Team Kawasaki’s 1996 Motocross squad. This team, with Ryan Hughes (bike No. 5), Jeff Emig (No. 2) and Damon Huffman (No. 10), inadvertently helped the AMA finally computerize its vast stores of historic racing results. (Kawasaki press kit photo)
This is Kawasaki’s 1996 professional AMA Motocross/Supercross team that featured riders Ryan Hughes, Jeff Emig and Damon Huffman. This was the team that inadvertently kickstarted AMA Pro Racing’s modernization of its record keeping.
What happened was in the off season between 1995 and ’96 Kawasaki’s ad agency was putting together its press kits for the 1996 season and a representative from the agency called Connie Fleming at AMA Pro Racing and told her they were looking for career finishes for Hughes, Emig and Huffman. It sounded like an easy enough request, but for Connie to uncover this information would be a nightmare. At that time AMA Pro Racing had media guides that listed winners, but if Connie wanted to find out for example, where Ryan Hughes finished at every national and Supercross race during his career, it meant going to Hughes license file, looking up when he got his pro license, then upstairs to the loft at the old Westerville AMA headquarters to go through years of 3×5 points cards and then manually writing down his finishes. Take that times three and you know the chore Connie had in front of her.
I was communication manager for AMA Pro Racing at the time and thought that was a ridiculous use of human resources. So I decided then and there that it was high time to database all those results. Over the next year or two the AMA Pro staff (mainly Connie & I) began the arduous task of going through old points cards and finally computerizing all of the old race results.
One interesting side story associated with that task was the fact that I knew Pat Murphy (ex-AMA Pro Racing communications director and partner with Roger Edmondson) had kept a database of all the Supersport and Harley 883 road races. I called Pat to tell him what we were doing and he just laughed because he knew the depth of the assignment. I came to Pat with hat in hand asking if he would share the Supersport and 883 database with us. I had been good friends with Pat, but his parting with the AMA was not pretty and by all rights he would have been justified telling me to pound sand. But to tell you something about the character of Pat Murphy, a few days later a disk showed up with the complete databases for all the racing series. Pat had graciously saved us hundreds of hours of work. It was an incredibly kind gesture by Pat, who has since passed away.
AMA Pro Racing finally got all of its major series results ‘digitized’ if you will, and I consider that one of my major contributions to the sport during the two years I worked as a staffer at the AMA. We used that database almost daily after it was compiled and it was Team Kawasaki, in 1996, that got the whole ball rolling.
