Larry Lawrence | April 9, 2019
Archives: One Kid’s Hero
It was 1994 – Phil Pummell and his 10-year-old son Scott were driving down the interstate to the Dealer Expo in Indianapolis from their home in Jamestown, Ohio. Scott remembers they were having a normal conversation when something strange happened. “He just quit talking and then started slowing down and then gradually he pulled off to the side of the road. I said, ‘Dad, what’s going on? Are you OK?’ He just sat there and didn’t say anything and I was starting to freak out. Then he said, ‘Sorry I was just having a spell’”
“That was the first time as a kid I remember thinking, ‘What in the world is going on?’”
Archives: One Kid’s Hero
Not long after that Scott had just finished a motocross race at Dirt Country in nearby Blanchester, Ohio. After his race he sat next to the track watching his dad race.
“It was in the middle of the race and he was winning,” Scott recalls. “It was about the second or third lap and he went over this grandstand triple jump, he lands it and all of a sudden he just stops. He was just sitting there on his bike. The bike was still running, he had the clutch pulled in. My grandfather was sitting next to me and I asked him what was going on. My grandfather said, ‘Don’t worry about it. He’s probably just checking his bike or something.’ But he wasn’t even looking down at his bike, so it didn’t make any sense.
“Then after a while he clicked it back in gear and made it all the way back to the front and won the race. I asked him what happened after and again it was like, don’t worry about it, I just had a spell.”
No one knew it at the time, but those were the first signs that something was terribly wrong with Phil. They would find out not long after that it was brain cancer. The disease would eventually take his life.
Phil Pummell was a promising young BMX rider, turned motocross racer in the early 1980s, who won several regional titles. As he got older Pummell expanded his racing endeavors to include flat track and road racing. He was good at them all, but seemed to have a special talent in road racing. He did really well at the club level and turned pro in AMA Superbike in 1987. Just about all the racing he did, Pummell did on his own. He was a motorcycle mechanic and his bikes were always immaculately prepared. Scott said he had a sponsor once, but fiercely independent, he didn’t like the idea of someone else telling him when and where and on what bike he was going to race.
“From that point on he decided to do it everything on his own,” Scott said.
Pummell was certainly talented, but he raced on his own dime, resulting in a fairly limited schedule of pro races. His best AMA Superbike result came at Mid-Ohio in 1988 when he finished 14th on his Honda VFR750.
Pummell excelled on the club level. In 1988 he beat a slew of talented riders like Fritz Kling, Scott Zampach, Jim Knipp and Dave Knapp to win the Michigan Gran Prix, a season-long WERA Championship held at Grattan Raceway in Grattan, Michigan.
“I think that was his proudest moment was winning that series,” Scott says of the Michigan Gran Prix. “He had all the clippings from the coverage of those races in Cycle News and American Roadracing. He beat some really good racers in the series, guys who went on to be winners and champions at the pro level. And he did it on a bike that was a couple of years old.”
Like many racers who worked fulltime as well as raced, Phil was often running on very little sleep.
“I think my favorite quote from dad was, one time he’d driven all night to get to a track and was sleeping in the back of the van, when in the morning another racer started pounding on the door. My dad looked out the guy told him the first practice session was getting ready to go out. My dad looked at him and said, ‘Novices need practice, Experts need sleep!’”
Scott, an only child, had been hauled around to a lot of his dad’s races with his mom and dad as a kid and it was his dad who got him into motocross, something Scott loved because they did it together as a family.
When the spells starting happening for Phil, Scott said his dad just ignored it. “He was one of those guys who just never went to the doctor,” Scott comments. “Finally, he started having seizures and it couldn’t be ignored anymore.”
It was in 1996 when doctors finally told Phil of his brain cancer. After an operation doctors said the cancer was so advanced at that point, they only gave him about six months to live, “but he lived another 12 or 13 years,” Scott adds.
Scott said even though his dad battled fiercely, the treatments the cancer changed his dad’s personality. He grins and says not all of it was bad though.
“My dad came from a family were there was no affection shown,” Scott recalls. “I remember when I was a kid, I would go to hug my dad and he would stop me and tell me, ‘Men don’t hug other men.’
“But during the height of treatments I was off to college and I remember every time I came home, he’d open the door and look me right in the eye and say, “Son! Come here and give me a hug!” I was like, ‘What the hell is going on?’”
Scott said his dad tried to keep his motorcycle service shop going through his illness, but in the final years he would just get out old motorcycle magazines to read and would only get bits and pieces of work done.
After Phil passed away in 2011, Scott said the most heartbreaking thing was to see the condition his dad’s shop was in.
“He was the kind of guy where nothing was out of place,” Scott remembers. “When he was teaching me to work on bikes if I put one tool in the wrong place, I’d hear about it for days. After he died, I went in the shop and things were just piled up everywhere. It was sort of heartbreaking.”
Today Scott said his dad’s old Honda racebike is still in the shop, just as it was after it rolled off the track at his final race nearly 30 years ago.
“This company came around a few years ago to buy whatever they could from the shop and they were like, ‘How much for the VFR?’ And I told them that was one thing that wasn’t for sale.”
When Phil passed away Scott not only lost his dad, but a friend and a mentor as well. “I still get a little emotional thinking about it today,” Scott admits.
Phil Pummell he was a solid racer who made it happen by way of his own skills and hard work. And while Phil was never a national star in motorcycle racing, to at least one racing kid from a small town in Ohio, Phil Pummell was the hero of all heroes.