While relaxing at the Iron Springs Pub in Fairfax, California after spinning nearly 60 miles of the Dino Ride this past September 18, I was introduced to San Francisco journalist Matt Smith, a former professional road racer with G.S. Mengoni in the mid 1980s. We struck up a conversation about his new clothing company DiSanto, and made vague plans to ride together.

Six weeks passed, and I called Matt to ask if he would be attending the SF Bike Expo at Cow Palace. Turns out he was exhibiting, so we met briefly before foot traffic got crazy (nearly 6,000 packed the aisles that weekend in November). I purchased one of his reversible Portland hats, just in time for the cold and wet weather riding to hit the Peninsula. My morning rides begin when the thermometer reads 45 or so, and climbing Page Mill Road is a chilly affair before 9 a.m.

I’m a hat hound, and was impressed with Matt’s hat, so I called him to talk more about his new endeavor; turns out he made cycling clothing to support his way into college (he’s a Reed College grad, and owner of a master’s degree from Columbia). Our conversation grew quickly, which prompted this interview. I’m always interested in the back story, and when a guy like Matt Smith pops into my life with a somewhat shared career path, I want to learn more.

Matt, who or what influenced you to become a cyclist? 

In grammar school I lived in Colfax, Calif., which is 15 miles from Nevada City, site of what during the 1970s was the West’s biggest bike race. Every Fathers’ Day I, my parents and sisters would go to the race and spend the day with old family friends Bill and Marylee Trampleasure, who’d made the trip up from Berkeley to watch their son Calvin race. We’d all eat fried chicken, watermelon and potato salad and, along with around 20,000 other spectators watch the elite cyclists of that era. We had an annual spot on the grass close enough to the course that we could feel the breeze generated by their spokes. At age 10, I thought Calvin and the other racers were like Zeus, Apollo, Hermes, and Ares.

So I’d have to say it was Calvin who most influenced me. Later Cal and I spent a lot of time together driving to races and getting into breakaways, which was kind of cool.

What have been some of your more memorable times on the bike?

Cycling is a sport that can seem to outsiders like an archipelago of transcendent moments in a sea of training drudgery. We insiders know it’s all good.

For me transcendent moments included winning The Nevada City Classic as a junior, hammering up Manayunk Wall at the US Pro championships in Philadelphia, and breaking the national 50 mile team time trial record at the 1984 Olympic trials, (before getting blown away a few minutes later by the guys who actually made the short team.)

But the funny thing is, when my middle-aged mind is drawn to re-imagining key moments during my time as a bike racer, I think about what non-cyclists might imagine as the drudgery part: I’m 17, with my hands on the hoods. It’s 6:15 a.m. on a school day. It’s raining lightly. I’m jamming the pedals over the potholes and asphalt patches of Slough House Road in southeastern Sacramento County. And my teenage self is pretending he’s Francesco Moser at Paris-Roubaix, feeling each tarmac bump as a kick in the pants to go faster, faster, faster.

Whenever I, or other cyclists who know exactly what I’m talking about, try to find words for this type of experience, we seem to end up saying corny things like, “I was one with the bike,” and we fail to get the message across.

I’ve had to go outside cycling to find my Slough House Road sensation put into proper words. It’s a soliloquy by Paul Newman’s Fast Eddie in 1961’s The Hustler, where he’s trying to explain to his girlfriend what drives him to play pool.

“You know, like anything can be great. Anything can be great.

Bricklaying can be great if a guy knows what he's doing and why and can make it come off.

When I'm really going, I feel like a jockey must feel with all that speed and power underneath him.

He's coming into the stretch, the pressure's on him, and he just feels when to let it go and how much, 'cause he's got everything working...  timing, touch. It's a real great feeling when you're right, and you know you're right.

It's like I got oil in my arm.

The pool cue's part of me...

It's got nerves in it.”

There’s ecstasy in winning a sprint at the end of a 120-mile road race, or getting interviewed on the podium after a big criterium. But during my middle-aged cycling daydreams my mind drifts more toward drizzly morning teenage training rides, at the moment when I had warmed up enough for my body to want nothing more than to go faster. There’s oil in my arms and legs and shoulders. The cranks have nerves in them that extend down to the rubber. And every single part of my remembered self is tickled to be doing something great.

Tell me about your experience as a professional cyclist on G.S. Mengoni. Who was on the team, which races stand out, and how much were you paid?

Key to my inglorious experience at G.S. Mengoni was the fact I’d gotten married at age 19 a couple of months before signing.

There were distinct eras of New York real estate mogul Fred Mengoni’s vanity investments in cycling. In 1984 Steve Bauer podiumed at both the Olympics and the World Championships. The following year, my year, was less triumphant. Mengoni had turned things over to Greg Lemond’s agent Warren Gibson, who put together a team that involved a couple of stars, and some NorCal riders he’d scouted at races the previous summer.

During the winter of 1984, I remember Gibson coming to my apartment in Carmichael and having dinner with my new bride and me. He told her about how cycling was getting big, with real money in it, and that it was a reasonable thing for her to have a new husband who would be travelling most of the time and immobile with fatigue while at home. The catch turned out to be that only stars such as Matt Eaton, Ron Hayman, perhaps Mike McCarthy and a couple of other guys got salaries; us NorCal nobodies’ benefits came in the form of new mini-vans, clothes, plane tickets, and prize money.

During the first few months the team chewed through money as if we had Sean Kelly on our roster. This meant New Campy-equipped Miyatas. Wet-look-lycra shorts, Diadora shoes, Vuarnet sunglasses, Spenco gloves, wool training suits, and jackets, and a fleet of new minivans with Blaupunkt stereo systems. The team rented a house in Folsom to train from, and hired a mechanic to drive behind us on all our training rides. We trained – trained, mind you – on Clement Criteriums. Mengoni flew in to take us all out to fancy dinner, tell us what a bang-up group we were, then showered more money on Gibson to fly us all out to the Tour of Texas with last-minute tickets, rent $100 a day vans there because our Plymouth-sponsored Chrysler Vanagons hadn’t arrived in time, rent an Austin apartment, and hire uber-pro mechanic Calvin Jones, now with Park Tool, and fly Warren out once in a while to say hello.

By April, Mengoni was alarmed that we weren’t beating the hell out of 7-Eleven despite the fortune he was disgorging, and pulled waaaaay back on his investment. A couple of favored riders got to keep the Vanagons at their homes as personal cars. For the rest of us, it was a summer of hitching rides and paying our own entry fees. We had Ron Hayman briefly as a team captain, and after a few months of seeing how mismanaged it was, he took off.

My wife, meanwhile, was not seeing the picture Warren Gibson had painted for her early in the year. At a certain low point she grabbed a couple of my Mengoni Campy/Mavic/DT/Clement racing wheels and smashed them on the floor until they were unserviceable. By fall, it was Her Turn. We moved to Mexico City, where she’d wanted to exercise her college Spanish major. There, I wound down my full-time bike racer years riding for an impromptu unofficial U.S. national team in the 1985 Tour of Mexico, and racing in 1986 for the Mexican trade team Llantas Especialisimo, sponsored by a tire manufacturer.

What led you to become a journalist?

My parents were Methodist pastors. I didn’t become a religious person. But I did absorb the mainline Methodist ethos of wanting to make the world a better place. So Journalism’s ‘comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable’ ethos appealed to me. It also didn’t hurt that my mom worked for a time as a printer at the west’s oldest daily, The Sacramento Union, before she went to seminary in her 50s. She used her pull to get me a job there out of college. One time, I spent several days with farm-workers in the Sacramento Valley and wrote a story about conditions in a labor camp. The right-wing publisher tried to kill the story. Veteran journalists at the paper – people I barely knew – put their careers on the line fighting to make sure it saw print. I knew I’d found a creed I could believe in.

You wrote several insightful articles about cycling during your 15 years as a SF Weekly columnist. You certainly didn’t toe the standard SF liberal line in your commentary on Critical Mass or other typical green issues embraced by cyclists. Who influenced your political and personal convictions?

My values as a newspaper columnist never strayed far from that 17 year-old kid hammering down Slough House Road at 6:30 a.m. It may sound simplistic or narcissistic, but I found if you try to do right by that boy, you serve the commonwealt.

When I first got to San Francisco in 1997, the city was in the clutches of a sort of self-centered, anti-development ‘Not-In-My-Back-Yard’ ethos that drove sprawl deep into the Sacramento Valley, meaning modern versions of my 17 year-old self had fewer and fewer open spaces to ride in.

In 1999 I wrote an essay about how shortsighted neighborhood activism fueled the city’s housing crisis, and pushed the best of San Francisco deeper and deeper into the suburbs.

Of course, sprawl, and a lack of urban density don’t just hurt 17 year-old cyclists. These phenomena deplete energy and other natural resources, kill jobs and lower regional standards of living by making employment and housing markets less efficient, eviscerate family life through lengthened automobile commutes, undermine artists and the arts by making urban housing more expensive, kill off animal and plant species, create pollution, increase water contamination, contribute to global warming, and in general make the world a shittier place.

As crazy as it seems, I think I was able to support my family as an opinion essayist for 15 years because, in that kid on Slough House Road, I had a fantastic reference point.

You’re a NorCal native, and you’ve lived all over the place. Are you happy living in San Francisco?  

Yes. I’m very happy living in San Francisco.

Though as a cycling town, it’s weird. Whereas in other places the cycling community will revolve around whatever racing club has been in the area forever – I’m thinking of the Berkeley Bike Club, the Sacramento Golden Wheelmen, the San Jose Bicycle Club – here the nexus is bike-commuting activism.

Tell me about your bikes.

My favorite bike is my family’s quadruplet.

It’s got a nice tigged chromoly frame, Shimano XTR derailleurs, Dura Ace cranks, DT-Swiss rear tandem hub, and a fully-adjustable, Mary-Poppins-handlebar cockpit. This summer I, and my two girls, took the bike and a trailer – 14-feet long in all -- on a five-day camping trip from SF to Pt. Reyes. It was a blast.

My next favorite is the fully functional wooden pedal bike with a disk brake and 16-inch cassette hub wheels I made for my daughter when she was three. It took five prototypes and far too many vacation days hovered over a table saw before I made a serviceable version. But daughter number one rode the heck out of it. And daughter number two learned to ride on it, too.

Aside from that I’ve got your bike-guy usual: a Jeff Lyons fillet-brazed tandem, a Waterford-era Schwinn Paramount track bike, a Rossin road bike, a Cannondale cyclocross bike, and a rusty blue Medici road frame that I really ought to get rid of.

Let’s talk DiSanto. Where did the name come from?

My business partner is Dan DiSanto, an extraordinary pattern maker, clothing shape designer, inventor, product specification specialist and production supervisor. One of the main attractions for me to building this company is having the recurring opportunity to watch Dan work: He’s precisely the type of guy Fast Eddie paid homage to in his soliloquy. When Dan’s at his sewing machine creating a new design, or perfecting the shape and fit of an old one, he’s like a guy with oil in his arm.

How did you first become interested in manufacturing clothing?

I actually paid for my first year of college manufacturing cycling clothing. While racing for Llantas Especialisimo, I and an ex-cyclist Mexican friend pooled our money, and started a company in Mexico City making and selling wet-look lycra shorts, like the ones I had on G.S. Mengoni. We made them in a coat factory run by an ornery Senor Velazquez. I was always sure to generously tip his mayordomo, so as to be sure the seams came out straight. That was a valuable lesson in the need to scrupulously bird-dog every step of the manufacturing process if you want to end up with a quality product.

But the moment that inspired my current efforts came when reading about a bicycle clothing design contest a couple years ago sponsored by the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, and the luxury goods house LVMH. The idea was that regular people are averse to bike commuting because cycling clothing suck, so kids at FIT were encouraged to come up with something better. Among the things they were supposed to design for cyclists were ponchos. F’ing ponchos!!???

As someone who’s commuted by bike for decades, I’m pretty sensitive to the office worker’s need to arrive clean, dry, and appropriately dressed. But my view, which arrived as an epiphany when I learned about the LVMH contest, is that traditional cycling clothing provides a wonderful starting point. It’s not an awkward backwater from which to flee.

And that’s where a lot of the thinking behind our DiSanto Portland reversible Merino Wool, water-repellent hat comes from. Cyclists starting out in the morning need to be warm. Mid-ride, they need to adjust their temperature so as not to become drenched with sweat. At the end of their ride they’re best off dry and comfortable. The classic Belgian wool cycling cap is a great starting point.

We redesigned its shape and fit so it doesn’t slip up off the head in an elfin peak like the old ones did. We sourced ultra-fine Merino wool jersey from New Zealand, and water-repellent, stretchy, breathable fabric from Schoeller of Switzerland. I bought a bunch of Italian wool sweaters and cut them into pattern pieces. I took sewing classes at the local community college, and monopolized my wife’s sewing machine making dozens of prototypes. Refining my designs, I essentially sewed two hats together into one thin, insulating, reversible one whose warming and cooling ability can be dialed up or down simply by reversing it.

I met Dan at a fashion business class given by a San Francisco entrepreneurship nonprofit, and he’s helped take my original product to a whole new level of fit, appearance and performance. Together we’ve set out to produce excellent, sui generis products. Now we get our wool from Levana of New Zealand. And we’re using Dan’s shop full of industrial sewing machines and equipment rather than my wife’s home-sewing rig.

How was the response to the hats at the recent SF Bike Expo at Cow Palace?

The response was extraordinary and gave both Dan and I the sense we really have something. I think we expected to sell maybe a couple of dozen hats and we ended up selling 60. One person after another told us they’d been searching for something like this for years.

What are your long-range hopes and dreams for the company?

We’d like to keep developing products that make more people more comfortable riding their bikes, and thus let them more apt to take to the streets.

We have exclusive design for more-comfortable-and-attractive-than-anything-before pants, jackets, base layers and other garments.

I see this design and production, and marketing project in the same vein as my work as a journalist: Make things better for a kid riding his bike through the countryside on a drizzly weekday morning, and chances are you’ll make the world a better place for the rest of us, too.

~ ~ ~

Matt Smith started as a staff writer for SF Weekly in March, 1997, after three years as staff correspondent in Mexico City for Dow Jones International Newswires. Previously, Smith held positions at newspapers in Albuquerque, New Mexico; Twin Falls, Idaho; and Fairfield and Sacramento, California.
 
He has worked as a special correspondent for the Bureau of National Affairs, and done freelance work over the years for several national magazines, newspapers and newswires. He holds a master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York, and a B.A. in political science from Reed College, in Portland, Oregon. Currently he's a reporter for the new non-profit paper The Bay Citizen.

Visit www.disantoclothing.com