Go, Speed Racer, Go

A wristwatch beeps and the otherwise empty parking garage echoes with the thunder of pounding urethane as four professional skaters break into a sprint, arms flying and legs clopping. Overhead fluorescent bulbs bleed into a stream of light as the racers hit a tight corner and slide into a single line. For an instant the skaters look like a single, four-headed, 40-wheeled, spandex-clad beast.

But by the next lap a red helmet has broken from the pack and is in a comfortable lead; by the time the two-minute race ends, you could park a truck between Eddy Matzger and his nearest competitor. “Thanks for going easy Eddy,” huffs one skater.

“You were on me like glue,” Matzger charitably tells another.

“Yeah, right,” comes the response. It’s a weekday evening and Matzger and a few friends have just started a two-hour session of interval training: quick bursts of skating followed by a (relatively) languid glide around the garage, across the street from the University of California.

Earlier in the day Matzger spent six hours on his bike climbing from sea level to the top of 3,800-foot Mt. Diablo. He does both workouts twice a week, plus some fierce long-distance street skating (50 miles usually gets him to break a sweat), including chasing the university’s women’s cycling team through the city’s hills. All of which is followed by two days of travel and a day of furious competition.

This is Eddy Matzger’s work week. Matzger, who just turned 30, is one of the country’s top professional in-line speed skaters and one of only a dozen or so who actually get paid well for their passion. Since roller-blades hit the market almost a decade ago, the sport has exploded and now almost 30 million Americans zip around on in-line skates. Few zip faster than Matzger.

“Eddy’s one of the great skaters out there,” said Tim Martin, director of USA Inline, the national speed skating body, based in Altamonte Springs, Fla. “He’s probably the best known skater in the world.”

Matzger’s renown is not merely a function of his skating ability; it also rests on a winning personality that brims over with goodwill and a savvy marketing flair that helped him to recently buy a two-story, turn-of-the-century Victorian near the UC Berkeley campus. “This house is mortgaged on skating,” Matzger said proudly.

Matzger is walking through the large, tree-shaded backyard in his usual summer outfit: a pair of baggy shorts and wooden clogs. The clogs come off as soon as he steps indoors. His forearms are very dark where his racing jersey doesn’t block the sun. Matzger is 5 feet, 8 inches and 165 pounds, muscular but hardly intimidating and quick with an impish grin; he has thick, dark hair, a nasal tone that sounds anything but threatening and boundless enthusiasm.

“I tried every sport known to man and all paled compared to the feeling I get from in-line skating,” he said. “It’s a feeling of floating and freedom.”

After winning a race Matzger has been known to stand in his skates for the next hour at the finish line, cheering on stragglers. He’s called “the gentle giant” because of his racing prowess, not height, and “the cannibal” because of his penchant for eating the competition alive. He thrives on steep climbs, rainy conditions and never stops smiling.

Matzger is often called the grandfather of the young sport, although somewhat perversely his early domination of speed skating helped pull in the kind of talent that makes him really work for his supper.

At the moment, Matzger is ranked No. 7 in points by USA Inline Racing, which runs a national circuit ranging from 1,500 meter sprints to 26-mile marathon events. Twentysomethings Chad Hedrick and Derk Downing are slugging it out for the top spot. Matzger finished first in points in 1994, but it is really on the grueling terrain of endurance racing on which he has left his urethane mark. “I’m not a sprinter,” he conceded. “I need time to wear down the opposition.”

Matzger is the only skater to have won the 62-mile New York City Marathon twice and holds a record number of first places (four) in the 85-mile Athens-to-Atlanta skate, which are coming up Sept. 21 and Oct. 12, respectively. The Monterey Sea Otter Classic race, which he has won the last six years, is now known as “The Eddy Matzger Classic.”

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Speed skating is not to be confused with aggressive or “extreme” skating, i.e. those skaters in baggy pants who defy gravity on ramps and have more in common with the skateboarding culture than with the elegance of ice skate racing. “We like to watch them once in awhile,” sniffed Martin, of USA Inline. “But we kind of think of them as a way-out element.”

While Matzger has been known to injure himself horsing around on a ramp, it was the combination of going fast and far that appealed to his nature.

“It was obvious from the start that he had extraordinary endurance,” said his father Paul Matzger, a San Francisco lawyer. “At 17 he ran a marathon in 2 hours, 43 minutes. It’s still a record for 18 and under at the Humboldt Marathon. It’s an extraordinary achievement, but you have to drag it out of him. He’s very self-effacing. I didn’t think he had it in him to promote himself the way he has. He doesn’t like to toot his own horn too much.”

Call it the luck of the Dutch, where Matzger’s mother was born and where ice skating is the national passion and in-lining has been huge for years.

In 1988, Matzger, who grew up in San Francisco, went to his grandmother’s 80th birthday party in the Netherlands and spent much of the summer exploring the country’s web of bike paths on a pair of early four-wheel in-lines that he had liberated from a friend’s closet. One day he stumbled across a race: Dutch speedsters were streaking around a track on the coolest looking five-wheel skates Matzger had ever seen, cheered on by adoring fans. “I had to have a pair,” he recalled.

Matzger canceled his return ticket, showed up at the factory that made the low-cut leather racing boots and laced up a pair in the company’s parking lot, much to the merriment of workers who laughed at the young American wobbling around like a newborn horse. He entered a race. He got lapped by women and old people.

Back in the states he did better, finishing second in his first race in Las Vegas. But he almost missed the start, having passed out in his car after driving all night because he had to stay in Berkeley until the last minute working on a school paper. But Matzger was soon burning up the fledgling racing circuit, picking up endorsements from an energy bar company and various product manufacturers.

When graduation from UC Berkeley came in 1991, the geography major / Dutch minor had to decide between taking a job at the Yellow Pages drawing area code maps or turning pro. “It was an easy call,” Matzger said. “I was born to race.” Making a living at it is harder. His friends at the garage, for instance, all hold day jobs while Matzger is busy building what you could call Eddy Inc.

His name and face beam from the package of TwinCam bearings (he’s a virtual one-man racing team for the company). When not training (which includes skating on Astroturf and sliding around in his socks on a board of Formica to work on his form) or spending up to 30 weekends a year on the road competing, Matzger travels around the country teaching skating seminars, charging $165 a head for a three-day workshop. Videos, books and a Web site are all in various stages of preparation.

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During the off-season in winter, Matzger (a travel nut who plays the flute and writes for sports magazines) likes to relax by skating across Indonesia, gliding across the Taj Mahal (smooth) or the Great Wall of China (not so smooth). “It’s still kind of a dream doing something you love so much and getting compensated for it,” he said. “I’m looking forward to doing this for the foreseeable future. There’s no danger of me slowing down for the next decade.”

But competitive skating isn’t always so fun. Recently, for example, Matzger was pulling into the final stretch of a race, when he felt a hand on his thigh. Matzger had been holding back until the end of the 20-minute event and had begun to pass other racers, his powerful stride carrying him into fourth place--until the shove from a competitor.

Then two hands grabbed his hips and yanked him back even farther. Matzger finished 13th. He complained to the racing officials and tried to present a video that he said proved his case. But the referee told him that there was no precedent for using tape to disqualify someone, sending Matzger home in an unusually dejected mood.

“Shameless,” Matzger said sadly, a few days later. “From fourth to 13th, all because of foul play. It’s so unfair and unsportsmanlike. It happened so fast I couldn’t react. A moment’s interruption in your stroke and it has dire consequences for your skating.

“It’s very discouraging. I’ll never be caught dead doing that, but it has happened to me numerous times, numerous times. It’s tough. You want to do an eye for an eye or a tooth for a tooth but you can’t or you’re just as guilty of perpetrating bad sportsmanship.”

Matzger blames money for corrupting the sport and making it more cutthroat. But he also sees a typically Eddy Matzger solution. “You’ve got to have longer races,” he suggested, hope coming back into his voice, “so people don’t have any breath left to do such things.”