hat if we told you that the 1988 Anaheim and San Diego Supercross races, run on January 30 and February 20, respectively, and both won by Team Honda’s Ricky Johnson, don’t actually count in the records books? Go ahead and have a look in the Racer X Online Vault. They aren’t there.
Back in the late eighties, former business partners Mickey Thompson and Mike Goodwin were battling over the right to run supercross races. The Mickey Thompson Entertainment Group (MTEG) had come into supercross from off-road truck racing and was now taking on Goodwin’s Supercross Inc. (SXI), which in 1972 had pretty much invented the sport as we know it. After their breakup, Thompson acquired exclusive rights to all motorsports promotions in Southern California. However, Goodwin’s SXI had a preexisting deal with the AMA to exclusively promote AMA-sanctioned supercross races in Southern California, and he would not release those rights to Thompson. In order to counter the planned Anaheim opener, Goodwin announced that, on the very same night, he would be holding the AMA-sanctioned ’88 supercross opener on the other side of the country in Atlanta—all this despite the fact that Goodwin’s SXI had filed for bankruptcy.
The factories had the power to decide where to send their teams, and the idea of not having any AMA Supercross races in Southern California in 1988 was worrisome; that was far and away the sport’s biggest sales market. With competing events set for the same Saturday night, the factories let it be known that they would rather be in Anaheim than Atlanta. At the last minute, Goodwin blinked and canceled the Atlanta race, but he still withheld the AMA sanction in Anaheim, despite the AMA’s wishes for Thompson’s race to have the sanction. Goodwin then filed an injunction trying to block Anaheim from even happening, as well as a lawsuit against the AMA for “anticipatory breach of contract” with him.
Three weeks later in San Diego it was RJ on top again, with Ward second, his Kawasaki teammate Ron Lechien third, then Yamaha’s Dymond and Glover. Neither Anaheim nor San Diego count in the AMA records. If they did, Johnson’s career win total would be a nice round 30.
At one point in January ’88, Cycle News prophetically asked Thompson if there was a war going on between Goodwin and the other supercross promoters. He answered, “I think Mike Goodwin has chosen to see it that way. . . . Hopefully this will be the last interview where I’ll ever be subject to discussing the bad part of supercross racing. I would like to think that everything that is written about supercross from this point on, will be about the good side of supercross. It’s one of the greatest sports there is.”
In early March, the California Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal from the bankrupted Goodwin over damages awarded to Thompson from their business breakup, so Goodwin was told he had to pay his former partner $750,000. It was also decided that the Los Angeles Coliseum race, set for June 18, would have an AMA sanction.
Less than two weeks later, Mickey Thompson and his wife, Trudy, were dead, gunned down in their driveway by masked assailants. Though the killers were never found, Goodwin was long considered the primary suspect. After a protracted legal case, he was eventually found guilty of hiring the gunmen and is in prison serving a double life sentence. He maintains his innocence to this day. 