Jordan Graham: Keeping the Glory Days Alive
Words by Seth Richards | Photography by John Ryan Hebert
“Let my body dwell in poverty, and my hands be the hands of the toiler; but let my soul be as a temple of remembrance where the treasures of knowledge enter and the inner sanctuary is hope.”
– Daniel Deronda by George Eliot
Motorcycle racers don’t have to appreciate history to make history. The past need not exist in their purview.
They are singleminded. They race to win. They tell you that if you want factory support to run the latest spec machinery, you must look ahead. To chase victory is to bet on the future. All that matters is the next pole position, the next race, the next season. What happened in the past is meaningless. The last corner, the last season: They’re as irrelevant as last century’s forgotten also-rans.
For Jordan Graham, though, it’s different. Winning isn’t enough.
Graham is the progeny of a long-lost Golden Age. He’s the first to admit that he lives in the past. Yet he’s one of very few racers to have a factory contract with Ducati North America. Ducati even released a limited-edition production replica of his race bike. He’s Ducati’s golden boy because he races to win.
When he won the 2020 Mint 400 on a near-stock Ducati Scrambler Desert Sled, it inscribed the Italian maker’s name into the history book of American desert racing. Graham’s own team lovingly describes the Desert Sled as an air-cooled hipster motorcycle. It was never meant to be a race bike; it can hardly even be considered a performance motorcycle. But winning on a motorcycle that the Borgo Panigale factory never designed to be a winner is just the kind of thing that speaks to Graham.
Graham is a custodian of the mid-century American motoring tradition of going fast by making do. In honor of that Golden Age, Graham wants to rush in a new one. He wants to see motoring culture grow at the hands of a new generation—to explore horizons and to retread the paths of the original racers, hot-rodders, and tinkerers of post-war America.
Beyond that, hitting whoops at triple-digit speeds on a retro-styled street bike designed to look cool parked outside the local coffee shop is just plain badass.
“Sometimes dirt bikes bore me,” Graham says. “You go on a group ride and you end up with 25 dudes on the same bike. And for me, I like challenging myself. How far can I push this motorcycle? It’s the challenge, the ‘holy shit’ factor.”
When Graham and his team unloaded the Desert Sled for their first Hare and Hound, no one took them seriously. People walked by and scoffed, sarcastically wishing Graham good luck, as if they knew something about desert racing that he didn’t—as if he were some superficial scenester who was only there to get some evocative photos for Instagram. You can imagine the twinkle in his eye as he replied, “Thanks! We’ll see how it goes.”
“And those same guys, I’m passing on singletrack,” Graham says. “It’s dirt, dust, and a hundred degrees out, and I’m passing them on this street bike.”
He’s quick to point out that he’s far from the first person to ever go desert racing on a big street bike.
“I think about what J.N. Roberts, Bud Ekins, and Steve McQueen did,” he muses. “I think that carries on today with racing the V-twin off road. It shouldn’t be happening, but it is. I think that spirit is what pioneers everything: There was somebody that was pushing the limits on something, and that evolved into what we do nowadays.”
Graham’s appreciation for that old-school, innovative spirit goes back to when he was a kid growing up in the Santa Ynez Valley in California. He and his best friend, Benny Breck (former supercross racer; currently a mechanic and development rider), would spend afternoons at motorcycle dealerships in Santa Barbara before wandering over to Breck’s grandfather’s house. Yankie Breck, a first-generation hot-rodder who was paralyzed in an accident in the 1960s, was living history—with a garage full of cars undriven since LBJ was in office.
“It was a time capsule,” Graham says. He was captivated. Yankie Breck introduced him to all his old hot-rodding buddies, and before he knew it, he was hanging out with a pack of septuagenarian hot-rodders who mentored him and instilled in him a love for 1950s-style hot rods.
While most kids his age would feel accomplished if they could take apart a VCR and put it back together again, Graham was well beyond child’s play. It didn’t hurt that he inherited his mechanical know-how from his dad, a lifelong auto mechanic and motorcyclist.
“I was probably 12 years old, and my dad had an old wire feed welder,” Graham remembers. “I started welding his old race car parts and making these sculptures. His friends would come over to watch NASCAR, and I’d be like, ‘Hey, you want to buy this?’ and they’d be like, ‘Yeah, I’ll buy it!’”
He thought he was hustling these guys—earning hard cash for useless trinkets—but what he didn’t realize at the time was that by encouraging him to use his hands, his dad’s friends were leading him on a path toward a vocation. Just as critical, they were sharing the passion that brought them all together in the first place. It was one generation looking out for the next.
Before he even had his driver’s license, Graham started building his first hot rod based around a 1931 Ford Model A Coupe that an old lady gave him after he weed-whacked her property, which was adjacent to his dad’s auto shop. It wasn’t long before his period-correct hot rod builds got noticed.
By 19, he even had his own television show on Hot Rod TV, called Nineteen-28.
Graham knew he could capitalize on the exposure he got from the TV show, so he started his own hot rod company. The business became all-consuming, and he quickly got burned out. He shut up shop, keeping his passion for hot rods alive by keeping it as a hobby.
These days, Graham is content working 9-to-5 at an excavation company, building hot rods in his garage and racing motorcycles two weekends a month. Not that he doesn’t second-guess himself. “I sit on tractors at work and think, ‘Do I want to race full-time?’”
It’s a question most racers don’t have the privilege to consider. For many, if the opportunity to earn the biggest share of the purse is there, they take it. It’s their best chance at big money and the only way to determine the limit of their talents and tenacity.
But Graham knows that there are greater things worth regretting than trophies and racing stories.“The way it is now, I’m home every night during the week with my wife and kids. I don’t want to lose that and be on the road 24/7 to go race. Having a 9-to-5 keeps me grounded.”
Graham also has as broad of a perspective as he does a great talent.
“I’d rather make the sport grow as a whole than race professionally and have to just go after that one thing,” he says.
When the brass at Ducati approached him to race the Mint 400, their objective was just to reach the finish line. Instead, Graham won the thing by 45 minutes. While he was sitting at the finish, soaking up the reality of it all, organizers from the National Hare and Hound Association (NHHA) came over to congratulate him. They were so impressed with his performance on the Desert Sled—that’s the “holy shit” factor Graham talks about—that they realized a Hooligan Open Class should be a permanent fixture.
Graham and the NHHA wrote a rule book and presented it to the American Motorcyclist Association (AMA). Considering the adventure-bike and dual-sport market is booming, and riders crave more versatile bikes, they knew it was the right moment to develop a real race series. The AMA was immediately receptive to the idea, recognizing that racing production street bikes harks back to its own heritage of organizing events for the average rider and the average bike.
By making the class so inclusive, Graham hoped it would attract all types of motorcycles—from custom Harley-Davidson Sportsters with long-travel suspensions to modern rally-inspired adventure bikes. He also wanted it to be accessible to riders of varying experience levels. Call it the speed demon’s noblesse oblige.
His altruism ultimately lost him the inaugural NHHA Hooligan championship.
When the class was announced, KTM decided to bring the proverbial gun to a knife fight by fielding a factory 790 Adventure R with Baja 1000 champ and Dakar racer Quinn Cody behind the bars. As it turns out, the 790 was actually an 890 Adventure R prototype that Cody was testing—cool way to do some R&D, sure, but kind of a kick in the balls to Ducati, which sponsored the class and had to be thinking KTM had overlooked the spirit of the thing.
None of that bothered Graham, though:
“It doesn’t take away from the class. A lot of guys were like, ‘I don’t want to ride my Harley out there against Factory KTM!’ But that’s not the point. We’re trying to get the class going.”
Graham also didn’t mind having someone to chase. At their first race together, Graham pushed himself, finishing around a minute-forty after Cody—a significant achievement given the KTM’s modern, rally-bred roots.
For 2021, adventure bikes and scramblers are split into different classes.
“Desert racing is the gnarliest form of dirt-bike racing there is,” Graham says, “but it isn’t an ego sport.”
The individual glory of racing is subjugated to something more important: survival. A sport that’s as on-the-fringe extreme as desert racing means competitors often have to help each other finish, fix breakdowns and generally look after each other. But the higher the stakes, the higher the sense of camaraderie and conviviality.
For Graham, the sterile conventionality of a racing paddock has lost its charm, if it ever had any.
“For desert races,” Graham says, “the NHHA gives you GPS coordinates, and you pull up to where the race is going to be and everyone’s camping. Everyone’s kids are riding mini bikes around. They play games, have a motorcycle rodeo the night before the race...the atmosphere is incredible. It’s like no other. You show up to a Hooligan flat-track race, you race, and it’s over and everyone goes home.”
“I still get that crazy feeling when I get to the desert. It brings back good memories.”
As a kid, Graham came from a broken home. He had trouble in school and struggled with ADHD.
“I should have been doomed from a young age,” he says. “My mom got me hooked on prescription meds because it was the ’90s and that’s what you did. I was depressed and practically drooling on myself.”
Part of a child’s vulnerability is that they only have the ability to see what’s right in front of them. They grope blindly. They falter. Without the perspective of time, they can’t comprehend that there are alternate paths beyond the darkness.
“The thing that got me away from that was motorcycles. The best part of my life was when my dad picked me up and we went to the desert. When I showed up to his place, he would literally throw the bottles of pills away. ”
From there: a way out.
“[Riding] two wheels teaches you so much in life,” Graham says. “From respect to helping other people—what revolves around two wheels is always good.”
For his daughters, ages 10 and 6, the desert has always been a home, not an escape. They love going to the races as a family. They camp out, hang with friends, and wander the desert bivouac wearing T-shirts with their dad’s number 47 on the backs. The girls play a role in how Graham wants to race because they’re part of his life—the biggest part. It’s as simple and as natural as that.
Desert racing on a retro scrambler and building authentically styled hot rods is aesthetically, if not philosophically, coincidental. It’s like Graham’s stuck in Southern California in the middle of the last century. The mid-century zeitgeist as symbolized by McQueen-esque freethinking, the reimagining of automotive style and performance, and the resourcefulness born of necessity are enduring components of the American identity.
But these days, many of us would rather spend than fix, consume rather than create, imitate rather than innovate. Honoring mid-century ideals involves no more than sitting on a tufted sofa from West Elm, watching Mad Men, and sipping a martini. To Graham, mid-century ideals have informed his conception of what’s cool, what’s worth doing, and how to live. Couches don’t come into it.
He wants to preserve the treasures of knowledge: how to drop an axle by applying heat and putting pressure on it with a jig; how to track down old car graveyards; how to modify a Desert Sled to make it handle in the loose stuff. He’ll give a kid a set of old wheels for free. He’ll teach his kids’ friends how to ride a dirt bike. He’ll sacrifice a full-time racing career to promote the culture that’s made him who he is.
“Influencing the younger generations and keeping the torch lit for the future is the most important thing for me,” Graham says.
He’s an ambassador of motorcycling. He’s a student of history, a steward of old-school cool. He’s a mentor to the next generation of hot-rodders, future fabricators, and would-be racers. He’s a husband, a father, a friend. He’s a motorcycle racer.
And he hopes the dust will never settle on the glory days.
