Two days later, Tony Stewart drove 1,100 miles in two races on one day, the Indy 500, averaging about 153.6 MPH for about three hours, fifty-two minutes, and then the Coca-Cola 600, 138.1 MPH for four hours, twenty-one minutes. All the while dozens of other drivers were bumping and scraping him, trying to run him off the track, and he was remembering to push the talk-back button to discuss gas consumption, tire use, and who was coming up behind him. Watching Stewart bounce and babble after his long day, I thought of my own 24-mile, twelve-minute taste of absolute concentration under incomparably less challenging conditions and was awed by his feat. If I had ever thought that all you needed was a heavy foot and a death wish to drive wide open on a banked track, I was now disabused.
Later on the evening of my run, after my adrenaline had drained, driving a rental car with far less aggression than usual, I felt amused at and offended by road hogs, ragers, and show-offs. They couldn’t get to me anymore. I had driven at speed.
For a while after that I found myself writing more about race tactics, but I eventually settled back into my version of anthropology, the circuit-riding NASCAR preachers, the winking attitude toward cheating (after all, NASCAR’s heritage was moonshiners outracing revenue agents), and the military culture in NASCAR families. All those brothers, sisters, cousins, and friends on active duty were making satellite calls and sending e-mails back to the garage. The citizens of NASCAR Nation were among the first to raise money to buy armor for Humvees in Afghanistan and Iraq.
I followed Mark Martin, of course, but as he faded that year it was harder to justify writing about him. By the end of that “Year at Speed,” as my NASCAR columns were titled, the rest of the country had caught on and I was feeling nostalgic for the old days. I remembered that at my first NASCAR cocktail party I had bellied up to the bar and asked for a white wine. The room had fallen silent. An old-time writer had told me kindly that I could order any kind of Budweiser I wanted. At my last cocktail party of that year, I bellied up and asked for a white wine, and the bartender asked, “Chardonnay, Pinot Grigio, or sauvignon blanc?”
Pour it, pal. Ishmael’s damp drizzle was gone, I was smiling. I was living with Lois, clearly the woman for me, sharp, quirky, fun, independent. She wrote about psychology and was not shy about analyzing me. We squabbled, but always worked through it, something I had never achieved before. I wondered why her dog, Rudy, was in bed with us. “Why are you in bed with us?” she’d snap. It was not always amusing. If I married her, it would be the fourth. Analyze that.
My dad thought four was a questionable number, but he loved Lois (“She is your format,” he said) and Rudy, too. Mom was dead two years now, and Dad, ninety-six, was living alone an hour away. I went up to see him often, and the blooming of our relationship was a joy. We roamed the county looking for secondhand books, ate in truck-stop diners, retold old stories in a relaxed way we had never shared before. When I slept over, I could count on being awoken to the kind of scrambled-egg or French toast breakfast I’d had as a kid. Only I didn’t have to rush off to school. Dad was very independent, and when he let me cut his toenails, I knew he was feeling as easy as I was.
I kept a fan’s eye on NASCAR over the next couple of years. I wrote a young adult novel, Yellow Flag, about a teenager in a famous stock car family who wasn’t sure he wanted to race. Promoting that in 2007 with John Jeppesen got me back to the races, which was fun, although seeing my old writer pals from a new angle was not; they scarfed up copies of my book, promotional plastic coffee cups, and free food as if I were just another sponsor, and for all their promises to mention Yellow Flag in their notes columns, few did. I sensed begrudgment. Did they think I had I crossed to the other side, did they resent me as a scorpion who’d gotten out of the barrel? “Bunch of freeloaders,” I groused to John, who shrugged. He’d been at this a long time. I thought more about My Great Drive, now six years in the past. Who was I calling a freeloader?
By then Mark had retired after nineteen years with the same team. He raced part-time here and there. Eventually, the recession hit NASCAR. Corporations were reluctant to spend millions of dollars to run a competitive car, and fans were hard-pressed to pay hundreds for tickets.
And then, in 2009, Mark Martin came back. It was the summer of the old dogs. Fifty-nine-year-old Tom Watson came within a putt of winning the British Open; forty-year-old quarterback Brett Favre unretired to lead the Minnesota Vikings to a winning season; thirty-seven-year-old Lance Armstrong, after a three-season layoff, finished third in the Tour de France; and I was the host of LIFE (Part 2), a weekly PBS show about the challenges and opportunities of later life, something I knew about.
Martin had a powerful new owner, Hendrick Motorsports, and a new sponsor, Kellogg’s. He seemed happier than he had ever been. The word around the garage was that the mellower culture of Hendrick had something to do with his new mood. And the pressure was off: Mark’s teammates now included the superstar Gordon, the three-time champion Jimmie Johnson, and Dale, Jr., still underachieving but since his father’s death the sports’s most popular driver. Not much was expected of Martin beyond some mentoring.
I began writing this book as the NASCAR season began. Watching races on TV had become more and more rewarding. There were in-car cameras with a driver’s-eye view and little techno-tutorials by former crew chiefs. I could start worrying about tire tread and gas consumption along with Mark, as I now thought of him. That’s how you know you’re a fan.
“I know that my reaction times are not what they were 15 or 20 years ago,” Mark told Sporting News. “But I also know that what I do when I react is tempered by those 20 years of experience.”
When Mark won a fourth race, the most of any driver at that point in the season, he was suddenly in contention for the Chase for the Sprint Cup, in which the top twelve drivers in the standings enter a ten-race postseason play-off.
I became addicted to Scenedaily.com, the best site for NASCAR news and features. I read it before I read the Times. I was feeling more excited than Mark was sounding. “Everybody gets a little too caught up in all this points stuff,” he said. “I’m happy to be driving fast stuff.”
I had to fill out a publicity questionnaire that day for another YA novel. “I’m happy to be writing new stuff,” I wrote. It wasn’t until I wrote it that I realized it was true.
Mark said that he was not stressing as much as he used to. “I can’t help if we have a flat tire, or we get caught up in a wreck, or a part breaks, or if rain comes at an inopportune time. There’s things you can’t control that I’m not going to stay awake at night worrying about.”
Only an old guy could say that and believe it. Winning may be the payoff, but the real victory is riding to the buzzer.
But it would be nice if he won.
When Mark won the twenty-ninth race of the season, he moved into first place. It was possible! By the thirtieth race he was back in second place, his place. And he was sounding like the perennial runner-up, at least to Scenedaily.com.
“I have learned a lot and I have seen a lot and I have come to realize that I’m no Dale Earnhardt,” he said. “My record don’t stand up to his, just doesn’t. And when you stand me up against Jeff Gordon, it just don’t stand up to it, man. I understand that. . . . So I think it’s pretty awesome to hold my own against guys like that in the sport. I gave them something to shoot at in the race from time to time. I gave their fans something to be concerned about and I gave mine something to cheer about.”
With one race left, Mark was second in the standings, 108 points behind Jimmie Johnson, who seemed to be storming toward a record-breaking fourth straight championship. I began to wishful-think like a fan: if Johnson ran worse than twenty-fifth at the Homestead-Miami Speedway—a little accident, a blown engine, a fuel miscalculation could do it—and Martin finished first . . .
Johnson was a good-looking, amiable cipher, a fine, if boring, emissary for the sport. But I could sense that sentimental drumbeat of hope for Mark. Or maybe it was just
my own heart. Can the old guy do it? Can I do it? Do what?
I made some calls to old NASCAR friends to talk about Mark. He really was happy, they said. He had come to terms with his place in the standings. “This has been the best year of my life,” he said. “You know, I found so much peace and happiness . . . as well as success on the racetrack.”
The last race was dull. Johnson and Mark drove carefully. Johnson finished fifth, good enough to cruise into NASCAR history. Mark finished twelfth in the race and, for the fifth time in his career, second in the championship standings.
“There’s no frustration,” he said afterward. “I don’t have one of those trophies, so I don’t know what one of those things would mean to me, but I can’t imagine it meaning any more than the feeling that I felt from so many people, competitors, and fans.”
He said there were a few things he would work on for next season.
Way to go, Mark. I don’t have the legs I had when I chased Ali, but I have smoother moves now. We’ll show the bastards our tailpipes.
Chapter Fifteen
Shooting Stars
On July 7, 2009, the day Lance Armstrong was two-tenths of a second off the lead of the Tour de France, I injected myself with testosterone, visualizing the oily yellow drug powering me up the Ram Island hills, the steepest on my routine twelve-mile bicycle ride. Those hills are my Pyrenees. For ten years now, when my quads begin to quiver and my mind begs me to kick off the stirrups and walk the bike, I start chanting “LanceArmstrong, LanceArmstrong, LanceArmstrong,” until I reach the top of the hill. It has always worked. It was especially meaningful in the fall of 2005, coming back from weeks of chemo after a second recurrence of testicular cancer, the brand of bully that Lance and I share.
Lance didn’t win the Tour in 2009—he finished third—but it was remarkable that he competed at all. He had retired for three racing seasons after winning the Tour a record seven times in a row. He was thirty-seven but as tough and focused as ever. He’s the closest I have right now to a celebrity jock hero.
So, Bobbin, let me ask you this: How would you feel if it turned out that the rumors were true about his use of performance-enhancing drugs?
C’mon, Lippy, isn’t it time to get past this chemical witch hunt?
Obviously, I have a personal take on PEDs in sports. Since 1991, when a second orchiectomy ended my natural testosterone production, I’ve been shooting the juice. Filling my prescription is often a hassle, even at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, where my surgeon, Paul Russo, prescribes it; pharmacists like to remind me that muscle pumpers like Arnold Schwarzenegger made the restrictions necessary and Barry Bonds, Marion Jones, Mark McGwire, and A-Rod didn’t help matters. I don’t blame any of them. Arnold and the next generation of enhanced performers, driven by their ambition and their audiences’ lust for spectacular action, have merely affirmed and endorsed the nation’s addiction to quick-fix upgrades.
Though I consider myself a prohibitionist for PED use among teenagers, I’m a libertarian when it comes to grown-ups. If Mark McGwire wanted to become a monster, it’s his body. As far as the “level playing field” that moralists call for, I think it is level—especially when McGwire was batting against all those enhanced pitchers.
When Roger Clemens’s trainer accused him of using steroids, Clemens denied it and filed suit. But my problem with Clemens was not his alleged drug use. It’s my old problem, doctor: he is the quintessential jock bully, in this case the big, white Republican who makes his own rules, lies, cheats, and waves phony family values. He manipulated and sacrificed associates and teammates to accomplish his mission. He was a moral black hole, but in Jock Culture Clemens was hailed for intimidating opponents and for winning.
Clemens is a onetime fat boy from Ohio whose biological father walked out, whose adoptive father died when Roger was nine, who was raised by his mother into a socially awkward, sports-obsessed, lifetime adolescent. His trainer said that he had injected Clemens’s wife with human growth hormone so she could pose for Sports Illustrated in a bikini.
About the drugs. I came out of the Greenie Era, when amphetamines were as common as M&M’s in major-league clubhouses and probably more popular. Ballplayers popped speed to jolt themselves awake after nights on the town. I did, too, once or twice, stopped when I found out it made my heart race but didn’t improve my prose. I’m still saving myself for the smart pills.
Rumors of widespread steroid use among American athletes surfaced during the 1968 Mexico Olympics, as did the payoffs to wear Adidas or Puma shoes. By that time we knew about drug experimentation as well as state professionalism among Soviet bloc athletes. I was writing a column then and wrote about it but did no serious investigations. I was more interested in racism in sports and the burgeoning, short-lived Athletic Revolution.
Twenty years later at NBC, I suggested a piece to the Nightly News on steroid use. I’d been getting good information from Jack Scott, Phil Shinnick, and some others from the old days. NBC News executives turned me down. They didn’t want anything that might besmirch the Games, an NBC Sports event. The wall between News and Sports, which was an entertainment division, was not very high. Moving from CBS to NBC in 1988, from Sunday morning to the early-evening network newscasts, doubled my salary, but I was frustrated in the job. I was marginalized in Seoul—the network wanted happy American stories.
I felt some vindication when the Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson came up dirty in Seoul on September 24, and I was awakened in the middle of the night to cobble together a piece from my previously rejected research. Later, Johnson and his coach admitted the steroid use and said they had been doing it just to keep up with everyone else.
My main lessons on performance-enhancing drugs, other than from the tip of my own syringe, came from two of the more complex and interesting athletes I wrote about, the so-called Running Doc, George Sheehan, and the Olympic hammer-throwing champion Harold Connolly.
In late 1991, toward the end of my first year back at the Times and only a few months after I began testosterone replacement, the Shrivers and Kennedys, who ran the Special Olympics, took exception to one of my columns and sent one of their executives, Connolly, to New York to reeducate me. I knew him from his competing days.
Harold and I spent the day touring Special Olympics facilities and talking to athletes and coaches. By evening, I liked Connolly. Once an aloof, driven athlete, a master at psyching out rivals and snubbing the press, he had become a friendly, thoughtful quasi-public man. He was sixty years old.
“I think you have to be selfish to be a world-class athlete,” he told me that day over drinks. “For more than twenty years my life revolved around throwing the hammer. I think I’m a better person now. Certainly a better father. I’ve mellowed, matured. Some of it’s this job.”
And some of it was coming to terms with his own handicap. A birth accident had left him with a crippled left arm.
Connolly remembered struggling to keep from being dumped into classes for the handicapped in working-class Brighton, outside Boston. In his senior year in high school, he managed to pass the football physical by keeping his withered arm behind his back while a bored school doctor listened to his heart. Faced with the permission slip, the coach reluctantly allowed Harold to try out. He “went nuts” on the field, tackling everything that moved, often with his legs since his left arm didn’t work. By the fourth game, he was a starter.
He was a mediocre shot-putter at Boston College until his senior year. Trying to hurry up track practice to get a ride home one day, he retrieved the hammers and threw them back to the hammer throwers. He threw them farther than they did.
As he told me his story, I compared him to the pampered, money-grubbing, drug-pumped athletes of the day. Harold, the natural man, was the real role model.
At the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, Harold met Olga Fikotova, the beautiful Czechoslovak gold-medal discus thrower. It was a sensational international love story. They married, raised four children in California, divorced. Afte
r retiring from thirty years of teaching English in the Santa Monica school system, Connolly joined Special Olympics.
Well oiled after a relaxed dinner, I said, “You could have been some disabled poster boy. What a role model.”
“I think about that,” said Connolly. “But times were different. They didn’t treat the disabled with dignity then. I couldn’t stand to be treated differently. I wish I had been able to talk about my arm then. I guess I might have helped some people.”
“It’s all timing,” I said. “If you’d been born later, taken steroids, you could have won a few more gold medals.”
He looked at me incredulously. “You kidding? I was using after 1960. We all were.”
I’ve turned that over in my head ever since. It was right in front of me from the beginning of my career. All those pimply shoulders, known as backne, in pro football locker rooms. (Could I have actually thought the shoulder pads were chafing?) But no one seemed to care about the monster linemen or the sculpted sprinters, women as well as men. The snide remarks in the press box—and there were plenty—always came with a that’s-the-way-of-the-world shrug. How you gonna find out? we asked one another. And who was going to print it? Editors weren’t interested. Investigations are expensive, and besides, they said, fans don’t want to know. But it shouldn’t have mattered. Aren’t the newshounds who cover beats supposed to sniff out stories?
I had been out of sports in 1973 when Harold told a Senate subcommittee holding hearings on steroids that during the 1968 Olympic trials, “any number of athletes on the 1968 Olympic team . . . had so much scar tissue and so many puncture holes in their backsides that it was difficult to find a fresh spot to give them a new shot.”
He told the senators, “I learned that larger doses and more prolonged use increased muscular body weight, overall strength, and aggressiveness but not speed, flexibility, or coordination. My vertical jump went up, but so did my blood pressure and cholesterol levels. Every time I felt unusual physical reactions, a twinge here a twinge there, a headache, disrupted sleep, or diminished libido, I retreated from the testosterone or steroids—too apprehensive to take them regularly.”
An Accidental Sportswriter Page 19