Through The Lens by Brad Phillips

By Brad Phillips

These last few months have been the best of my life! So much was accomplished and so many cool things happened it is hard to put into words. But I’ll try, here goes…

When I left you last we were gearing up to go to London, KY; not for the GNC national but to pay a visit to Jason Lewis, Greg Stuart and Roger Brown for some cross country footage. I have to admit, I personally have never experienced a GNCC race or even much pro level cross country action. I was very impressed to say the least! I can’t imagine going that fast through such tight areas and doing so for a whole race. As I said, I was impressed to say the least, and stoked to get it all on film. That wasn’t easy however. We resorted to several bike and helmet mounted cameras which gave a great view of what it really takes and feels like to muscle a 350 pound machine through the tight woods of southern Kentucky. Before we started filming we took a tour of the Lewis Racing facilities. I counted at least four full TRX250R race bikes, including some of Jimmy Elzas old TT bikes, just sitting on shelves, countless spare engines and parts laying around and of course more than a few GNCC quads. Then we went to their second shop about a mile away. When arriving we imediately noticed their huge toter-home, a huge 44’ stacker trailer, a custom Yamaha Rhino, his and her Corvettes, two Cyclone trucks and a top-fuel dragster! I didn’t think it was possible, but Jason Lewis may have surpassed Skyler Stewart for the most toys!

The first day of filming consisted mostly of tearing around a wooded track by Jason’s parent’s house. We were able to get some good tight wood’s shots there because of the natural terrain in the area. There was also close to 30 acres of rolling grass hills that seemed to be where they spent there time screwing around and unwinding after a day of practice. We filmed until around 6:00 and had to wrap it up because Jason and Greg had to play in a business sponsored softball game. We attended the game to get a good look at what KY softball is all about. Just as we though, it’s pretty standard with the exception of the prison issue pants they were wearing. After that it was lights out so we could get a jump on filming in the morning.

The next day we went along with Jason and Greg to Rogers Brown’s house. Roger has another track that is a lot tighter and has a lot more tree coverage, making it even more difficult to film, luckily we brought along our Rhino. We found a cool section of land that the power lines passed through, which was a very scenic and rolling landscape that looked excellent on film. After wrapping at Roger’s house we went on a trail ride in the Rhinos to cut loose a little. I logged over 40 miles on that one trail ride! It was intense, but a lot of fun! Yet again Jason and Greg had to report for duty at yet another softball game that night so we decided to pack up and head down to Muddy Creek Raceway in Blountville, TN for GNC round eight. We pulled into the track entrance at 1:00 a.m Thursday morning.

Doc Ragon got Brock all stitched up and ready to go for Saturday.The next morning there was another line of about 30 rigs waiting to get in. Of course we somehow neglected to buy food to cook before we parked in line.

 

Knowing that we couldn’t unhook the truck and get out because of all the other rigs, we unloaded the Rhino and drove it the ten miles into town. The journey including some four lane highway driving, might I add.

Once again the race went off like any other GNC, but with surprisingly good weather. We did have one of our riders get hurt though; Brock Lyons came up short on the finish line jump and cut his forehead open pretty deep during Friday’s practice. It was nice to see all the top Pro-Am riders stop to help a fellow friend and rider in need. Cale Downen was one of the first ones there, Brock was bleeding so badly from his cut that it saturated Cale’s glove, but he still stayed to help him. Roco Arno, Jesse Sheaffer, as well as a few others also stopped to help.

Friday night Brock, Skyler, Jack Bednar, Donna Stewart, Nick Prohaska and I drove into town to get some drugs for Brock and to get some more stuff to eat. We stopped at a local restaurant called Cootie Brown’s. It appeared to be another fairly uneventful meal until Skyler spotted a pair of tie-die long underwear for sale. He spent at least 20 minutes trying to negotiate a lower price for them; he finally got them down to $20 and bought them. Because the girl running the cash register (the one he was haggling with) was in a noticeably bad mood, Skyler put the long underwear on over his clothes in the middle of the restaurant and began dancing around. I quickly decided to leave so no one knew I was actually with him. From there we went to the grocery store so Donna could get supplies. Skyler, still in his decratove long underwear, went into the entrance of the store and began riding a coin operated horse. Somehow he ended up breaking the rein, and as he bent over to fix it, the horse bucked him off! Brock jumped on the back to try to help him and he got bucked off too. So picture this, they are both squished between the wall, wedged betwen it and this little kid’s coin operated bucking horse. It was hilarious! And, of course, we caught it on film.

Sunday after the races there was a large number of people still at the track, most waiting for early morning planes. So we took advantage of the logistics and planned an outing with some of our friends at a local gentlemen’s club. There was close to 20 of us there but I am going to refrain from making a list of people out of respect for some of those not wanting to be mentioned. I will tell you about some people there however, especially those that left me with a $150 tab (cough) Skyler Stewart (cough). Everything was going great, we were all enjoying the entertainment, Skyler was screaming something about how he loves Pert Plus shampoo, as I said – really pretty normal. Then all the sudden I hear “Another round for everyone…and shots too!” Of course it was Skyler, I asked him how he planned on paying for all the drinks he just ordered, he gave me a dumfounded look and then said “I love Pert Plus!” As the waitress tried to collect money for the drinks Skyler just ignored her, I figured it would be cheaper to pay the tab than to pay bail so I flipped her my card. I figured I can just take it out of his video royalties later anyway. I decided not to drink that night because we had a long drive the next day so I drove all of us back to the track where we were staying. Instead of helping Skyler into his rig we decided to turn the camera on and let him try it himself. It was a good idea because 30 minutes of pure comedy ensued.

Monday we hit the road and headed to Oil City, PA to pay a visit to Joel Hetrick and Hetrick Racing. When we arriced on Tuesday the Hetrick facility was insanely busy. I don’t know how they can do it, but they are definitely doing something right! Around 2pm Michelle, Joel’s Mom brought us to his school so we could surprise Joel with a camera crew at school because we were interested in getting some shots of him at school for possible use in the upcoming film. After school was out the whole Hetrick crew quickly loaded up and headed out to their favorite track for some practice, of course we tagged along. I can’t even explain how fast Joel is, he amazed me more than I was expecting. I have a whole new appreciation for youth racers now. He was smoking corners and clearing 40 foot doubles on a Kasea 90! He rode on the pipe the entire time; I can comfortably say that Joel could probably compete in the 4-stroke B class at nationals on his Kasea 90 and possibly win. He is that fast! (No offense to you B classer racers). We got so much good footage from him that we wrapped in only 4 hours of filming, the quickest I have ever gotten done. That night we packed up and kept heading east towards New Jersey to film with Kerry Getz.

I initially found out about Kerry Getz’s interest in quads when he ordered a copy of Carpe Diem off our website. I did a double take when I saw his order. For those who aren’t familiar with Kerry, he is a world famous professional skateboarder, has his own line of skateboards and shoes, and is featured in many films and TV stations such as Fuel, MTV, and ESPN. Plus, he isn’t the stereotypical “skateboarder,” he’s a normal guy who rides a board for work and a quad for fun. Needless to say I was excited to get to meet him and work with him. As we were driving near Allentown on our way to Kerry’s house in New Jersey, he called us. I figured he was calling to give us directions to his house, instead he said, “Do you guys want to go to Bam Margera’s house to ride?” It didn’t take long for me to agree to the suggestion. We met up with Kerry in now-famous West Chester, PA to follow him out to meet MTV’s newest star Bam and check out his castle. It was so surreal pulling into the driveway and seeing the Hummer by the front door, the skate ramp they made during one of the episodes, even Vito’s car that was made into a jump. We took a quick look around and saw his Lamborghini one day after Billy Idol cut a hole in the roof of it. Brian Deegan’s tire tracks that were left upstairs by the pool table and the tree fort casino in the back yard. This was too cool! We unloaded our quads and gear and began filming right away. We were excited to see that there was a good sized quad track in the woods around Bam’s house. Kerry started playing around back there while Nick helped Kerry’s friend Brian build a jump over Bam’s driveway. After about an hour, Bam got back from filming part of an episode in town and joined us on the track. He rode out on a old foreman 300ES and started jumping it, he even took it over the 30 foot gap! After a short time, it started to get dark so we went inside to play some pool, listen to some tunes and check out the new Adio film. After a couple hours of that we went to NJ and crashed at Kerry’s.

The next day we called Donny Lysinger to come out riding, Kerry took us to the place they ride most of the time; a sand based riding area with a lot of cool trails and a track that they made themselves. It was cool for me to see and ride on because I have been so used to groomed race tracks, this reminded me of what I started on and it was fun to get back to those good-ole-days kind of ridding. I was impressed by Kerry’s quad talent, I wasn’t sure what to expect but I can see that he takes it seriously and obviously rides a lot. After a few hours of riding on the track we checked a strip mine that was real close to the first spot. We were a little disappointed when we got there though, there used to be some really nice natural step-up jumps but they had been taken away by the mining so we just rode around the area and played around for awhile, figuring we still had a full day the next day to film. Unfortunately that wasn’t the case, it started to rain with no sign of letting up, so we made the tough decision to load up and head back to Iowa.

To my surprise, I found Skyler at my place when I got home; he had been staying with Chad Wienen in Galena, IL (about 2 hours away) but decided to come to Iowa City to practice. He has a pretty good set-up here, he parks his rig at Bill and Joan Frees’s house (the parents of past GNC pro Nate Frees), they have a 10 acre practice track in their backyard, a gym within 5 miles and a large mountain bike area 3 miles away, plus, one of the biggest party colleges in the country is right there. He still managed to complain about being bored, so we took him out on the town. The whole night he said he wanted to cut his hair into a mohawk, so, at the end of the night we helped him out with that, Nick grabbed the clippers, our buddy Ted held Skyler down and we clipped away; it was masterpiece if you ask me.

The rest of the week was uneventful, Skyler practiced and worked out everyday and I worked on the film. After we got our work done, it was off to more adventures. For three weeks we had been trying to go skydiving but we couldn’t because of windy conditions, finally we got our chance this time. It was the coolest thing we had ever done. We all got hooked immediately and are planning on getting our license so we can jump alone. If you ever get the chance to do it, I highly recommend it!

From there we took a trip to southern Illinois to see Cale Downen, Chad Wienen and Sage Baker before heading to Daniel Boone in London, KY. It was another pretty basic trip, with one exception; we blew up a propane tank. This had started several weeks earlier, we were trying to find a way to shoot a full 5 gallon propane tank and make it explode. We figured southern Illinois would be the best place for this kind of explosion. One of Cale’s friends grabbed a 30OT6; we took the propane tank 200 yards onto the track and fired away. After a few misses we finally hit it. Although it was a pretty sweet explosion I was looking for something a little more, but impressive nonetheless.

Daniel Boone was another basic National, except it was on the July 4th weekend! That just screams fireworks! After dinner Friday night we stopped at a fireworks tent and stocked up on roman candles and Black Cats, pretty innocent stuff really. That’s what we thought at first anyway. NOTE: DO NOT TRY THE FOLLOWING AT HOME OR ANYWHERE, IT IS NOT SMART! When we got back to the track Skyler threw a Black Cat at Brock, this simple toss of the wrist started a two hour war that seemed to as long as World War Two. Brock fought back with his wimpy air-soft gun with no avail, we had fire power. What was he thinking? We shot him with roman candles until we ran out. At one point a shot got stuck in his shirt and burnt a hole in it when it exploded in the cloth. Once that happened we decided it was enough and called it a truce before someone got hurt. Brock now has a pretty cool scar from it. The next night was a fireworks bonanza but this time we at nothing to do with it. Well not at first anyway. Someone was lighting mortars off on the track (the correct way) for close to an hour, it was fun to watch. Then one of the ATV Scene guys came up to us with a four inch mortar and asked us for a light. For some reason he didn’t think we would quickly grant him with a light. He must not have read the Through the Lens from Phoenix! We calmly lit and threw the mortar, “BOOM!”, but we weren’t satisfied. It was over so quick, so we grabbed a 55 gallon water barrel, put 5 gallons of MR2 race gas in, and dropped another mortar in. Unfortunately the fuse got wet and went out. So we threw another in, same thing happened. Then someone handed us an even larger firework on a long stick. “Perfect”, said Brock as he quickly tilted the barrel onto its side, placed the firework pointing into the barrel and lit it, a huge fireball suddenly shot out of the barrel and engulfed Brock in flames! And at the same time, it set off the long firework which instantly shot into the barrel and set off all the rest of the fuel, it was pretty sweet! Again, all caught on film. AGAIN, PLEASE LET US BE THE DUMMIES. DON”T GO BLOWING YOURSELF UP!

We are now back home getting to ready to go on more film trips. We were invited back to Bam Margera’s so we will be heading there on Monday, then onto Unadilla for round 11 and then to ’05 Pro Quad Champ, ’05 GNC Pro Champ and Great Outdoor Games gold medalist, John Natalie’s house for a shoot. From there we have plans to go to Keith Little’s house in Alabama and then to Loretta Lynn’s. It should be busy, but fun.

See ya at the races!

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