his father bought a TZ750 soon thereafter, and it was during this period he hooked up with legendary “Pops” Yoshimura, who began using Cooley to test engine and chassis mods on the Kawasaki Z1s Yoshimura was building for this suddenly hot — and important to the OEs — Open Production class…which in ’76 would officially become the AMA Superbike division.
“Pops had Yvon [DuHamel] riding for them,” Wes told me, “but since [Yvon] was in Canada and Yoshimura had very little money, he ended up using me to test stuff at Willow and Riverside. At “Pops had Yvon [DuHamel] riding for them,” Wes told me, “but since [Yvon] was in Canada and Yoshimura had very little money, he ended up using me to test stuff at Willow Springs and Riverside.”
Cooley on the Yoshimura-built Kawasaki Z1 in 1976, the first full year of official AMA Superbike competition. The bikes were fast, but flexy frames made them a handful to ride quickly — which is why slicks were not always fitted.
the time I didn’t think Pops spoke much English, but we could communicate pretty well about the bikes, and it worked out.”
The back and forth between Cooley and Team Yoshimura might have worked, but the Z1 chassis wasn’t getting the message, especially with slicks fitted. No surprise, really, with engines making double the horsepower they did stock, and chassis technology being what it was back in the mid ’70s.
Folks often assume AMA Superbike’s earliest days were filled with monster inline-four Japanese bikes headshaking and sliding around and lighting up their rear tires on corner exits, but the truth is a little different — and largely Euroflavored. That tire-smoking scenario would become pretty well established in ’79 and ’80, but the division’s first few years were largely dominated by BMWs, Ducatis and Moto Guzzis, which lacked the pure horsepower of the Japanese bikes but offered better high-speed stability and chassis performance.
To wit, six of the top-ten finishers in that first official season (1976) were on Euro bikes, with Reg Pridmore (BMW), Steve McLaughlin (BMW), Gary Fisher (BMW), Cook Neilson (Ducati) and Mike Baldwin (Moto Guzzi) filling the top five slots. In 1977 it was Pridmore’s title again, with Neilson second, Baldwin third, Ron Pierce’s BMW fourth and Kurt Liebman’s BMW fifth. Cooley was sixth on the Z1, with seven of the top 10 on Euro bikes.
Things began to morph a little in ’78, with only four of the top-10 slots taken by Euro bikes. Pridmore took the championship hat trick (but on a Kawasaki), with John Long (BMW), Paul Ritter (Ducati) and Harry Klinzmann (BMW) following. Cooley was fifth overall, but on a Suzuki for much of the season, as Yoshimura moved away from Kawasakis.
The move to Suzuki’s GS1000 platform would bode well for the team and Cooley in the coming years, with Cooley winning both the 1979 and 1980 AMA Superbike championships against the likes of World Champions and AMA
Hall of Famers Freddie Spencer and Eddie Lawson. Superbike racing had arrived, and in a few years would become the Big Show.
The next few seasons would see Cooley on Suzukis (the blueand-white GS1000S in ’81 and the Katana in ’82), GPz750-based Kawasakis (1983), Suzukis again in 84, and Honda VF-based bikes in ’85. He’d finish third overall in ’81, fourth in ’82, seventh in ’83 and ninth in ’84. Not a great direction, and a frustrating few years for the ex-champ.
Cooley started 1985 off with a bang, finishing second to Spencer at Daytona in a top-four Honda sweep, with Jeff Haney and Ron Haslam grabbing third and fourth. He got third at Willow Springs in round two, with then-mostly-unknown – and future World Champion and Hall of Famer — Kevin Schwantz taking his
first-ever AMA Superbike win, with reigning champ Fred Merkel second.
Things were looking good…right until tragedy struck in round three at Sears Point, Cooley going head-first into a retaining wall and breaking his neck, both femurs, five vertebrae, two fingers, and severely bruising his
Cooley (34) up front, followed by Hall of Famers David Aldana (109), Mike Baldwin (43) and Freddie Spencer (hidden), as well as Roberto Pietri (88) and others.
lungs and kidneys. Cooley spent two weeks in a trauma center, underwent three separate operations and had four pounds of pins and steel plates placed in his legs and back. In the days after the crash, the question wasn’t “would Wes ever race again?” but “would he live?”
Somehow, and this goes directly to the level of mental and physical fortitude he had, Cooley was back racing just over two years later, this time in an endurance-racing setting for John Ulrich’s Team Hammer/ Team Suzuki squad at the WERA 24hour West event at Willow Springs
Top: Cooley slicing beneath Team Honda’s Roberto Pietri in the Pocono hairpin in 1981. Here: At Daytona that same year, railing through Turn 1. That ’81 bike’s blue-andwhite livery, which mimicked that of Suzuki’s ’79 and ’80 GS1000S production bike, might well make the Cooley racer the most visually stunning Superbike ever. Right: Cooley at AMA Vintage Motorcycle Days in 2016, with the author and Brian O’Shea (upper right), partner Melody and the GS1000 he won the 1980 AMA Superbike title on, which O’Shea owns.
— where he’d first cut his roadracing teeth nearly 20 years earlier. “I’m addicted,” he told LA Times journalist Shav Glick in 1987. “I guess that’s all I can say to explain it. When John Ulrich offered me that ride, I was so happy to know that someone still believes in me.”
He was fast and smooth and rode most of his sessions at night, and while the Vance & Hines team I was riding for ended up winning the event (we’d do so three years in a row), Cooley was impressive. I distinctly remember him passing me on the team’s GSX-R1100 around the outside in the middle of the night at about a buck-thirty in Willow’s notorious Turn 8, and to see it happen up close like that from the seat of the GSX-R750 I was riding was something I will never forget.
Cooley continued to dabble in roadracing for a few years and was a lead instructor at Ulrich’s Team Suzuki roadracing school, but the pull of the medical profession eventually took over, and he went back to school and ended up working as a nurse in the surgical unit of St. Luke’s Medical Center in Twin Falls, Idaho, for nearly 25 years until retiring…and then getting my call in late 2015 to be Grand Marshal at AMA Vintage Motorcycle Days. made him smile…he truly enjoyed meeting and talking to the fans, and signing posters and photos and GS fuel tanks, and was so appreciative of the opportunity to reconnect with
Wes had a ball at VMD, and I cannot tell you — especially now, knowing he’s gone — how personally satisfying it was to host him that weekend in 2016, and sort of help jumpstart his re-emergence as a true motorcycling superstar over the next few years. For Wes, it was much more than simply the attention and adulation at those events that the motorcycling community.
I remember our Sunday night dinner at VMD like it was yesterday. “Guys,” he said earnestly to Brian O’Shea and me, “this has been an amazing weekend, for me and for Melody…Thank you so much for making it all happen!”
No…thank you, Wes Cooley. Godspeed, my friend. AMA
