Jeannie Carmichael stands off the practice track's straightaway, stopwatch in hand. It's the middle of February, midweek, in the midst of the 2002 Supercross season. Her son zips past on his No. 4 blood-red Honda CR250R. Its knobby tires kick up a cloud of dust that swallows Jeannie and almost blots out the concern on her face. Ricky Carmichael, a.k.a. RC, the AMA/EA 250 Supercross champ, pulls up next to his mom and hits the kill switch. The dust settles. Jeannie checks the watch. "You got a 57.1 and a pair of 57.2's," she says.

RC pulls off his goggles and looks at his mom as, well, only a son can. He's 22, wire-hard at 5'6" and 150 pounds, but freckles and a mop of blond-streaked red hair make him look more like a rec-club dodgeball victim than the world's best motocrosser. "There has to be a 56 in there," he pleads. No, Mom says, nothing faster than 57.1.

"Well, you did it wrong," he snaps.

"You weren't fast enough," she shoots back.

RC slumps on his bike like a kid struggling with algebra. He's trying to wrap up a four-hour practice at the track he built 10 miles from his Havana, Fla., home, but Mom keeps busting him. Right now, Carmichael's sparkling amateur career counts for nothing. Right now, it doesn't matter that he won 13 races in a row to take the 2001 Supercross title, or that his 2002 season has seen more whoops than a 20-lap moto. He's crashed hard, been booed loudly and had his confidence rocked for sure. All right, he's won three of the past four races. None of that matters right now.

What matters is 56 seconds on the stopwatch.

"You can either sit here all day or you can get it right," says Jeannie.

Carmichael fires the CR to life with a kick and blasts down the straightaway. He dives into tight corners and blasts out of them with a blip of the throttle. He carves up the whoops and triples the gaps. Yeah, he gets it right. He whips the CR flat over a 60-foot triple in celebration. Mom gives an enthusiastic thumbs up. Yeah, he gets it right.

***

The sweet smell of homemade brownies is hypnotic, and the tiny kitchen in the Carmichael home is more crowded than the first turn at Daytona. Jeannie, Big Ricky (RC's dad), RC and Mike Brown -- training bud and 125 champ -- are gathered around the counter/dinner table.

Jeannie serves up a spread of sloppy joes, corn on the cob, salad, fresh pineapple and those brownies. RC is into his second sandwich by the time Dad sits down. It's Tuesday night, Family Night in the Carmichael house. The gang gathers each week for dinner and conversation -- no motocross. "We need to know we're still a normal family," says Jeannie. "This lets us get away for a night."

Motocross is filled with rugged individuals, and Ricky is the best rider in the world, in part because he's scrappy enough to dive into gaps, smooth enough to float over step-ups and smart enough to find the fastest lines around the track. But trumping his enormous riding gifts is all of this: the Carmichael kitchen, family at his side, keeping him humble, keeping him Ricky. The truth is, RC is a mama's boy. And that's a good thing.

Dinner barely ends before Big Ricky is asleep on the couch. Little Ricky slumps in a recliner not far behind. Her work done, Jeannie pulls out the scrapbook. She's chronicled RC's entire career, complete with an old Kawasaki contract that granted him eight minibikes a year. A bio of 9-year-old RC from the local paper reveals his heroes were Michael Jordan and Jeremy McGrath.

Part-trainer, part-coach, part-crew chief, all-Mom -- that's Jeannie. "She always gets the most out of me," says RC. "I can't picture this without her." Jeannie has played her roles since Ricky first threw a leg over a bike 16 years ago. Big Ricky, an electrician, couldn't take time off from his job to be a full-time motocross parent, so Jeannie drove RC as far away as Texas to race minis in the 8-and-unders. She pulled him out of school to practice, gassed up his bikes, packed race-day lunches. She's missed exactly one practice in her son's entire career -- the one at which he crashed big and broke his collarbone. Jeannie knows when RC's brakes are fading and when his carburetors are running lean.

As for the Mom part, she also knows when Ricky ain't right. Facial expressions, body language, tone of voice. He'll look at the ground a lot, too. She's seen it all, and she knows how to fix it.

This season, there's been a lot of fixing to do.

***

The first bout of adversity is always the most painful, and Ricky has taken a triple hit recently. It started in October when he let promoters at the U.S. Open, a precursor to the January-to-May AMA/EA Supercross Series, set him on a throne, put a crown on his head and lower him to the Las Vegas track to honor his championship season. "It was goofy. It wasn't me," he said later.

He was right on both counts. Ricky isn't big on bravado, and this smacked of arrogance. Plus, it irked the fans, who booed him loudly. To them, Carmichael may be the champ, but he's a long way from being the king. Motocross fans are a fiercely loyal bunch, and they're still in love with seven-time winner McGrath, the greatest and most popular rider in Supercross history.

While the boos stung RC down below, up in the stands, a fan behind Jeannie tore into her son like it was sport. Now, Mom knows boos go with the territory, and she's developed pretty thick skin. But this jerk wouldn't quit, and she finally broke. "The little bastard you're talking about is my son," she said. The stunned fan apologized, then asked for RC's autograph -- which, amazingly, he got.

The throne business was only part of why fans were ticked at Carmichael. Their wrath had been brewing since September, when RC jumped from Kawasaki, his team since day one, to Honda for a reported $6 million. Honda hadn't produced a Supercross 250 title since 1996, and fans felt they were trying to buy one. RC says he just needed a change of scenery: "It was never about money."

Whatever, the season hadn't even started and RC already had two strikes against him. It got worse before it got better. When RC was introduced to the opening-day crowd in Anaheim on Jan. 5, he was pelted again with boos. "It just made me focus harder on racing," he says. Five laps into the race, Carmichael came up short on a jump and flew headfirst over the bars. He suffered a mild concussion and could not finish the race, ending his victory streak.

A pair of fourth-place finishes followed, which meant Jeannie's new job was assuring RC his form would return. "As long as you're fixable," she said, "you shouldn't worry." And she told him, "if you're the best you can be, that will be good enough to win." RC took back-to-back events in Phoenix and Anaheim, moving into third place in the series standings. "I've had to work way harder this year for wins," says Carmichael. "But I finally started to get my timing back." RC looked ready for another streak, and another championship run.

Then the tour reached Indianapolis on Feb. 9. Twelve laps into the 20-lap race at the RCA Dome, Carmichael trailed Travis Pastrana, the popular 18-year-old wonder-rider. On a left turn, RC tried to pass on the inside. When Pastrana dropped down to close the gap, the riders bumped. Carmichael stayed upright and took the lead; Pastrana bit it hard. In real time, to the 57,883 fans, it looked like RC had taken Travis out. It looked like he did it on purpose. It looked like a dirty move. No matter that the replay showed otherwise, or that Pastrana shrugged off the hit: "Just two guys going for a line."

The live fans were ripped, and when Carmichael, who finished second to David Vuillemin, tried to give a postrace interview from the podium, he was plastered with boos, worse than Vegas, worse than Anaheim. "As long as they're making noise, it's fine with me," Carmichael says, trying to be convincing now.

That mantra is what Jeannie's been telling him all season. As it turns out, the Pastrana mess goes to the heart of why RC draws such heat from fans. He could be forgiven for switching bikes and even for beating McGrath, if he were just a little different. But the truth is he doesn't want to play the spin game. He's the antihero because of what he is not. He's not a smooth-talker. His edges aren't polished. He's never learned to hide the moods that rumble through his head. "He's a nice guy, but he's no charmer," says Eric Johnson, who, as editor of Racer X Illustrated, talks to RC every week.

"If I'm in a bad mood, you're gonna know it," says RC. "I don't hide how I feel and tell you everything's great. I've been getting better with my interviews, but it's something I have to work on, just like racing." Jeannie cuts to the chase: "He's the good ol' boy who speaks his mind."

The booing in Indianapolis was the absolute low point of Carmichael's season, perhaps of his career. But the turnaround has been sweet and swift. Fans in MX chat rooms pounded the Indy crowd for its unjust treatment. Most of RC's opponents rallied to his support, expressing shock that a rider could be booed for making a clean pass. And Carmichael did his part by notching another pair of wins, topped by a wire-to-wire romp in Atlanta in late February, where the crowd of 69,471 at the Georgia Dome cheered him from start to checkers. Wins in four of the past five races have moved RC into second position behind Vuillemin. "He's riding like he did last year," says McGrath. "Really in a groove, really tough to beat."

Yet even as mother and son get back to cashing in on their hard work, RC's recent showing has a bittersweet edge for Jeannie. Ricky is still her little boy, and his success represents an unavoidable fact: That little boy is growing up. Jeannie cried the day Ricky held up the No. 1 plate in 2000 after winning his first 250 Outdoor championship. "That was a sad day," she says.

"Mom, those were tears of joy," counters Ricky.

But what if Ricky hadn't won? What if the hard work hadn't paid off? A mother's devotion is a coin with two sides. Her side is the worry: What if I haven't done enough? On her boy's side there's only power, the confidence to ride any monster. Believe this about Jeannie's son: There's never a doubt in his mind that he'll win -- each moto, each main, each title. Every time out. Mom is never so sure.

***

The 4,200-square-foot house Ricky shares with his fiancée, Ursula Holly, is 10 minutes from the only other places that matter to him as much: his folks' place and the practice track. Ricky's never given over to flash. His only "car" is a 2000 Ford F-250 diesel pickup that fills the driveway because the garage is filled by two bikes, boots, helmets, other gear and the bicycle he rides for training.

Ricky lounges on a plush brown sofa in the game room upstairs, sipping a glass of orange juice. Around the room are framed jerseys and magazine covers, helmets from title seasons and a few favorite trophies. One trophy sits front and center, right next to the 36-inch flat-screen TV. It's a silver cup, three feet high, inscribed with the words "2001 AMA/EA Supercross Championship."

Carmichael flashes a grin when asked about it. But when he hears McGrath has seven just like it, all lined up in his house, the smile fades. He knows how much goes into getting just one. How many years and laps. "If I win this year, that'd be something," he says quietly. "It's the mother of all mothers. They don't just hand those out."

Of course, he could be talking about another mother, the one with the stopwatch.

This article appears in the March 18 issue of ESPN The Magazine.