Larry Lawrence | July 11, 2024
Larry Huffman, who was the voice of Supercross from the first Superbowl of Motocross at the Los Angeles Coliseum in 1972, all the way through to 1988, died on Monday, July 1, 2024, at Desert Regional Hospital in Palm Springs, California. He had long been battling infections relating to foot surgery over 10 years ago. He was 82.
Larry Huffman was just as much the star as the supercross racers were in the 1980s.
Whenever the subject of great racing announcers comes up, Larry Huffman’s name is still one of the first that comes to mind for many racing fans. Although Huffman hasn’t been a regular announcer at AMA Supercross races for over 30 years, his influence on the way Supercross races are announced lives on today.
Racing fans of the day marveled that they could actually hear Huffman in the noisy stadiums, even over the roar of the crowd and the screaming two-stroke motors. Larry himself wondered how he managed to cut through that wall of sound.
“I hadn’t been to a Supercross race in years, and I finally went to one and couldn’t hear a thing they were saying,” Huffman said in a 2008 interview with Cycle News. “People tell me all the time they were able to hear me, and I guess from my radio experience, I learned to project my voice. Certainly, the sound equipment wasn’t any better back then than it is today.”
To say that Huffman’s style was high energy would be a major understatement. Wearing his trademark tuxedo, Huffman often worked himself into a near frenzy when calling close races. Somehow, his voice held up every Saturday night, thanks to secrets of the trade—a combination of cough drops and water; but you wouldn’t want to talk to Huffman early on a Sunday morning.
“My voice would be pretty shot the next day,” Huffman said.
Huffman, who started out announcing drag races, began announcing motorcycles at Speedway events in Costa Mesa when that sport experienced its revival in the late 1960s. His first big motocross gig came at the Cycle World Grand Prix at Saddleback Park in 1970.
Nicknamed “Supermouth” for his ability to get the crowds excited and for being clocked at over 300 words per minute on his radio and TV commercials, Huffman initially got bad reviews for his announcing style.
“Roxy Rockwood was the main AMA announcer in those days,” Huffman said. “He was very good and a walking encyclopedia of racing knowledge, but his style was pretty sedate. And here I come in wearing a tuxedo and jumping up and down on the platform, and while the fans seemed to like it, a lot of the press didn’t approve because it was not traditional. Cycle News and one of the big dirt bike magazines did editorials at the time saying the sport didn’t need my kind of announcing because the fans were knowledgeable enough to follow the action on their own. That was wrong; people wanted to be turned on at the races.”
Huffman followed one of Rockwood’s precepts, which was to know his subjects. Huffman would hang out with the riders, even having them over to his house at times, to give fans insights into the personalities of their heroes.
He also became known for his zany description of race battles with catchphrases like “He’s holding on like a dog to a piece of meat” or “He’s sticking to him like a Hare Krishna to an airport traveler,” a phrase he credits to Warren Reid. Do you want more Huffmanisms? How about “He’s riding smoother than a mayonnaise sandwich,” or “He’s tougher than a two-dollar steak,” or “He goes to Mexico just to drink the water.” You get the picture.
His tenure as the Voice of Supercross didn’t have a storybook ending. Huffman was caught up in the political upheaval Supercross went through after Mickey Thompson’s murder, and he said he was blacklisted after the 1988 season. The memory of how things were handled was still a bit painful for Huffman.
“The next year, I asked if I could get some passes for Anaheim, and I was turned down,” Huffman said. “I wanted to bring some friends, but they wouldn’t even offer me a discount on tickets.”
Huffman stayed involved in the sport, doing a lot of work for Suzuki in the late 1980s. He would do the occasional Speedway race, but pretty much faded from the scene in the 1990s. Huffman was very well received when he was asked to make a comeback to do select AMA Supermoto races, including the year-ending race in Long Beach in 2006.
In 2008, Huffman was one of the guests of honor at Anaheim II for Throwback Night, a retro salute to the legendary ’80s racing that helped establish Supercross. Larry was the announcer that night in Anaheim in 1986 when David Bailey and Rick Johnson had what is still considered to be one of the greatest Supercross battles of all time.
“The Live Nation folks treated me like royalty,” Huffman said. “That was a lot of fun working with Terry Boyd, Erv Braun, Todd Jendro and the crew. They went out of their way to be nice to me.”
While Huffman is well known for his announcing skills, what some people may not know is that Larry produced one of, if not the first motorcycle TV magazine show, a program called “Motorcycle World” that ran on KNBC in Los Angeles for 13 weeks during the summer of 1983.
The show’s concept came about when Huffman produced a half-hour show for Hester Communications to promote its Daytona Beach Motorcycle Show during Bike Week. The program, which featured Kenny Roberts and Freddie Spencer, aired on WCPX, the Orlando CBS affiliate, and drew a remarkable 9.0 Nielsen rating.
“We ad-libbed most of the program with my wife holding the cue cards,” Huffman said. “But I was convinced when I saw the ratings there was a place for a motorcycle show on television.”
Back home in California, Huffman produced “Motorcycle World” with a skeleton crew and had many top racers as guests, including Mike Bell, Brad Lackey, and Rick Johnson. He initially went on the air at a San Diego public access station and shopped the pilot around with little interest until KNBC took the bite.
“Unfortunately, it was the middle of the summer,” Huffman said. “The worst time to go out and try to get sponsorship from the OEMs. We did our little motorcycle show that was held together with scotch tape and beat CBS every week and tied Wide World of Sports a few times.”
KNBC was so encouraged by the show’s ratings that it wanted to extend the contract. Unfortunately, by the fall, the manufacturers had not provided enough advertising budget to keep the show going.
“It was nervous breakdown time trying to meet the tight weekly deadlines, and ultimately, I lost a lot of money but earned a great deal of experience from it.”
After a stint with CART, Huffman continued doing commercial and voice narration work for radio, TV, and even video games. In the mid-2000s, he gave one of the all-time great interviews DMXS Radio has ever had, encouraged by the hosts to do stuff like conjuring up ordering from a McDonald’s drive-through in his over-the-top Supercross announcer’s voice.
For an entire generation Huffman was the Voice of Supercross and was ahead of his time with his innovative TV show. Tributes and condolences have poured in by the thousands on social media. He is survived by his wife KC Huffman, daughters Kimberly Frowiss and Camela Juskaitis and a granddaughter Aislinn Torrance. CN
