Brickyard Just Doesn’t Seem Same

INDIANAPOLIS — Wait a minute! I came back here to cover the Indianapolis 500! But I can’t find it. Whatever happened to it? Where is everybody? Who are these guys?

I know what an Indianapolis 500 is supposed to be like. I’ve been coming here since 1963, when Parnelli Jones won it with oil leaking all over the track.

That’s the kind of Indy I remember. Full of Andrettis, Unsers, Bettenhausens, Mearses, Rutherfords, Vukoviches, Penskes, Danny Sullivans, Fittipaldis, Rahals. Household names. Racers, not chauffeurs. They used to make movies about Indianapolis racers. With Clark Gable. As Norma Desmond said in Sunset Boulevard, “We had faces in my day!”

Now, what have we got--Billy Boat? Give me a break! Nice name. But what’s a Billy Boat? An opera, right? Is it a name or a description of his driving style? And what if I told you there’s a Marco Greco in here? Would you know what his sport is? A flamenco dancer, right?

And the cars! What, pray tell, is a G Force-Aurora? That’s an Indy car?! Hey! We used to have Offenhausers. Novis. And a Lola chassis. Screaming banshees that would rattle the sky as they went into the short chutes. Traveling earaches. They’d come down the stretch like World War III.

Remember the years they had the turbine cars? The whoosh-mobiles? They just whispered around the track. Everybody hated them. You gotta have noise in an Indy 500. Americans love noise.

They also love speed. Wasn’t it only a couple of years ago, Scott Brayton clocked 231.604 mph in a qualifying run? Scott Goodyear clocked 230.759? You had to make 225.306 just to get in the race.

And what is the top qualifying this year--218? You’ve got to be kidding! That wouldn’t get you in the ’94 race, never mind on the pole. A 206.512 puts you in this grid. Been a long time since a 206 would put you in an Indy field. I figured in the natural progression of things, Indy cars would be nudging 250 by now.

I don’t want to get wrapped up in the controversy. Tony George says he’s trying to return racing to what it was before the big bucks took it out of the build-it-in-a-Torrance- garage-and-truck-it-to-Indy.

But how far do you go? Back to the Mormon Wasp? They had 17 rookies in the field last year. They have 13 this year. I can remember when they fainted around here if they had more than one.

What was wrong with the old guard, the old way of racing? Too fast? Too experienced?

It wasn’t broke, but they “fixed” it. They said they wanted to save racing. In order to save it, I guess, it was first necessary to kill it.

Tony George owns the ball. So he makes the rules or he takes it and goes home with it, I guess.

But, you know, I like movies with John Wayne or Humphrey Bogart in them. I like operas in which Pavarotti sings, ballgames in which Maddux or Koufax pitches, Ruth or Junior Griffey bat, fights with a Joe Louis or even a Mike Tyson in them, Super Bowls with Troy Aikman, golf tournaments with Tiger Woods.

It’s about stars.

Front-office brawls are a bore.

All I know is how they affect us journalistically. You spend 50 years building up characters, dramatizing their performances, mythologizing their accomplishments.

Then one day you look around and they’re all gone. In their prime. And you’re left with a “Who’s He” instead of a “Who’s Who.” It’s as if golf decided to restrict the field in the Masters to Nike Tour players and disenfranchised Tiger Woods, Nick Faldo and Fred Couples. As if baseball had gone ahead with its replacement players, and tennis went back to being amateur and banned Pete Sampras and Steffi Graf. How many years you think it would have taken us knights of the press (and TV) to build the newcomers up to size? A lifetime?

It comes down to--Is Indianapolis bigger than the sum of its parts? The Indy Racing League is betting that way.

But is it? Indianapolis has always been an American tribal rite--like a World Series, a Kentucky Derby.

But let me tell you on a personal level what has happened. Every other year, it has been advisable to arrange your housing for the Indianapolis 500 the year before. Or at least six months before.

This year, for some reason, I had neglected to clear it. We came down to mid-May. In a panic, I called a hotel on the south side where a colleague was staying. I expected the worst. But what I got was “No problem! When do you want to check in?”

A check of the geography showed that venue far from the track. So, with crossed fingers, ready for pleading, we tried another hotel nearer the action. There was no problem there, either.

There’s plenty of room in the race too. As many as 109 cars have showed up to try to get in the usual 33 spots in this thing. In 1974, they had such a logjam that 10 cars were left on the starting line when the gun went off signifying the end of qualifying.

There was no logjam this year. They let everybody in. They boosted the number of cars eligible to 35. You had to go back to 1979 to find a 35-car field and, before that, back to the two-man cars of the ‘30s.

In past years, in the overcrowded city, you often had to make a desperate last-minute call to PPG or Texaco or some other corporate sponsor to shoe-horn you into an overcrowded hotel.

It’s a good thing you don’t have to do that this year. Because corporate sponsors--such as Texaco, Budweiser, Shell Oil, Target, Valvoline, et al.--are as long gone as the Marmon Wasp. They don’t block out complete floors of hotel rooms for their best customers any more.

In a way, this was the event that pioneered action sports advertising. Long before the days when golfers went around with Amana hats and Cadillac shirts on the course, before the athletic shoe insignia was on every baseball cap, before corporate America began to buy into other sports, Indy cars went around with more ads on them than the Wall Street Journal or the 11 o’clock news.

Maybe that’s why Tony George wants them to go slower. So the people can read the ads. Even though they may say only “This Space Available.”