Anyway, nobody died.
Reports of Sunday’s Indianapolis 500 stretch run, describing “a perilous blocking move” by eventual winner Simon Pagenaud swerving back and forth across the track ahead of runner-up Alexander Rossi in the final lap, recalled a similar—and frightening—drivers’ dare in 1989, the one time I covered the celebrated race.
That high-risk duel 30 years ago, between Emerson Fittipaldi and Al Unser, Jr., hardly resembled typical last-second sports drama—the decisive jump shot, walk-off home run or tackle-breaking touchdown dash. It was deadly serious, a game of chicken at speeds in excess of 200 miles per hour. And a reminder that an aversion to chronicling human fatalities was a major factor in making sports my chosen sphere of journalism.
Automotive competition has its attraction, certainly. In what feels like a previous lifetime, I in fact partook in a gymkhana event, maneuvering my old MGB through a parking-lot maze of cones and turns for time. I have no recollection how well I did, but it was great fun. And quite safe.
Compare that to my first racing assignment at the 1979 Formula One championship in Watkins Glen, N.Y., when it was required, in obtaining press credentials, to sign a form acknowledging the possibility of collateral damage (including death) to us non-combatants. A real attention-getter, that.
A subsequent mission in 1982 to report on the Indy 500 “speed week,” the series of training sessions leading up to the race, began with the news that Gordon Smiley, attempting to qualify for his third Indy, had just hit the wall at 190 miles per hour and died instantly. He was 36.
A sobering twist of the traditional Indy 500 opening command of “Gentlemen, start your engines” once was offered by Jim Murray, the often snarky sportswriting great, by beginning his column on the race with “Gentlemen, start your coffins.”
Department of irony: A first impression in 1989 of finally witnessing the self-proclaimed America’s Greatest Sporting Spectacle was mostly dullness. Cars whizzed past, over and over for hours, in a deafening, almost lulling routine, while the usual attrition of broken automotive parts thinned the field.
But when Fittipaldi and Unser began their treacherous jousting through the last half-dozen laps, the speeds and the drivers’ abandon became unsettlingly evident. With continuous turns rushing at them in a blur and no room to spare in the corners, Fittipaldi and Unser were dodging and weaving dangerously past lapped cars. Unser had barreled past Fittipaldi on the straightaway with just more than two laps to go, then wandered all over the track to keep Fittipaldi from latching onto his draft. There seemed every chance that if the wall didn’t get them, a car was bound to.
So, when it ended no worse than it did, it was fairly miraculous. Unser was literally bumped from the lead when Fittipaldi’s right front tire clipped Unser’s left real tire and sent Unser into a slow spin, sliding backwards into the outside restraining wall. Somehow, trailing racers avoided a multi-car pile-up as Unser slipped back across the track and onto the infield.
The baseball expression “suicide squeeze” came to mind. But in a literal sense. Yet Unser, having lived through it, insisted afterwards that it was “just racing.”
“Y’know,” he said, “in racing there’s just times when you don’t think about life, you don’t think about money, you think about winning. [Fittipaldi] wasn’t going to lift [his foot off the accelerator], and neither was I.”
According to the Indy 500 website, only 16 drivers have died during the race in its 103 years (and another 27 during qualifying and practice sessions.) Fittipaldi, now 72, and Unser, now 57, could be said to be too old to die young anymore.
Veteran Indy 500 driver Johnnie Parsons years ago argued that he and his colleagues “are not wild and wooly characters who do not care if they live or die, nor or they clowns or speed-happy maniacs. They are men with a special skill….envied by many who were not gifted with the daring spirit and the ability to live life to the fullest.”
Still. Kids, don’t try this stuff at home.