Southwick 1998: John Dowd, Doug Henry & New England’s Best Day Ever

On June 14, 1998 New Englanders dominated Pro Motocross at The Wick 338

“I’m glad you picked the photo you did, it really captures it,” said Jim Boschen, referring to Paul Buckley’s 1998 image of John Dowd celebrating his Pro Motocross win at The Wick 338. “That fist in the air says ‘This is who we are!’ Holeshot pictures are cool but it’s what you do after the start that defines you.”

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When we embarked on this project to celebrate New England’s Best Day Ever, we agonized over which Buckley photos captured Dowd’s moment. Should we use the one of Dowd ripping the start? Or the one of him after the race?

We went with the latter.

Autographed: John Dowd & Doug Henry

Boschen would understand the ethos of racing New England MX; the former pro from Norfolk, Mass. raced The Wick 338 National five times (1988-1992) and followed the very competitive New England Sports Committee (NESC) series.

The photos Buckley took that day were among the thousands–more like tens of thousands–he’s taken at Southwick. Going back to the very first one in 1976, he’s yet to miss a Southwick Pro Motocross, although he did suffer a DNF in the extreme heat of 2023, while battling cancer.

The 1998 event was one that would be easy to skip. It rained the entire week leading up to the race and continued on race day. The 10,000-plus poncho-clad fans who lined the fences got a special treat: an all-New England moto sweep as Massachusetts’ John Dowd and Connecticut’s Doug Henry each won both motos of their classes.

The diehards are showing up in a hurricane or 95 degrees.

–Paul Buckley on New England Motocross fans.

Buckley, who lives in Franklin, Mass., understands why New England fans line up in the most extreme conditions, in sickness and in health, in heat or hail. “Maybe they’re just tougher, grittier,” Buckley said. “The diehards are showing up in a hurricane or 95 degrees. They’ve been fans their entire lives.”

Shooting on a Canon EOS 1n with a Canon 300mm f2.8, Buckley romped around a very soggy Southwick in 1998, garbage bags protecting his equipment from the rain. Days like these were a nightmare for professional photographers, not just because of more challenging conditions or the threat of their equipment getting trashed. It’s because corporate clients don’t typically want to buy images of their products covered in mud.

Fortunately for Buckley, Fox Racing was one of his clients and both Dowd and Henry were Fox riders.

On a day where the sun stayed hidden, Dowd and Henry were the brightest stars. Surprisingly, these were the last motos each of them ever won at The Wick.

Snapped: John Dowd

John Dowd: Old Guys Rule

John Dowd doesn’t look almost 60. He’s trim, a bit weathered with lots of salt in his stubble, but he looks similar to how he did 12 years ago when he last qualified for a Pro Motocross.

When I pull into his driveway at the center of a Ludlow, Mass. cul-de-sac, he’s bent over in the back yard, attacking patches of mutant weeds that threaten to destroy recently planted grass. He plucks with the same quick precision he used overtaking lapped riders at The Wick 338.

“Look at the size of this thing!” he says holding a gnarled mess of roots. He apologizes for the dirty hands but you’re not going to refuse a handshake from the Junkyard Dog, no matter how grubby his mitts, no matter how much that old man strength overpowers your own grip.

Dowd’s age becomes more apparent when we’re inside his dining room. He sighs as he lowers himself into the chair at the head of a wooden table. His hands grasp both armrests, while a gray pair of readers swing from his neck.

The orange Moose Racing t-shirt he wears might actually be something he found stuffed in his gear bag at the 2013 Southwick National, his last pro race. He was more than twice the age of the winner and he finished 23rd overall (30-19). His gray dad cap features an oval woven patch that says “Old Guys Rule” and it’s that hat, more than anything else, that sums up John Dowd.

John Dowd @ Southwick

Even when Dowd was much younger, he was still the oldest guy on the track. When he raced motocross for the first time ever, he was a 20-year-old novice on a CR500.

Six years later, he won his first of 8 Pro Motocross Nationals.

One of those races is the reason Dowd has a stack of posters in front of him. When the top cover sheet is pulled, the memories pour in as quickly as the rain fell on June 14, 1998 at The Wick 338.

“Ohhh, nice! That is so cool!” he says with an exclamation point as he grabs a print off the top to give it a closer look. He’s looking at himself, half a lifetime ago, on a Yamaha YZ125, riding by Paul Buckley’s camera with his left arm thrust flag-pole-straight into the air. He’s covered in mud and sand and, as uncomfortable as it was having the dirt rubbing everywhere, he didn’t feel any of it because the vibe and screams from the crowd washed it all away.

Only 10,500 fans braved the rain that day but Dowd distinctly remembers the New England crowd being loud when he made a victory lap to celebrate his 1-1 overall win in the 125 class. “It was a pretty fun day. Believe it or not I had a lot of tough days at Southwick before I was able to win there. Years previous I always had some issues: crashes or bike breaking.”

One hour later, Connecticut’s Doug Henry won the 250 class, also 1-1. Add in several more locals in the top 20 and it’s indisputably New England’s greatest day in motocross history.

“It was just kind of magical,” Dowd says. “It seemed like we could do no wrong for whatever reason. Some people say luck has nothing to do with it or whatever, but I believe a little bit of luck still helps.”

Doug Henry: “Just Another Southwick Day”

Dowd was one of the reasons Doug Henry was so fast. Especially at Southwick. They clashed often at the NESC races. “We raised the level of each other,” Henry said as he autographed his own stack of prints from Southwick 1998. “He was my toughest competitor whenever I came back here. A lot of guys were fast, but when John was there, the pace was just a lot faster.”

For Henry, Southwick 1998 was just “just another Southwick day.” It blended into the scores of other times he raced there, the memories from that day buried in the sand amongst the thousands of laps he made there.

He doesn’t remember that it was Yamaha’s first Pro Motocross win on the YZ400F, 13 months after his historic victory on it at the Las Vegas Supercross. He doesn’t remember taking over the points lead in the 250 (now 450) championship standings. “We still had a long way to go,” he replied (8 rounds remained).

And he doesn’t remember being one of the few factory-level riders to practice the day before the race on what was already a muddy track. He did every single lap available to him. “I was one of those guys who could always use a little extra practice.” It checks out. His formative years were spent learning on tracks so sub par, like The Dam, visitors and guests wouldn’t even unload their bikes.

Doug Henry @ Southwick

Henry does recall lying in his motorhome the night before the race. He listened to the sound of rainfall on the roof and thought to himself, “Not a lot of people are going to like this.”

Not that he loved the mud. He really did not. “I knew that everybody else hated it and that would put a smile on my face.”

Why Locals Shine at The Wick

Jim Boschen watched the 1998 Southwick Pro Motocross under the cover of a giant infield party tent. His young children were two and four at the time and, as they aged, his own professional racing career was an increasingly distant memory. But he came up with Dowd and Henry, battling the latter for the 1987 NESC Rookie of the Year award (Doug won it). He witnessed Dowd’s rapid escalation from sketchy novice in 1985 to finishing 13th in moto 1 of The Wick 338 National in 1987.

Now a parts manager for a large network of automotive dealers, Boschen, 57, understands why locals shine at The Wick more than any other track on the circuit. Of all the Motocross races he did in his pro era, The Wick was the only one where he was able to score championship points.

Boschen said the track actually felt smoother when only professionals raced on it because they carried much more speed into, and out of, the corners than novice and intermediate level riders. The bumps, especially the braking chatter, were spread out. “It was almost like the track was smoother even though it’s still rough as heck,” he said. “Someone who knows how to ride that track on a regular day is going to be able to go even faster on pro day. The lines are still there, they’re just faster.”

He remembers the rainfall in 1998 and how sloppy the track was. When asked why so many fans still showed up on such a miserable day he said, “Southwick is the Super Bowl of Motocross for New Englanders.”

It was still raining hard when the first set of motos ran, so hard that Henry wore a garbage bag over his jersey.

John Dowd: Winner AND Points Leader

Even though Dowd had finished second overall at the first three rounds of the 1998 125cc championship series, he entered round four (Southwick) with a 15 point deficit to Ricky Carmichael, whose only blemish was 8th in a moto at Hangtown.

At the end of lap one, Carmichael had a five second lead but 32-year-old Dowd went to work, picking away at RC’s lead. On lap five, he made his move. “I took an outside line coming out of the corner and Ricky took the inside and got messed up in a rut or something,” Dowd told Cycle News.

With two laps to go, Carmichael, still running second, blew a head gasket in his KX125. He couldn’t finish the race and his 28th place awarded zero points. “[Southwick] used to just eat people up and eat bikes up,” Dowd says today.

In moto 2, Dowd got a rare holeshot and dominated the race. When he fell over on lap 13, he had a 20 second lead. His fear wasn’t losing the lead; it was getting the bike started again. Carmichael finished second and lost 28 total points to Dowd that day. It was the first time Dowd ever held a Pro Motocross points lead, which he gave back to Carmichael after round six at RedBud MX.

“They were just so loud,” Dowd said of the crowd. “I feel like, especially in this moment when this picture was taken, I remember them kind of running around. Everywhere I looked they were just screaming, just looking at me and screaming at the top of their lungs. And I just remember thinking, man, this is so cool. How could you not give it your best out there? It doesn’t get any better than that.”

Doug Henry: Winner AND Points Leader

Henry’s day was somewhat similar to Dowd’s in that he had to hunt down the leader in moto one and then holeshot and led every lap of moto two. Ezra Lusk led the majority of moto one before Henry used a lapper to set a pick and make his move with four laps to go. The pass even happened in front of Henry’s motorhome, where all his family and friends were hanging out. “I planned it that way!”

In moto two, Lusk and Kevin Windham pressured late but Henry controlled the entire race. He credited the off-week work he did with Dowd as a key to his success. “We had three weeks off and I didn’t take a single day off. John (Dowd) and I worked really hard to come out here and win, and that was my plan.”

The 1998 Southwick win was also Henry’s first Pro Motocross win in over three years, since breaking his back in the legendary 1995 crash at Budds Creek.

Henry came into Southwick 1998 third in the championship, -17 to Jeremy McGrath and -5 to Greg Albertyn. He left with an 11 point lead over Albertyn. McGrath dropped out the series before Southwick because of a broken wrist.

Dowd and Henry were not the only New Englanders who scored points that day. In the premier class, Keith Johnson, who now runs the The Wick 338 facility, finished 5th overall (4-9); Bruce Stratton (5-18) was 11th and Mike Treadwell (19-11) was 17th.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Dowd said when asked about processing his feelings after the race. “I think I had to pinch myself, but it was definitely one of the best days of my racing career.”

Stock: John Dowd and Doug Henry at Southwick