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Part 2: Randy
still recalls one boat company calling him in an attempt to hire his son,
not knowing Matt was still in high school.
By Jeremy Wallace — Fall 2004
Plenty of boaters have dreams like Matt’s, so
he became Voyaging’s first reader to have his Dream Come True. Not
only did he get to live his dream, but he got to blow it away during an
all-expense-paid trip for himself and his father to Opa-Locka, Florida,
just outside Miami—and home of the legendary Cigarette
Racing Team (305-931-4564, www.cigaretteracing.com).
There, the teenager was not only given a first-class tour of the boatbuilder’s
facilities and a personal audience with CEO and President Skip Braver,
but was put behind the wheel of Xntrick, a 42-footer with twin Mercury
HP1075 SCis and No. 6 drives.
“I can’t believe this,” Matt said
after his limousine ride to the dock in North Miami where the 42X was
waiting. “It’s all so surreal. I can’t believe this
is happening.”
Five years earlier, the adventure seemed improbable.
Matt knew little about boats, having grown up in Colorado—not exactly
a hotbed for offshore racing. But when his dad earned a promotion in his
financial services job, the family of five (Matt’s the middle of
three brothers) headed east to Connecticut, where the clan traded their
skis for their first boat: a Sea Ray 240 Sundancer. They named it
Trade Off. “We traded one type of precipitation for another,”
Randy said with a laugh.
Little did the elder Riley know the effect that decision
would have on young Matt, or “Motor Man,” as he came to be
known. As early as Randy can remember, Matt had an uncanny knowledge of
cars, especially high-performance automobiles. Mercedes, Porsche, Ferrari—the
family never passed one without a quick tutorial from Matt about what
each machine could do. After Randy bought the Sea Ray, Matt’s appetite
for learning about boats soon rivaled his voracious hunger for high-performance
cars. He scarfed up every magazine he could find and eventually talked
his father into trading up to the Formula and a faster cruising speed.
So intense was his interest, Matt began calling and e-mailing brokers
and engineers with suggested improvements in hardware and styling. Randy
still recalls one boat company calling him in an attempt to hire his son,
not knowing Matt was still in high school.
The more he studied high-performance boats, the more
Matt found himself aching for a shot at riding on one of them someday.
“I always wondered what it would be like to be on a Cigarette,”
Matt said. “If in a chop, what is it like going 80 [mph] on a Cigarette?”
Little did he know his Dream Come True would turn out
to be about more than just sitting next to the captain. A few miles out
onto Biscayne Bay, Lorow motioned for young Matt to take over Xntrick
so he could feel firsthand what the $750,000 machine could do.
>> Next page >>
Part 3: “It’s
just all so surreal. This has been an amazing trip.” Page
1,
2, 3
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