SW Philly streets forged a motorcyle drag-racing legend

AS A TEENAGER in Southwest Philadelphia, Rickey Gadson would lie in bed on sticky summer nights, listening to the motorcycle engines on the streets call out to him like howling wolves.

Fear should have kept him in bed, but he broke Vicky Gadson's midnight curfew often, sliding down a bannister to avoid creaky stairs and slipping into the garage to grab her motorcycle. Down the block, he'd start the bike up and join his two-wheeled pack to break untold traffic laws.

Eventually, Gadson would make his way to Front Street or the Airport Auto Mall, where - in his mother's leather Catwoman racing suit - he'd straddle a bigger, borrowed bike full of horsepower. That's when a deeper, debilitating fear, the memory of his father's recent fatal motorcycle accident, could have made the skinny kid from 54th and Warrington ease off the gas.

But Gadson would twist the throttle harder and open up the clutch with his left hand, laying the foundation of a legend as his bike screamed down public highways at mind-boggling speeds.

"I made my name on the streets of Philadelphia," said Gadson, now a 43-year-old married father of four who lives in Hammonton, Atlantic County. "Now there's pretty much nothing I haven't done on a motorcycle."

Gadson knows that his name and his sport - motorcycle drag racing - aren't famous among the masses in his native Philadelphia. But, over the last three decades, he has zoomed from high-stakes, illegal drag racing all over the East Coast to sanctioned drag strips, where most everyone knows him, all over the world.

Gadson's won nine national titles in various classes and broken countless speed records.

"People always ask me how I stay so calm and collected when I race," he said. "When you have other people's money [wagers] on you, that's pressure. One slip of the left hand and you lose. I was in races where $80,000 was on the line. I was a hired gun who could race fast."

In 1991, his first year as a pro, Gadson won a national title and rookie of the year honors, ripping off five straight wins after buying a turbo-charged bike at a Gainesville, Fla., track.

"Winning those five races put me on the map as a pro," he said. "Everyone knew who I was after that."

Gadson's speed records include a recent track record in South Africa that hadn't been broken in 26 years. He's the first fully sponsored drag racer, and whenever Kawasaki revamps its biggest, baddest Ninja model, Japanese engineers take copious notes on Gadson's opinions.

"In Philly, he's known among motorcycle guys, but for people who don't know him, I'll say this: He's the Michael Jordan of his sport," said Richard Gadson, Rickey's nephew and competitor on the drag-racing circuit.

Rickey Gadson is in second place in the MiRock (Maryland International Raceway-Rockingham Dragway) Superbike Series, and with only one race left this season, he doesn't think he'll be able to take the crown. He turns 44 tomorrow, but said that he has no plans to retire from the track as long as his eyes and his nerves stay sharp. When he's not racing, he hosts television programs and travels around the world promoting Kawasaki.

On public streets, Gadson said, he's pretty tame - no more wheelies, no burnouts and no triple-digit speeds.

"I was lucky I made it out of that street racing alive," he said. "I've seen plenty of people get killed."

During a recent open-track night at Atco Raceway, in Camden County, Gadson, along with his wife, children and nephew, gathered in the parking lot at the custom trailer that bears his image. His runs on the track began with smoky burnouts to warm the rear tire. At the starting line, the rpms steadily escalated until the "Christmas tree" starting signal went from yellow to green. The rest was simply a blur and all over in about 8 seconds.

It's not a blur to Gadson, however, and that's why others in the sport say he's the best.

"He can literally watch that light turn green, and see the millisecond when it first lights from yellow to green," said Brock Davidson, a speed-shop owner in Ohio. "His reflexes, hand-to-eye coordination, are amazing. He also just has a knack for winning, even when, on paper, it looks like he should lose."

When Gadson returned to the trailer after his runs, he connected a laptop to a port beneath his seat and pulled up a graph of every detail of the short ride, from motor temperature to the timing of every shift.

"I use these runs to dial it in, to get everything ready for race day," he said.

But he also spends a lot of time shaking hands, giving out advice and acknowledging the many motorheads who arrive at Atco in everything from Audis to "funny cars" with parachutes to slow them down. He even went searching for a quart of oil when a man - racing a muscle car - said that he was desperate for one.

All the Gadsons ride, no matter their age. All his kids, who range in age from 3 to 12, scuttle around on tiny dirt bikes back at home. At Atco, his youngest daughter, Laila, 3, sat on his Italian scooter, giggling, pretending she was a drag racer.

Vicky Gadson, now in her mid-70s, still lives in Philly and still rides a motorcycle almost every day, much to her son's protest.

"I had her bike converted to a trike," he said. It's a little safer."

Gadson's older brother, Emory "Skip" Gadson, was also a famous Philly street racer. He died of complications from diabetes in 1992, and Gadson helped mentor nephew Richard, bringing him to races, keeping track of his grades, and eventually teaching him how to ride at his drag-racing school at Atco Raceway.

"We've been racing against each other for a few years now," he said.

But the foundation for the Gadson family's love of motorcycles, the man who poured gasoline into their DNA, was Rickey's dad, Richard "Suicide" Gadson, a gas-station owner, night-club operator and overall "hustler," who raced from light to light on Ridge Avenue in his youth.

"That's real street racing there," Rickey said. "Someone could have opened their car door and it would have been all over."

Gadson said that his father often took the family to motorcycle "roundups" all over the country. It wasn't unusual to see the children, their small hands clenched tightly around his torso, cruising the streets with him. On one ride, the elder Gadson locked up his brakes. Rickey flew backward off the bike, unharmed, but his father slid with the motorcycle, breaking multiple ribs.

His father never properly treated his broken ribs, Rickey said, and in 1979, while "Suicide" rode his new, beloved 1300cc Kawasaki, a 17-year-old motorist with a freshly minted driver's license made a left turn into him on 54th Street.

"The accident broke loose one of those ribs," Gadson said. "When he sat up a rib went through his heart and he died."

Gadson credits his mother for keeping the tradition alive, for fostering their love of motorcycles and their indescribable need to go fast. She never let the fear set in, and even helped him refurbish that big Kawasaki that his father died on. He had to cut some foam out of the seat so that his feet would reach the ground.

On another clandestine drag- racing trip that his mother wasn't aware of, Gadson blew the engine on the prized bike and sold it.

Years later, when Gadson owned a motorcycle performance shop in Magnolia, a customer came in with a surprise gift.

"He said, 'I think I have something you're going to like.' It was my dad's bike, still broken and all rusted out," he said.

That rusted ghost of a bike now sits in Gadson's garage amid a stable of more valuable high-performance machines, but he values it more than many of them.

"I spend a lot of time on eBay looking for parts to get it back running again," he said. "I'm going to restore it. That's the only thing I have of my father's."