The Ride of My Life

My dad’s boyhood home. The only thing I remember about this house when we visited my grandparents were Raggedy Ann 8 Andy dolls. They kept me entertained on our visits.

01

OKLAHOMEBOY

My dad, Matthew Hoffman, is the original take charge, do-it-yourself guy. He grew up with nothing. Dad’s family were hardworking, salt-of-the-earth midwestern folk, but they were superpoor. The House of Hoffman was literally a shack in a field—no plumbing or doors; it was barely a step above camping. My father quickly learned that determination was the way to overcome hardship. As is the case with young people who possess a lot of raw willpower, my dad clashed with authority on occasion. He was not really a juvenile delinquent, but definitely someone with a defiant, reckless streak inside. Never back down was his modus operandi. When he was eighteen years old, he’d do stuff like bet his friends a quarter that he could lie across the hood of a car and hold onto the windshield wipers while one of the guys drove it down the street at one hundred miles per hour. Although cashing in on these wagers didn’t make him much money, it is how he earned his reputation: wild man.

My mother’s family comes from the southern part of Italy. Both her parents’ families jumped a boat for America, Land of Opportunity, and wound up in Ridgeway, Pennsylvania, an industrial mining town. My grandmother’s family lived on top of the hill on High Street, which was the prosperous section of town. My grandfather’s family came from the other side of the tracks in Ridgeway. He met my grandmother and the two courted, which started a long tradition in my family of proper, respectable young ladies falling for disreputable young men. My grandfather, Al Papa, began to get restless in Ridgeway, but he had no money to leave town. He hopped a boxcar and rode the rails west, leaping off in Elkhart, Indiana. A small Italian community took him in. It took Al two weeks to get himself settled and then he went to a used car lot to test-drive one of their cars. He cleverly unhooked the odometer and headed back to Ridgeway to give my grandmother a plush ride to their new home. Young, married, and on their own for the first time, they stayed in Elkhart and started a family. My mom, Geovanna Teresa Papa, was the youngest of their three children. She grew up in a house flush with ethnic pride, old country traditions, and heritage.

Geovanna Teresa Papa, AKA Joni Hoffman.

What more can I say about this photo? My mom’s skating! I’m so psyched I found this one.

Matthew Hoffman, looking suave and debonair.

Dad met my mom when he was a cook in an Elkhart restaurant—he was seventeen, she was sixteen. He loaned his car to a buddy in exchange for getting set up on a date with her. Almost immediately their relationship aroused the suspicion of Mom’s father. Her dad did everything possible to discourage the two teenage lovebirds from seeing each other. My grandfather tried intimidation, Italian style, to convince my dad to back off: If you don’t stay away from my daughter, I’ll have your legs broken. But my mom and dad were in love, and that’s a hard force to disrupt. When their love was forbidden, that was the proverbial gasoline on the fire.

My parents got married in a secret ceremony in 1962 and hit the road in a beat-up Oldsmobile. My dad’s instructions to the minister were to wait three days before submitting their marriage license, so their names wouldn’t show up in the newspaper until after they had made a clean getaway.

The newly wed Mr. and Mrs. Hoffman left Indiana and made brief detours through Minnesota, then Nebraska, finally stopping at the outskirts of Oklahoma City. Oklahoma is the dead center of the United States. It’s where the original forty acres and a mule concept of post-Civil War American freedom started, and it seemed like the perfect nesting ground. My dad figured that nine hundred miles was enough distance from their past to allow them to start their life together. When my parents settled here, they had nothing but a car, some clothes, and their dreams. There was no turning back; their only option was to make it.

Equipped with an outgoing personality and a drive to succeed, my dad was a natural salesman. He got his break selling hospital supplies for Zimmer, a big distributor of everything from ankle braces to artificial hips. He rolled over whatever stood in his path like a tank, closing sales, earning customers, and reaping plenty of commissions. He became the number one salesman in the country. He had found his true calling, and before long he struck a deal with Zimmer to run a distribution hub in Oklahoma and West Texas. Things were looking up.

When Jaci and I were married, I gave her the wedding ring my dad gave my mom in this photo.

When my mom found out she was pregnant with their first child, Dad bought her a diamond ring to celebrate. After Todd was born, they made amends with my mom’s parents. Having proved his good intentions and ability to provide for his family, my dad even smoothed things over with Grandfather. In the next five years my dad and mom had two more children: my sister, Gina, followed by my brother Travis. The Hoffman kids were spaced two years apart… boy, girl, boy… like a beautiful flower arrangement.

Then I showed up. I was an accident, right from the get-go. This time, when my mother announced she was pregnant, there was no diamond ring. She sent my dad out to get a vasectomy. I arrived kicking and screaming on January 9, 1972. My parents wanted to call me Matthew, but rather than make me a Jr. they left out a T: Mathew. Easy enough, but they also needed a middle name. Both my brothers’ middle names are Matthew, so each brother thought it was only fair that their first name be my middle name. My mother, being the great mediator, came up with an idea. Instead of calling me Mathew Todd Travis Hoffman, they shortened my middle name to the letter T and told my brothers that it stood for Travis and Todd. It sounds a little odd, but I was a product of their environment. My parents were freethinkers, and it was the seventies.

When Todd was born baby bottles were sterilized. He drank out of a cup at six months, walked at ten months, and was potty trained by eighteen months.

But with me, things were a little different. As my father tells it, When Mathew came along, I was traveling for my business a lot and was gone a lot of nights. I always called home to check on my wife and kids. One night, I asked Joni, Mathew’s mother, what he was doing. Mathew was about eighteen months old. She said, ‘He’s eating dog food in the pantry.’ I started to laugh—we’d gone from trying to be perfect parents with the first child, to a free spirit approach with the fourth child. Joni said, ‘Look, if he likes dog food, let him eat dog food.’

As I was growing up, to make it easier, I spelled my name the traditional way, M-A-T-T. Then at age twenty-five, I realized if Mathew was only spelled with one T, I’d been spelling Mat wrong my whole life. So I dropped the extra T. That’s one thing I think my siblings and I picked up from my parents: Life is yours to design and change at will. So M-A-T it is.

Floppy, Moppy, and Me

My dad’s skills in the medical business had afforded our family a home on twenty acres, populated with farm animals. My father grew up in the middle of nowhere, which he equated as more space to do whatever you pleased, so he wanted his kids to have the same. The combination of fresh air, sunshine, hard work, and gentle creatures were supposed to do us kids some good.

There is a distinctive smell to a barn that’s in use. Part of my job as a kid was to monitor the smell and fix it by cleaning out the stalls when it became unbearable. This was the shittiest job, literally. Travis and I were the barn boys, and we fed the animals. The horses were fed mixed oats, sweet feed, grain, and hay. (In the process of serving them breakfast, I would sneak some of the corn out of the sweet feed and feed myself]

I made up bottles for the baby goats, Floppy and Moppy, and fed those to them until they could join the oats and hay family. I threw out bird feed for the chickens, rooster, peacock, and our three ducks, Huey, Dewey, and Louie.

When the animals were hungry, it was a circus. If I fed the smaller animals first, the horses chased me to get their food. If I tried to avoid the horses, the rooster would chase me. I used to throw chicken eggs to keep the rooster away from me. I danced around like a boxer in a ring to avoid his razor-tipped beak and claws made of nightmares. [I think this is where I started developing survival techniques.)

When I was five, our family was really into horses. Todd and Gina both got into rodeo-style racing, riding fast and slaloming barrels and poles. Gina was great at it and was the resident animal queen. She wouldn’ve slept in the barn if my parents had allowed it. I entered a few of these rodeo events, in the Peanuts category. I was a reckless rider, but I had my moments when control came easy. Once, one of our horses, Little Britches, told me he was thirsty. (I couldn’t pronounce my R’s yet, so I called him Little Bitches.] So I took him out of the barn and led him into our house to the kitchen sink. My mom, thinking fast, grabbed a Super 8 camera and didn’t intervene, she just documented. I got Little Bitches a drink and led him out the back door.

We all had our list of daily chores, and if we got those finished, my parents would pay us four dollars an hour to do additional chores. They then encouraged us to buy livestock and pets with our Saturday paychecks. In a way, it was genius: We learned to work hard because we got paid well (for kids], and the animals provided us a perpetual supply of entertainment. The more animals we took in meant we had a steady stream of chores just keeping up after them. It instilled a work ethic in us.

Gina and Todd on top of their second home. Yeeeeha!

Dealing with Disaster

However, life on the farm wasn’t all petting the ponies; some rough stuff went down occasionally. My poor mom. Between my brothers, our friends, and me, there was almost always a carpool going to the hospital with various moaning, bleeding, and damaged juveniles in the backseat.

When I was six, I broke my leg playing Frisbee. I was trying to get the disc before the dog, and I stepped in a random hole in the yard. Snap. My first broken bone. Two days after the Frisbee incident I was climbing our fifteen-foot-tall slide with a cast on my leg and fell off, breaking my wrist when I hit the ground.

When I was seven, I was banned from the go-cart after I drove it into Travis (who was on the motorcycle] while playing chicken. I had to get stitches in my wrist, and Travis’s hand went through the motorcycle chain. His palm got gouged up, and I still have the scar to this day. I also got in trouble for trying to jump the work truck over a barrel in our horse arena. I took the keys to the truck and leaned some two by eights up against a barrel with the intention of jumping, but when I hit the ramp it pitched the vehicle sideways. I landed on a barrel, smashing the side of the truck. I had to work random jobs around the house until I paid it off.

There was a trailer park nearby our place, the KOA campgrounds, with lots of transient residents and some permanent ones, too. We’d hang out with the campground kids, and sometimes they would come to our house and start trouble with my brothers or me. Since I was small and naive, I was an easy target to be exploited. One afternoon some of the crew from the trailer park came by and described a new game to me. At first, the object of the game was to stand up and drop a knife into the ground between your feet, getting it as close to your foot as possible, with the closest winning. Then it evolved into, Let’s see how close to Mathew’s foot we can stick a knife into the ground, closest wins. They would throw the knife like Vegas magicians, and it was heavy enough to thunk into the dirt and stand up. I closed my eyes and clenched my fists tight, waiting for the next toss, and sure enough felt an incredible pain on the top of my bare foot. I looked down, saw the knife handle sticking up, blade buried in my flesh. My eyes welled up with tears. My friends tried to hush me and offered to take me over to our swimming pool to flush out the germs. After dunking my raw laceration into the highly chlorinated pool water, I let out a yell that could have shattered a wineglass. My mother materialized instantly. They weren’t invited over too often after that.

For as long as I can remember, I have been a crisis magnet. Things just seem to go to hell when I’m around. My family used to draw straws to see who had to sit next to me, because meals usually involved a lap full of water, milk, or the always-devastating Hawaiian Punch.

My first cast. I got it blue to match my bike

I came home one day to find our house in flames. Some things just suck.

There were more serious close calls, too, which made me realize how life can end at any moment—so each day should be lived to the fullest. My dad’s passion was flying, and he had his own plane, a Beachcraft Dutchess. He used it for business travel, but also for joyrides and long-distance family vacations. When I was eight, we had a full load in the cockpit, so Dad put me in back with the luggage. After he landed and went to get me out, he noticed the compartment door latch was broken. If I’d have leaned against it in flight, it would have given way and I’d have had my first and last skydiving experience.

We also had guns around our house, and while target practice was always adult supervised, one time Travis and I found the gun case had been left unlocked. Travis pointed a twelve gauge at me, not knowing it was loaded. It went off. The spray of steel missed me by a foot and blew a hole in the wall the size of a Big Mac. Travis got very grounded for that one, and my dad never left the gun case unlocked again.

Dad surveys the damage from a catastrophic creek flooding. Dealing with disaster was a skill I learned early.

Disciplinary action was occasionally administered to me for the typical kid violations: I had a mean sweet tooth and would hunt down and eat entire caches of candybars. Whatchamacallits were my favorite, and I could find them wherever they were stashed. I also recall sliding down the laundry chute into the basement a few times, causing my parents to get pretty upset. And streaking. I definitely had a problem with streaking.

When I enrolled in grade school, it wasn’t long before I got into a fracas with my teacher. One day during class I was either spazzing out or talking out of turn and my teacher asked me to go outside and bring her a stick. I did as I was told, not knowing her intent was to beat me with it in front of the class. After the first lash of the switch, I took off my moccasin and gave her a dose. We exchanged blows, and an uproar ensued. It ended with my mom going down to the school and the teacher being fired. For the rest of my years in the educational system, things were never the same. I got Bs and Cs in most subjects but never really trusted teachers again.

When Travis and I were younger, my dad didn’t let us join any teams until we were in the sixth and seventh grade. He thought wrestling would teach us discipline, so he signed both of us up at the local YMCA.

His favorite story is from a meet in El Reno, Oklahoma. He told me the correct way to have good sportsmanship was to pray for my opponent before the match. According to my dad, I looked at him and said, Dad, could I pray for him after the match?

When I was twelve, I came home after basketball practice and our house was in flames. There was an electrical short in the stove, and the kitchen caught on fire. The whole structure went up fast. My brother Travis was in the shower and escaped with nothing but a towel. My mom and I pulled into the driveway just as the dog ran out of the house, fur on fire. The rescue squad aimed their high-pressure water hose at the dog to put him out, and it blew him in two. This was on a Saturday. Our homeowners’ insurance policy had run out on Friday, and the new policy didn’t take effect until Monday morning. Nearly all of our possessions were gone. The only thing I had was the basketball uniform I was wearing at the time. My mom, who was crazy about photos, lost almost all the family photo albums, negatives, everything.

We moved into a trailer with my cousins until we bought another house. The new place was by a creek, which flooded twice, wrecking the ground floor of the house each time, taking any remaining family photos and mementos we had with it. Having everything and then practically nothing was rough, but we stuck together as a family.

I learned that even the nicest material things in life are temporary.

I grew up bouncing on trampolines. I loved gravity before I even knew what it was, and experimenting with ways I could play with it. I’m two years old in this shot.

02

LEARNING TO FLY

Thirty-five years before I was born, inventor and former circus worker George Nissen envisioned the first trampoline. He was inspired by flying carpets. George’s preliminary designs provided about the same amount of bounce you’d get from, say, leaping up and down on a hotel room bed. Nissen used rubber bicycle inner tubes as the next technological step, honing his design until he felt it was time to give his invention the ultimate field test: get some kids on it. The trampoline made its public debut at a YMCA camp, and the reaction among the first test pilots was so overwhelming that George was convinced he was onto something big. It would take a few years to attract a mass audience to try this new kind of fun, but George stuck to his guns and kept on bouncing. During the feel-good 1950s, the trampoline became an American phenomenon.

Wherever you are, George: Thank you.

I was raised on trampolines. I started jumping when I was two years old. To me, it was a big stretchy thing that made you go bouncy-bounce. By the time I was six I had backflips wired. From there I learned to do thirty backflips consecutively, with only one jump between each flip. Travis, Todd, Gina, and I would come up with different combinations and string our tricks together into runs. One of my favorite runs was a backflip and a half, landing on my back and launching into a front-flip to my feet, then following through into another flip. I had one trick I called a suicide. I would jump as high as I could and do a front-flip and arch as hard as I could, coming down staring straight at the canvas, then turn my head and land on my back right before I hit. This one never failed to frighten bystanders.

There are two disciplines in trampolines: the backyard style and the more formal gymnasium style. At one point when I was a kid, I enrolled in a gymnastics class, ready to demonstrate my skills for the instructors. They insisted I start out on the balance beam. After a week balancing on a narrow beam, I decided gymnastics wasn’t for me and reverted to backyard style. I owe a lot to the hours we spent experimenting on trampolines. Before I discovered bike riding, the canvas catapult was my halfpipe. It increased my equilibrium and taught me how to spot. It also developed my craving for individual sports, things that combined physical and creative abilities.

I think it was Todd’s idea to move the trampoline next to the slide. We worked our way up the steps on the ladder, until we were jumping off the top of the slide. This was a hoot, and we soon got a new tramp. We put scaffolding in between the two trampolines and learned to do flips over the scaffolding from tramp to tramp. We’d raise the bar on the scaffolding to see how high we could go as we flipped back and forth. Soon we built up the confidence to begin moving the trampolines apart, creating a gap: four feet, six feet, eight feet. Anything farther than eight feet across and over the scaffolding got pretty intense.

We also tried doubles routines on the trampoline. There’s a technique called double bouncing, where two people jump together to harness their momentum, using the canvas like a teeter-totter. If you do it right, you can really sky doing double bounces. Attaining maximum height was a conquest we never grew tired of. We would also hose the canvas down to make double bounce marathons and scaffolding sessions more challenging.

I was trying a double front-flip when things went crooked. I overrotated and ended up doing an extra half flip, and all my momentum was channeled into my head. I came down and whacked my face on the steel springs, punching through them and connecting with the metal support bars of the trampoline. It made a sound like a bell in a boxing ring, and the springs peeled my eyebrow back, putting a bone-deep gash just above my left eye. My dad took me to the emergency room, my head wrapped in a bloody turban. The ER doctor undid the bandages to reveal a slab of skin dangling from my ham-burgered forehead. As the doctor prepared his suture tray he said to us, I don’t know if this is going to ever heal properly. There’s going to be extensive scarring, and … At that moment my dad did something that made a dramatic impression on me and came in handy many times later in life. He told the doctor if he didn’t have the confidence to do the job to keep his hands off my head. We left the doctor standing there holding the needle and thread. Dad used his connections in the medical field to find the best plastic surgeon he could find, and my eye healed up fine—there’s barely a hint of scar today.

Thanks, Dad.

MEDICAL TIP FROM MAT

New doctors are often assigned to the emergency room shifts to give them plenty of experience dealing with a variety of traumas. Sometimes you get a great doctor; other times you get a green one. Trust me, it sucks to be somebody’s learning curve. Any time you find yourself in a situation where you need a doctor, remember that you have a choice in the matter. Insist on a doctor who has 100 percent confidence in the outcome of the procedure, and don’t be afraid to get a second opinion.

Like Father, Like Son

When I was growing up, my dad was in his heyday. His go-for-broke approach to life hadn’t faded with age, but it had become more refined. He was enjoying success as a businessman, and his leisure activities reflected his freewheeling, high horsepower persona. I don’t think my dad paid attention to how much money he made, or spent. He was good at spending it, sometimes too good.

He had a penchant for Porsches. Once he made a bet with one of his salesmen that he could leave their meeting and make it in time for my brother Todd’s football game, which started in ten minutes—and it was a twenty-minute crosstown drive to the game. He hit the road doing 110 miles per hour in his Porsche Targa, and took a shortcut. He didn’t see the ravine in the road built for the drainage of a lake. It was a twelve-foot drop and fifty feet across the ditch. With a slight pitch on the takeoff, it was a scene right out of a Burt Reynolds movie. Dad’s foot never left the gas pedal. He later said he was so high in the air he could see a little old lady in a white Chevrolet as he flew over her. He landed hard and blew out the motor mounts in the car, wasted the engine, lost the bet, and missed Todd’s game.

Dad loved to race his cars. He was in Dallas with my mom when some knucklehead in a hot rod goaded him into a street sprint. Despite the fact that my mom was his passenger, Dad accepted the challenge and the two cars tore through town. Dad drove like a nut until he was confident he’d tramped his opponent, then realized they were rapidly approaching a stoplight. He locked up the car sideways, screeching the tires and leaving melted Goodyear imprints smoldering in the intersection. Dad was stoked he beat the guy, but my mom was steamed. Her philosophy was to give you as much freedom as you wanted, but if you screwed up she held you responsible for your actions. She was definitely the voice of reason in our family. She helped balance out my dad’s stubborn side.

My dad went through a phase where he kept two Maseratis—one to drive and the other as a backup vehicle. He was in the habit of rocketing down lonesome highways at 150 miles per hour with one finger on the wheel while en route to his next sales call, or just to clear his head. Even with the two Maseratis, one was constantly wrecked and in the shop. He’d swap them back and forth between crashes, and eventually his hazardous driving in these cars is what made him find religion.

My dad didn’t need a motorized vehicle to test himself. Once, when he was away on business in Texas, he went out for some cocktails and found a guy with a bull. Dad expressed his desire to be a matador and seized the opportunity by the horns. Before the night was through, he was in the bullring waving a red cape. The fifteen-hundred-pound steer charged, and my dad quickly came to his senses. He ran for cover. Unfortunately, he made his move clutching the cape right in front of his chest. The bull zeroed in and rammed him dead center in the torso and almost blew out Pop’s lungs. During another midnight rodeo escapade, Dad made a bet he could rope a calf while riding a bucking bronco. He got flipped off the horse a few times but climbed back on and rode him out, eventually winning the bet. Later he found out he’d split his sternum.

Mi familia (left to right, top to bottom): my sister, Gina, Dad, Mom, my oldest brother, Todd, me, and my big brother, Travis.

Even during activities as innocent as going out to eat, my dad usually managed to take control of a situation. One day we were in a hurry and stopped at a Waffle House for a quick breakfast. As fate would have it, the food was taking forever. Finally my dad said, We gotta get this food going We all watched, shocked and sort of psyched as Dad marched into the kitchen and shooed the cooks away from the griddle. He wasn’t aggressive about it, but he definitely exhibited, how shall we say, extreme confidence. The bewildered chefs didn’t know what to do, so they got out of the way and let my dad make the waffles.

I was involved on a recon patrol with my squad, searching for the enemy deep in the bush. Canteens were the only source of water.

Bring the Pain

If I inherited my dad’s no compromise genes, the characteristic my brothers helped bring out in me is a tolerance for pain. I wasn’t a Kevlar-coated superchild. I bruised, bled, and cried like a typical seven-year-old. But I did begin to toughen up under the influence of Travis and Todd.

Todd has always had a natural ability to do everything and make it look easy, and he could talk anybody into anything—even climbing into a clothes dryer. We were playing hide-and-seek, and I was looking for a good spot. Todd suggested I hide in the dryer. Perfect! I thought. I’d never be found in there. I climbed in and the next thing I knew I was tumbling on high. I clonked and bonked around inside until I figured out how to kick