Spirit of a champion

He doesn't remember this first part. Jason Griffin, of Easley, now 36, was then only 2. His mother was looking for a magazine. The toddler managed to open the back door.

"I ran all the way around the house," Griffin said. In the front yard, his father was trying out the neighbor's new riding lawn mower.

The child ran behind the mower just as his father put it in reverse. The machine took the boy's right arm.

Know that about Griffin but then forget it; he does.

He grew up like any kid, playing soccer, baseball, basketball and football, and wrestling. By the age of 4, he was riding his own mini motorcycle. His younger brother John, when he came along, rode too.

"They tore the yard up," Griffin's father, Larry, said. "And the fence."

Larry Griffin had borrowed money to buy his first bike in 1973. He raced every weekend. And when he and his wife Andrea had sons, and the boys got old enough, he taught them to ride. The boys went with their parents to races, too.

John would go on to try his hand at professional motorcycle racing. "He was doing well with it," Griffin said. But Griffin himself turned to other pastimes. He bought a boat and fished competitively.

He was living in Rock Hill and hadn't been on a motorcycle for 15 years when the call came that October in 2004. His brother had died unexpectedly in his sleep. John was 27. "I came home the day that they called," Griffin said, "and never went back."

Difficult days followed as the family struggled with their grief.

Griffin went to work for a doctor. "I guess if there are angels out there, he'd have to be one. We talked, and we did some praying." He can't explain what happened next "other than it was a spiritual thing. That really was a turning point in my life."

More than one night Griffin had sat in the shed behind the house and looked at his brother's red motorcycle and wept. A few months after John's death, a way to honor his brother came to him.

"I just thought it would be fitting if I rode his bike and did something with it." Griffin wanted to continue what John had started. He wanted to win a championship for John.

The idea grew out of a newfound sense of what could be. "However you want to put it," Griffin said, "when I found God or He found me. I read it in the Bible, 'With God all things are possible.' I firmly believe that."

Griffin's decision to take up racing turned out to be good for the family as a whole. "It helped everybody out, my parents and all," he said. "We were all having a really hard time with (John's death)."

Despite Griffin's childhood and teenage years riding, he hadn't set himself an easy task. For one thing, there was that decade and a half he hadn't ridden.

For another, there was the demanding nature of the sport.

The tracks used for flat-track motorcycle racing are dirt, a mile or half-mile in length, Griffin said. In the Midwest, they're horse-racing tracks. "Some of the horse tracks are made out of pea gravel. It's really loose stuff. The track changes every lap. With clay you get a lot more traction. You slide on all of it."

The motorcycles Griffin rides weigh from about 240 pounds to about 325. "On the mile tracks we go about 130 mph and you're going to go into a corner and if it's sliding, you have to have the balance and strength to hold it.

"And some of the horse tracks get rutted out. It's not like riding on the road. It's like riding on the moon. There's big craters out there. And you're six inches away from this guy right here. And you're going around a corner, everybody sideways, and there's not a lot of room for error."

In the beginning, Griffin would fall. A lot. "I would break off wheels, gas tanks, seats, fenders, break handlebars. Hit everything on the track. Hit guardrails and fences.

"The first year we went to Daytona for Bike Week, I was black and blue." Griffin competed in that race as an amateur. In the mornings, he could barely walk, and his arm would be so badly swollen he couldn't pull on his leather suit.

"My mom had me on a bunch of Advil," he said. "But if I could get my leg over the bike and I could get on it, then I was fine." Fortunately, his falls were in practice and not when it counted. In the end, "I won a national (amateur) championship the first year we went down there."

He has since, like his brother, turned pro.

The family is at a race track somewhere nearly every weekend. His dad is his mechanic. His mother is the cook and nurse.

The fine art of racing is a matter of both science and skill.

In the science part, weight is key. Less is better.

"Anybody that's short is either meant to ride horses or race motorcycles," Griffin said. "The fastest guys in the country are probably five feet tall" or close to it.

Griffin is 5 feet, 9 inches, a disadvantage, but lighter than he might otherwise be, he said, because of the missing arm. Recently, he weighed 154 pounds. He gets on the scales every morning.

And every day, he does an hour or two of strength and cardio training.

Motorcycles for racing are taken down to the frame, Griffin said, and then put back together "shaving off a little bit (of weight) here and a little bit there. You can't take seven pounds or five pounds off any one spot so you take ounces. Like thinner washers. Use titanium bolts. Use plastic. We have to safety-wire our caps and nuts and bolts. If you use a smaller diameter of wire in 10 different places, it will save you."

Eliminating weight is like adding horsepower, he said.

Among other victories, in 2006, Griffin won the American Historic Racing Motorcycle Association grand national championship -- and the American Motorcyclist Association's Racing Sportsman of the Year award.

Griffin understands when people tell him how amazing it is that he does what he does. "Even when I see pictures of myself," he said with a good-natured grin, "it just doesn't look right."

At Bike Week in Daytona, Fla., a few weeks ago, riding his new twin-cylinder motorcycle from a sponsor, Griffin finished in the top three of the first three races he competed in.