How good was Steve McQueen?
It was the famous bike jump in
The Great Escape that inspired Bruce Brown to buy a bike in the first place, and he was impressed by just how good his hero was on a motorcycle.
“Steve could get out there and mix it up with everybody,” he said. “He was a good rider and super-competitive. If you ever beat him, it would piss him off to the max. He lived in a pretty insulated world, so bikes gave him a chance to get out with real people and bang elbows with them. I think that was important to him. He was real good. I mean, he was an excellent rider and race car driver. It was a no-bull deal – he was good at it.”
Brown even got to ride with his hero regularly. McQueen might have been the biggest box office star on the planet in 1971, but he loved nothing better than getting out on a dirt bike and letting rip. “I had a ranch and we used to go out there and ride quite a bit,”
Brown said. “He wasn’t worried about injuries at all – the studios were worried about it! During the Elsinore race, he broke his foot, which they really didn’t like!”
With riders of the calibre of Mert Lawill and Malcolm Smith co-starring, McQueen was up against the best, but still he held his own. “Steve admired them, and they admired Steve, but they were all just friends. Mert got his hand severely hurt one time and Steve drove him down to Los Angeles and took him to a hand specialist he’d found out about, who did a major operation, and now Mert’s got full use of his hand, which he wouldn’t have had if Steve hadn’t done that.”
‘It was a no-bull deal – he was good at it’
BRUCE BROWN