High Rise

Seeing James “Bubba” Stewart’s likeness on magazine covers at newsstands is nothing new. The Florida teenager attracts attention as if he were a rock star instead of a motorcycle rider.

Actually, calling Stewart “a motorcycle rider” is like calling Eric Clapton “a guitar player.”

But that’s what Stewart does. He rides his green Kawasaki bike over dirt courses created with jumps, berms, ruts, potholes and stretches of jarring stutter bumps called whoops -- faster than anyone his age has ever ridden them.

“My Whole Life Is About Jan. 8,” Stewart is quoted in huge type on the cover of Racer X, a national motocross-supercross publication.

Today is Jan. 8 and what Stewart is talking about is the opening event of the THQ AMA supercross season at Angel Stadium. It will be the first time he has ridden in the 250cc class, the major league of supercross. After record-breaking years in the amateur and professional support classes, he will compete, for the first time, against the men at the top of the sport -- Ricky Carmichael, Chad Reed, Kevin Windham and, coming back after two years in retirement, seven-time champion Jeremy McGrath.

“This is it, everything for me was based around Anaheim,” he said. “It’s what I’ve dreamed about, what I’ve been thinking about since I rode my first bike. This is it, dude.”

Stewart rode his first bike, a combination birthday and Christmas present, on his fourth birthday. His father, James Stewart Sr., was a motocross rider and from the day Junior first watched his dad, he knew what he wanted to do.

By the time he was 7, Stewart had won his first national championship in the 50cc class at the Loretta Lynn Nationals in Tennessee. When he turned pro in 2002, he had won a record 11 national titles riding for Kawasaki Team Green.

He was the first African American to win a national event, a fact not lost on Stewart, but not one on which he likes to dwell. He knows the implications, sometimes being called the Tiger Woods of motorcycle racing, or likened to Jackie Robinson as a pioneer in his sport.

Two years ago, Teen People named Stewart as one of 20 teens who will change the world.

“I don’t know about that pioneer stuff,” he said rather shyly when confronted with the attention he is receiving as an African American icon. “I just like to go out and ride and have fun. When I first started, there weren’t many black folks around in motocross, but there seem to be more fans now. If I’m helping to bring them in, that’s cool.”

Then, as he has since first being asked about his situation, he says, “When we put our helmets on, you know, we all look the same.”

His life has changed dramatically, however.

There is his stable of cars, the fulfillment of a desire he has had since well before he was old enough to drive.

“To tell the truth, dude, I can’t remember all of them,” he said with a grin. “I know I have enough cars to go two weeks without sitting in the same leather.”

Among them are a Ferrari, a Porsche 360 Spyder, a Lamborghini, a Cadillac Escalade, a Land Rover and a Ford F-150 pickup truck.

“The truck’s so I can say I’m ‘Ford Tough,’ ” he said.

He recently bought a home in Corona, near the Kawasaki training track, to have a home atmosphere while living in the area four or five months a year. His father, still his coach and trainer; his mother, Sonya, the team bookkeeper and travel agent, and his younger brother, Malcolm, at 11 Bubba’s heckler, live with him.

“It’s a good feeling to know I can go home after Anaheim and sleep in my own bed and eat my own food instead of going to a hotel and having to eat out.”

Back home in Haines City, a central Florida community near Orlando, the Stewarts live on an 80-acre farm, complete with a herd of cattle and three race courses, one for supercross that has a lighting system for night practice, one for natural terrain motocross and one easier layout designed for friends such as baseball star Ken Griffey Jr., who often brings his family to ride at the Stewart compound.

Tom Cruise and his Hollywood production company, Cruise/Wagner, is partnering with Paramount Studios to produce a big-budget film on Stewart’s life. It is expected to debut in fall 2006.

Those are some of the perks that go with earning an estimated $5 million before you turn 19, which he did on Dec. 21.

McGrath, the rider who elevated supercross from a fringe sport to the most successful motorcycle competition in the world, says that Stewart deserves it.

“Stewart can do things on a bike that nobody ever has,” he said. “He is coming in like all of us did when we were getting ready for our first 250, pumped up and ready for the gate to drop. His skill level is so high, it is hard to believe how he learned so much so young. He is a student, he watches tapes of myself and other people, and he has taken his skills one step further. He sees the little things, the things an average fan, even an average rider, might not see. Just amazing.”

Ask Stewart after whom he has patterned himself and he claims he has his own way of riding, although he acknowledges having taken something from the great ones in the sport.

“I think I have the determination of someone like Jeff Stanton or Rick Johnson, the flash of someone like Jeremy McGrath or Damon Bradshaw, but really I’ve kind of developed my own style,” he said. “The guy I idolized was Jeff Matiasevich, the tall dude they called ‘Chicken.’ He was so cool and he rode a Kawasaki like I did. I talked about him so much the guys started calling me ‘Baby Chicken.’ ”

Matiasevich, from La Habra, was the AMA 125cc supercross champion in 1988 and ’89.

Carmichael, after winning his first supercross title on a Kawasaki, jumped to Honda’s higher-priced team in 2002 and industry insiders expected Stewart might do the same, particularly after Carmichael left a void in Honda’s roster this year by switching to Suzuki. No chance.

“I’m on a Kawasaki for the next two years, and hopefully more,” Stewart said. “I’m with the same crew and that means a lot to me. I know everybody around me. I know Kawasaki. I honestly think we have things down pat, and it’s really helpful to me that everybody knows their job.”

Bruce Stjernstrom has been with Stewart since his amateur days as Kawasaki’s director of racing, and Jeremy Albrecht, the crew chief, came to the team after working as a mechanic with Jeff Emig in 1997 when Emig upset McGrath to win the supercross title.

“Bubba is like a member of the crew, just one of the guys who pal around and horse around together,” Stjernstrom said. “Everybody loves him. He’s as fine a young man off the track as he is on it.”