Speedway Kings Are on the Repair : A Headline Will be Coming Shortly : Father, Son Resolve Their Differences on Road to World Final

Lance King wasn’t cut out for baseball. He tried playing a year of Little League in Van Nuys and actually earned the starting job in right field because he could catch and throw fairly well. Even as a scrawny 9-year-old, though, he couldn’t hit his weight.

His coach used to tell him to go up to the plate, pretend he was going to hit, and look for a walk. If he struck out without swinging, that was OK. He got one hit that whole season, a single in the last game of the year. That, incidentally, was his last appearance in organized baseball.

Basketball wasn’t his forte, either. King, who was living in Auburn, Calif., at the time, made the junior high school team because he was quick and could play defense. He just couldn’t shoot.

In 25 games, he made one basket, a jump shot from the right corner in the final game of the season. That was King’s last appearance in organized basketball.

Put King behind the handlebars of a motorcycle, though, and he was as good as Ted Williams with a baseball bat or Jerry West with a basketball. When it came to shifting gears and maneuvering mechanical bikes, the kid was a natural.

King was riding a minibike before he learned how to ride a bicycle. He began racing on the junior speedway circuit when he was 9 and, at age 11, he was riding professionally, having negotiated his first sponsorship contract with Wild West Clothing Stores.

After an illustrious career as a junior rider, King became a top Division I rider at 16 and competed internationally in the prestigious British Speedway League for three years.

At 22, he has qualified for his third straight World Final and is considered one of the favorites, along with American Shawn Moran, to win the title tonight at Odsal Stadium in Bradford, England. He placed third in last year’s final, held at Gothenberg, Sweden.

No, King was never into mainstream sports. But then, he is not your mainstream kind of guy.

He owns a house in England and is looking to buy another in Huntington Beach. He has earned enough as a professional speedway driver to start a classic car collection, which includes a 1981 Mercedes 350 SL Zender convertible, a 1981 Renault R5 Turbo rally car, one of only 200 made, and a Volkswagen Baja bug with a BMW 320i engine.

While most 22-year-olds are scratching to pay rent, hoping their cars will start so they can make it to class, King is living a life of luxury.

But while motorcycles and speedway racing have provided King with the means for a prosperous life, the machines and the sport have also taken their toll.

There were the problems in high school, when King would skip classes to tend to his motorcycles and was in the principal’s office so much that people thought he worked there.

His quest for speed away from the track got King enough speeding tickets to earn a four-year scholarship to the traffic school of his choice. Every police officer in Sepulveda, his hometown, knew him. He was on a first-name basis with the local judge.

There were three hard years in England, where King constantly struggled with allergies aggravated by the poor weather.

There was that treacherous plane ride from Germany to England in 1983, when a section of the wing on a 12-seat Cessna broke off, and King and several teammates thought they would crash into the North Sea. The pilot, however, was able to land the plane safely.

But most of all, there was the precarious relationship with his father, Don King, a mechanic who built all of Lance’s motorcycles until he was 16 and who desperately wanted to be a part of his son’s career.

The two seemed to be in constant disagreement. They argued often, usually over how Lance’s bikes and engines should be prepared. One week, they’d be talking to each other. The next, it was the silent treatment.

It got so bad that Lance moved into an apartment when he was 16 and still attending Birmingham High in Van Nuys. He was glad to get away to England when he was 18, not just because he would be fulfilling a long-time goal of riding internationally, but because he would be living on his own.

Racing almost tore apart this father and son for good.

Almost.

“It has taken up until the last couple of years for us to be father and son again,” King said. “Now, the relationship is a lot better.”

When Don King was 2 years old, his father died in a car accident while racing. Having grown up without a father, King vowed that being a father would be the most important thing in his life.

King and his wife, Corky, eventually divorced, but Don gained custody of his only son, who was 6 at the time. He bought Lance his first minibike and was glad to see him get involved in racing.

When 9-year-old Lance was too small to ride the traditional speedway bikes, Don built his son’s first junior speedway motorcycle. They lived together, went to all the races together and combined to form a very successful racing team. But the relationship began to deteriorate when Lance reached his teens.

“It was a case of a typical teen-ager,” said Don, who financed Lance until he was 16. “Dad didn’t know anything and he knew it all. We’d go to war and wouldn’t talk to each other for weeks. We’d argue over little things.

“It was just like a marriage--we had too much of each other.”

Lance King never really understood why his father made such a commitment to him during those years. He always thought his father was overbearing.

“It was a nightmare then,” he said. “We were always arguing, over anything. We were talking maybe a week out of every month. That’s why I had to get away.”

King moved to an apartment in Canoga Park, but that was hardly a panacea.

He was still getting in trouble at school, usually earning detentions for talking in class or messing around. The pressures of racing four nights a week on the Southern California speedway circuit and trying to keep up in class were getting to him.

He became alienated with school and, by his senior year, he estimates that he attended class about 10 days a month. He found some sanctuary then in punk rock music.

King and fellow rider Rick Miller became regulars in such Hollywood night clubs as the Whisky a Go Go, the Palace and the Starwood, and King was into hard-core bands such as the Dickies, the Dead Kennedys and the Plasmatics.

“We would go in there and slam-dance all night,” King said. “We were the only normal looking guys in the place, and all the punkers would gang up on us because we were the only ones who didn’t fit in. I did it just to get my aggressions out. After I left there, I was good for about three weeks.”

A year after King graduated, he left for England to compete in the British Speedway League with Bruce Penhall on the Cradley Heath Racing Team. But after two years away from home, relations with his father still hadn’t improved.

During King’s first year in England, his father and a friend came for a visit. When the friend expressed his desire to drink in an English pub, Lance said he’d take him out, but Don King didn’t want to go.

Lance and his friend went, regardless of his father’s wishes, and Don King was so upset at being left behind that he returned to the U.S. the next day without informing his son.

It wasn’t until this year, after Lance had been away from his father for four years, that they resolved some of their differences. They seem to have found a happier medium for racing.

Don King now tunes just one engine for Lance, and he continues to do engine research and development work on his own. When he comes up with an idea for an improvement or something that might add a little extra speed, he’ll run it by Lance.

But Don King realizes now that his son is independent. He has his own mechanic, Ronnie Scopeletti, and handles all of his financial affairs. Lance, who has been living with his mother in Fountain Valley for the past eight months, runs his own life, and Don can’t force anything upon him.

“The second year in England, I tried to buy him a microwave to help out with his cooking, because the food is so bad there,” Don King said. “He said, ‘No way, Dad, I don’t need it.’ I said I just wanted to help him out. He said that everything he puts in his home, he will buy.

“I have to respect him for that. He went to England when he was 18 and grew up at a young age. It was a learning experience for him, and no amount of money in the world can buy that. I’d like nothing more for him to win the World Final, but I am more proud of the individual he turned out to be.”

Don King was always proud of his son, even when Lance was rampaging through the San Fernando Valley as one of the area’s leading hell-raisers.

“I told him to raise hell because that’s part of growing up,” said Don, 47, who used to race cars down Van Nuys Boulevard during the 1950s. “So I let him get away with more stuff than you could believe. He’s told me some of the outrageous things he’s done, and we’d just laugh. His mother would be shocked, wondering why we were laughing, and I’d just say those were the same things I did when I was a kid.”

Having fun and raising hell was one thing Don and Lance had in common. It was something they could laugh about, like the time Lance and his friend, Johnny O’Mara, currently a top motocross rider, filled a Jacuzzi with two boxes of Mr. Bubble and turned the pool area at his mother’s apartment complex into a giant bubble bath.

Then, there was the night Lance, Rick Miller and Louis Franco (a former speedway rider) collected a trash can full of golf balls and began driving them into Birmingham High from a hidden area about 100 yards away.

Several police officers reported to the parking lot, and the three began peppering the area with golf balls out of the dark. The officers couldn’t figure out where the balls were coming from and began dispersing into the outer areas, but the three desperadoes got away.

“I thought that was pretty funny and couldn’t reprimand him for that,” Don King said.

Lance didn’t always escape the long arm of the law, though. When he was 14, Don bought him a moped and boosted its horsepower. A normal moped can go about 30 m.p.h. King was passing cars at 50, which usually caught the attention of police. Lance averaged a speeding ticket per week.

“In Auburn, they just made me write a 500-word essay saying why I wouldn’t speed again,” Lance said. “That was easy for me, because when I got a ticket, I just went in and wrote the same essay I had written the month before.”

King should have made Xerox copies of the essay. By the time he moved back to Van Nuys at the start of his sophomore year, he had written about 30 of them. The assignments were tougher in Van Nuys.

“In Van Nuys, the tickets started costing me money because I wasn’t taking care of them and I was getting warrants,” King said. “I used to go to court with my Dad all the time, so one time, he asked my Mom to go with me.

“She said OK, because she thought I was just in for one ticket, but the judge opened his book and pulled out seven outstanding tickets. My mom was so mad that she never went to court with me again.”

King’s pranks weren’t confined to the United States. In England, he and a friend formed the International TV Towers Assn. For fun, they would buy a few cheap, used TVs, tie them to their car with a 20-foot rope and drag them around the streets.

“They do blow up and they do shoot flames,” King said.

It has been a rocky relationship between Lance King and his father, one filled with good times and bad. Fortunately, his racing career has been just the opposite--smooth and consistent.

If only life was as easy as handling a motorcycle.

King started racing at age 9 under the guidance of seven-time U.S. champion Mike Bast, who retired from the sport last year. Bast taught him all the right moves and King caught on quickly.

“He was a natural-born speedway rider,” Bast, 33, said. “He was a cute little guy and I kind of wanted to adopt him. The next thing I knew, he grew up and was beating me.”

When King was finally 16, old enough to be compete in Division I, he qualified for the U.S. Championship twice and was the leading rider on three Southern California tracks in 1981.

He won his first three races in England in 1982 and English sportswriters immediately nicknamed King, “The Whiz Kid.” But he struggled the rest of the season and finished with a 6-point average out of a possible 12.

“I don’t think I was ready to compete internationally at age 18,” King said. “Those guys are the best in the world. And for most of them, racing is their job, so if they don’t win, they don’t eat. They didn’t just pass you, they gave you an elbow.”

King learned his lesson and returned to England for his second season a much tougher rider. He learned how to muscle against the European and Eastern Bloc riders. He learned when to pass, when to throw an elbow. His aggressiveness paid off, as he improved to a 9-point average in 1983 and became a 10-point rider in 1984.

“It was that or you didn’t survive,” he said. “People here think I’m a bit too aggressive and hard, but you have to be if you want to win.”

For financial and personal reasons, King decided to pass on the British Speedway League this year, opting instead to race in Southern California five nights a week. King thinks it was a wise decision.

He was still able to qualify for the World Final, having placed fourth in the American Final at Long Beach in June, third in the Overseas Final at Bradford, England in late June and second in the InterContinental Final at Sweden in July.

He will attempt to become the third non-British Speedway League rider to win the World Final, following the success of Sweden’s Anders Michanek in 1974 and West Germany’s Egon Muller in 1983.

King has also earned a good living on the local circuit, as purses at Ventura, San Bernardino, Ascott, Costa Mesa and Carlsbad can amount to as much as $1,100 a night for a first-place finish.

He has two major product sponsorship contracts (worth about $20,000 each) with Off Shore Clothing and STP, and is riding for the Weslake Factory Team, which has supplied all of his motorcycles, thus saving him about $20,000.

And he’s home.

“When you’re in England, there’s nothing to do because of the weather except speedway,” King said. “If you’re not racing, you’re working on bikes or you’re home thinking about racing. That’s all there is to do.

“But Southern California is not that way. There’s a lot to do and I’ve had a lot of fun this year since I’ve been home. I’ve discovered there’s more to life than speedway.”