A "Marred" Day

By Tom Callahan

More death at Indianapolis

"Marred" is the handy word regularly inserted in the second sentence of news reports after the race driver wins his race or loses it or qualifies for it in record time. "The day was marred . . ." Not ruined completely, just slightly marred, as our small pleasures are forever being slightly marred. Gordon Smiley was slightly marred at Indianapolis two weekends ago, just as Gilles Villeneuve had been in Belgium the week before that. They are dead, of course.

Who has died is always news, but death in auto racing never is; it is an expected part of the game. At Indianapolis, 49 drivers have won the 500-mile race, and 62 people have died there. One-quarter of all the racers who have competed at Indy since 1911 have been killed somewhere or other in a race car. Sportswriter Jim Murray's bitter line years ago hangs on still, like the last note of taps: "Gentlemen, start your coffins."

For some reason, people can be horrified enough by a boxer's detached retina to implore him to quit fighting before it is too late, and yet be strangely unmoved by photographs of a man on fire in a disintegrating race car. Hockey fights are a sports fan's idea of an outrage, and a defensive back's how-to book on spear tackling is considered obscene. Auto racing is just auto racing.

"All I think Gordon wanted was a piece of the action," said Driver Bill Alsup at Smiley's funeral. "Gordon didn't know anything but 'fast,' " said Derek Mower, Smiley's crew chief. "If you hit wrong, I don't care if you're in a Sherman tank," said A.J. Foyt. "It's all over." Then Dennis Firestone, Smiley's close friend, dried his tears and went out and qualified for this Sunday's race. "I know Gordon would have wanted me to," he said.

Probably so. That these men know something the rest of us do not is undeniable. Merle Bettenhausen, a man with stretched, shiny pink skin and a hook for a right arm, said one time in Indy's Gasoline Alley, "I know why you feel sorry for me, but you don't know why I feel sorry for you." The name Bettenhausen is engraved at Indianapolis everywhere but on the trophy. The father, Tony, died in a practice run in 1961. Two of his sons, Gary and Tony Jr., both drive at Indy. Merle would too, but his arm happens to have been sliced off ten years ago in the Michigan 200. "We are discoverers," Merle said. "You may be alive, and you may have two arms. But you have never felt it."

Last month, in a remarkable comeback from a 2 1/2-year layoff, two-time world Formula One Champion Niki Lauda won the Long Beach Grand Prix. The layoff had been voluntary. The little Austrian simply stepped out of the cockpit one day and announced, "I have lost the desire." Lauda could no longer bring himself to take the car "to the limit, as I am supposed to do." So he quit.

Nobody would say Lauda lost his nerve. "Desire" is the right word. In a fearful and fiery 1976 crash in Germany, Lauda's helmet had been ripped off, his left ear burned off, his lungs seared; he was given the last rites. Six weeks later he drove again, and one year later he was champion again. Then Lauda walked away. Why did he come back? "The challenge," he said.

Mark Donohue, the 1972 Indy winner, quit for a time because of an expressed feeling of dread. He got over it and died in the Austrian Grand Prix at Graz. Dashing Peter Revson gave "Miss World" a playful squeeze and asked, "Is there a better life?" His ended in the South African Grand Prix at Johannesburg.

Aficionados of the sport seem much less upset by bleeding men than by bleeding hearts who always point to the slaughter. Some 450,000 people will perch or picnic at the Speedway on Sunday. Nobody knows how many of them are ghouls spreading their blankets beside a bad intersection.

In the dispatches on Smiley's death, it was quickly pointed out that nobody had died at the old "brickyard" since 1973, when Art Pollard was killed in qualifications, Swede Savage was fatally injured in the race, and Armando Teran was run over by a fire truck speeding the wrong way toward Savage's crash. (That was also the year Salt Walther was maimed, if maiming counts.)

Teran was a pit crewman, just 22. To someone standing a few feet away, the sound of the thud was enough. Teran was dead. But the reflex thought was the irony of betrayal, not the horror of racing. Who would think to look both ways before stepping out into the alltime one-way street? George Bignotti, the famed engine builder, picked up Armando Teran's shoes. After the rest of the debris was picked up, the race resumed.

--By Tom Callahan

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