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Bobke: A Ride on the Wild Side of Cycling
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
June 12, 2021
My three stars bestowed on this book represent an act of charity. Bob Roll (the Bobke thing is kind of contrived -- even people from the book who recognize him in public call him Bob) is a character and a bit of a working class hero and if you've ever worn a Saint Christopher medal while cycling; had your bike blessed by a priest; gone out and hit the trail or the road and thought "I could ride pro"; enjoyed piles of diner food or beer or pork rinds etc. as fuel for your ride, well, there's some Bob Roll in you. He's presented as this gonzo cyclist-journalist and admittedly anyone who admires Hunter Thompson the least bit will find Roll way more interesting than most any other cyclist. That's how I raised my estimation of this book to three stars: 'cause it's unique and a document of 80s/90s American cycling culture.
Peel back the layers though: It's thin. It's clearly ghost written with highly questionable editing. In cycling when something "grenades," it (often a derailleur, maybe a chain or fork etc.) explodes all over the slope or highway and scatters bits to the dust. That's the outline of the book: scattershot a bunch of commentary into a sort of paragraph so you can combine "where I went, how I got there, who I met, an odd detail, the entire event itself in one sentence, then a summation like "and all that good trash" at the end. Skimming is a must. It's unreadable otherwise.
That's most of the anecdotes. Sprinkled with kind of unimaginative surfer dude talk. Bob is frequently stoked, but this most frequently is "fully dipped," as in "I was fully dipped in shit." Which is kind of a funny euphemism until it gets used 15 times and starts to cover not only being surprised/stoked, but also being dragged through meadows or valleys or snow drifts.
It's dated af too. He rides past a cantina, wanting to drink beer and play pool, but after peering inside, sees "Pancho Villa's grandchildren" and decides to ride away. I had to read it twice 'cause at first I thought he was saying there were kids running about but then remembered, oh yeah, there was this period throughout the 20th Century where it was perfectly okay to be casually racist among your own tribe, so long as you weren't pointed about it. I wonder what Tinker Juarez thinks of the Grandchildren of Pancho Villa reference. There are other hints regarding Bob's happy-go-lucky "I'm not all-the-way-racist, man, I'm just having a good time" sort of homogenous commentary.
Other boomerisms: "The place is now overrun with tourists." I'm an expatriate Coloradan -- we used to say this about Bob's ilk: "the place has become lousy with Californians."
Imagine an 80s or 90s movie, where unlikely stuff happens all the time with nobody questioning it because it's mildly entertaining. Take this concept and repeat it with diminishing returns ad nauseam. Bob passed out in a bathroom and his head went through a door. Bob gets into fistfights with people who ride different disciplines than him. Bob drinks five espresso/amaretto concoctions and goes mad dog on the local Italians. Bob loses pints of blood in countless spills. The machismo and No This Really Happened gets tiring.
There are two very convincing sagas (one about an ill-fated trip in the New Mexican mountains; another about back-country snowboarding in Colorado) that are very accurate. Not self-deprecating in order to seem plausible, but relatable and far from overblown. You feel them. I assume he had enough of this material for a *real* memoir, but Velo News probably owned most of it by 1995 and so we got the scrapbook.
As a time capsule it's fun. An uneducated, non-elite-athlete, short-order cook with no prospects from California decides in his 20s to just get with it and insert himself into what was in America an emerging sports phenomenon. And he succeeds. In a way that you couldn't today. You hear about Davis Phinney and John Tomac and these other elites a bunch, but he only alludes a couple times to the fact that he was their servant (literally -- he was a domestique-class rider in Europe) or second-stringer in mountain races -- a privateer who ate hamburgers and pies and beer: stuff you simply could not get away with doing today. So that's entertaining.
Also fun: the photos of odd 80s/90s stuff -- hairmets, peace-sign cable hangers, a random Social Distortion sticker, Pedro's Bob Roll signature handlebar grips, a truly awful rig Bob rode in the early 90s featuring a suspension stem *and* a suspension saddle. Let that last detail sink in. If you're a 90s cyclist you'll probably get a kick out of the name-dropping or call-backs to days of cycling long past. If not, even the most die-hard cycle nerd probably won't get much satisfaction from this hodgepodge.
P. S. There are far more entertaining stories from Bob's time in Durango as a mountain pro, and time stuck in Euro hell as a domestique. I imagine they're mostly in old copies of Velo News.
P.P.S. First in a series of my honest-to-goodness reviews of off-beat cyclehead books.
Peel back the layers though: It's thin. It's clearly ghost written with highly questionable editing. In cycling when something "grenades," it (often a derailleur, maybe a chain or fork etc.) explodes all over the slope or highway and scatters bits to the dust. That's the outline of the book: scattershot a bunch of commentary into a sort of paragraph so you can combine "where I went, how I got there, who I met, an odd detail, the entire event itself in one sentence, then a summation like "and all that good trash" at the end. Skimming is a must. It's unreadable otherwise.
That's most of the anecdotes. Sprinkled with kind of unimaginative surfer dude talk. Bob is frequently stoked, but this most frequently is "fully dipped," as in "I was fully dipped in shit." Which is kind of a funny euphemism until it gets used 15 times and starts to cover not only being surprised/stoked, but also being dragged through meadows or valleys or snow drifts.
It's dated af too. He rides past a cantina, wanting to drink beer and play pool, but after peering inside, sees "Pancho Villa's grandchildren" and decides to ride away. I had to read it twice 'cause at first I thought he was saying there were kids running about but then remembered, oh yeah, there was this period throughout the 20th Century where it was perfectly okay to be casually racist among your own tribe, so long as you weren't pointed about it. I wonder what Tinker Juarez thinks of the Grandchildren of Pancho Villa reference. There are other hints regarding Bob's happy-go-lucky "I'm not all-the-way-racist, man, I'm just having a good time" sort of homogenous commentary.
Other boomerisms: "The place is now overrun with tourists." I'm an expatriate Coloradan -- we used to say this about Bob's ilk: "the place has become lousy with Californians."
Imagine an 80s or 90s movie, where unlikely stuff happens all the time with nobody questioning it because it's mildly entertaining. Take this concept and repeat it with diminishing returns ad nauseam. Bob passed out in a bathroom and his head went through a door. Bob gets into fistfights with people who ride different disciplines than him. Bob drinks five espresso/amaretto concoctions and goes mad dog on the local Italians. Bob loses pints of blood in countless spills. The machismo and No This Really Happened gets tiring.
There are two very convincing sagas (one about an ill-fated trip in the New Mexican mountains; another about back-country snowboarding in Colorado) that are very accurate. Not self-deprecating in order to seem plausible, but relatable and far from overblown. You feel them. I assume he had enough of this material for a *real* memoir, but Velo News probably owned most of it by 1995 and so we got the scrapbook.
As a time capsule it's fun. An uneducated, non-elite-athlete, short-order cook with no prospects from California decides in his 20s to just get with it and insert himself into what was in America an emerging sports phenomenon. And he succeeds. In a way that you couldn't today. You hear about Davis Phinney and John Tomac and these other elites a bunch, but he only alludes a couple times to the fact that he was their servant (literally -- he was a domestique-class rider in Europe) or second-stringer in mountain races -- a privateer who ate hamburgers and pies and beer: stuff you simply could not get away with doing today. So that's entertaining.
Also fun: the photos of odd 80s/90s stuff -- hairmets, peace-sign cable hangers, a random Social Distortion sticker, Pedro's Bob Roll signature handlebar grips, a truly awful rig Bob rode in the early 90s featuring a suspension stem *and* a suspension saddle. Let that last detail sink in. If you're a 90s cyclist you'll probably get a kick out of the name-dropping or call-backs to days of cycling long past. If not, even the most die-hard cycle nerd probably won't get much satisfaction from this hodgepodge.
P. S. There are far more entertaining stories from Bob's time in Durango as a mountain pro, and time stuck in Euro hell as a domestique. I imagine they're mostly in old copies of Velo News.
P.P.S. First in a series of my honest-to-goodness reviews of off-beat cyclehead books.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 1, 2011
I talked about this book in a blog entry at:
http://wheelbike.blogspot.com/2011/08...
http://wheelbike.blogspot.com/2011/08...
March 19, 2012
dude is a nutball and frequently a good writer.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews