Back home again in Indiana …
The hair still stands up on my arms and neck when the strains of that old World War I song rise over the massive public-address system, across the most massive grandstands on the face of the earth.
The song is about dreaming, longing, for things understood and held dear.
And it seems that I can see …
Time was when, by that line, the attention of more than 300,000 people — there were years when the Indiana State Police estimated 400,000 — was rapt.
I’ve covered the Kentucky Derby, and for lumps in throats and goose bumps, the playing of “My Old Kentucky Home” used to run a relatively muted second to the rising storms of emotion here.
Some of that was the sheer size of the crowd here, more than twice that at Churchill Downs. Some of it was the imminent danger to the competitors.
The gleaming candlelight, still shining bright …
I went to several Mardi Gras in my youth. For sheer milling madness and the need for cavalry charges of mounted police, nothing I ever saw at the corner of Bourbon and Canal Streets was wilder than the annual riot that spilled from the corner of 16th Street and Georgetown Road, for a mile in each direction, beginning at sundown Friday, not subsiding until sunrise Sunday.
By Sunday morning the ticket scalpers walked a complete pavement of flattened beer cans, and as race time neared the prices shot as high as $1,500 a seat. Three hundred thousand seats, and still this was one of the toughest tickets in sports.
The price for those same prime seats, up in the roofed main grandstands you always see in the pictures, plummeted to $10 on the rainy race day eve of 1996, and one distraught scalper shouted to the sky, “This race is gone, and it ain’t ever comin’ back.”
Through the sycamores for me …
CART broke away that year and hasn’t been back. But through the years nearly all the most radical rebels, Roger Penske, Chip Ganassi, even the Andrettis, have come straggling back one by one, bloodied by the ruinous civil war, swallowing their pride, trying to salvage something of American open-wheel racing, and most of all trying to save this once-titanic American institution.
I’m long past placing blame. I just wish it could be the most electrifying sports event in the world again.
Sometimes the eyelids of the semicomatose event flicker. Every year I hope that somehow they will open.
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They almost have, the last two years.
When Danica Patrick led late in the ’05 race, it was Indy again for a few minutes. And then an excellent but unknown English driver, Dan Wheldon, shot past her, and the eyelids shut again.
When Marco Andretti, at 19, led going into the final lap last year, electrifying a crowd that was down to maybe 250,000, it was Indy again for a few minutes, all the Andretti sorrow of all the years about to be salved and healed, along with the race itself.
But out of nowhere came a red and white blur — Penske’s engineers had outdone everybody else in horsepower again — and a nice, quiet young man with no Andretti-esque magic to his name, Sam Hornish Jr., won by a car length at the line.
The new-mown hay sends off its fragrance …
Time was when NASCAR could do nothing that even approached the foot of this Olympus. Struggling for any sort of attention, they invented in 1960 the world’s longest oval-track race, 600 miles, down at Charlotte.
And still, for more than 30 years, that race was little more than a Memorial Day afterthought.
Occasionally a NASCAR driver would come to race here, but the best run ever mounted from those ranks was by Donnie Allison, fourth, rookie of the year here in 1970. He never came back.
Formula One’s best did better here. Both Jim Clark and Graham Hill won.
But this was mostly the domain of the great U.S. open-wheel drivers. I was here when A.J. Foyt won his fourth one in 1977. His gleeful opening comments were far too profane to print nowadays.
Through the fields I used to roam …
And with that line, the thunderstorms of emotion would begin to roll and rumble, ready to explode at the crescendo of the moment.
There was not just danger, there was enormous innovation, sprung from the lineage of the techno-rivalry Harry Miller and the Brothers Duesenberg in the 1920s, on down through Andy Granatelli and Colin Chapman in the ’70s.
Sunday, 33 cars will start as usual. Thirty-one of them will be spec Dallaras, with two stragglers in outdated Panoz chassis. All will be powered by spec Honda engines and race on spec Firestone tires.
There is little innovation left. Only kit cars. Buy one and put it together.
Still they streak through the corners here with lightning grace that the oafish NASCAR cars cannot remotely match when they slip and slide and stumble around here each August.
When I dream about the moonlight on the Wabash …
The Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte on Sunday evening will have nearly all the household names of American motor racing, save for Patrick.
The years go on and on, the NASCAR dominance of America grows monolithic, the sadness wells and wells and will not go away for those who have revered the Indianapolis 500 for so long.
Can’t somebody restart Indy’s heart? Danica? Marco? Somebody? On behalf of the nation and much of the world.
How I long for my Indiana home …
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