Planning and a lot of guts. when i do a big jump, anything can happen. on july 4th, 2001, the worst happens. the last thing i remember is putting the bike in gear and letting the clutch up. bubba attempts to jump 22 cars at the del mar fair where performed a crowd pleasing show in 1999. i jumped over 14 school buses. a really cool jump. it went great. it was flawless. i said, we got to do this again. i m thinking, oh, yeah, i got the perfect plan. so my idea was to jump over 22 cars on a harley davidson motorcycle off of a 7-foot high ramp. ever the showman, bubba intends to give the audience their money s worth. so the day started off pretty good. i got to tell you, they paid old bubba to be there, so i made sure i did my job. so what i did is hired a laser light show company and we rocked it.
And i like to have fun, but now i m a daddy. i have a 3-year-old little girl so now my excitement for what i do has kind of changed gears a little bit because i want to make sure that i m going to be safe. but for now, bubba is still loving the ride and he insists he is living his boyhood dream. the terrible thing is i m starting to get a little bit old and it is kind of like, all right, hot shot, you have done it all now, what are you going to do next? coming up, a cowboy finds out that when you mess with a bull you really might get the horns. you are playing with this sort of thing and you get burned. and it is said astronauts can see it from space, but can a skateboarder jump out of it? it was so out of the box for somebody to jump the great wall on a skateboard. there are so many things that motivated me to do it. when caught on camera: the danger zone continues.
All the cars were white, we wanted them to look really uniform and we spent most of our concentration on making sure we put on a fantastic show for everybody. and if i had that to do over again, i think i would spend more time on making sure i got a good ramp. in front of 35,000 spectators and a backdrop befitting a rock star, bubba appears. i get out there and i m doing the show. we got the lasers going and the power road going and everything was working really good, but i m making all these passes back and forth. i m doing wheelies and it is going really good. what i did was made all these passes and chewed up the water-downed packed surface. it is now like running in sand. i m in fourth gear, i m going to the ramp, the engine is you know, it sounds good, i m in a high rpm, the bike is not fishtailing, i must be good. i lift my visor up and put the bike in neutral and bow my head and say a quick little prayer.
Very lightweight, very space hitch technology material. you are not supposed to break those things. that motorcycle helmet was broken in three different places, but it saved my life. saves hi life but barely. i had a major head injury. i had bleeding on the brain. i crushed my right shoulder, broke the collarbone and my shoulder blade in the back. i broke all my ribs, i punctured both lungs, ruptured spleen, i shattered my pelvis and i broke six vertebrae in my back and one in my neck. but other than that i was all right. bubba has no memory of the jump, but ever the perfectionist, he critiques his performance from his hospital bed. i m thinking that is so obvious that i didn t have enough speed. it got me to thinking, did something happen, did i black out? what went wrong? as i started watching the video an analyzing it quite a bit more, you can see me mid-air working the bike, i m trying to move it around, so obviously i was totally there, but the only
he puts the bike back in gear and that s all he remembers. the jump and its horrifying results are caught on camera. i don t remember getting closer to the ramp. i don t remember shifting the motorcycle. i don t remember getting closer and closer and positioning myself for the jump. i don t remember any of that stuff. and i certainly don t remember the helicopter ride that, you know, sent me to scripps memorial hospital, which is where i woke up a day or two later. bubba breaks a lot of bones, not to mention a state of the art helmet. that is a $1,000 indy car helmet.