One of the many highlights of the Memorial Day weekend is the annual Indianapolis 500 at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway (IMS).
A good friend and former bowling teammate, Randy Chelf, got me a crowd-control job at IMS in 1990. Randy and I were one of tens-of-thousands of “Yellow Shirts” because the uniform was a – well, duh – yellow shirt with the IMS official logo screen-printed on the back. I got to see every Indy Car and NASCAR race at Indianapolis in the 90s by working as a yellow shirt, but my favorite part was practice days. The picture ID we also got was an access pass to anywhere on the IMS grounds, so I’d spend hours each weekday walking around. My favorite area was near the garages, where you could literally be run over by a race car, or as what nearly happened to me one year, Mario Andretti on his bicycle.
In 1992, the first man to win the Indy 500 four times, A.J. Foyt, was struggling getting his car to run the way he wanted. When crews needed to have the motor running while they worked on it, they would open the garage door so the exhaust would not asphyxiate the driver or crew members. A running race car motor attracted all of us nosey spectators. I called it “The Great Big Sucking Sound.”
Approximately 40 people and I were watching Foyt and his crew tinker with the engine, and all of us could see that Foyt was not happy. Suddenly, some guy yelled, “Hey A.J. Come out and meet the people.” “No,” Foyt said without looking up. A couple of minutes later, the same guys yelled, “Hey A.J. Come out and meet the people.” Foyt just gave the guy one of those looks that could melt ice cream in Alaska. A couple of minutes later, the same guy yelled, “Hey A.J. We’re going to (another driver’s) garage. He’ll come out to meet the people.” “Then good f****ing riddance,” Foyt yelled back. A.J. Foyt does not care about political or Christian correctness.
Shortly thereafter, Foyt and his crew stopped working, rolled the car back into the garage and closed the garage door. As I started to leave, I noticed out of the corner of my eye the access door open and there stood A.J. Foyt. He stuck his head out, looked both ways like he was about to cross the street, and said to the guy to my right, “Is that a**hole still out there?” When he heard that the answer was “No”, Foyt smiled and said, “Then I think I’ll come out and meet the people.”
Idiot me did not have a notebook or my camera, so my only record of that day is the memory of A.J. Foyt shaking my hand and thanking me when I wished him luck. I’m glad I was one of the people A.J. Foyt came out to meet.
