Emig’s Career Takes a New Flight Course

When the throttle stuck approaching a big jump and Jeff Emig and his motorcycle were launched about 45 feet into the air, he had one thought as he separated from his bike and felt the long drop ahead of him:

“This can’t be happening.”

Emig’s motocross-supercross racing career ended May 4 when he crushed a vertebra and broke his leg in two places on a Glen Helen practice track. Now, he is fully consumed in the second stage of his storied, but not always storybook, career.

Emig, one of the most successful riders of the 1990s, is a team owner whose riders take to the dirt course at Edison Field on Saturday in the first round of the EA Sports Supercross Series, the first of three events in Anaheim over the next five weeks.

With defending race and series champion Jeremy McGrath competing, along with two-time 1999 race winner Ezra Lusk and more than half a dozen factory riders, Emig isn’t expecting his riders--Michael Byrne, a 21-year-old Australian, or Casey Johnson, 26, who won in Anaheim in 1999 on a smaller 125cc bike--to be taking any victory laps. A top-10 finish is the short-term goal, said Emig, who has retired officially.

As his TheEdgeSports.com Kawasaki team finds its wheels, Emig is trying to get comfortable in his new role and new life.

A resident of Menifee, Emig was a team owner-rider last year, trying to regain the form that led him to a world supercross title in 1996 and the U.S. title in 1997, the same years he also won motocross championships.

But four months before his career-ending injury, Emig broke both wrists, so he missed the 2000 supercross season. His 250cc rider and teammate, Phil Lawrence, tore shoulder ligaments in the third race of the season. It was a horrible year for a first-time team owner.

That came on the heels of an embarrassing episode in 1999 in Lake Havasu City, Ariz., where Emig was arrested for possession of marijuana and drug paraphernalia and public consumption of alcohol. He was fined and put on a year’s probation--and dropped as a Kawasaki factory rider the next day.

“I needed something to make me change my direction,” said Emig, 30, who since has reunited with Kawasaki after a year with Yamaha. “I never had been a pot smoker, but every now and then I would party. When it came to that, I decided to give it up. I gave up drinking too. I needed clarity in my life.

“I lived a pretty fast life while I was winning races. The real punishment was making the call to my father [Gary] to say I [messed] up. Posed with the same situation next time, I’ll make a different choice.”