Speedway Racer Just Knew How to Win : Motor sports: Mike Bast, considered by some to be best U.S. rider in history, still hasn’t gotten the sport out of his mind.

Rich VanderMeeden promotes Fast Fridays at the Auburn Fairgrounds, a weekly speedway festival for those who love motorcycles and mayhem.

He has followed the sport since 1976, and as he walks through the grandstand, he seems to be on a first-name basis with every other person wearing a black Harley-Davidson T-shirt.

There are plenty.

He has been glad-handing and answering their questions the last four years because he is, after all, in the promotion business.

Tonight’s question: Mike Bast--what happened?

“He still is the guy people ask about,” VanderMeeden says. “Consistently.”

Mike Bast is coaching Little League. On Monday, the Colfax-Meadow Vista all-stars open District 11 play. Bast, whose son, Shane, is the center fielder, will be in the dugout.

It has been a busy week.

“It’s like riding speedway,” Mike Bast says. “You’ve got to give it everything you have.”

Bast, 40, knows something about giving his life to something. He is the greatest speedway rider in American history, the only man to win seven U.S. national championships.

“He was brilliant on everything he rode, not just speedway,” said former racing rival Bruce Penhall of Laguna Hills. “Dirt bikes, motocross, road racing.”

On Friday nights in the 1970s and early ‘80s, he ruled the Orange County Fairgrounds. Ever see Muhammad Ali in a ring? Bast was the equivalent for speedway’s dirt oval, spraying the front row with mud as he angled his bike into the next turn, his steel-toed boot the only brake he had.

“Mike was probably the best rider in American history, as far as small tracks go,” Penhall said. “He taught me most everything I know.”

Penhall knew enough to become the first American in 47 years to win the world championship, and he did it twice, in 1981 and ’82.

Penhall also was a Bast rival-- the rival from 1977-79--and Bast was about the only guy Penhall couldn’t beat regularly.

“Even when I came back after gathering so much experience in Europe, my greatest threat was Mike Bast,” Penhall said. “He was that brilliant.”

The adjectives roll off the tongues of those who saw Bast win seven national titles, in 1971, ‘73, ‘75-79--no one else has won more than two. The man himself is more understated.

“I wasn’t by any stretch the fastest or the best rider,” Bast said. “I was the smartest rider.

“That’s what I tell my Little League pitchers--’You don’t have to be the fastest pitcher, you just have to know how to strike people out.’ ”

And one thing Bast knew how to do was win. He was a fabulous starter--that was his trademark--but Penhall said Bast also was a great finisher.

“Ninety-five percent of the time, if he got ahead, he would stay there,” Penhall said. “He was really good, and he had eyes in the back of his head.”

The thrill that kept Bast riding as a youngster, the exhilaration of winning and being the best at something, has never left. He thinks of racing every day.

It’s not the trophy case in the entry way of his home that reminds him. Or the game room, covered with racing plaques and photos around his pool table. Or the motocross track out back his boys ride on.

He has made the physical and emotional break from the sport. He hasn’t made the mental break.

“When I was 18, 19 years old, I thought I would race forever,” Bast said. “If I raced again, inside of two weeks I would win the scratch main (event). No doubt in my mind. I feel I could go back and win the world final if I wanted to. So could Bruce Penhall.

“But no one in the United States scares me riding speedway.”

No one, perhaps, except himself. He has a wife of 19 years, Dee Ann; three kids, Ryan, 14, Shane, 12, and Kari, 7; and a business, Bast Construction and Developers. He knows he could still race and win. There’s just too great a risk to try.

“I have to go on,” Bast said. “I have to make $100,000, $150,000 to keep up with my toys. That’s why I don’t have any problems with anyone (from the speedway days).

“Not a day goes by that I don’t think of racing. If I had one wish, it would be to race again. I just dream about it.

“I look back and think that racing was easy compared to what I do now. I’m older now, and I see why Harry (Oxley) made the decisions that he made then. I’m in that position now.”

Oxley, the race promoter at the Orange County Fairgrounds, is a shrewd businessman whose arguments with Bast are legendary.

Bast championed the only riders’ strike at the fairgrounds, in 1975, in pursuit of purses larger than 30% of the gross. It lasted a week. The hard feelings lasted longer.

And Oxley and Bast went round and round over handicap races, which Bast thought were unsafe because the better riders started behind the lesser riders, creating too many crashes. But it made for great theater.

Bast refused to ride handicaps, and Oxley took a hard stand. He threatened Bast with fines, and when that didn’t work, Oxley left Bast off the complete program--if you don’t ride the handicap, you don’t ride the scratch.

Bast conceded, riding halfheartedly in the handicap races, but it eventually took its toll.

Bast retired in 1984. He was 31.

“I won everything I laid my eyes on that first month, and I didn’t want to ride handicap,” Bast said. “(Oxley) said I was making a mockery of the sport, and I didn’t feel like getting mowed over by the younger drivers.

“I can see his point.”

Getting fed up with the politics, he said, was “a godsend, a blessing.”

His father-in-law, Ed Meister of Duarte, handed him a piece of paper and told him to take inventory: On one side, list what he had to gain by racing; on the other, list what he had to gain by going into business for himself.

“It really wasn’t Harry’s fault,” Bast said. “At 40, I could’ve still been riding, but I never would have seen the business world. It was tough; I had to hawk the family jewels.

“Nothing’s forever--that’s all I can say. It was time for someone else to take my place.”

Bast has forged a new career, one that has provided many comforts for his family: the basketball court, the baseball diamond, the pool. He buys land, then puts a home on it. Except his own land, which he fills with toys.

When Bast was 25, in 1978, he was one of the few riders actually making a living at his sport. He had a house in Riverside, and he invested his winnings. When he left in 1988 for Meadow Vista, a town of about 2,200 about 10 miles outside of Auburn, his house in Riverside was worth $500,000.

Now, he says he plays Monopoly--with real money--and he’s as competitive as ever.

“My life is as comfortable as I want it to be,” Bast said. “I wouldn’t want to change it; I don’t want any more or any less. I’ve been blown away by how my life has turned out. The Lord has blessed me.”

It wasn’t always easy being Mike Bast, the kid who grew up in the San Fernando Valley, had early sponsorship because his dad had a welding business, and who idolized his Uncle Harlan, a speedway racer.

He and his brother, Steve, were painted the bad guys on the Southern California circuit. They were not into public relations, being inaccessible in a sport in which fans walk right up to most riders.

Nicknamed “the Wind Machine,” Bast’s style was more cold and calculating.

“If you opened him up, you half-expected him to have wires inside,” said Brad Oxley, Harry’s son, the 1987 national champion who’s in charge of running the day-to-day operations of the Costa Mesa Speedway. “This is a sport where the riders are flashy mavericks; Mike Bast was a computerized kind of guy.

“There was a mystique about him, because people didn’t understand him totally. That’s why people still talk about him--people didn’t know if he was flesh and blood.”

The Bast brothers were opposite the more flashy, golden-haired glamour boys, the Newport Beach-type, Rick Woods and Danny Becker.

“I was from Van Nuys, the other side of the world,” Bast said. “They built the shows around Rick Woods, and I think it helped the show, but it was tough going through.

“If you’re perceived as a villain, it’s hard to shake. That’s where a lot of my problems came from. I never liked the bad-guy role. Many nights I went home to my wife and cried. I was the best rider, the best groomed, the best dressed. I just wish I could’ve gone to a race and had the same following (as the glamour boys).”

He heard the boos and the taunts. Fans spit on him, threw beer on him, paid money to watch him lose.

“I should have been laughing all the way to the bank,” Bast said. “I probably took it way too seriously.”

But Bast took everything seriously, including minutiae. The difference between him and everyone who finished second were the details, the focus.

“I was overwhelmingly focused--too focused,” Bast said. “I knew every intricate detail possible. That’s why I won a lot of races--I put a lot more into it than most people. It was that one little bit that the next guy didn’t do that made the difference.”

And what a difference it made.

“No one else was as smooth or consistent or steady as Mike Bast,” Brad Oxley said. “This is a sport that’s totally unpredictable, and here comes this guy who was as predictable as a Rolex.

“I’m convinced that if Mike Bast came back tomorrow, he would be competitive by the end of the week, and he might even be winning.”

Bast thinks about it. Daily. But he made up his mind long ago.

“Nothing’s forever.”

He was wrong.

Legend is.