I saw Jeff Alessi passed away in his mid-late 30’s. The Alessi family has been in MX/SX in one way or another for quite a while.
Jeff might be best remembered for the Washougal laser pointer incident…
R.I.P.
Yep.. No doubt about it.
What happened to him? I hadn't heard that.
I don't try to hide the fact that I don't like the Allessi's, but that's still sad whatever happened to Jeff. I think their biggest hurdle growing up was their dad Tony. He seems better now but he used to cause all kinds of shit at the races when they were coming through the ranks. It was no surprise to anyone they pulled that stupid laser pointer BS. Tony used to accuse whoever beat his kid of having illegal equipment in the 80's and Super Mini events when they were young. They just made the kind of reputation for themselves that nobody likes or wants to be around in racing.
If you happen to be the fastest guy there, people might cut you a little more slack,(right or wrong) but in their case, it just made them all look like assholes. Mike was great off the gate though, I gotta give him that. The incident where he stood on Tedesco's front wheel when he was trying to pick his bike up after Allessi kamakazied him going into a berm and they both went down. Matt Walker (who was a bonifide badass) had to come over and shove him off Tedesco's front wheel. Mike seemed to be having a nervous breakdown of some kind, throwing his hands in the air. He knew he was about to loose the title to Tedesco and was NOT gonna let him remount and win...
We nicknamed him "tiny dancer" after that. Hilarious stuff
And then there was the whole "Believe the hype" incident when Mike went into the 450 Pro class.
You better not put those t-shirts out and expect any quarter from all the seasoned elite Pro's that you just insulted.. Those guys can make life really suck for you if they want to but most of the time they ignored them.
It was fun to watch it all in that time though. Good or bad, everyone knew his name and who he was, and had he handled things differently, a lot of those people would have pulled for him to back up the talk, and do well.
But most of them were glad when he rarely ever did.. Maybe once or twice..
It is what it is, Mike is still doing stupid shit, he really has not learned much from it all. You'd think he would have after eating all that pie,
but maybe he just likes pie...