MMA Toy Run with Music by DJ KevDog

About this event

Three initials do a lot of damage to this listing. MMA here is the Modified Motorcycle Association of California, a riders' rights organisation founded in 1973, and nothing whatever to do with fighting. Its members have long claimed theirs is the original California toy run, and the arithmetic in old press cuttings supports a first ride in the late seventies. It is also a run in decline, which the organisation has never hidden — four to five thousand riders turned out before the end of the nineties, and about two thousand a few years after that, drawn from something like two hundred clubs. The Smirls, Bobbie and Pete, ran the Sacramento end of it for years. What has not changed is the shape: a nominal fee and a new unwrapped toy at the gate, Marines and the Salvation Army at the other end, and a car park's worth of club colours in between — which, for a body whose day job is lobbying legislators about helmets and profiling, is a strange and rather good way to spend a December Sunday. The start has moved up to Folsom and the foothills, so do not aim at Sacramento out of habit.