It’s funny how sometimes a picture can invoke a vivid recollection, or two. Over my years in the industry, I’ve had the opportunity to meet scores of interesting decision-makers, designers, and other movers-and-shakers but always in my typical nobody, hangers-on, extroverted-wallflower, everyman capacity.
It might make for a few interesting random anecdotes here and there and this beautiful Ira Ryan bike & trailer combo has me thinking about the two, brief, random, opportunities I’ve had to exchange a very small number of words with the Chris King.
I had no idea what Chris King looked like or, for that matter, any inkling of his personality. I actually remember being surprised both at how tall he is and how much hair he had going on. I’d met my share of folks running bike companies, and compared to those big personalities, he was uniquely, indeed strangely, like talking to my engineer-dad.
But, if you’d asked me in my mid-twenties to name just one bicycle legend I’d like to meet he would have narrowly edged out Dirt Rag’s Maurice Tiernay and Sheldon Brown for my number one choice so my two ‘Dr. Livingstone, I presume’ moments have stayed fresh in my mind.
My first encounter with Mr. King was entirely random in a food court at the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas. The man in front of me turned around and, being quite a bit taller than myself, I couldn’t miss his ‘Chris King: Chris King’ Interbike tradeshow badge. “Hi,” I said, “I’m Andrew from Orange Sport Supply, your Canadian Distributor.”
[fun fact] At the time the North Shore still had an outsized influence on bikes being ridden everywhere and dual crown forks had given ground to increasingly long travel single crown options paired with 1-1/8″ headtubes. Chris King had not yet come out with the GripLock for their signature NoThreadSet. [/fun fact]
There was a long pause while he examined something way up on the ceiling, and then he replied: “why is it that people out there keep saying my headsets come loose?” I stammered out something about staying on top of changing my bearing cap o-ring and that was the end of the conversation.
The second time I ‘met,’ for lack of a better word, Chris King was equally random, back a couple years before The Clairebarian was born. I have no idea how long I stood transfixed on the Ira Ryan bike and trailer in this photo set. Nina had long ago abandoned me to find a beer when I looked over, and up, and who should be standing next to me but Mr. King himself. Unmistakable after our first chance encounter in the desert. He was equally enthralled and we stood side-by-side quite a while saying nothing.
Eventually, he spoke, perhaps as much to himself as to me, saying something along the lines of “this is the nicest bike here.” I wholeheartedly affirmed that opinion, having taken a brief pause in my drooling to check out the other pieces, and was met with another long, thoughtful pause. “Do you know, that I also am showing a bike here?” I replied that I had indeed looked over the white Cielo, Chris King’s frame company from 2008 to 2017, and it was “nice.” Which indeed it was. And, I noted as conciliation, that the beautiful red machine we were both cherishing was equipped with more King components than every other bike in the show put together.
I suppose it provided little succor as that was the end of our brief exchange. Sometime later, when Nina came to drag me away, he was still standing there silently analyzing it’s every angle.
