One Year Later | Swapmoto Live Turns One!

They say that time flies when you’re having fun, and that certainly rings true over the past year. TransWorld Motocross was put to rest on January 30 last year, and though I built a primitive version of the Swapmoto Live website a couple of days later with the help of my daughter Megan, our small team officially launched as a business on April 1. April Fool’s Day? Why not! We’re no joke, but our approach to covering the sport we all love is lighthearted and fun…

I’ve gotten all sentimental a few times on social media about the trials and tribulations that the past year and change has brought, but the truth of the matter is that life is good! Our small team – Michael Antonovich, Chase Curtis and I on the content creation side and Don Wilson and Dominic Gaytan on the sales side, Cindy Rutland as our web specialist, Austin Schott helping with art, and Casey Davis as a valuable contributor- runs smoothly and efficiently. I certainly wish I could have brought my entire TWMX team with me, but small businesses have their challenges and limitations. I’ve often been asked how things are going with SML and my canned answer is, “great!” Truth be told, we’ve been in the black since day one and the support we’ve enjoyed from the motorcycle industry has been overwhelming and humbling. Personally, I’m making about half of my old deluxe corpo salary, but the quality of my life has improved tenfold! The friendships that we’ve all formed through the years have all proven true, and getting to work hand-in-hand with the stars of our sport is something none of us will ever take for granted. Life is good.

In between the time that we were let go from TransWorld and launched SML, I had several great conversations with people whom I respect. “Business isn’t hard it’s just scary because you haven’t done it before,” Jeremy McGrath told me. “You have to keep it going.” At one point, MC even offered to buy TWMX back from AMI for me since the proposition scared me so much. As it turned out, the magazine was not for sale and we turned to plan B with SML, and Jeremy has continued to be a huge supporter and has graciously offered us a home base to work out of at his McGrath Motorsports race shop in Elsinore.

“Motocross needs your voice and the industry will support you,” Sean Estes said to me. “Do what you do and it will all work out. You just have to lose those pinups, man.” Sean has been a friend of mine since the Yamaha of Troy days when he worked for Easton. At Specialized, he changed my life by getting me on a mountain bike years ago and at the time I found myself at a crossroads, he too was making a career switch to Fox, the suspension giant. My conversation with Sean included much more than those words, and I hung up feeling courageous and inspired. To his dismay, though, our readers demanded we keep the pinup tradition alive and O’Neal even stepped up to sponsor them. Haha!

Frank Kashare, most of all, planted the seed for SML months before D Day even hit. “You’ve got to start investing in yourself, man,” he said. “All of TransWorld is for sale, what if some knucklehead buys you guys and doesn’t like motorcycles and shuts you down?” Six months before we all found ourselves unemployed, Frank helped me launch the SML Show, the foundation on which our new media platform is based on. Our friendship has certainly come a long way since our first phone conversation that included some choice French, and I appreciate Frank more than I can express in writing.

Of course, none of this would be possible without my great friend of 30+ years, Danny Malfatti, or my amazing wife Eileen, who runs the books for us and keeps us all in line. My crew of best buds and test riders, Pat Foster, Kyle Puerner, Mike Sleeter, Rene Garcia, and Rich Taylor…the list goes on and on…

I am proud of every piece of content that we’ve created in the past 12 months, but my favorite was an impromptu, “live” podcast that Jeremy McGrath and I did in Whistler, Canada. We had ridden mountain bikes all day at the famous Whistler Bike Park and before heading out to dinner, I got the idea for us both to sign into our Instagram accounts and take questions on our live story feeds. Jeremy spiced things up with a bottle of tequila and though I tried to resist, peer pressure from The King won out and the results were pretty funny. For the record, I hadn’t done a tequila shot since around 1995, when too many shots caused me to miss a race in the Cantamar Sand Dunes below Tijuana.

It’s been a heck of a year, and aside from this dang COVID-19 pandemic, I wouldn’t have changed a thing. Thanks for your support. And hey..please tell a friend about SML!
– swap

Michael Antonovich
@michaelantonovich

To look back on how much has happened in a year is a little bit of a trip. The walk out of the old office in Carlsbad was surreal and once the shellshock wore off, we got to work and started to build something, but it wasn’t an easy task. I bought two Apple computers that were more than 10 years old (that got me by until I scored a new MacBook Pro) and we spent hours on the phone or meeting at restaurants (on unemployment and unsure when the paychecks would start flowing, we’d order the bare minimum to keep a table for a few hours) coming up with ideas for the site. All of March 2019 was spent framing out the website with our developer and there were plenty of stressful moments when I’d stare at the computer screen trying to understand the WordPress tutorials on YouTube, but soon everything came together and we debuted a completely new site without much issue on the day we promised.

The ingenuity of our staff really came to light in the last 12 months. All five of us will do whatever it takes to get a job done, be it finding a way to get it paid for, a creative angle to talk about a topic or a way to appeal to an advertiser. We see eye to eye most of the time, but when we don’t, we’re able to explain the issue and figure out a solution. We know our roles and skills, and I think that shows in the finished product. These guys are family.

It’s hard to say one race or trip that means more than another because when I think about them all, I can remember what I was going through personally or professionally at that time. The Atlanta trip was paid for by our friend Steve Matthes on the agreement that I would produce some PulpMX content and that was a very thoughtful gesture on his part, especially because Donn employed him for a time at TWMX. The Daytona trip a week later made me realize how cushy the TWMX budget was, because I booked the cheapest flight possible and landed in Jacksonville at 1 AM on Saturday, slept a few hours in the hotel, drove an hour and a half the track in the morning, did the race, drove an hour and a half back to Jacksonville that night, turned the backseat of the rental car into a makeshift office in Walmart parking lot, stayed up until 5 AM, and then went to my flight. The Thunder Valley trip in June was when I realized that I had to move back to Illinois, which led to a very long talk with Donn in the Glen Helen parking lot (I put it off for weeks fearing he’d say no), and then his approval via text message when I was at Washougal. Chase and I got much closer during that week in Idaho and Washington, a much-needed trip for two guys that hadn’t spent much time around each other prior. Thanks to Christina Denney and Mike Pelletier, I was able to do some work for Team USA and secured the funding for the Motocross of Nations trip; to be “part” of the team in some way is an honor that I cannot thank them for enough. Donn said I could go to Montreal for an offseason Supercross race as long as I kept the whole trip under a grand (an easy feat) and it’s there that I met Yarrive Konsky for the first time. After a few weeks and phone calls, Yarrive made it possible for me to come to Australia for the AUS-X Open with the Penrite Honda team, which has many of my good friends on the staff (Nate, Lillis, Duffe, Mitchell, Brayton, Blose, Jason, Nick). That Aussie trip was incredible, thanks Yarrive.

Hell, these past few months have been excellent. I basically lived at Donn’s house for the full month of January and really became his adopted white son over the dinners with his wife and daughter. For how long Donn and I have known each other (over a decade), this was the most that we’d been around each other non-stop and now we really understand the other better. You’d never know it, but Donn goes out of his way to make sure people are taken care of and that our partners are more than pleased with what we’re doing. Our Oakland and Tampa trips were a great time and I cannot wait to be back at the races with him again.

It’s hard to pick a single favorite piece of content, so I’ll give you three. The Motocross of Nations Kickstart was a challenge because sand from Assen got under my keyboard and rendered my spacebar useless. I spent my entire last day in the Netherlands typing thousands of words on my iPhone and completely missed the chance to see Amsterdam (probably for the best) but the write-up was something that told the story of the weekend and every photo was one that I took. A recent podcast with Zach Osborne that discussed practice and testing with a factory team answered questions I’ve always had about factory bikes and it was great to hear about the details from someone that is knowledgeable and passionate about a very complex process. The last pick would be a few things that I did with Justin Bogle and Brad Frace, two guys that are very like-minded and into the same things I am. The Pak X Emh aesthetic isn’t for everyone, but I love it because I see the influences and respect the willingness to share a different vision with the world. The podcast Bogle and I had at the end of the summer, where we talked about confidence and public perception is two guys speaking from the heart.

I love Swapmoto Live. With no corporate boss telling us what to do, we’re free to be ourselves and that is very apparent in our content. We’ve broken our share of news, have put some creative twists on standard content (the Big Guy Shootout with Dommer was genius), and have the respect of the industry. Thanks for making this possible. – Anton

Chase Curtis
@chasecurtis_

Man, one year! I am genuinely proud of what our team has accomplished in this short time period. As cheesy as it sounds, we overcame adversity and have reached a point I don’t think any of us expected to reach in just a year. There have been a lot of memories made since April 1st, 2019; from my first trip out of the country with Jeremy McGrath to watching my drone explode all over the Washougal National track.

The Swapmoto Live staff is significantly smaller than that of the former Transworld Motocross crew and the fact that we put out just as much content, if not more, has allowed me to travel and attend events I wasn’t able to before. In the summer months of 2019, I was able to attend the Fly Racing Summer Camp and then fly from Boise, Idaho, to Washington for the Washougal National. A lot happened that week, Anton and I were out of our element and on the track battling for the win in a pit bike race one day and then in the river whitewater rafting the next. As I reflect on memories from just days later in Washougal, nothing too enjoyable comes to mind; I had crashed and destroyed my drone early Saturday and that put quite the downer on my weekend. I was never able to recover every part of my drone, as it had hit a high part of the track going about 35 MPH and littered itself across horsepower hill. Honestly, it still hurts a little today to even talk about it.

Another chunk of my favorite memories from the last year was created in Whistler, Canada, when Maxxis flew Donn, Doni, Jeremy McGrath, and I out for the week of Red Bull Joyride. After experiencing days of riding and filming at the best mountain bike trails in the Western Hemisphere, Donn and I cozied up in a Panda Pod for our last night in Canada. We had both consumed a large amount of Cheezies on the bus ride down the mountain, which led to quite the fart war, a list of pissed off guests in other pods, and if we are being honest a stained pair of Ethikas. The night in the Panda Pod wasn’t ideal, but I do have one take away from the experience, that being it’s better to be the one causing the disturbance than to be the one having to deal with it.

There are seriously endless stories from the last year. When you are surrounded by your best friends at work, not a single day goes by without a laugh. A large amount of my fondest memories in the last year were created simply from working. I can not name a single thing that I am more passionate about than filming and editing videos. This might be a bad thing; according to my chick, I need to bring some of that passion I have for work into the bedroom. All jokes aside, I truly enjoy creating content. Something I challenge myself with is to constantly improve and aspire to be the very best I can be. That translates distinctly into my work, as I am always looking for ways to improve in both filming and postproduction. So although it very well may change in a few weeks, currently my favorite piece of work is my “On To 2020 ft. Cameron McAdoo” video. Prior to my broken ankle that occurred just a few days after Cameron McAdoo and I filmed for this video, I had planned on doing a series with various racers leading up to the start of the supercross season titled “On To 2020.” This video remains my personal favorite piece due to the lone fact that it was from the last day I could use all of my equipment and shoot while not maneuvering around on crutches. However, I plan on walking very soon and creating plenty of rad videos to top that in the next year, so cheers to another year living my dream!