I’d just barely heard the name of Pat Schutte and already I wanted to wring his neck.

I was working as AMA Pro Racing’s communications manager living in Westerville and a longtime friend from my hometown called me asking me if I knew this guy named Pat Schutte. My friend was an Indianapolis  television sports reporter who said this crazy Schutte guy was running one of his TV crews off the steps of the RCA Dome.

I’d heard of Schutte. He had just been hired by PACE Motor Sports, the primary promoter of the AMA Supercross Series. Pat and I hadn’t interacted yet, but my first impression of him via the report from my TV sports buddy didn’t leave me with a particular affinity for the guy.

It seems that this station hadn’t attended the Thursday media day prior to the Indy Supercross and as Pat saw it PACE rented the RCA Dome for the weekend and they had the right to control who was on the grounds. This TV station was doing an Indianapolis Colts story on the steps of the RCA Dome. This was when the Colts were a pretty miserable team and were having trouble filling up the Dome. Pat told them under no uncertain terms that the RCA Dome was going to be sold out in a few nights, yet their station didn’t see worthy to do a pre-race story on the race. If that’s the way they felt about it they could go somewhere else to do their Colts story.

Our paths didn’t cross and later I heard Schutte had moved on to another job.

Fast forward five years. I was now a contractor for the AMA now recently working as media manager for AMA Superbike and was being reassigned to do media work for AMA Motocross. I found out the National Promoters Group (NPG) had hired their own media man who’d I’d be working with. You guessed it – it was none other than the infamous Pat Schutte.

As it turns out Pat (or Shoots as his buddies call him) was far from the raving maniac I pictured. For the next four years Pat and I teamed to build media attention for the AMA Motocross Championship up to a level not seen before or since. I’m not ashamed to say we flat out kicked ass. And most of the credit for the media attention we garnered goes to Pat.

I was a meat and potatoes media guy. I was good with the everyday tasks of setting up media tours and getting TV stations and newspapers to come out and cover an event with pre-race coverage. I also had a good relationship with the Associated Press and we got great national post-race coverage as a result.

Pat on the other hand was an idea man. He was always thinking about some crazy way to promote the races. While I’d be happy to do the standard pound on the media, Pat’s out-of-the-box thinking resulted in “happenings” where TV, radio stations and newspapers were calling us. He brought in local celebrities and athletes from other sports to supplement the standard cover-your-local-motocross-racer story. Extreme sports were just getting a foothold and Pat (being an early Extreme sports guy himself as an accomplished skater, snowboarder and a surprisingly deft athlete in general) used that angle to the hilt, bringing in the X-Games roster of skaters, snow boarders, bikers, and stunt riders. He also somehow pulled in Hollywood actors, national recording stars, Olympians you name it, they attended and were part of the media build up to AMA Motocross races in the early-to-mid 2000s thanks to Pat.

Pat’s ideas often took us from the sports page to the front page of the newspapers. He would set up street-hockey matches, basketball games, mini-bike and go-kart races and all kinds of other attention grabbing pre-race happenings. Pat once even managed to tie in a story about fathers and sons sharing their love of motocross on Father’s Day that CNN taped and ran the entire weekend of the Budds Creek National on Headline News.

Before you knew it a sport that couldn’t even attract a local reporter was suddenly being featured on CNN, HBO, ESPN, Sports Illustrated, Men’s Health, GQ, the New York Times, the Los Angles Times, the Washington Post and the Associated Press – not to mention an explosion of local coverage for the races.

I worked with a lot of publicity flacks over the years (it takes one to know one), but never have I had the fun nor gotten the results that I did working with good old Shoots.