KENNY ROBERTS

It is a comforting fiction of our settled life that intelligence must be identified in early childhood and cultivated by professional educators to produce the leaders and creators of the future. Yet there are schools without classrooms that focus intelligence just as effectively.

For Kenny Roberts, three-time world champion in 500cc Grand Prix roadracing, that focus came from riding.

“If it hadn’t been for motorcycle racing, I’d have been just another guy in a rusty pickup truck on his way home from work in the almond groves,” he once told me.

If you get to know Roberts even a little bit, you quickly discover he has no use for the human politics of playing the hero. He can be funny, irritable, annoying, or deliberately insulting in quick succession. Yet the whole time you feel his wit and intelligence. During his racing career?”