GODSPEED! MXA PUBLISHER ROLAND HINZ

On Jul 12, 2023 Last updated Jul 13, 2023

Roland was the only magazine publisher smart enough to hire the very best—including Roger DeCoster (shown here with Roland Hinz).

By Jody Weisel

I’ve written the headline “Godspeed!” hundreds of times—always to report the passing of a member of our small community of motocross racers, industry icons and close friends. Sadly, the death of those close to us is a burden that everyone must face if we outlive those who meant so much to us in happier times. It seems as though I’m outliving most of my friends from the good old days.

Of all the obituaries I have been forced to write, I’ve been most affected by three men who help guide me through life. They each came at a different point in my development and I hope that each of them left this mortal coil with a full understanding that they left me a better person.

The first person who’s death crushed me was my father’s. He cut me no slack, leaving the coddling to my wonderful mother. As a career officer in the U.S. Air Force, he was a man’s man. If he wasn’t preparing to go to war, he was hunting, fishing, camping or out in the garage rebuilding something. He always took me along as one of the crew (most commonly as a tail gunner). As I got older, we didn’t alway see eye to eye, but in an ironic twist, my mother would always tell my wife, “He is exactly like his father was.” When he died, I cried—which brought back childhood memories of when I would cry over some minor injury and he would tell me, “Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about.” I found it best, not to cry over spilled milk.

Chuck “Feets” Minert was a second father to me. He was famous for dominating scrambles in the 1950s, winning the 1956 Catalina Grand Prix victory, going to Europe to race motocross, his “On Any Sunday” segment in which he powers through a face full of roost during the 1971 Trans-AMA series, and for the BSA “Catalina Scrambler” based on Feet’s Factory race bike. I was honored to call him my friend, even though he was much more than that to me. Feets was kind, soft-spoken, as honest as the day is long, generous to a fault and a fountain of folksy witticism (in which were hidden pearls of wisdom). We raced together every weekend for 35 years, we flew aerobatic planes on the weekdays and shared a bond that couldn’t be broken (even after I fired his grandson from MXA). When Feets died, I was heartbroken. That day I rolled my airplane into the hangar and never flew it again. I didn’t want to look in the back seat and not see him sitting there smiling as I flew upside down through Glen Helen.

The best place to meet Jody (right) is at the track and Roland (left) loved being at the races.

Which leads me to the passing of Roland Hinz. He was a powerful force for good in my life. Roland entered my wheelhouse when he showed up unannounced in the art department of MXA’s Encino offices on Ventura Boulevard in July of 1980. He said that he was the new General Manager and was just looking around. I had come to MXA in December of 1976 to take over MXA because the editor, Dick Miller, had been hit by a truck while pre-running the Baja 1000 and was confined to his bed in a full body cast. In my three years at MXA, Roland was the first General Manager I had ever met. There had been a regular rotation of new General Managers under owner Bill Golden, but Roland was different. He was a motorcycle rider and he had an extensive background in publishing popular magazines, albeit most of them Hollywood gossip mags and teenybopper magazines (mostly about Bobby Sherman, David Cassidy and Davy Jones).

Most inexplicably, he hung around and asked questions about the systems in place to produce Dirt Bike and Motocross Action. He asked about editorial planning meetings, how we chose the covers, what our monthly budget was and who oversaw what we did. He was surprised when I told him that Ketchup Cox and I did everything at MXA by ourselves; we shot all the photos, tested all the bikes, chose the covers, didn’t know anything about a budget, never held any meetings with management and he was shocked when I told him that I had never spoken to Bill Golden or any of the long list of previous General Managers during my time there. None of the editors ever paid any attention to the General Managers because they never lasted very long. But, this General Manager was different—very different.

It turns out that Roland was buying the magazines because he had a passion for motorcycles the same way all the editors did. Daisy/Hi-Torque was in debt to the printer to the tune of $3 million dollars, because, apart from Dirt Bike and MXA, all the other titles were flops. Roland’s changes paid that debt off in record time.

My life changed when Roland took over. I saw him constantly, he embraced spending time in the art room overseeing the cover photos and he loved to write cover headlines. In my case, one day he asked why I was below Dick Miller on the masthead. I explained that I had been recruited from Cycle News to right the ship while Dick was injured and that I was only temporary. “Not so!” said Roland, who immediately moved Dick to another magazine, gave me a big raise and complete control over MXA. I have been there for the last 46 years—and all of Roland’s 43 years as the publisher.

He was great boss—a mentor and a really funny guy. The door to his office was always open. Yes, he could be tough, but he had to be because he was running a company with titles for BMX, Mountain Bikes, Road Bikes, ATVs, Electric Bikes, plus the flagships of Dirt Bike and Motocross Action. That meant that he was dealing, not with professional magazine editors, but a staff made up of passionate racers—not all of whom understood the word “deadline.”

He was positive beyond a doubt that his magazines needed to express his beliefs—he refused to accept cigarette or alcohol advertising, banned provocative photos of women in bikinis holding carburetors in ads and refused to accept ads that used foul language. Roland was a devout Christian, but accepted that the staff had religious beliefs of their own. Best of all, when the vast majority of competing motorcycle magazines folded their print issues, Roland kept right on printing magazines because he believed in them, while expanding the social media arm of his magazines.

When Roland passed away it didn’t surprise anyone, he had struggled with heart disease for years, and we all held our breath through his heart surgeries, but his time had come…and sadly my time with him had come also. He was the greatest motorcycle magazine publisher in the sport. His death left me speechless and I didn’t want to face the task of writing about it so soon after it happened. The words I was looking for to express how I feel are, “Godspeed Roland.”