The Chicken and the Beast

Jeff Matiasevich and Damon Bradshaw starred in one of motocross racing’s greatest rivalries ever—and they’re about to get a chance to revive it
By Eric Johnson

Surprisingly for such a competitive sport, American motocross has only seen a handful truly fierce rivalries. There was Bob Hannah and Marty Smith, who went at it on 125s in 1976 and then 500s the following year; Hannah and Roger DeCoster had more than a few run-ins in the Trans-AMA series in the late 1970s; and perhaps the bitterest rivalry of all was between Hannah and Kent Howerton in 1981 (noticing a trend here?).
     However, in the modern era (otherwise known as “post-Buckwheat”), the most intense motocross rivalry of the last twenty-five years involved two riders who never won a major AMA Championship, though they did find success in 125cc supercross. Between 1989 and 1992, Damon “The Beast from the East” Bradshaw and Jeff “Chicken” Matiasevich had such a deep and profound hatred for one another that their on-track antics and altercations are still the stuff of legend. So poisoned was their relationship that the recent Ryan Dungey-Jason Lawrence dust-ups are minor by comparison.
     We recently asked both Bradshaw, a country boy who grew up in North Carolina racing Yamahas, and Matiasevich, a Southern California wild child who was once a Team Green standout, to relive the rivalry.

“I think you’d have to go back to Bob Hannah to find a rivalry like we had,” Bradshaw begins. Damon is 36 now, and he’s been out of supercross for a while, though he does drive the Air Force Afterburner monster truck. He also lives in Idaho, not far from Hannah, with his wife, Angela, and their two boys. “And even then, Bob had so many rivalries that I don’t even really know if there was a battle like ours.”
     Jeff Matiasevich, now 39 and working in the family produce business in California, fully agrees with his once-bitter adversary. “I really don’t think there’s been a rivalry like ours since,” he muses. “I mean, between Damon and me, it got mean! I would say things on the gate like, ‘Hey, Bradshaw, you redneck, are you still dating your sister? Your sister’s hot!’ He’d be all, ‘Screw you, Chicken! Leave my girlfriend alone!’”
     Matiasevich says he’d then turn to another rider and say, “He’s probably got kids with forearms sticking out of their foreheads walking around the woods like Jason from Friday the 13th, with a Fox jersey on with ‘Bradshaw’ on the back. That’s how Damon got the ‘Beast From the East’ nickname!”
     In retrospect, it may have been inevitable that Bradshaw and Matiasevich would serve as foils for one another. They both came up through the amateur ranks around the same time, Damon in the East, Jeff a California boy.
    
“There was a lot of hype on both of us,” Matiasevich says of their formative days. “Actually, I think what really started it was the Mini Olympics in Florida around 1988, when we were just getting ready to step up to the professional level. We were kind of above that level at that point—we shouldn’t have been there, basically. I’d just gotten back from racing in South Africa. After missing two weeks of school, my first day back, I got called into the office with a letter saying I had a 12:00 flight out to Florida. I guess Kawasaki figured out Yamaha was bringing Damon, so they called my mom and had her get me on the first flight out. That was actually the first time we raced against each other, but even at that point, we already weren’t going out of our way to talk to each other. We never hung out—we never even stood next to each other!”

     Bradshaw remembers the Mini Olympics encounter, but believes the rivalry didn’t truly reach a boiling point until the winter of 1989. By that time, Matiasevich had already proven himself by winning the 1988 AMA West Region Supercross Championship, but even that couldn’t match the unprecedented hype that greeted Bradshaw when he turned professional following the ’88 AMA Amateur Nationals at Loretta Lynn’s.
The first shockwaves came when Damon won an international supercross that fall in Japan against some of the top riders of the day. Then, on a white sand track at Joe Robbie Stadium in Miami, Damon made his AMA supercross debut on February 18, 1989 in Miami. A sweet mullet of blond hair hanging from the back of his helmet, Bradshaw won that evening’s 125cc main event despite crashing several times and having to come all the way through the pack—twice!
Bradshaw would take the 1989 AMA 125cc East Region title, while Matiasevich took the West Region crown again. Then came the AMA 125cc Motocross National Championship—the first pro series in which the duo truly crossed swords.
    
“In supercross, we only raced each other a few times,” Bradshaw explains. “Remember, I only rode the 125 class that one year. Although they were nothing major, there were some incidents that occurred between us throughout the outdoor series, and from there it just continued. It seemed like every time we were in a race together, no matter if we started in the front or last, we were together. We were just always banging into each other. I didn’t want to let him beat me, and I think he felt the same way.”

FRENCH DUEL

According to Matiasevich, the first international incident between Bradshaw and himself was at the 1990 Paris-Bercy Supercross in France. Damon was a natural 250cc rider who was already a five-time 250cc AMA supercross winner, while Jeff had won his first AMA supercross that March in Las Vegas (it would be the only supercross win of his career).

     “It was in a small little hockey rink,” Jeff recalls of the Palais Omnisport on the edge of Paris, “but they built the track right up against a 10-foot cement wall. You came through a section of whoops, and then you made a right-hand turn that was right up against the wall.
“Well, Damon got the holeshot, and I yelled at him in a turn and spooked him. He straightened up, I went underneath him, and then we came through the whoops. I got out of the whoops and started to make the right, and I could hear him just freaking pinned! I guess he was just hanging off the back of thing and out of control and pretty much launched the bike. There was no way he was going to make the turn, and that put me into the wall.”

     The impact sent Matiasevich to the emergency room with blood in his urine and saliva. “I wasn’t going to let that go,” he recalls. “I felt it was just an idiot move. You could only go so fast, and there was no way he was going to make that turn. It was early in the race, so there were going to be plenty of other opportunities to get by.”
Once they were back stateside, Bradshaw continued to enjoy better results than his adversary. During the ‘92 season, he came out on top of the second round, at Houston, starting a five-race win streak. Though Matiasevich wasn’t winning, he was a competitive, top-five rider who was often in the mix, and he and Bradshaw seemed to have a knack for brushing each other’s fur back.

“It got to a point where it wasn’t about winning or losing,” Matiasevich admits. “It was just about trying to beat Damon and getting an opportunity to stick a handlebar in his ribs. There were times I think we lost focus of everything around us except getting one in on each other.”
     According to Damon, this mindset wasn’t necessarily mutual. “I always wanted to win and always tried to race with guys the way they raced with me,” he insists. “Why could I go out and battle with the guys like [Jeff] Stanton and have the battles we had and never have a problem? I raced with Stanton the way he raced with me, but with Chicken, I had to race with him totally different. You never knew what he was going to do. You could never trust him.”

THE TIPPING POINT

Until the spring of ‘92, the grudge match had primarily been limited to the battlefield, but it started to spill over at the Atlanta race, where the two nearly came to blows after their qualifier. At the Las Vegas round that April, things escalated to the next level. Having swept the Pontiac doubleheader two weeks earlier, Bradshaw was heading toward what seemed like a sure AMA Supercross Championship, but he was on the verge of coming unglued with Matiasevich. Roy Janson, then the AMA’s director of professional racing, saw it all coming.
     “They’d tangled many times up to that point of the season,” Janson confirms. “It seemed like every Saturday night, it was one thing or another. And all throughout the day, I had the feeling that Vegas was going to be one of those evenings.”

     Matiasevich could also feel something brewing in Sin City’s warm evening air: “Up to that point, we’d rammed into each other so many times, it was just part of racing. Yeah, we may have went out of the way a little bit to make some contact, but I could feel Vegas was going to be something else.”
     Team Suzuki’s Larry Ward grabbed the holeshot in the main event, but he was soon shoved aside by Honda men Stanton and Jean-Michel Bayle. Matiasevich then motored up on the duo, while Bradshaw charged through the pack like a freight train. All 17,769 fans present in Sam Boyd Stadium looked on in awe at what came next.
     “We set into a little pace there, and I knew Damon was right behind me,” Matiasevich explains. “I knew I had to watch what I was doing; I couldn’t ride the track the way I could if somebody else was behind me, because I knew Damon would stick it into me if he could.”

     Oh, and did Bradshaw stick it to him! The two riders dove into a large left-hand bowl turn, Bradshaw choosing the far inside while Chicken railed his Kawasaki around the higher, faster outside line. But Bradshaw didn’t even bother to try to make the turn, pinning his YZ to the stops and aiming it right at Jeff. The white bike hit Matiasevich like a missile.

     “I was about halfway through the bowl turn, looking down the straightaway, and I saw Damon coming straight at me from the inside,” recalls Matiasevich. “There was a big two-foot inside berm, and the @#%!er just never let off. It was by far the hardest hit I’ve ever experienced. It was like a freaking truck ran me over! We exploded!”
     Amazingly, both riders continued on, Matiasevich eventually placing seventh and Bradshaw finishing ninth. Not knowing whether to laugh or cry, Jeff immediately rode to the AMA trailer to file a protest. Bradshaw was cited for breaking Rule #23, Chapter 9 of the AMA rulebook, which read, “Riding at any time in such a manner as to endanger the life or limb of other riders is forbidden.”

     To this day, Matiasevich is still somewhat amused by the number of fines he and Bradshaw racked up in 1992. The typical penalty was $5,000, but when that didn’t dissuade his run-ins, it was raised. “After one race, we got called into the AMA trailer,” he recounts. “Roy Janson said, ‘Ten thousand dollars is a lot of money, but if you continue to do it, we’re just going to hold you to $10,000 a week.’ I looked at Roy and said, ‘Let’s just make it $60,000 and call it the end of the year. We’ll just finish off the year with that. I don’t want to waste my time coming here every night, you know?’ I didn’t care. I really didn’t.”

     “Back then we used to pay the riders in cash, and when Damon came over to get paid after one race, I gave him half the money and said, ‘The rest is going to have to cover the fine for ramming Matiasevich tonight,’” Janson says. “Damon just looked at me, handed the rest of the money back, and said, ‘Well, then you might as well hold this for next weekend and save us both the trip.’”

THE REMATCH

Amazingly, these two American gladiators never actually took to throwing haymakers at one another, which raises the question: What would have happened if they had?

     “It got to a point—and I’m sure he felt the same—that a fistfight would’ve just felt good,” Matiasevich says, laughing hard. “You know? It wouldn’t have mattered if he kicked my ass or I kicked his ass, but to just get out there on the dirt field and start swinging—I know it would’ve felt good. It never did go there, though. We never got the opportunity. It was just one of those rivalries that wouldn’t go away.”
     Unfortunately, the race wins and factory rides did go away. In a monumental meltdown, Bradshaw lost the ’92 supercross title to Stanton at the very last round of the series. He was never the same after that, and early in the following season, he went on an indefinite hiatus, citing burnout and a need to get away from racing for a while. He would return a couple years later, but he was never the same man on the racetrack. He did manage to win the ’97 High Point National on a Manchester Honda, along with a handful of arenacross races a few years later, before retiring for good.

     As for Matiasevich, he never quite lived up to his full potential as a racer either. He took a ride with Suzuki after his Kawasaki contract was up, but his habit of burning the candle at both ends caught up with him soon enough. He made a few haphazard attempts at comebacks, but the fire of his youthful potential was long gone.
     Fifteen years later, is it all just water under the bridge, or do the two still hold a grudge? Oddly enough, it was a road race—the recent Red Bull U.S. Grand Prix at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca—that provided the answer. That’s where Bradshaw walked into a Monterey bar and was surprised to see his old nemesis sitting on a barstool.
     “I was like, ‘Holy s****!’” Damon laughs. “So I decided it was a good opportunity, and I ran up behind him and just grabbed him.”

     Matiasevich was even more surprised than Bradshaw: “Out of nowhere, I hear, ‘Hey, buddy!’” he says. “Somebody grabs me from the back, and I turn around and it’s Damon Bradshaw. I was like, ‘Hey, what’s up?’ That was the first time I talked to the guy my whole career, and we talked for a long time.”
     The timing was perfect, as the promoters of the Rockstar Energy Drink U.S. Open had approached both riders about a Legends race they were planning for the October event. “I was saying, ‘If Damon’s doing it, I’m doing it,’” Matiasevich explains. “I guess Damon was saying the same thing: ‘If Chicken does it, I’m doing it for sure!’”
     As a result, fans who attend the race in Las Vegas will have the opportunity to witness the ultimate rematch: Damon “The Beast from the East” Bradshaw versus Jeff “Chicken” Matiasevich, squaring off one more time in the five-lap exhibition race. What can we expect?

     “While we were sitting there talking about it, Damon said, ‘With this Vegas thing, we’re older now, and we don’t need to go kill each other,’” offers Matiasevich. “I looked at him and said, ‘Dude, as soon as I strap my helmet on, nothing’s going to freakin’ change. And you know what? Nothing’s going to change for you, either! So why even bother!’ I still owe you from Vegas!’”
     Old rivalries really do die hard.