Ghosts of the Coke Zero 400 – Act IV

Tim Richmond; Jimmie Johnson climbs into his car before practice at Daytona yesterday afternoon.

Watching  practice at Daytona this afternoon resurrected my memory of the underground basso whine of racin’ at that track that I had experienced last February, when I was at the Bud Shootout. My first race, I had heart nothing like it; the closest equivalent was playing balls-to-the-walls, end-of-the-third-set, amps-cranked-to-10 rock ‘n’ roll—the sort of full-wattage, high-horsepower intensity sends those Sprint Cup cars around the track like a pack of Hounds from Hell.

It was friggin’ cold that night, sitting up in an empty stretch of seats way up in DePalma Tower where we could see the entire track. By race’s end, while Kevin Harvick was doing doughnuts in the infield, Rick (who programs NASCAR This Week) and I beat it outta there. By the time we made it out of the stadium over to the bus pickup area for Lot Seven, I was shivering harder than a drunk deep in the DTs. It couldn’t have been less than 40 degrees, but the long exposure under a clear moony sky made had infiltrated my skin. Exiting from the bus at Parking Lot Seven was like stepping onto the ramparts of Dunsinane where Hamlet’s Ghost would soon appear.

A different time of year; final practice is delayed right now as a thunderstorm blows over. A different kind of race, too. The Shootout was a seasonal warm-up, made competitive for the big purse thrown in for the winner. The Coke Zero 400 is ten races down to the Chase, and Shootout winner Harvick is in 27th place in the points standings—not much hope for him. Matt Kenseth, who won the Daytona 500, struggles to hold onto to 10th place. Dale Earnhardt Jr. has a shot in 19th place but something has to happen for  him, now. Jamie McMurray, who beat Kyle Busch by the shortest of nosehairs to win the 400 two years ago, is in 22d place, a notch behind Joey Logano.

Yet perhaps because so many drivers who have normally made the Chase are lagging this year, the 400 may have more intensity than usual. And that should make the pack going round the 2-1/2 mile track at 190 mph a feral thing indeed.

Lots of present legends in the making are here, not so much crowding out the ghosts of past racers as adding to their paternity, the fathering and furthering which is History, all that dust slipping down the glass faster than the pack roaring around the track under the massed stormclouds of deep summer.

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In September 1986, crew chief Harry Hyde first noticed something was wrong with Tim Richmond. Richomond had won  the Southern 500 at Darlington but “he looked awful bad, and he was taking antibiotics.It looked to me like he had the flu or a cold.”

“After Darlington …. I thought he was all right. But by Rockingham and the last two races, I could tell he was … down. It was in his face and eyes.” At NASCAR’s December awards banquet, where Richmond was named co-Driver of the Year with Dale Earnhardt, Humpy Wheeler thought he looked awful. “I could tell it was something worse than stress; he said he was exhausted,” he said. “He was extremely disturbed about what he looked like.” Within a week, Richmond was in the Cleveland Clinic, diagnosed with AIDS.

This was news for heterosexual America. (The previous November, the supermodel Gia had died of the disease, the first woman known to have died of AIDs in the U.S.)  Evelyn Richmond, Tim’s mother, called to explain her son’s illness to team owner Rick Hendrick. He had never heard of AIDs. . “I didn’t know what she was telling me,” Hendrick said.”It was like my first time …. I was confused. I didn’t know what it actually meant – what the prognosis was. The more you found out – the more you just … it hurt and it killed you.” Richmond spend Christmas and New Years in the hospital, dwindling from 171 to 148 pounds. The rumor was that he was using drugs.

Supermodel Gia Carangi, the first woman in America known to have died of AIDs, at her last photo shoot.

Rumors swelled further when Richmond missed the 1987 Daytona 500 with what was reported to be double pneumonia. Some said it was cocaine addiction. Others said AIDS. Drivers were divided in their opinion Kyle Petty didn’t believe them any more than he believed Richmond had pneumonia. He thought it was cancer. Richard Petty, stock-car racing’s King, felt then and now it was drugs. “There’s a question in my mind about drugs – that at the time he was driving that race car, he was pumped up,” Richard Petty says. “Whether he was or he wasn’t, I’m always questioning that. I always will.”

(As you’ve probably heard, a judge yesterday issued a temporary injunction to allow Jeremy Mayfield, whom NASCAR had banned for methamphetamine use, to enter the Coke Zero 400 on Saturday. Mayfield has contended all along that he was using Adderal for attention-deficit syndrome and Claritin-D, prescribed for allergies. So for now it’s a battle of the test labs. Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson submitted affidavits last week in a NASCAR filing stating drivers said they are not “willing to put my life at risk driving a race car on a NASCAR track with drivers testing positive for drugs that diminish their capacity to drive a race car.” Now, drivers can’t really be helped by taking steroids as other athletes do to improve performance, but Adderal is a “smart drug” used by many in academic to improve mental performance – obviously of great benefit to a race car driver.)

Richmond’s return to racing in spring 1987 triggered a media frenzy. He set track-record speeds at Darlington. At Rockingham, Richmond tried to run 500 miles, but couldn’t last more than 127. Hyde covered again, telling reporters, “Tim wanted to go on longer, but I pulled him in.” Richmond was too weak to run Charlotte’s Coca-Cola 600 in May, so he flew to Indianapolis for the Indy 500 instead.

Linda Vaughn, racing’s most famous beauty queen, got a call at her Indianapolis apartment shortly after midnight. He’d been partying and had to see her. “He fell into my arms, and his eyes rolled back, and he said, ‘What can I do? What can I do to make it up to you?’” says Vaughn, a longtime friend of hers. “That’s when he told me what was wrong.”

Linda Vaughan.

“And I said, `Go back and kick ass and take names, because you are a racer.” ” … He had a deep, dark lonely side. He was like a little lost boy sometimes. He always used to sing, `I Want You to Want Me, I Want You to Love Me.’ He used to drive me crazy with that song.”

Richmond was changing on the outside as well. In 1986 Richmond “wore threads that make Don Johnson look like a bag lady,” observed Godwin Kelly in the Daytona Beach News-Journal. “Now he wears baggy slacks and T-shirts. Last year he would fly to a hairstylist in Miami to have his locks sculpted and frosted; this year Richmond’s hair grows as it grows, cowlicks and all. Although he lost some 25 pounds during the illness, he’s gained more than that back, and doesn’t seem to mind the impending potbelly. ‘Before I got sick, I cared too much about what people thought of me,’ he says. ‘Now my goal is to enjoy Tim Richmond as Tim Richmond.”

Richmond missed the Daytona 500, suffering from double pneumonia, but he did manage to win two races in 1987 – Pocono and Riverside. His last race was at Michigan in August, finishing 29th. He resigned from Hendrick Motorsports that September. He would attempt a comeback in 1988, but he was banned from competition NASCAR after testing postive for a banned substance. Richmond sued NASCAR, was re-tested and summarily re-instated, but couldn’t find a car owner to sign him. He was last seen in public in Februrary 1988. His decline into the disease was now inexorable.

Richmond at the 1987 Pepsi Firecracker 400, won by Bobby Allison. Richmond finished 22d.

(In 1990, The  New York Times  reported that NASCAR had falsified Richmond’s drug  results to  keep him from racing.)

Shortly before he died on August 13, 1989, Richmond talked with Hendrick about making his AIDS diagnosis public — a question he struggled with to the end. “He always said maybe I should take a positive step and try to warn people,” Hendrick said, “but the country really wasn’t ready for it. We all prayed there would be a cure. We chased everything we could find. And if he did come forward, it might have been even worse for him.” His last months were filled with pain. “He suffered,” Hendrick says. “He hurt. He was ill. If he had a good day, he could see people. If he had a bad day, he couldn’t see people. I don’t think they had the wherewithal to keep you as comfortable as they do today, and he was really sick at times. I would go see him, and I would wait until it was a good time to go see him. If he wasn’t having a good day, then I’d talk to his mom.”

Richmond died as dawn broke over West Palm Beach on Aug. 13, 1989. Each January since, Jimmy Johnson turns his new desk calendar to that date and copies the words, so he won’t forget: “Tim died, 5:12 a.m.” Richmond was buried at Ashland County Memorial Park in Ohio following a private ceremony for the family. Charlotte Motor Speedway held a memorial service for him the next week. About 200 people attended. Fearing the obvious stigma, many of his past lovers refused to appear.

Later, Evelyn and Al Richmond asked their son’s doctor to announce the cause of death. “I had the thing sold to CBS,” Needham says, “But his mother said she just wasn’t ready to do that.” Now, it’s too late. “Hell, look at all the thousands of people who’ve got AIDS now. I couldn’t sell it now. … Then, it was brand new. Today it isn’t.”

A French AIDS poster.

Richmond’s parents now live in their son’s Lake Norman home. His golf clubs are in the front closet, and nine pair of boots, a few hats and favorite jackets still in his bedroom closet. Many personal things have been passed on to friends. Dodson, his Blue Max crew chief, has Richmond’s custom-made tuxedo. Harold Elliott, his old engine builder, has one of his cowboy hats.

Rick Hendrick saved Richmond’s road-race car, along with the uniforms and few helmets and trophies Richmond’s parents don’t have. He hopes to build a museum someday where he can display them. “There are just so many people who want to know more,” he said. So Hendrick and friends like veteran crew chief Harry Hyde hold on to what they have left of Richmond. Hyde, now 69, stores a roomful of mementos in his trailer – videotapes of each race, cases of Folgers coffee and stacks of photographs of Richmond in Victory Lane. “He wasn’t going to be like you wanted,” Hyde says. “He wasn’t going to be like mama wanted. He wasn’t going to be like Harry Hyde wanted. Or Folgers. Or Rick Hendrick. “Now if you can blame a guy for that ….

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A dream from late 1986: I was playing onstage with  ZZ Top at my rock n roll club, trading licks with Billy Gibbons so hot and sweet and nasty that the night itself becomes a vowel only women can mouth, in the high tide of their ecstasy … And sure enough, a woman walks up toward the stage, blonde curly hair, lavishly curved, wearing this tight white dress with black polka dots. And its me she wants, she stands there at the edge of the stage looking at me directly in her eyes, and in her eyes I see the eternal present, the moment I can never quite wedge myself into or breech the walls … And wake, to my sweaty forever-empty bed, badly hungover from some bottle-club closing, after a two hours’ sleep, gotta go to work …

Another dream, from the winter of 1986-87. I was walking in some vast Siberian wilderness, just snow and night and tundra as far from anything human as you can imagine, like the moon. Just walking, avoiding wolves (or were-wolves) whose eyes stared balefully out from thickets of trees.  The snow up to my knees and getting deeper. Then in a moonlit clearing I see a farmhouse with all its windows alight and smoke coming from the chimney. I approach from out of that black lonely wilderness and press my face to a window. Inside a pregnant woman sits on a rocker by a fireplace tended by a muscular, bearded man. Their happiness is brighter than the firelight and I would give anything to be inside, in the man’s place. But I know I cannot – it’s not my place, not with my kind of heart, my booze-addicted soul – and I turn reluctantly around and head back into the night, moonlight turning the frozen landscape a merciless blue-black, subzero winds blowing hard in the my face, wolves howling in the reaches I am lost in.

I got a DUI in April 1987 closing down one of my regular watering holes and that was about it. The judge gave me 120 hours of community service (I’d blown a .23) and ordered me to attend AA.  I was sober eight years, drank another six (almost destroying my second marriage), sobered up again a few weeks before 9/11.
I lost all interest in playing guitar and began to write, and that’s where I am this still-dark, hot summer morning in Florida, beginning to write. Becoming whoever I was meant to be, on paper at least. Each word part of the acceleration which gets me through each sentence, which gets me through each paragraph, which gets me through a Theme, each writing another cirucuit of the track, each Theme another race, accomplished for better or ill, fathering the next Theme’s gambits and conceits, its strolling thunder, always praying for grace, a nugget of truth, a bit of rain, you know, enough to water the garden today.

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The first 25 nominees for NASCAR’S Hall of Fame were announced yesterday, and the crew is an obvious Who’s Who of racing greatness:  Fireball Roberts and Joe Weatherley, David Pearson and Richard Petty, Darryl Waltrip and Bobby Allision, Cale Yarborough and Dale Earnhardt, Bud Moore and Junior Johnson and Rick Hendrick. Fans are being invited to be a part of the voting process—well, collectively their five picks will consist of one of the 51 votes to be cast, with the five first inductees announced last year.

Hall of Fame nominees “Fireball” Roberts, Drew Pearson, Cale Yarborough and Richard Petty.

It is ironic, perhaps, that NASCAR’s first Fabulous Five – the first round  to be voted into its Hall of Fame—occurs in the year when its decline was most evident. Better get the stamp of official history on this thing before it disappears, guys.

Tim Richmond was not one of the first Twenty Five nominees—not surprising, given all of the ambivalence which surrounds his legacy – but its sad, when you consider how that man raced round the track, unrelenting, hellbent, brilliantly, and certainly destined for more had not the deep dark wilderness found fangs to bite him with and haul him off from the track.

Well, that’s old history, part of NASCAR’s past which the official body would rather not  have us recall. But during an interview in the garage during the rain delay at yesterday’s practice, Dale Earnhardt Jr. talked about growing up at Daytona, how he and kids of other drivers and crew chiefs got to watch the race from a tower, no longer used, closed to Turn 1, how privileged he was to see so many races. Dale Jr. would have been 12 years old at the ’86 Pepsi Firecracker 400, watching his dad race toward a win that seemed certain until he blew and engine, blinded leader Buddy Baker with smoke and allowing Tim Richmond to slip through and take the lead and the win. Dale Jr. would see many duels between his dad and Tim Richmond that year, the best of their kind. How great it would be to see Dale Jr. move to the front of this year’s 400 and have it out with Kyle Busch or Tony Stewart, and race that way to the finish.

We can only dream. And remember …