King of the Mountain : Thousand Oaks’ Mutolo Made the Grades in Class, World Competition

Before handing out report cards, Newbury Park High math teacher John Mutolo Sr. always tries to comfort the Bart Simpson crowd with a story about his son. John Jr., it seems, was failing eighth grade until he decided to make use of his brain. As a reward for passing his classes, he was given a new bike, which sparked an outstanding cycling career.

“And it all began with poor grades,” Mutolo tells the underachievers, many of whom start squirming in their seats.

No doubt Mutolo’s story of hope and redemption will have an even bigger ending the next time he recounts it. Johnny, now 18 and a graduate of Thousand Oaks High, has gone to the head of his class in mountain biking after winning the Junior World Mountain Bike championship earlier this month in Lucca, Italy. Give him an A+.

“Johnny has done wonders,” Mutolo said. “He’s a natural.”

Growing up in Thousand Oaks, John Jr., the second oldest of four children, could always run like the wind and ride a bike with abandon--his father remembers him doing wheelies for an entire block--but sports also provided him with an excuse to slack off. According to his father, Johnny would rather hit the pavement on his roller blades than hit the books.

“I was very unhappy with his grades,” Mutolo said. “He wasn’t even doing his homework.”

Like parents of all lollygagging children, John and Jane Mutolo figured their son was not “applying” himself. What he needed was a little discipline, so John grounded him in eighth grade from Easter until the end of the school year. Every day after school, Johnny was confined to his father’s office. No sports, no slacking, a routine that made Johnny a student and his father . . .

“Guilty, really guilty,” Mutolo said.

It is a well-known fact that a father with guilt becomes loose with the gelt, so Mutolo took Johnny to a bike store for a treat. He expected him to want a BMX bike--on a friend’s back-yard track, Johnny was always beating kids who raced BMXs seriously--but Johnny picked out a mountain bike. He was being practical.

“I thought I could ride tracks and trails with one bike,” Johnny said, munching an apple. “A mountain bike is indestructible.”

Johnny discovered the trails in the Santa Monica Mountains, which are not too distant from his home. The appeal was “the danger on the downhills,” he said. “That’s why I like climbing uphill--I know the downhill side is coming up.” He never went back to BMX riding.

Johnny played soccer his first two years in high school but quit to devote himself to cycling. “I got into cycling every day,” he said. “It was total dedication immediately.” With Greg LeMond’s “Complete Book of Cycling” as his guide, Johnny trained like a professional. As his speed improved, so did his grades.

“When you’re that dedicated, you’re dedicated to everything you do,” said Johnny, who took honors classes in high school. “I wouldn’t take a day off from training even if I had a cold.”

Mutolo also did road racing to fill in the weekends between mountain races. “There are a lot more road races than mountain races,” he said.

He did well on the flats--leading most of the race, he finished seventh in the U.S. Cycling Federation Junior Nationals in Texas earlier this year--but his first love was mountain biking.

Last year, he placed fifth in the mountain bike Junior National Championships in Mammoth, qualifying for the U.S. team in the world competition. A broken wheel put him out of the world meet but made him train harder for this year’s competition, “my ultimate goal,” he said. “All my training revolved around me going to Italy.”

Mutolo made the U.S. team again this year by finishing fourth in the junior nationals in Vermont, so he headed for the Italian Alps to compete against 150 junior riders from more than 30 countries. Aside from “a pizzeria on every corner,” he remembers his shocked reaction in Italy when the food bill came and he owed about 50,000 lire, a currency bloated by inflation.

The mountain-bike course for juniors consisted of two nine-mile laps, starting in a stadium outside town. Mutolo was fifth during the first climb but won the sprint to the single-track trail and took the lead for good. When he crossed the finish line in 1 hour 23 minutes 9 seconds--77 seconds ahead of the runner-up--he was overwhelmed by the tumultuous ringing of cowbells, the Italian version of the tomahawk chop.

“I’d never seen so many people watching a bike race before,” he said. And they were all cheering him “because my last name is Mutolo.” (His father’s family is from Sicily.) Johnny would have been satisfied with a top-five finish, but his win wasn’t a big surprise.

“We knew he had it in him,” said Randy Commans of Moorpark, manager for Team Parkpre, for which Mutolo rides. “It was always one thing or another that kept him from winning anything major before this.”

Mutolo will turn 19 in June, meaning that he has to race in the senior division starting in January (he calls the world championship “the ultimate end” to his junior career.) Men don’t reach their peak in cycling until their late 20s, but Mutolo seems likely to be a contender immediately. Had he raced the senior men’s course in Italy, his pace would have put him in seventh place behind men’s champion John Tomac, a former Chatsworth resident who lives in Durango, Colo.

One day, there will be life after cycling, and Mutolo is preparing by attending Moorpark College on his way to a degree at a four-year school. Mutolo wants to be a firefighter, his dream since he watched “Squad 51” on television.

He also would like to mix in a party once in a while. “I don’t have as much social life as I’d like to,” he said. “I’m gone every weekend racing.”

And while his social life may suffer, it’s a good bet that his grades don’t.