13 minute read
MALCOLM AT 80
Fifty years after the release of On Any Sunday, AMA Hall of Fame Legend Malcolm Smith just keeps on chugging along, longstanding injuries and Parkinson’s Disease be damned
By Mitch Boehm
Malcolm Smith is sitting on a stool at a workbench in his garage workshop at his Riverside, Calif., home with various mechanical objects in various states of repair and disrepair scattered on the scarred surface.
Beside him on a smaller stool is his two-yearold granddaughter Amelie, who’s poking her screwdriver into an old (unplugged) radio while Malcolm messes with a carburetor from one of his Matchless restorations. Amelie’s checking out Grandpa’s carburetor more than she’s looking at her radio, and is clearly interested in what the legendary Hall of Famer is up to.
Malcolm just smiles, and says, “Turning the screw, Ami, turning the screw.”
Few of us who grew up on a diet of dirt bikes and On Any Sunday VCR showings would have imagined our off-road hero, ISDT Gold Medalist and do-everything motorcyclist with the ear-to-ear grin being called Poppy, but these days it’s a shoe that fits. Because as hard as it may be to imagine, Malcolm Smith turned 80 years of age on March 9, 2021.
In so many ways, eighty years old just doesn’t compute when it comes to Malcolm Smith. Wasn’t it just yesterday we watched him, Mert Lawwill and Steve McQueen cavorting on the beach on front of Camp Pendleton? Or read about him winning at Baja, or one of his eight gold ISDT medals? Or launching his MSR off-road aftermarket business? He’s that 20-something kid with the big ears and the even bigger smile, right?
They say time flies when you’re having fun. And in Malcolm Smith’s case, and in most of our cases, too, the saying rings totally true. He – and we – have had fun in the 50 years since On Any Sunday debuted in American theaters, and time has flown by.
Of course, you want to be able to say you had fun – and had a good ride – when you get older, and Malcolm’s happy to admit as much when you ask him. But it’s still a bit sad when we stop and realize that, for many of us, it’s maybe later than it seems, to quote the great Jackson Browne.
Ol’ Malcolm (left), hanging with Steve McQueen (middle) and Mert Lawwill during On Any Sunday filming.
Malcolm with parents
sometime in the mid-1940s.
Of course, we might be getting a little ahead of ourselves here, as the Smith DNA is dang strong stuff. How strong, you ask? Well, consider this: Malcolm’s father, Alexander Malcolm “Sandy” Smith, not only lived to be 99, and spent many of those years as a precious metals miner and expedition leader in Alaska and Northern Canada’s Yukon Territories, he conceived Malcolm with Malcolm’s mother Elizabeth Anne “Betty” Beesley, who was then in her 30s, when he was 80 years old. (Let that sink in for a moment. We’ll wait.)
The guy was so active and in such great shape that Betty thought he was in his early 50s when they married, and didn’t find out the truth until she was pregnant with little Malcolm. Sandy Smith was nothing if not a tough old Scotsman, and Malcolm seems to have inherited a lot of the very same grit and gumption.
Still, the last decade has been very difficult for Malcolm in terms of his health. And health issues aren’t a new thing for him, either. There was the horrific shattered femur and lower leg when he was 17 when a buddy centerpunched him while riding his Matchless on a San Bernardino trail, the impact of which hurled him into a tree. He almost lost the leg and spent two years recuperating, part of that time in a body cast. He broke that same femur again years later in Baja, bending the rod that had been placed in it earlier, and there have been a long list of broken bones and other serious injuries over the years – most of them from riding and racing.
But the last ten or fifteen years have been especially challenging. Aside from all the broken bones, twisted joints and herniated discs, all of which have degenerated over the years, Malcolm was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in the early 2000s. And despite the latest advances in medicine and treatments, the disease has inexorably taken its toll, year after year, and contributed to him having to walk with a cane and stop riding motorcycles altogether.
If all that wasn’t enough, Malcolm had a run-in – literally – with a golf cart back in early 2019 during a charity golf outing in Death Valley, Calif. A buddy jumped in a cart Malcolm was standing behind, and when the friend stomped on the accelerator the thing lurched backward and ran Malcolm over, breaking his hip badly and causing him to be taken to Las Vegas for emergency surgery.
And in a completely crazy twist of fate, Malcolm and wife Joyce’s son Alexander was injured badly a couple of days later during an organized ride in Baja, Mexico. “While searching for a lost member of the group,” Malcolm remembers, “Alexander hit a cow head-on at high speed, badly breaking his femur, arm and hand, all of which required multiple surgeries to fix. What’s crazy is that we both ended up at the same rehabilitation center, and in rooms right next to one another!”
“Like a lot of folks,” says Joyce, “we’ve been pretty much totally shutin here, all while trying to protect him. He just got his first vaccine shot, but it’s been a huge thing over the last year or so shielding him. We’ve all been paranoid; no one wants to be the person that got him sick, you know? It would be funny if it weren’t so serious! Christmas was especially tough for us, as COVID was rampaging here in Southern California.”
Still, there are plenty of positive things happening in Malcolm Smith’s world these days despite all the health- and COVID-inspired craziness. Two that are near and dear to his heart are right outside the door of his Riverside home, in fact. One is his garage/workshop, where he and son Alexander (and others in the extended Smith clan) have motorcycles, buggies, tools and workbenches galore. It’s also where he and Amelie do their thing.
The other is his old Range Rover ‘collection,’ which might also be called a Range Rover ‘boneyard’ to some in the family, Joyce included. There are four or five early-’90s Rovers out there, all in various states of disrepair. Malcolm keeps collecting them and says he wants to build one or two good ones out of the carcasses spread out among the trees, but the claim seems to generate more good-natured eye rolls than nods of agreement among family.
“I have soft spot for old Range Rovers,” Malcolm told me recently, “mostly because I raced one in the Dakar Rally in ’88, and got a brandnew production one for Joyce as payment for my driving during the Rally, where we finished fourth. Joyce drove it for a few years, then gave it to our daughter Ashley during college. It still runs, and we keep it at our home in Colorado. Anyway, I bought three long-wheelbase models a few years ago, and then a few more non-runners as parts vehicles. Joyce doesn’t like the Range Rover wrecking yard in the orange grove, so I am trying to get one running and sell the rest.”
Joyce is less sanguine about it all. “They’re all full of rat poop,” she says of the old Rovers with a laugh. “I keep telling Malcolm, ‘let’s just sell them and get on the list for one of those new Ford Broncos’ – but he’s a little stubborn!”
Left: Malcolm and wife Joyce (who’s an experienced pilot), hanging out. Bottom right: Malcolm with the AMA’s Rob Dingman and Mert Lawwill at The Quail in 2019.
Books and movies are other high points. Malcolm’s acclaimed autobiography, titled Malcolm! The Autobiography, which he and I arranged, co-wrote and published back in 2015, continues to sell well. It’s 400 pages, 450 images and more than 100,000 words covering Malcolm’s entire life. Also, Bruce Brown’s epic moto-documentary On Any Sunday, which Malcolm starred in alongside Mert Lawwill and Steve McQueen, and which celebrates its 50th Anniversary this year, is more popular than ever. “We sell the heck out of those DVDs at our store,” Malcolm says of what’s arguably our sport’s finest cinematic effort. You can get both at malcolmsmith.com.
Sales, service, parts and accessories are doing brisk business at the family’s Riverside, Calif., motorcycle store, too, especially with COVID pushing Americans to rediscover the joys of powersports, camping and the great outdoors. The current Malcolm Smith Motorsports location is a mammoth establishment designed and built in the early 2000s and first opening for business in 2006, complete with a Malcolm Smith museum of sorts spread out along the upper deck. Malcolm and Joyce ran things for a handful of years, but began handing off the management reins to son Alexander and daughter Ashley six or seven years ago, and the two are fully in charge nowadays.
Right: Modern side-by-sides have been a blessing for Malcolm and allow him to continue exploring. The Malcolm Smith Motorsports showroom from the upper balcony.
“Things have definitely changed out there,” echoes Joyce. “Now it’s not so much about going to Disneyland or to the movies, but in many cases enjoying the outdoors with family and friends in RVs or toy haulers on motorcycles or UTVs. COVID has slowed everyone down. Folks have stopped hurrying quite so much, and seem to be taking a fresh look at what’s important.”
Spend any time with Malcolm or Joyce and you get the feeling pretty quickly that what’s important is family and family time. Despite all the hunkering down COVID has encouraged, the Smith family still does a lot together, at home in Riverside but also at their second home in Colorado and at their small beach house on the Baja Peninsula, where watersports, relaxing and SeaDoo exploring seem to rule just about every day.
Up until a couple of years ago, Malcolm was still riding a modified KTM cross-country bike, though the Parkinson’s has now limited him to watercraft and UTVs.
“The Parkinson’s didn’t hit me too severely until about two years ago,” Malcolm told me. “It affected my balance so much that I had to stop riding my off-road motorcycle. My left knee is basically bone-on-bone, my lower back is a mess, and the golf cart incident didn’t help, either. I switched to a side-by-side to get my thrills and be able to get into the back country and explore. Baja has lots of primitive trails and roads, and today’s side-bysides work surprisingly well off road.” And as a Baja winner on two and four wheels, Malcolm Smith knows a little about that.
“He’s been slowing down every year,” says Joyce, “this past year more than usual. But what’s been a godsend for him and for us are these modern UTVs, and we’re all so grateful to the industry for having introduced them during these last several years. He can’t do motorcycles anymore, but on these side-by-sides he’s having a really good time, and doing a lot of exploring, which he loves, especially in Baja. And he doesn’t have to jump into them from a hole in the roof, as he did on those Baja buggies he raced! [Laughs] He can still ride an ATV, but without these wonderful UTVs he wouldn’t be able to do much, and that would be pretty bad for someone like Malcolm.”
The Smith clan at their Colorado retreat. Below: Malcolm in Baja, with UTV (left) and with Joyce.
“At times it’s a little difficult to accept how things have changed for me,” Malcolm told me. “Leaving the business world, a culture I existed in and enjoyed for so many years, hasn’t been easy. Not being able to ride motorcycles has been very difficult, though the UTVs are a wonderful alternative. I have some regrets, for sure. But I’m an optimist at heart, and as I look around at my family, my friends and my life, I’m shocked at how fortunate I’ve been.”
And then there’s the latest round of grandkids, two from daughter Ashley and husband Ryan (Amelie, 2, and sister Adeline, 4) and a newborn girl named Miley from son Alexander and his wife Lauren. (Malcolm’s older son Joel and wife Carrie have two kids of their own, Ethan and Evie.)
“The grandkids have been a blessing for Malcolm,” says Joyce, “and especially two-year-old Amelie. She’s adopted him, and is very much a tomboy. She spends hours with him in the garage, climbing up on her stool, taking stuff apart, turning screws and handling tools while he does his thing. She even goes in there when he’s not around. It’s so satisfying for Malcolm, and so good for him mentally.”
Just as he did 50 years ago in On Any Sunday, Malcolm Smith – American motorcycling’s favorite son – is still inspiring people, still making them happy, even at 80 years of age.
You go, Poppy.
