Howard?!

Howard?!

Sitting in the emergency room of a major metropolitan hospital after midnight on a Saturday is a stark reminder of what the real world looks like—especially when it comes to what qualifies as a true medical emergency. This waiting room was filled with people who, despite their suffering, could afford to wait: victims of minor gunshot wounds, heart-attack guys not yet in full cardiac arrest, diabetics on the verge of losing their feet, car accident survivors likely to pull through. Meanwhile, behind locked doors, doctors and nurses worked with urgency on those who couldn’t wait.

Unfortunately, we were there with someone who couldn’t wait—not even for a minute.

“Howard? Mr. Howard?” A nurse from behind the locked doors where patients are treated was calling out for someone. Anyone not holding their own intestines in with their hands—or anxiously hovering over a loved one—was glued to their phone.

Mr. Howard? Is there a Mr. Howard here with James Monaco? You can come back, the nurse said, her weary yet clear voice cutting through the sea of misery in the waiting room.

I looked around. I was the only one who had come to the ER with James and was still in the waiting room. One guy (who I later learned actually was Howard) was in the bathroom, another was outside having a telephone conversation with his wife. Seeing no one else, I got up and walked to the partially open auto-lock door the nurse was holding open.

Are you Howard? She asked me.

Yes, I lied. She motioned me through the doors, she had a file folder in her hand. What’s your first name, Mr. Howard?

Moe, I said, another lie. She was young and looked like she should be out dancing, not resetting broken bones and whispering reassurances to the dying—the ER had left its fingerprints on her face.

Okay, Moe Howard, she said, come on back, James wants to see you.

Why is it always arm wrestling? Why?

That’s what I asked myself as I watched yet another match break out.

My friends and I had reserved a table at the Minnesota Mile AFT dirt track event in 2019, so we were perched above the track with a spectacular view of the racing. Bench racing was in full swing, the beer flowing like old times. Yet, every time there was a break in the action, someone started arm wrestling—just like they always did when we got together. When we were 21. 27. 35. 42. Now.



I’d known most of these guys for 30 years. We club-raced together, stayed in touch after, attended each other’s weddings, and usually ended up at the bar talking MotoGP or WSBK racing. Once, at a wedding, the bride stormed up to her new husband and said, “Hey! This night is supposed to be about us, not racing, remember?!” He sheepishly took her out to the dance floor but rolled his eyes at me as he twirled his new wife around.

A few of us had brought our sons and daughters—old enough to drink, old enough to know better—to this race at Canterbury. It was glorious. We were all perma-grin.

Then, during a SuperTwins heat race, a friend pulled out a large bag containing something legendary—the Holy Grail to us. Inside was a set of Wes Cooley’s Yoshimura Suzuki leathers, which the friend had bought in the 1990s and managed to keep for 25 years. We moved to better light to admire them, trying to date them by the sponsor patches. Probably 1979 or 1980, I thought. I was in the middle of telling the story of how Cooley won the title despite Eddie Lawson and Dave Aldana swapping bikes before the last race, when I suddenly felt my son towering behind me.

"Dad, James crashed. He’s not getting up," he said, fear in his voice.

What?

James Monaco was more than a racer I knew—he was a friend of my family, a talented dirt tracker I’d tried to help keep racing. He was riding a brutally fast Indian in the SuperTwins class that night.

"What happened?" I asked my son, John.

"There was a big crash. James went down. They stopped the race. EMTs or corner workers were working on him and…"

And what?

"Dad, I think they tried to stand him up, and he collapsed right away. The ambulance is taking him now."

James and his team had no street vehicles at the track—only their team hauler. If he was going to the hospital, they had no way to follow him to the hospital.

"I’ll get my truck," John said before sprinting off. I ran to James’ pit, where his crew were desperately trying to find out if they could ride in the ambulance with their rider. No.

The next instant, John rolled up in his truck. “Let’s go. Get in.”

I got in the truck last. For a brief moment, in the last few seconds while they made room for me inside, before jumping into the back seat, I turned and pulled up my Nikon and took a photo of James’ crashed Indian sitting there in the dim light—silent, waiting. The ambulance threw on its lights and rolled.



John planted his truck on the back bumper of that ambulance, and we ran every red light into downtown Minneapolis.

Inside the cab, no one spoke. It was tense. Finally, one of James’ crew guys, sitting beside me, broke the silence.

"Why did they try to make him stand? Why would they do that?"

No one had an answer.


The Yvon Pinch Test

The Moe Howard ruse ended when the first ER nurse handed me off to a weathered triage nurse. She was waiting for us outside the triage room. I could hear James’ voice inside. The first nurse introduced me: this is James Monaco’s friend Moe Howard.

The triage nurse was savvy and was in no mood for this Three Stooges bullshit.

She reached for the phone to presumably call security. “What’s your real name, Moe Howard?”

I told her, and said I was a friend of the Monaco family and I was the only one in the waiting room.

I think she was about to dial security when I told her that I live about 50 miles away from where we stood. “I’m his friend,” I said. She set the phone back in its cradle.

"Follow me."

I asked her what to expect.

"Follow me."

She pushed open the doors to the triage room. It was brightly lit, and busy like a Daytona pit stop before there was a limit on the number of team members allowed over the wall. James was literally surrounded by nurses, doctors and devices. Screens were everywhere, showing his heartbeat, temperature, blood pressure and a million other vitals. A team of probably ten people were directly tending to James, talking to each other and James simultaneously Hey, grab two more bags of saline will you, Sally? Stay with us, James. How you doing honey? Keep talking to me, James as machines beeped and probed his body. The nurse who led me in disappeared into the busy hive of people working on James. I realized that I had not moved much past the swinging doors of the trauma room.

What my son said, and his mechanic asked, in the truck throbbed like a bad headache.

"Dad, I think they tried to stand him up, and he collapsed right away."


I watched the scene in front of me: James was alive and talking, crying, laughing, he was hyper-ventilating a bit and they were trying to keep him calm. He was shirt-less and a stack of blankets were over his legs and feet.

Half a dozen people crowded around him, their words spilling out in a rapid-fire mix—some calming and directed at James, others muttered to their co-workers in urgency.

I’d seen Yvon DuHamel do what I was about to do once—when Miguel was lying on his back in an emergency room.

I approached slowly, by the inch, looking for clues as to his condition. The machines told me little: his heart was pounding and he was moving his arms around.

I needed to know one thing and I wasn’t leaving that room without knowing.

I silently approached, willing myself to be invisible. I was trying to slip into the nucleus without being noticed. I shadowed a taller and wider male nurse who looked like he was prepping James for surgery or an MRI. I watched the man’s feet so I could move with him, like a pick-pocket. He moved closer to James’ bed and I moved with him.

“Dad, I think they tried to stand him up, and he collapsed right away.”

The nucleus of nurses and technicians were concentrated on the upper half of James body so no one noticed when I slipped up close to the bed, an inch from the tech in front of me, and slowly, put my hand on the bed. I moved up a half an inch closer and put my hand under the blankets. The blankets were as hot as tire warmers. I pushed my left hand inside the blankets until I felt flesh. I felt the side of James’ foot, pulled back a bit, found his big toe. I grasped it between my thumb and forefinger and pinched his toe, softly at first, while watching James’ face for reaction.

Nothing.

Okay, more pressure.

Nothing.

I needed to know and wasn’t leaving without knowing. I dug my thumbnail into James’ toe very hard. James’ face did not change. I bent my knees slightly and pushed my hand across the bed and found his other foot. I dug my thumbnail into that toe and watched his face.

Come on James, scream, look at me, do something.

There was no reaction from James.

Horrified, I pulled back, stepped back. The enormity of what I’d just learned made my body feel like I was on a rug that someone had decided to pick up and shake. This can’t be happening. How could this have happened? The world was suddenly spinning. How is this possible? This isn’t happening. It can’t be. I felt vomit coming up, and the world started to go monochrome.

Deano! Deano!

Bam, I snapped back to reality. James had noticed me. I’m sure my face was white as a ghost and my mouth was so dry I could not easily speak but I forced myself to smile and pushed my way to James. He was crying. “My mom is going to kill me,” he said to me.

I reached around him, cradled his head, his curly brown hair and said in his ear, you stay strong, you hear me? You are alive. Be grateful, but stay strong. Do not let off; stay strong.

The second nurse, who had let me into the inner sanctum, had reappeared and now sneered, “Okay, Mr. Howard, you can go back to the waiting room now. We are going to transport James to a different hospital."

I pulled back, and the mass of doctors, nurses and techs instantly filled the void of where I had been holding James as he cried. I backed up four or five steps and pulled myself together.

Then I walked outside in the dark and used my mobile phone to call a man in California and tell him that in all probability his son would never walk again.

Call JU

We piled back into my son’s truck and drove to the next hospital, again drafting the ambulance that had James inside of it. It’s well after midnight and inside the truck it is again quiet as we hurtle through the night. Do any of James’ friends and crew know what I know? That James is paralyzed and will probably never walk again? I don’t know, but I don’t think so.

The buttressed, structural wall I had built around my heart after Nicky Hayden was killed, which I thought could withstand anything, eroded like sand in brisk wind when I called James’ father, Bub, my friend, and told him James had not passed the Yvon Pinch Test.

Maybe it’s just a bruised spinal column, he said. Maybe, I replied. Hope against hope.

It’s the middle of the night. Hammering at 80 mph in downtown Minneapolis, drafting an ambulance for the second time in hours, the enormity of the new information overwhelmed me. I put my chin in my chest and sobbed as quietly as I could. My son turned on the radio. It’s a hell of a thing to be sitting shoulder to shoulder with men you barely know and be crying.

What to do?

You know exactly what to do in just this situation: you call John Ulrich.

My son parked the truck in front of the next hospital and everyone piled out and marched almost in lock-step into the trauma center waiting room. James was also taken inside. I stayed back, stood by the truck and slowly collapsed against the back wheel. I punched my phone’s contacts until I hit the letter U.



It was well after 2:00 AM in California but the unflappable Ulrich picked up on the second ring.

“Hey, Dean, what’s up?” he asked.

I told him. James Monaco had crashed at the Minnesota Mile and suffered spinal injuries. The cornerworkers had tried to stand him up after the crash and he collapsed back on the ground like he was made from metal and the earth was a strong magnet. I told him I did the Yvon Pinch Test and there was no reaction. I told him I had to call the kid’s dad and tell him a click off the worst news a dad wants to ever hear.

For a few minutes John and I just traded expletives as he thought.

So, what should I do, I asked, just laying it all in John’s lap.

“Okay, look,” he said. “You gotta remember these are riders. They aren’t like me and you; they never were and nothing will ever change that. They have a tremendous ability to persevere and overcome. It won’t be tonight and won’t be for a while but my experience is that riders who become paralyzed do a lot better long term than any others. They are accustomed to attacking problems and just because they can’t walk it doesn't stop them like it does a lot of people. So, anyway, right now you gotta just get everybody through tonight and then take it one day at a time. I’m confident that James will acclimate to his new life. It won’t be easy but he’s raced—he knows nothing is easy.”

We talked a while longer and he gave me examples of riders he’d known that had sadly become “wheelchair pilots” but who had found peace in their new life of not walking. Talked off the ledge, I told him I'd call him tomorrow, or later today, actually.

My son came outside. “Hey, dad, they are going to take James to Mayo in Rochester. They have transportation for his guys,” he said.

We went inside the trauma center and we sat with James' crew. I told them that I had secretly done the Yvon Pinch Test on James when I was inside the trauma room with him a few hospitals ago. I told them that I looked in his eyes while I did it and there was no reaction. No one seemed surprised.

“Why did they pick him up and try and make him stand?” one younger crew guy asked me, again.

We all sat down in silence and waited for James and their transportation to arrive.

For my final memory of the night I will sadly never forget, I sat and watched, from 30 feet away, as former AFT Grand National champion Brad Baker, himself in a wheelchair from a racing crash, entered the waiting room and wheeled over to someone on the Monaco crew that he knew.

From 30 feet away I watched as Baker was told that the cornerworkers had tried to stand Monaco up after the crash. After processing this for just a few seconds, Baker became as livid as any human being I have ever observed in my entire life. He was so angry that I would not have been even mildly surprised if his anger and frustration sheared planet earth in half.

Mayo Nurses are Saints

James and his crew headed off to the Mayo Clinic. My son and I drove home.

James spent more than a month at the Mayo clinic where his body was prepared for the new chapter. His crew never left. They swore he was coming back to California with them in the hauler and nobody was going home until James did. The over-night nurses at Mayo were pure gold: they could see this was a low-buck racing effort so if they had open rooms on James’ floor they broke policy and let his crew sleep in those open beds. For a month.

We all went out to dinner the night before he was released. Overwhelmingly we were all just happy that James was alive and could carry on.



James went home to California in the Monaco race truck.

He adapted really well to his new life on four wheels; he is racing a go-kart with hand controls, and has ridden a motorcycle, with his brother Dom' controlling the bottom half of the bike, a few times. It’s not all good times but Monaco is a rider and he is figuring things out one day at a time. Friends and his family are important components in his recovery.



Through it all, James remains the same determined competitor he’s always been. He is motivational speaker-level positive about his life, turning setbacks into challenges and challenges into opportunities. The road ahead isn’t easy, but he’s proving that spirit and adaptability can take you just as far as raw WFO speed ever did. His resilience isn’t just about racing—it’s about embracing every new experience with the same fire that made him a competitor in the first place. Whether he’s working with a young rider to learn new racing skills, pushing his limits in a racing kart, or just enjoying a ride with his brother’s help, James refuses to let circumstances define him. With his family and his truly glass half-full optimism, he’s not just moving forward—he’s accelerating into whatever comes next, full throttle.

What has he shown us? That he is the strongest among us—something we may not have realized until after his crash.