Tag: Malcolm Smith

Great documentary about motorcycle racing of all kinds. I still drool over these vintage motorcycles. For the early seventies, it gives you some fantastic footage of what it was like racing on a motorcycle. 

I love documentaries, but I wasn’t sure this one would interest me…but it did. I’m not a motorcycle guy, and I only rode some when I was a teenager, but this 1971 documentary kept me glued. I would recommend this to anyone, young or old. The longer I watched, the more I got hooked.

Steve McQueen is in this film, and he helped finance it because he believed in it so much. He is not in it a lot, but he was a gearhead. It was made by Bruce Brown, the same filmmaker who made “Endless Summer,” an excellent documentary about Surfing. Again, I’m not a surfer by any means, but it was also very interesting. I saw the surfing one first, and I got hooked, so I went to this one. It swapped out surfboards for motocross bikes, waves for dirt trails, and sandy blond beach bums for sunburned gearheads with calloused hands and battered helmets.

This film follows about every kind of motorbike competition you can think of…  it centers on off-road competition rather than road riding. While Steve McQueen was the draw and provided a lot of the backing to the film, the two main motorcyclists they follow are today’s leaders in their field. The two were Mert Lawwill and Malcolm Smith.

Mert was one of the early pioneers in the off-road bicycling world, having introduced the first production mountain bike. He also developed prosthetic limbs for amputees.

Malcolm owns a dealership and runs Malcolm Smith Racing, a producer of off-road rider equipment. Smith was inducted into the Off-road Motorsports Hall of Fame in 1978, the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America in 1996, and the Motorcycle Hall of Fame in 1998.

I gained a lot of respect for these men who gave their lives to this sport they loved. They traveled around the country with broken vehicles, raced with broken arms and backs to do something they loved without much pay. Brown didn’t over-explain anything. He just showed it. And that’s the charm. On Any Sunday, it doesn’t try to sell you the sport; it invites you to ride with them.

This documentary helped change the image of motorcyclists. There was a “sequel” to this documentary called On Any Sunday: The Next Chapter in 2014.

After watching it, I wanted a motorcycle really bad…But I let the thought pass by and got a Jeep instead. 

FULL MOVIE