Harley-Davidson Sport Glide review: Taking my son out on this motorcycle was a revelation

Only people who don’t like having their children around would let them learn to ride on the road, which does make me wonder why my parents were so keen on the idea …

I was quite taken with the Harley-Davidson Sport Glide, writes Stephen Corby.

When your children are little, you don’t encourage them to frolic on freeways, use snakes as skipping ropes or kiss politicians. And yet all of a sudden, when they reach the all-too-tender and mentally febrile age of 16, many of us decide it’s wise to usher them into a tonne-and-a-half of high-speed death trap in the shape of a car.

The only thing more clearly unhinged would be encouraging your teenager to learn to ride a motorcycle on the road, which might be legally defined as attempted filicide. Surely only people who don’t like having their children around would do such a thing, which does make me wonder why my parents were so keen on the idea when I was 17 …

Now that I am a Dad, surrounded by other parents who encourage fearful helicopter-hovering at all times, I would not consider for a moment letting my son learn the wild ways of the road in an environment where I couldn’t sit next to him imparting strings of pearls of wisdom loudly and constantly for the 120 legislated Learner hours (and can I just say, as an aside, that I think removing proper hand brakes from modern cars was a huge mistake).

Indeed, I debated long and in much torture over the decision to take him on the back of the Harley-Davidson Sport Glide I’d specifically borrowed because it had a rear seat, and one with a back rest so I couldn’t lose a child.

On the one hand I wanted him to see, hear, feel and smell how fantastic motorcycling is, how it hurls you at the moment, in the wind, and how the speed and vibration and violence ring through your body and soul, rather than rippling through your back and buttocks via the protective cage of a car.

I needed him to see why I loved it, and why I gambled his and his sister’s very existence on it, let alone my own, so many times as a motorcycle lover and then reviewer (a job with a life expectancy slightly lower than a hopscotch contestant on a minefield).

At the same time, I definitely did not want him to love it the way I do, because watching him learn to drive a car is terrifying enough and because I am intensely aware of the immovable certainties and statistics around young people and motorcycles, even if I myself stubbornly ignored them.

‘Harley riding is about doing crazy stuff on bikes clearly NOT designed to do crazy stuff.’

As such I was just slightly more alarmed than relieved to hear him say that he’d really enjoyed the ride, and more disturbed when he called it “cool”. In the limited and anti-loquacious patois of the teenager, that single word means so much.

So I left it for a day or two and asked him again and was pleased to hear that he’d also found it “kinda terrifying” and “exposed” with a strong sense that his life, and mine, were in the hands of other people, and many of those hands were twitching to let go of their steering wheels and grab their mobile phones.

That experiment aside, I was quite taken with the Sport Glide, which is unusual, but I put it down to just how rarely I ride motorcycles at all these days, and the fact that the last one was an electric scooter with less power than a toothbrush.

The seating position on the Harley still feels anathema to me – the foot pegs are just too dangerously close to the ground – but I love the look of it, which is like a big metallic tattooed forearm hitting your face. It’s hard to explain, but I also loved riding it, despite not loving the way it rides. (I also liked the discordant thumping of its V-Twin engine.)

Seeking clarification on how this was possible, I went to my motorcycling guru, author and former outlaw Boris Mihailovic, who explained that to properly enjoy a Harley you need to be unhinged.

The seating position on the Harley still feels anathema to me, writes Stephen Corby.

Pushing one hard is something you do in spite of its design, not because of it. “Harley riding is about doing crazy stuff on bikes clearly NOT designed to do crazy stuff,” Mihailovic states. “That is the whole damn appeal of it. Harleys are not like other bikes. They are far, far more than the sum of their parts. They are their own ‘thing’.

“There were times when we failed utterly to impose our will upon them, and they threw us into operating theatres and morgues with ferocious glee. And yet we persisted, because we were crazy.”

I could not explain it better, because I’ve never ridden a Harley that way, and I must admit I rode the Sport Glide far more like the brand’s modern buyer – an older man with grey hair and lingering delusions of youthful vigour. The point at which this theoretical customer and I part ways, however, is at the checkout, where he would be willing to pay the asking price of $32,495, and I would burst out laughing.

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Harley-Davidson Sport Glide

ENGINE: Milwaukee-Eight 107 V-Twin 1745cc (61kW/139Nm)

FUEL ECONOMY: 5.3 litres per 100km

TRANSMISSION: Six-speed cruise drive

PRICE: $32,495

RATING: 3.5 out of 5