Over the past seven to ten days I was nonchalantly perusing these two books. The Dirt, Motley Crue’s autobiography and God is Dead, a Frank Vandenbroucke biography.
Here and there. Now and then. One or the other or both. With coffee or beer or both in one hand or the other. Then the Turkey Day holiday gave me some extra down time and VDB went on a breakaway where I plowed through the final 200 pages of Andy McGrath’s book.
The Motley Crue book is amusing and dumbfounding. Crazy tales of crazy things leaving me wondering how they survived it all.
The VDB book is not so amusing but sort of astounding. Crazy tales of crazy things leaving me wondering how Vandenbroucke survived it all as long as he did.
Andy McGrath did an amazing job on this book. Travelling all over the place and interviewing over 60 people to put it all together. Family, friends, teammates, managers, journalists, doctors, therapists, bartenders and people who knew Frank Vandenbroucke. Many of those people wondered why he was working so hard on another book about VDB when there were already several out there.
In the final ten years of his life VDB was in the news for his transgressions, doping, car accidents, legal troubles and marriage problems. Very little media coverage of bike racing success because there was little to speak of.
Early on in my reading both of these books I arrived upon an excessive-excess common theme. Then yesterday I read on page 219 of the VDB book where McGrath talks of overly hungry aggressive inconsiderate cycling journalists:
their often legitimate argument would be that they were also feeding a rampant public interest. People wanted to read all about it; nothing succeeds like excess.
inexplicable excessively excessive excess
A former teammate-friend of Vandenbroucke said in the book that only about ten people knew Frank, but hundreds of thousands thought they knew VDB.
VDB refused to train or race with a cycling computer. He said all those numbers just got in the way. That made me smile. He was a real badass with amazing physical gifts and talents.
As a messenger I had a cycling computer for a few weeks. Then I chucked it. The numbers just pissed me off. Miles. Miles. Miles. And nothing to show for it, at least in a bottom line dollars per mile way.
As a mechanic at Bike Works I had a bucket full of cycling computers chucked in one at a time, one refurbished old bike with an old computer at a time. Some of them made it onto the “artwork” you see in these photos.
I highly recommend this book. Molly Foster has spoken for my copy, but when she’s done with it, maybe she’ll give it to you. Or you can buy your own on eBay.
