Going to XTREMES
By
William T. Quinn
For Clayton Keeler, soaring through the air on several hundred pounds of snarling two-wheeled, two-stroke, dirt bike meanness delivers an adrenaline rush he can’t resist.
Now
it’s about to blossom into a $25 million indoor sports arena in
Trenton designed as a palace for dirt bike racing.
Keeler is a 45 year-old engineer with his own construction management firm in Pennington. For the past eight years, he has been dreaming of an arena for dirt bike races in New Jersey. Over the last year those dreams have turned into detailed drawings of a five-and-a-half-acre box he calls XArena.
Keeler is close to closing on his dream. His company, XArena Motor Sports, has reached agreement in principle with PSE&G to lease an 11-acre site for the arena alongside Route 1. PSE&G once operated a coal-to-gas conversion plant on the site and recently spent $20 million on an environmental remediation project to remove tar from the soil. The site is now an expanse of crushed stone surrounded by a cyclone fence in a residential neighborhood near North Olden Avenue.
Trenton Mayor Doug Palmer is backing the project in hopes it will further boost Trenton’s claims to be a sports center and will generate spinoffs such as hotels and restaurants that will cater to visitors to the arena. However, some neighbors have qualms about the noise and traffic it may bring to the area. The Trenton Planning Board is scheduled to vote November 14 on the site plan.
“Right now I’m very optimistic that we’ll be able to have XArena,” Palmer says. “In the last eight years, Trenton has really distinguished itself as a sports and entertainment venue in this region,” he adds, citing the Trenton Thunder baseball team, which plays in the city’s Waterfront Park, and the Trenton Titans hockey team, which plays in the Sovereign Bank Arena.
“We still have some issues with the residents,” Palmer concedes. “But they don’t know what it [XArena] really is. I’m confident that once things are explained, things will work out.”
Keeler hopes to raise the money to build the arena from Commerce Bank, the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority, the New Jersey Economic Development Authority, and private investors. To help secure funding, he has lined up a well-connected set of partners who include James DiEleuterio, James Kennedy and Frank Smollon.
DiEleuterio served as state treasurer under Christine Todd Whitman and then as CEO of the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority until his ouster last March by Governor James E. McGreevey. Kennedy, the mayor of Rahway, is a close friend of McGreevey’s. Smollon, a real estate investor in the Trenton area, is also friendly with the governor.
Keeler’s motor sport dreams have wheels and he wants to keep them rolling well past Trenton. XArena, he says, will be the first facility in the U.S. designed specifically for the needs of motorcycle racers. Once it is up and running, he wants to use its design as a prototype for similar venues across the U.S.
DiEleuterio says part of his job will be “working on new market development in other parts of the country.” After looking into the popularity of off-road motorcycling, he believes he can pull it off. “You can’t get away from the fact that this is not only something that has attracted national interest, but that the interest is growing.”
The 231,000 sq. ft. XArena will include a pro shop, a restaurant, two food courts, a banquet facility and several bars, plus seating for 2,500 spectators and room for up to 400 bikers to race on two adjoining dirt packed floors.
Keeler says the main motivation behind the XArena is his vision of what dirt bike racing could become. “I want to bring the sport to a new level,” he says. “Pros are treated well in any sport,” Keeler notes. He aims to provide a place where amateur and semi-professional riders can enjoy themselves as well.
“We want to take that amateur segment and professionalize it. This sport is ready for it, the demographics support it.”
No one who visits Keeler’s office could doubt his passion for the sport. Mounted against one wall is a 1974 125cc Honda Elsinore, one of the favorite dirt bikes from his riding career. The rest of the wall is filled with photos of Keeler or his 10-year-old son, Grant, soaring through the air at dirt biking events.
While a handful of professional racers like Ricky Carmichael and Jeremy McGrath have scored multi-million endorsement contracts in recent years, dirt biking remains a sport dominated by amateurs, XArena will be a place where they can pay for practice time and compete in races while spectators watch professional events.
Supercross, the name for indoor dirt bike races, has been speeding ahead of outdoor motocross events in popularity thanks to cable television coverage and the promotion efforts of event coordinators like Clear channel Entertainment, a unit of Clear Channel Worldwide of San Antonio.
Dirt bike racing now ranks behind Nascar as the second most popular motor sport in the U.S. The growing spectator interest in seeing riders perform gravity-defying jumps and flips has coincided with rising sales of dirt bikes, which have doubled in recent years to more than 275,000 units annually, according to the Motorcycle Industry Council. As sales have risen, so have injuries from riding accidents. Their Consumer Products Safety commission says dirt bike related injuries more than doubled in 2000 to about 53,000.
Other data from the Motorcycle Industry council shows there were 30,000 competitive off-road motorcycles in New Jersey in 2000, a number that has been growing rapidly. The trade publication Dealernews estimates that some 5,000 dirt bikes will be sold in the state this year. Keeler also cites data from the American Motorcyclist Association and other bike rider groups showing that 35,000 registered riders live within a two-hour drive of the proposed XArena.
Keeler says the level of interest in the sport in New Jersey “is very silent. People don’t know about it, but they will when we get the arena built.”
Keeler’s timing could be deft since the state’s off-road riders face growing pressure to head indoors because of their impact on parks and other public land. Last summer the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) vowed to step up enforcement of the state’s longstanding ban on off-road vehicle use on public land to prevent riders from ripping through sensitive areas like the Pine Barrens.
Amy Cradic, a DEP spokeswoman, says out-of-state bikers appear to have gotten the word that New Jersey is a good place to ride and have been showing up in numbers at state parks and forest. Cradic cites a rising number of incidents in which riders have ignored or threatened park ranger who tried to stop them. Since January, 1,400 summonses carrying fines of up to $1,000 have been issued to riders in New Jersey.
Robin Hartfiel, the editor-in-chief of Dealernews, says areas like New Jersey where riders face land closures could be especially good markets for indoor arenas. “In the California desert, it might not make nearly as much sense,” he says.
Keeler has his eye on Los Angeles and the Midwest as likely arena sites. He views further growth in the sport as inevitable since the instant thrills it provides are in sync with teenagers who have grown up with computers and the Internet. Keeler calls baseball a bore and he says many kids share that opinion.
Demographic data complied by Clear Channel Entertainment appear to support Keeler’s views. Clear Channel found that 20% of tickets buyers at the 16 Supercross events it has sponsored this year were between the ages of 12 and 17, while 73% were between the ages of 12 and 36. Only 2% of the fans were over 50.
Keeler describes dirt bike racing as “a wonderful family sport” despite the obvious risk of injury from sailing through the air and crashing to the ground. “At the amateur level it’s very nice,” he says. “The father races or the son races or the daughter races. It’s always, from what I’ve seen through all the years that I’ve been involved, a nice clean sport.”
If dirt biking isn’t enough to lure spectators to the XArena, Keeler has a few more thrills up his sleeve. The complex will include a 100 ft. tall vertical wind tunnel, where anyone can get the feel of sky diving with substantially less risk.
Keeler also wants to acquire adjoining tracts of land to build a facility for skate boarding, inline stating and BMX biking – an event where riders do aerial flips and turns.
Keeler’s enthusiasm for the sport is clearly infectious. David Kelly, a 35-year-old political consultant who lives in Trenton, met Keeler while working out at the Pennington Athletic Club and wondered what was in the briefing books Keeler kept studying while working out. They turned out to be the plans for the XArena.
“I had no idea what was going on,” says Kelly, who had never been interested in motorcycles. But after some proselytizing by Keeler, Kelly has tried riding himself. Now, he says, “I’ve become an enthusiast” as well as an investor with his wife in the XArena. That’s the kind of fervor Keeler hopes to promote in financiers, politicians and the public at large.