10/28/2022 0 Comments Darkest of days crackThe most common victim of his mischievousness were his father Ralph’s smokes. He could disarm a bully with his wit, and with his humor make milk come out his friends’ noses. The sarcasm ran thick and the jokes and pranks plentiful with Bruce around. He broke the frame on nearly every bicycle he owned. When the neighborhood daredevils set up the classic milk crate and wood plank jumps on the sidewalk, Bruce was always the first one to test it, especially when the ramp was pitched higher and higher with blocks of wood. He was uncannily coordinated, like a deer, Anne remembers the teacher telling her. His elementary physical education teacher marveled at his ability to run through the school’s obstacle course. Anne says he walked at nine months and rode a bicycle at three, skipping the training wheels phase entirely. He would copy me.”īruce was a precocious, curious child. When he was really little, he would do exercises while I was doing them. He did everything you should do to be an athlete. “He was very disciplined about exercising,” Anne Bunch says. This is the untold story of their lives and deaths. It’s the darkest day in the history of motocross, and even though these teenagers became faster with the passing of time, for many, there’s no doubt that the motocross record books of the 1980s and 1990s are missing three names: Bruce Bunch, Rick Hemme and Kyle Fleming. He lived, but 40 years later is still undergoing surgeries and suffering complications. Hemme died in the hospital nine days later, and Duke spent two months in a coma with slim chances of survival. What we know for sure is that at 4:43 pm on August 1, Bunch and Fleming died instantly. When people discuss it today, it sounds like they think they witnessed… something. The legend and the rumors about what happened in the Mercury Lynx wagon driven by Oakley’s Dana Duke have grown. Nobody at the four-day event witnessed the accident that happened one mile east of the racetrack the accident that took the lives of three of the sport’s best minicycle racers: Bruce Bunch (16), Rick Hemme (16) and Kyle Fleming (13). Yet, everyone remembers what happened a little bit differently. When a memory isn’t periodically reinforced, it gets boxed up, packed away and sent into a mental black hole.įor those who attended the 1982 NMA Grand National Motocross Championships in Ponca City, Oklahoma, the afternoon of Sunday, August 1, is one of the most unforgettable of their lives. There are over a dozen types of memory errors, from false memory to bias, intrusion, misinformation, absentmindedness and transience (forgetting over time). While everyone remembers where they were during a highly emotional event (say, September 11, 2001, or JFK’s assassination), the details surrounding it can warp over time – even when one was directly involved. They get foggy or faint sometimes they fizzle and can be fickle or fleeting. –Excerpt of a 1982 poem by 12-year-old E.T. They were chasing their dreams, doing what they did best,īut now the incredible three are put to rest. They were friends, teammates and out for the winning,īut the tragic day at Ponca was the end of the beginning.
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