33 years ago, Dep Ed Hamish Cooper got roped into running errands for Bazza on the very first Ducati Monster…
The bedside phone rang at 6.30am. I sleepily picked it up and the voice on the other end of the blower said: “Barry Sheene here, I’m a phone man, not a fax man; that’s why I’m calling.”
A few days earlier I’d faxed Barry Sheene MBE, two-times world 500cc Grand Prix champion, after Classic Racer magazine had commissioned me to interview him about his new retirement life Down Under.
“So, Bob Berry’s put you in touch with me?” he asked. Berry was a former sports editor for UK Motor Cycle News and now editor of Classic Racer.
“Well, does he know that the last interview I did was with Hello magazine and they paid me quite well? Hope he’s got some sort of budget for this.”
Shaking away the early-morning fog in my head, I gathered all the skills honed working in the cutthroat world of 1980s Sydney tabloid newspapers and played the only card in my pack: the Joker. I replied that he was already rich but I might get famous by interviewing him. The only money that would change hands was the Classic Bike airfare and motel reimbursement.
“OK. Don’t worry about all that,” he barked. “When do you want to come up here? And don’t bother about a hire car, just get a taxi to our place, there are motels nearby.” Photographer Andre Kamer and I arrived at the neo-Spanish Sheene residence just after 10am on the following Saturday.
He came out to meet us, looking fit, tanned and wearing battered boardshorts with a perfectly white Cagiva-Ducati singlet tucked in (as you did in those days). His semi-mullet hair looked impossibly black, considering the life-changing traumas he’d been through. As well as the huge injuries sustained during his career, he’d also recently been battling a type of chronic fatigue.
Bazza looked us up and down and we must have passed the test because he invited us in. Soon we were in his study and he was happily posing for portrait photos. Then he walked us around his collection of GP bikes as Kamer kept the camera snapping.
He stopped in front of one of his semi-factory Yamahas and pointed to a large photograph of him racing it that was mounted high up on the wall (main image).
“See that? It couldn’t pull the cock off a chocolate frog,” he said. (I still have that photo up on my workshop/study wall as a moment of conversation caught perfectly by an Old School photographer in a single shot because Velvia 50 slide film was so expensive.)
Sheene then took us outside to his workshop where he was putting a Suzuki triple engine back into its Seeley frame as part of the restoration of the bikes he’d raced early in his career.
He soon got us involved with some menial workshop tasks then suddenly stopped and said: “It’s nearly lunchtime. Grab the Monster, get some more of these metric nuts, sort out a motel and buy some lunch at the servo up the road. Put in on my tab.”
I must have looked at him with disbelief because he said: “No. I’m not stupid enough to own the petrol station; I own the land it stands on but they know me there. Also don’t forget that the Monster has a reversed race shift on it.”
So, there I was bungling around Nerang running Bazza’s errands on a first-year tricked-out 900cc Ducati Monster.
It’s hard to believe it’s 20 years since Barry left us. In retirement from GP racing, he quickly found a new life Down Under, both as a GP commentator on television and a talent scout who helped youngsters like Troy Corser and Chris Vermeulen get into international competition.
Bazza never wasted a minute. Including the uncomfortable early morning phone call Bob Berry received a few months later. He had dragged an old racing photo out of the files to accompany our feature and used the original caption.
“You got it wrong 10 years ago and you’ve got it wrong again,” Sheene screeched. Godspeed Bazza, a phone man, not a fax man.
