The Indy 500

Today is the running of the 107th Indianapolis 500.  It promises to be just what the radio announcers refer to as they go into each commercial break, "The Greatest Spectacle In Racing".  I have watched nearly every "500" since 1969. It was my introduction to auto racing.  Between watching televised open-wheel racing and racing slot cars (Google THAT, youngsters) with my brother Rudy in the cellar of our house, I became a big fan.

It was exciting to think of being a professional race driver at that time.  A thought that probably coincided with my love of baseball to the point where I wanted to play third base for the New York Mets. I imagined this vocation until the day I heard of the death Peter Revson in March of 1974. I can still remember going down to the cellar a few hours later and playing with my slot cars by myself, as my brother had moved on to Boston University. I had only seen a still photo on the news that afternoon. The same photo appeared in the New York Daily News the following day. I still have that day's paper in my memorabilia collection. I couldn't imagine what had happened in South Africa that caused the death of this driver. Revson wasn't my favorite driver at all, but he was well-known.  After driving my slot cars for about an hour or so, I retreated upstairs to have dinner.  While in preparation of our fare for that evening I told my mother that I'd decided not to become a race driver.  Her response was, as often was the case when I made such a profound statement was, "Well, at least we got THAT out out the way."  She didn't say it in any sort of dismissive way, but I'm sure that she thought for a moment that she didn't know her 12 year-old son was even considering  such an occupation.

I was a huge fan of Mario Andretti, the 1969 Indy 500 winner. His name was almost melodic and for decades his name alone was synonymous with drivers deemed by their friends to be a little too aggressive behind the wheel of their own automobiles. I thought surely that he would win another 500 in his career, but alas this was not the case.  He became the first victim of "Andretti Luck" which was all bad and was passed on to other relatives who drove in the race. In 1982 he was an innocent bystander when on the opening lap he was run in to by  a "driver" named Kevin Cogan and was done before the race even started.  Just three years later in 1985 he had a great ride but was outrun by Danny Sullivan who earlier in the race had actually done a 360 directly in front of him and won anyway. Mario never did win another 500, but he sure looked cool while trying.  I actually got to meet Mario while working at the airport. I was supposed to be inspecting his carry-on bag at the departure gate. It wasn't the most thorough bag check I've ever done. He was much larger in stature to me than the 5'4" gentleman who was standing in front of me that evening. His grandson Marco will start today's race from the 25th position.

I recall as a kid that the Indy 500 was not shown live on television. Yes, you read that correctly. An amazing concept given today's vast array of available channels on television.  It was edited after the original running and shown on "ABC's Wide World of Sports" some SIX DAYS LATER.  Trying to avoid hearing who the winner was for 6 days was not that easy, but in the era before the internet it WAS possible.  I asked my mom to not give me my copy of Sports Illustrated until I'd seen the race.  Starting in 1971 the race was shown on the same day in prime time.  For many years I would avoid all radio and television reports on that Sunday and firmly plant myself in front of our console tv hoping like anything that when the broadcast started at 8:00 p.m. that I would hear the great Jim McKay's voice accompanied by a gentle guitar version of "Back Home Again in Indiana" and the shot would be of a darkened Indianapolis Motor Speedway with only the scoring pylon lit in the background.  The number of the winning car was unable to be discerned because of tragically-low-definition television that was available in the seventies. Which was okay for me in this circumstance.  Some years, however, the race had been postponed due to rain and my excitement would have to wait until later.

The races were often called by McKay and former Formula 1 driver Jackie Stewart.  For myself  and a lot of others watching it was the first time we had heard someone from Scotland speak, and in retrospect, it was quite a treat.  In the pits was Chris Economaki, who was great in his role.  Essentially doing the same work that 4-6 pit reporters perform on racing telecasts today. 

The race has had some thrilling finishes, including one which took four months to decide in 1980 when Andretti lost to Bobby Unser even though I thought Andretti had won. The race has also had more than its fair share of tragedy.  There was the infamous 1973 race during which three people died and another was critically injured. Art Pollard was killed in an accident during practice on Pole Day.  Salt Walther was critically injured during a multi-car crash on the opening lap.  Rain then postponed the race until the following day and during that race Swede Savage was seriously injured when he hit the wall on the front stretch.  Amazingly, Savage survived the accident but died some 33 days later from an infection following a blood transfusion. The third death was as a result of a pit crew member being hit by an emergency rescue truck which was responding, amazingly, to the Savage crash. That crew member died on impact with the truck.  Why THIS didn't make me want to dismiss a career as a race driver I just don't know. It was probably my first experience of seeing a tragic event on television.

A large number of great drivers have participated in the Indy 500. Only two of them, A.J. Foyt and Mario Andretti have won both the Daytona 500 NASCAR race and the Indianapolis 500. There have been four driver who have driven in the Indy 500 and the Coca-Cola 600 NASCAR race on the SAME DAY. The race still has two great traditions. The winning driver drinks milk in the winners circle and has done so since 1956. And more recently the winning driver and pit crew make their way to the start/finish line to kiss the yard of bricks which remain from the original track in 1909. NASCAR Hall-of-Famer Dale Jarrett started that tradition after his win in the 1996 Brickyard 400. 

I certainly look forward to today's  broadcast, but I'm sure I will be reminded of my past history of viewing.  NBC is now the network which telecasts the race. ABC did so until 2018.  It's an amazing event, where humans move on the ground at speeds which they were never supposed to reach. In 1912 the top qualifying car topped out at an average speed of 88.45 mph.  In 2020 the top speed for qualifying was 231.828.  Indy has not only brought us great moments and tragic moments but it  also brought innovations that have transferred to the cars we use today,  Originally, there were two seats in the front of the car.  One for the driver, the other for, essentially, a spotter to look around and behind the car for help to see them.  This led to the invention of the rear-view mirror in order to get rid of the passenger and make the car lighter. But I shan't bore you with more relatively meaningless trivia about this.  I will save THAT for the boredom of my friends, family and co-workers.

After the 2020 race was devoid of spectators due to the pandemic this year's race sold all 135,000 available tickets. The track has grandstand seating for 240,000 and suite and infield space to accommodate 400,000 but this year is one step closer to those numbers for 2022. I hope to be one of them myself next year. Racing is probably the one sport where the absence of fans in attendance least obvious, especially on television. Rare is the time when you could actually hear the crowd cheering above the roar of the engines anyhow. I hope someday to attend "The Greatest Spectacle In Racing" before my time on this earth is done. That'd be kinda cool. No week of avoiding the news. No tape delay telecasts. Not even a television screen at all. Just opening my eyes and seeing it all develop right in front me......and about 400,000 other fans.

May you enjoy the race today, if you are so inclined.

.......I'm just sayin'. 

My World Of Sports

"Sports. It provides the comfortable separation between fantasy and the cruel realities of life."

I wish I could take credit for that quote, but alas I cannot. I heard it spoken by a sports anchor, the late Fred Hickman as he opened an episode of CNN Sports Tonight one night back in the 80's. I liked it so much that I made a point of writing it down immediately. That was nearly 40 years ago and I still have the slip of paper on which I wrote it.

The majority of this blog is the same as it was when I originally composed it in May of 2014. But in light of the current surreal conditions in which we all live right now, I wanted to add to it just a bit. As the country emerged from the pandemic the NHL hockey and basketball seasons for the NBA and WNBA finished in "bubbles" located in Edmonton, Alberta Canada and Orlando, Florida and Bradenton, Florida respectively. The 2020 World Series was played entirely at a brand new ballpark in Arlington, Texas. Neither of the teams in the series were based IN Arlington, Texas. So, surreal is a huge understatement. 

Those of you who know me know that I love sports.  I grew up in the New York City area and followed five major sports for quite a while.

Baseball has always been my first love and always will be. The orange and blue of the New York Metropolitans (what, you didn't think "Met" was short for something?) have coursed through my veins for as long as I can remember. This was factual even during my time while in the employ of the front office of the Minnesota Twins. They Mets are the team of my past, present and future. I was born approximately 10 hours after and about 25 miles away from the groundbreaking for what was originally known as Flushing Meadow Park. It was later renamed William A. Shea Stadium.  The Mets have not won a championship since 1986, but the fact that I've seen them win two of them in my lifetime means that I am still +1 to any fans of the Chicago Cubs and +2 to fans of six franchises. I could go on endlessly about my love for baseball, but this posting isn't about baseball, as you will soon read. 

I, like many young boys, collected baseball cards. I grew up right next door to a package store (in New England the liquor stores are called "package stores", or "packies") I used the empty boxes which originally contained liquor bottles to keep my cards in. I had one slot for each team. It was easy to figure out which team was represented by their cap logo. Except for one. I often had a hard time remembering which team had an interlocking T and C on their cap. I wondered how they got TC from "Minnesota". But I eventually started remembering it correctly. I actually worked for the Minnesota Twins for thirteen seasons, (1989-2001). The last six of those seasons were as a front office employee. So I at one point went from not knowing what the logo meant to one day designing the letterhead, envelopes and business cards for said major league franchise. I was even the backup mascot for two seasons while I was there. I experienced a World Series championship firsthand  and will never forget that experience. 

Hockey entered my life at about the same time.  I was a fan of the New York Rangers. I still am. Back when I started watching hockey there were only 12 teams.  The schedule was very much balanced throughout the week. I remember watching Ranger road games WOR-TV Channel 9 with Jim Gordon and Bill Chadwick, then listening to home games on Sunday night while doing my homework on WNBC 660 AM with Marv Albert and Sal "Red Light" Messina on the call. Back then you would've thought the NHL to be a foreign country to a young African-American male during the seventies, but I loved all of the aspects of the game. I longed to see the Broadway Blueshirts play at the "World's Most Famous Arena", Madison Square Garden. My first home Ranger game wasn't until October of 1986. I hoped that someday the Rangers would eventually win a Stanley Cup and in 1994 they did just that. Following their Cup win we adopted two dachshunds. One came to be named Rosie, in honor my dear mother who had just passed only 3 months earlier and the other was named Ranger.  Ranger's AKC registered name is "Rangers' Stanley Cup".  I currently have another dachshund named Shea. You can figure that one out on your own, I'm sure.  

I actually followed the New York Knickerbockers (what, you didn't think that "Knick" wasn't short for something?) during their heyday in the '70s.  Willis Reed, Dave DeBusschure, Bill Bradley, Jerry Lucas, Earl Monroe and Walt "Clyde" Frazier were the Knicks I followed.  I no longer follow the NBA very much as the game has changed so much. Not to say that the other "big three" sports haven't had their share of changes, scandals, etc. But the NBA lost me when they started taking players from college who had only attended college for two or sometimes even ONE year. Then the whole marriage of basketball and rap/hip-hop which has caused the game to go to extremes culturally along with the skill set which players have today and the fact that players are looking to be on the highlights every night on ESPN and the fact that you can see HIGH SCHOOL games on television nationwide is a travesty. Besides, the refs haven't called traveling on anyone since the H.W Bush administration. One footnote, however,  is that I could watch Steph Curry shoot 3-pointers (which were known as "home runs" in the old ABA) all....day...long.

Football. New York Jets? New York Football Giants? New England Patriots? None of the above. I grew up as a fan of the Minnesota Vikings. I know, I know. How does this happen to a young man in Connecticut? Well, the Jets had won a championship in 1969 but had gone back to mediocrity. The Giants had no appeal either. As a matter of fact during the decade of the 70s neither team had the talent to qualify for the playoffs. But the Vikings always seemed to be in the playoffs, they had great players, especially on defense, and they had what I considered to be the coolest uniforms in the league at the time. And so it was. I thought that they would have given Viking fans a Super Bowl win by now, but we seem to get close once a decade, so we aren't too far away from another chance. The NFC Championship game loss to the Saints was tough, but the loss to the Falcons in 1998 is STILL the one which "chaps my hide" the most.  That may have been the best team this franchise ever had.

I actually followed and played soccer in high school and during the 1980s.  The New York Cosmos were my team during the first invasion of soccer.  Players like Giorgio Chinaglia, Franz Beckenbauer and the incredible Brazilian, Edson Orantes do Nascimento (you may know him better as Pelé) led the charge and won three NASL championships in 1977, 1978 and 1980.  But the thrill of those wins was nothing like it would've been had it been for any of my other favorite teams.

While I still follow the Rangers in New York, there is again an NHL team in my immediate vicinity. When I moved to Minnesota the North Stars played their home games less than six miles away from my home. But that would prove to be short-lived and too goo to be true. In April of 1993 the North Stars moved due south to Dallas, Texas. That was a bitter pill to swallow, but not as tough for me as it was for so many fans who had followed them for a quarter century. I had only followed them for the previous five seasons. The NHL tried to appease us by sending us "neutral site" games for awhile. The IHL sent us something called the Minnesota Moose. It was hockey in the sense that it wasn't lacrosse. The Dallas Stars won the Stanley Cup in their sixth season in the Lone Star State. 

In 2000 the Minnesota Wild joined the NHL. My wife and I bought season tickets so early that my original season ticket holder number was 199 out of 18,000. The Wild (horrible name for a sports team) gave us a false sense of what was to come by advancing to the Western Conference Finals as the #6 seed in only their third season. That's the furthest they have advanced in their history. In their first 19 seasons they have made it to the second round just three times. I'm probably in the top 100 remaining season ticket holders at this time. The wait for Lord Stanley to come to Minnesota continues. Currently the Wild are "two years away from being two years away" from contending for that holiest of sports grails.

Sports fans, for the most part, don't ask for a great deal.  We want to believe that our favorite team's players are giving their all, are playing within the rules, and want to win as much as we want them to. We hope that they stay off of the suspended list for PEDs, the police blotter and the sports department at TMZ. We hope that our owners genuinely are trying to make personnel moves that improve our team's productivity. We buy jerseys with names of our favorite players on the back, hoping that they don't embarrass us is into moving them to the back of the closet. I, personally, have never purchased a jersey with a player's name and number on the back. I simply buy jerseys and then have them customized with my own last name and my favorite number, 11, on the back. I know that unless something goes incredibly wrong, that I'm not going to get traded and so the jersey is always current. Jerry Seinfeld once said, "You're actually rooting for the clothes, when you get right down to it. You know what I mean? You are standing and cheering and yelling for your clothes to beat the clothes from another city. Fans will be so in love with a player, but if he goes to another team, they boo him. This is the same human being in a different shirt; they hate him now. Boo! Different shirt! Boo!"

Jerry was right.

I always have a hard time with people who "jump on the bandwagon" of a team late in the season or even during the playoffs.  How these people can take any true satisfaction from a short-term, non-committal relationship with a team is beyond me. Wait, I think I just described the quintessential "no-strings attached" relationship. The great thing about having your team win a championship after you've followed them all season is the sense that your emotional, financial, and time investments have all paid off. Anything else pretty much amounts to the sports version of a one-night stand. It might feel good for about 3-4 hours, but when the sun comes up, what do you have?  

The NFL is currently having issues with teams and players testing positive for COVID-19. Games have been moved to different dates, including one game recently which was played on a Tuesday night. The NFL received incredible tv ratings for the draft televised by ESPN. I remember the days when the draft took place in the afternoon on a nondescript  Tuesday in April. I just found out about, believe it or not, a marble racing league which can be seen on youTube. (YouTube, a website that is a direct result of the Janet Jackson/Justin Timberlake wardrobe malfunction at Super Bowl XXXVIII in 2004. You could look it up). 

Lastly, I also follow NASCAR. I originally followed Indy-car racing until the league split and forced some drivers to choose sides. I still watch the Indy 500 each year, but in the late 70s I started following NASCAR. I attended my first NASCAR race in 2003. My first "favorite driver" was Rusty Wallace. Rusty was pretty much on the back end of his career by the time I chose him to be my guy. He'd won a championship in 1989 but I didn't really get into the sport until after he'd won that. Rusty's Last Ride" was in 2005 and I needed to find a new driver to hitch my fan wagon to. Also in 2005 a Federal Express was the primary sponsor of a car driven by the late Jason Leffler. He didn't produce well and mid-season was replaced by a young Denny Hamlin. I was at the November race in Phoenix and he won his first pole position that day. He drove the #11 car, and 11 is my favorite number. I figured, "Why not Denny?" And so I became a fan of Denny Hamlin. I have followed the 11 car in a major way for 15 seasons. I've seen him come close to winning a championship in 2010. That was tough. But I've seen him win in person 5 times, which is a huge thrill. I have scads of merchandise and clothing with the number 11 on it in purple, orange and white. Last November I purchased a ticket to the Phoenix race. Then I flew from Minneapolis the morning of the race. I rented a car and drove to Avondale. I watched Denny win the race, got back on a return flight to Minny and watched the replay of the race on tv as I went to sleep. It was a good day. Hamlin has a chance to win his first championship this Sunday in Phoenix. I had a ticket for this race, but due to COVID-19 I wasn't fortunate enough to be one of the fans who will be allowed to attend the race. I'll have my swag on during my viewing on NBC, that is for sure. 

What I have learned over the past 4 decades is that if you're going to hitch your wagon to a sports team be prepared to have your heart broken.  Your team will lose games they should have won but they will also win win games they should've lost.  Your team may be found to have cheated to win. (See Bobby Thompson's Shot Heard 'Round the World or 2017 Houston Astros). You will lose sleep over them.  You will develop superstitions based on their performance.  You will spend money you don't have on them. You will name your pets or children after favorite player, team name or stadium, as I have a son named Shea.  You will be ridiculed by your friends because of your passion for them, especially when they are in their "lean" periods.  If you find yourself in a "sketchy" area of a city you might even have your health and well-being threatened. You will find that the phrase "Losing feels worse than winning feels good" really IS true. But above all else, before you can call yourself a "true fan", you must be prepared for all of these things. Because if you can't run with the big dogs, stay on the porch.

I'm just sayin'.