Mick Matheson
A fine roadtester, Mick Matheson was Editor of Two Wheels in 1993-1994. He went on to also edit Australian Motorcycle News and Australian Road Rider magazines. Today, Mick runs his own video production company, Phantom 2 Media.
What do you do when you land your dream job at 21, the one on the magazine you’ve been fantasising about since you were 16 while all your mates snuck Penthouse under the sheets? What do you do when you’re surrounded by motorcycles and still able to afford food? What do you do when they put you in charge of this paradise?
You admit you’re a complete bastard. And sink yourself deeply into bastardry.
I don’t really know how long I edited Two Wheels. It was all so vague, the way it came about. Roothy quit in frustration, as is usually the case with editors of Two Wheels. The bosses looked around, but all they saw in the office was a woman and a gangly youth. A woman?! Publishing wasn’t that liberated. Matho?! What the hell does he know about anything?
Not much, really. I could fill out a mean insurance claim and didn’t complain about working ridiculous hours. So they appointed a managing editor above me, made me associate editor, promised a pay rise and sort of left me to it. Then one day they decided I was fit to be a full-blown editor.
I’d first lobbed into Two Wheels as a very green and daggy cadet journalist a few weeks before the 20th anniversary edition arrived hot off the presses. What a time. John Rooth, swinging on crutches, led me through a burned out building to a chaotic office full of manual typewriters, smouldering ashtrays and full-on enthusiasm. Geoff Seddon and Jamie McIlwraith filled the other editorial seats, and John Waugh sold ads. We went to the pub every Friday for lunch – at least – rode bikes as often as possible, and had a ball.
This was a time when the publisher sent on edict insisting we have only one farewell lunch per week, no matter how many people were leaving the company. Our condemned building was known as the Beirut Wing because it looked like a bomb had hit it, and threatened to collapse. There was a desperation to the whole company – which was far more than just a motorcycle magazine – and a kind of the-end-isnigh atmosphere.
But it changed as I took over, and the accountants got serious. We put our heads down – Wendy Spooner and I – and worked our rings out. We instituted regular comparison tests, following the lead that my managing editor, Fraser Stronach, set when he got involved on Roothy’s departure. We began using racetracks for sportsbike performance testing, as well as the road. And we continued the epic trips that Two Wheels has always covered in one form or another. Yeah, it was all very serious.
Kinda. Comparisons? A solid head-to-head measure of the intricacies of several competitive motorcycles? Yeah, sure, and an excellent excuse to grab the boss’s credit card and bugger off with some good mates for a few days on someone else’s motorcycles. All care, no responsibility. Probably not much care, now that I think of it.
Phillip Island Superbikes? A unique opportunity to meet the heroes and teams and see the machinery that influences the market and previews technology? Um, I guess, but struth, the Cowes pub was fun on a Sunday night, especially when the boss wasn’t expecting you back till Tuesday or Wednesday and he’s paying you anyway.
We spent eight days fanging around western NSW on dirt bikes on an exhaustive, ah, comparison which took as to Cameron Corner. I once took – what was it? – a week to test a touring BMW because, of course, I had to do it justice as a topclass tourer. It was purely coincidence that my girlfriend was holidaying in Noosa, honest.
There was always adventure. Perhaps the weirdest was waking up in BMW’s carpark at 8.30 am, having slept in a swag waiting for them to open, and handing the bike’s keys to a smirking receptionist. Well, they didn’t expect me to find a motel room when I lobbed into Melbourne at 5 am, did they?
Except for the huge amounts of paperwork, there wasn’t much else to do. My period in the chair was a rather dull one. Nothing was happening. GSX-Rs were getting fatter, 600s weren’t exciting yet, the Across was the biggest thing to happen to 250s and ad revenue was so low we rarely went to more than 100 pages in a single issue. We still ran black-and-white pages.
But we had our moments. The FireBlade still stands out from those days, but the launch of the 916 was the highlight.
By the time I was editing the mag, I’d overcome my youthful stupidity and ignorance – to some degree, anyway- and so had stopped crashing Ducatis (um, for a while), thrashing Harleys in front of the importers, and letting Roothy cover for me when I crashed Kawasakis. Now I had to be responsible. So when we said the GSX-R1100M was a shitbox, I fielded the phone call from Suzuki. And agreed to let them give it back to us. Well, they did blame us for buggering up the suspension settings. We got it back and Stuart Kennedy, one of the most gifted writers I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with, said it was a dinosaur.
The man at Suzuki was much, much bigger than me. His beetroot-red face came within two inches from mine as he showered me in fury and spittle. I smiled politely at him and defended Stuart – who was, of course, absolutely right.
It wasn’t the last time something like this would happen (Bowdler has backed me on at least two similar occasions in his time), but this was the incident which taught me what the magazine had to do. Two Wheels had to shoot straight.
So we did. And we had more fun to boot. But I was simply steering the magazine on a course that was already set. We marked the 25th anniversary by miraculously getting approval to reprint the entire first issue on the back of the regular mag.
Two Wheels suffered perennially under an unpredictable management regime, and you never knew if they’d approve something like that or sack half your staff.
When they butchered my budget to less than what Brian Cowan had in his day- I’m talking actual dollars, no inflationary adjustments or anything – I realised I hated being an editor anyway. I was so burnt out I wasn’t even able get half a day’s work done in 12 hours. I quit.
But I couldn’t break the ties after six years with Two Wheels. Still haven’t, 15 years after I first arrived.
By Mick Matheson, 35 Years of Two Wheels, 2003
