Michelle Sheehan

The Woman Who Ran S&S Bikes and Backed Tiger Teeth

A Legend Bike Co. chapter · a short page about a woman the written record almost missed entirely

At a glance

Role Proprietor, S&S Bikes (Sheehan & Sheehan Racing)
Scene Round Rock, Pflugerville and Austin, Texas · 1980s into the early 1990s
Known for Running one of the very first Supercross BMX dealerships, backing the Tiger Teeth component brand, and importing JIVE number plate panels from Belfast into the American scene

BMX history has a habit of writing down the riders and forgetting the people who paid for the van. This is a page about one of the people who paid for the van.

It is still shorter than she deserves, because almost nothing about her was ever written down. What has changed is that we can now say what she actually did with more than one line of it. She did not only bankroll a family race program and put her name behind a component brand. She ran the supply line that carried a Belfast number plate into the hands of the people who made BMX Action magazine — and that turns out to be one of the more consequential things anybody in this library did with a cardboard box.

What the record confirms

The clearest account comes from Supercross BMX's own published company history, which matters here because Supercross dealt with S&S directly and had no reason to invent any of it.

In that account, Michelle Sheehan ran S&S — the Texas BMX mail-order and vending trailer operation that was one of the very first Supercross BMX dealers when the brand started up in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Her son Ryan was the founding member of the S&S race team. And when Ryan came to her with the problems that professional riders and older amateurs were having with their bikes, she started a little company called Tiger Teeth to fix them. Bitchin' Bolts came first, then the Tiger Teeth chainwheels, then imported JIVE panels from Ireland.

Read that back as a business ledger rather than a family story. A woman in Central Texas was running a retail counter, a mail-order catalog, a trailer that traveled to races, a sponsored team touring as far as England, a manufactured component line, and a transatlantic import arrangement. In the 1980s. In a sport that was almost entirely run by men and almost never wrote any of this down.

Bill Ryan knew this family directly, and in 2026 he confirmed the relationship in plain terms: Michelle Sheehan was Ryan Sheehan's mother. His own assessment is that the Sheehans were highly influential in BMX through S&S. This page exists because that influence never made it into the written record anywhere else.

The woman who brought JIVE to America

The last item in that ledger — then imported JIVE panels from Ireland — sat on this page for a long time as a single clause at the end of a sentence. It should not have. It is the most far-reaching thing she did.

JIVE was a clothing and number plate label run out of Belfast in the late 1980s by Will Smyth and a handful of friends who called themselves the Jive Five. They cut plates by hand at night in a friend's house with the radio on. They sponsored an American rider, Dave Clymer, because he ran a Dead Kennedys sticker on his number plate. They gave the sport the word nac-nac. What they did not have was any way into the American market — no distributor, no rep, no importer.

Michelle Sheehan was the way in.

Bill Ryan states it firsthand, and he is not repeating something he was told. He took delivery of one of the panels himself. In his account the JIVE panels were imported by Michelle Sheehan of S&S, and she was the one who got them out to riders. They ended up on Kevin Hull's bike, on Ryan's own bike, on Erick “Big E” Bartoldus's bike, on Craig “gOrk” Barrette's bike, and on the bikes of a good many others in the BMX Action loop.

Look at who is on that list. gOrk was an editor at BMX Action, the magazine that set the sport's taste for a decade. Hull was a factory pro. Bartoldus was on the Auburn Cycles factory roster, and is now marketing director at Yoshimura Cycling. These plates did not filter out through a catalog or a sales rep's sample case. They went hand to hand through the small circle of people who decided what American BMX looked like — and they got there because a woman in Pflugerville, Texas opened an account with a bedroom operation in Northern Ireland and started shifting boxes.

There is a dated document on the American end of it too, and it needs keeping separate from the testimony, because it proves a different thing. In its March 1989 issue, BMX Action ran its Probe column on Kevin Hull's customized Brackens under the title The Sheep Dogmobile. The bike was photographed the previous October. Printed in the component list is the line CLAMP PLATE: Jive Panel.

That page proves a Belfast-made plate was bolted to an American factory pro's race bike in Southern California in October 1988, and that the biggest BMX magazine in the country printed it. It proves nothing whatsoever about how the plate crossed the Atlantic — a plate can travel more than one way. The route is Ryan's, and it is testimony. The date and the bike are the magazine's, and that is paper. Both are set out at length in the JIVE chapter.

Put plainly: Michelle Sheehan is the reason a number plate label that existed in a Belfast living room ended up in the pages of American BMX. Nobody wrote that down at the time. It is written down now.

2020, and giving her blessing

The one moment where she appears in the record in her own right comes decades later.

In 2020, Supercross BMX wanted an original-pattern chainwheel for its 30th anniversary bikes. Rather than reverse-engineer a dead brand and say nothing, Supercross reached out to Michelle Sheehan and asked permission to replicate the Tiger Teeth design. She gave her blessing, and the part went out as the Tiger Teeth Ryan Sheehan Tribute Chainwheel — named for her son, who had died in 2005.

That is the whole documented episode, and it is a decent measure of the person. She was under no obligation to say yes to anything.

Where the record runs thin

• Effectively everything biographical. No birth details, no hometown of origin, no account in her own words. Nothing.
• Her exact role and title at S&S. Owner, co-owner, manager, the one who actually worked the trailer — the sources say she ran it and go no further. We do now know she personally handled the JIVE import and the distribution of the panels, which tells you the job was hands-on, but it does not tell you what was on her business card.
• How the JIVE arrangement worked. That she imported the panels and got them out to riders is settled, per Bill Ryan firsthand. Everything around it is not: when it started and stopped, how many plates came in, what they cost, whether she dealt with Will Smyth and the Belfast crew directly or through somebody in between, and whether there was ever a written agreement. No invoice, order form, packing slip or catalog page has turned up.
• The exact form of her first name. Michelle is the name Bill Ryan knew her by; the family memorial site uses Brenda. See the naming note above.
• Whether she held any role in track operation, race officiating or sanctioning. We specifically looked for this, because it is the sort of thing a shop owner in a strong state scene often ends up doing. We found no evidence that she was a track operator, an official or a sanctioning body figure, and we are not going to assume it to make the page more impressive.
• Hall of Fame status. She is not among the 79 inductees listed by the Texas Bicycle Motocross Hall of Fame as of August 2026, including in its industry and pioneer categories.
• A separate identification we did not make. A Michelle Sheehan is publicly listed as president of Gaston & Sheehan Auctioneers, the Pflugerville firm that Ryan joined after he finished school. Same surname, same small town, plausible on its face. We could not confirm that these are the same person and we are not treating them as one.

Where Michelle Sheehan fits in the bigger story

Family and brands: S&S Bikes, Tiger Teeth, Ryan Sheehan. What she imported: JIVE number plates, Belfast. Where the plates ended up: Kevin Hull, Brackens Bikes, Craig “gOrk” Barrette and BMX Action. Trade connection: Supercross BMX and Bill Ryan. The shop-owner tradition she belongs to is covered in The Bike Shops That Made BMX and in the Beavers Bicycle Shop chapter. The wider arc is in The History of BMX.

Do not confuse S&S Bikes of Texas with the unrelated California company covered in our S&S Performance chapter.

Sources

Supercross BMX, supercrossbmx.com — Tiger Teeth Ryan Sheehan Tribute Chainwheel product page; the primary source for Michelle Sheehan running S&S, S&S being one of the very first Supercross BMX dealers, Ryan as founding member of the S&S team, the founding of Tiger Teeth at Ryan's urging, the Bitchin' Bolts and chainwheel and JIVE panel sequence, and her blessing for the 2020 replica. BMXmuseum.com — reference entry 4521, S&S Tiger Teeth Chainrings, for S&S as Sheehan & Sheehan Racing and its Central Texas base (page not directly loadable; text obtained through search indexes). rememberingryansheehan.com — the Sheehan family's memorial site for Ryan Sheehan, which uses Brenda Sheehan for his mother; the basis for the naming note above. Texas Bicycle Motocross Hall of Fame, txbmxhof.org — inductee index checked directly against all categories; no Sheehan listed. Bill Ryan, founder of Supercross BMX, 2026 — firsthand confirmation that Michelle Sheehan was Ryan Sheehan's mother, and firsthand recollection that Michelle and her son Ryan were highly influential in BMX through S&S, that S&S came out of Pflugerville, Texas, and that Tiger Teeth started out of S&S. Bill Ryan, firsthand, August 2026 — source for Michelle Sheehan being the person who imported the JIVE panels and got them out to riders, and for the panels running on Kevin Hull's bike, on Ryan's own bike, on Erick “Big E” Bartoldus's bike and on Craig “gOrk” Barrette's bike and through the BMX Action circle; and for the identification of Big E as Erick Bartoldus, now marketing director at Yoshimura Cycling. BMX Action, Probe column, March 1989 — “The Sheep Dogmobile: Kevin Hull's Customized Brackens,” photographed October 1988; the printed component list carries the line “CLAMP PLATE: Jive Panel.” That page is a document of the plates being in American use at a fixed date; it is not evidence of the import route, and the two are kept apart above. Will Smyth interview, Deathless Avenue, July 2019, also carried by Profile Racing — source for JIVE as a Belfast BMX clothing and number plate label, the Jive Five, the plates cut by hand at night, the Dave Clymer sponsorship and the naming of the nac-nac. bmxsociety.com and oldschoolmags.com were checked and returned nothing naming her.

Last reviewed: August 2026. This is a living chapter and a thin one. Firsthand accounts and corrections are welcome through the contact page.