It sounds like one of those stories that could only exist in the American Midwest—equal parts fear, television, and not knowing any better. Like something you’d hear leaning on a toolbox at 11pm, half beer-buzz bullshit, half memory, and too ridiculous to fact-check.

It has all the fingerprints of an urban legend—the kind of story that’s just too perfect, and a little too dumb, to be true.

But it is true.

Three-time world champion Freddie Spencer tells the story much better than I can, but the gist of it is this: after he won one of the first Superbike races at Elkhart Lake’s Road America in the early 1980s, a local Milwaukee reporter cornered him. After a few “what was it like out there, champ?”-level sportswriter questions, the reporter finally revealed what he really wanted to know. His true feelings about the event—and motorcycle racing—distilled into a single question:

“Now, Freddie,” he asked, “come on, tell me—which motorcycle gang are you with?”

A Christian and forthright young man, Spencer was largely unflappable even then. He chuckled a bit, but told the reporter he wasn’t a member of any gang—he rode for American Honda. Stone-faced, the reporter closed his notebook and walked off.

As this website has stated numerous times over the last 30 years: never get between an American and their television. That tenet helps explain what American culture was like in the Midwest in the 1970s and even into the 1990s. Films like The Wild One, C.C. and Company, and The Wild Angels packaged and sold a version of motorcycling that the wider culture accepted as truth. In many middle-American towns, that fiction wasn’t questioned—it was absorbed.Truth be told, there was local pushback to even having a motorcycle race at Road America in the early years. Some believed it would attract gangs of marauding bikers hell-bent on mayhem. As laughably overblown as that fear sounds now, it wasn’t born in a vacuum—it was fed by a steady diet of leather-clad chaos from those films and countless television and drive-in knockoffs, where every rider looked like trouble and every gathering turned into a riot. For people who’d never actually met a motorcyclist, that fiction had a way of hardening into fact.

Incredibly, what’s now known as the great American race—the Springfield Mile—wasn’t held for more than a decade starting in the mid-1960s because of fears that bikers would descend on the town and tear it apart. It took an appeal from the governor of Illinois to bring the Springfield Mile back in 1982.

Keep in mind that Elkhart Lake is a quiet little village surrounded by a constellation of even smaller ones. For years, local inns and hotels didn’t accept credit cards—nor even cash. You were sent a bill after your stay and trusted to pay it by mail. And, like every town in America in the 1970s, you could walk down the sidewalk in Elkhart Lake, Sheboygan, or Plymouth at night and see the glow of a television set in nearly every home.

What flickered on those screens shaped perception. For years, it influenced how locals viewed the Superbike race at Road America. Justified or not, the event carried a heavy police presence, and even into the mid-1990s some restaurants refused to serve patrons dressed in race uniforms.
The hammer finally came down in the mid-1990s, when AMA Pro Racing Director of Competition Merrill Vanderslice and his crew—wearing AMA uniforms—were refused service at a local supper club for dinner, while another group in street clothes were seated immediately.

Vanderslice, Road America’s late PR man Roger Jaynes, and CEO Jim Haynes worked with the local chamber of commerce to change attitudes.

Today, the Superbike race at Road America is well attended—and fans are welcome everywhere.

It just took about 30 years for the movie to end.