Jesse got his first minibike at 7, and with that thrill his passion for choppers knew no boundaries. He made his first crude motorcycle exhaust system during his freshman year of high school in his mother's garage. His perfectionism, however, prevented him from keeping it around; he threw it away before anyone saw it.
Jesse excelled in sports, playing linebacker for his high-school football team. He went on to play football at the University of California at Riverside, barely making ends meet as a student athlete. Jesse even remembers counting quarters to pay his $175 tuition bill. A knee injury kept him from continuing his athletic career.
With sports out of the picture as a career, Jesse then trained to become a professional bodyguard. He worked for many A-list bands, including Soundgarden, Danzig and Slayer, and traveled the globe on tour with them. During this time he met his former wife, with whom he shares two children, a 5-year-old son, Jesse Jr., and a 7-year-old daughter, Chandler. After an injury sustained at a show, Jesse decided to leave the bodyguard business to pursue something that he has loved from childhood: motorcycles. He began working for the famous hot-rod builder Boyd Coddington and learned everything he could. Then Jesse set out on his own.
Jesse began West Coast Choppers in 1992 in a corner of a friend's garage. He started with no loan and no partners, and built it from the ground up, in the painstaking way Jesse builds his bikes. Now he has over 50 employees ? his 18,000-square-foot facility in Long Beach, Calif., is being quickly outgrown ? and sells his bikes for $60,000 to $150,000 each to a clientele that includes celebrities such as Shaquille O'Neal, Kid Rock and model Tyson Beckford.
Jesse James sometimes can't believe that he gets paid so well to do what he loves. Of course, Jesse's other great loves are spending time with his children and riding his bike with the gleaming chrome, day-glo metal-flake paint and 140-horsepower engine.
--The Discovery Channel
UNITED STATES