The Motorcycle Hall of Fame.

I wish the NASCAR Hall of Fame would have been founded before the Motorcycle Hall of Fame. Perhaps the template of the NASCAR Hall might have been adopted by the Motorcycle Hall. Unfortunately it wasn’t and the power and impact of the Motorcycle Hall of Fame was greatly diminished by the way the institution was founded.

The primary problem with the Motorcycle Hall of Fame is that too many people were inducted in the early classes. Look what NASCAR did. It had 25 nominees and just five of those made the Hall. It was a major honor just to be nominated and to get into the Hall of Fame was the ultimate honor.

NASCAR did it right.

Compare that to the Motorcycle Hall of Fame’s first class in 1998. Take a guess how many were inducted in the inaugural class? 10… 20… 50?

Try 124!

That’s right the initial class of the Motorcycle Hall of Fame was 124 inductees.

That decision by the first election committee was poorly thought out to say the least.

Proponents of the mass induction say that motorcycling had 100 years of history to catch up on, but NASCAR has been around for over 60 years and only five were inducted. Yes the Motorcycle Hall of Fame covers a lot more than one series, but I still maintain that a reasonable number for the first class of the Motorcycle Hall of Fame would have been more like 10 or 12, not 124.

That mistake caused both short and long-term problems for the Motorcycle HOF. First a mass induction of 124 cheapened the honor of being in the Hall of Fame. Plus a massive class allowed little recognition for the initial, and in many cases, the most deserving inductees. How are you going to properly recognize an inductee when the podium is crowded with 123 others?

The long-term problem is that much of the star power of the induction ceremony was swallowed up in the initial class. How great would it have been to have 12 inductees the first year? Those inductees would have gotten major recognition as the first NASCAR class did. Plus it would have truly represented a happening in motorcycling and established the induction ceremony as an annual must-see event. Now all the big-name riders have already been inducted and it will be difficult in the coming years to name anyone with major drawing power.

Quick – name a flat tracker who deserves to be in the Hall who’s not already in there. They even inducted riders who were not retired from racing!

The Motorcycle Hall of Fame multiplied its problems by more mass inductions in the following years. It wasn’t until recently that they’ve backed off on the number of annual inductees, but it’s still too many.

I love the Motorcycle Hall of Fame as an invaluable depository of information. The one advantage of having so many inductees is that the Hall has become the best single source of the history of motorcycling. I’ve lost track of how many are in there now, but it’s well into the hundreds.

It’s too late to do anything about it now; as they say the Motorcycle Hall of Fame woulda, coulda, shoulda. Now the challenge for the Motorcycle HOF is to find a way and go back and properly recognize those inductees who were involved in those early mass inductions.