INDIANAPOLIS — One night this summer, an ex-driver we’ll call Easy Earl walked into the pits at a track he hadn’t visited since 2006, five years after he’d put away his helmet. He’d been a winner there and at a few other tracks. Not a big winner, you understand; in a good season he’d grab three or four features. But Easy Earl was respected, admired and well-liked.
He was wearing a polo shirt and a snowbird’s tan. In 2015, he’d retired from his job with one of his state’s largest industrial manufacturers, so he and his wife now wintered at their modest second home in Florida.
That made sense. Easy Earl always was the responsible type. No matter how his racing weekends went — good, bad, sore from a crash — he never missed a Monday at work. He started on the shop floor, then transitioned to supplier relations. For 35 years he earned well, but he and the missus lived cautiously, saving for rainy days, college tuitions for the kids and their golden years.
Along the way, he lost touch with racing. He joked that these days he didn’t do much of anything, yet he was always busy.
Suddenly, Easy Earl’s eyebrows shot upward.
“I’ll be damned,” he said, looking past me. “Is that who I think it is?”
He excused himself to greet a driver whose hair was as white as his Nomex suit. We’ll call him Fast Phil. He and Easy Earl had run thousands of laps together. They were roughly the same age: 61, 62, somewhere in there.
From his early 20s, Fast Phil won wherever he went. Big track, bullring, flat, high-banked, he’d be in the mix. Come spring and fall, the special-event seasons, he’d hit the road hunting money and trophies. The sight of him back then made the locals wince.
“Guess we’re running for second,” a mechanic would mutter.
Fast Phil spent his career as a hired gun, driving for team owners who didn’t worry about what things cost. He was a professional racer, feeding a family with his cut of the prize money he earned with his quick hands and his right foot.
You wouldn’t have ever considered him well-off, but between his racing and his wife’s office job, things were fine. Every autumn, their kids had new school clothes. There was never a current-model car in the driveway, but the cars that were there looked sharp.
Fast Phil had it made, man. He slept late, but he wasn’t lazy. Most weeknights he’d be at his team’s shop, tinkering until well after midnight. He embodied the short-track life.
Watching them talk, I thought of all the post-race occasions when I’d wander past Easy Earl’s pit stall and catch him looking over to where Fast Phil’s car was parked. He’d see the trophy — another one — standing on the roof. He’d watch the men lean in to shake Fast Phil’s hand, and the kids jostling for autographs.
When it was just the two of us, Easy Earl would admit to the obvious: that he’d give just about anything to be Fast Phil. He wondered what that felt like.
Be careful what you wish for.
Maybe a dozen years ago, it became clear that Fast Phil was up against an opponent he’d never worried about — time. For 25 years, he’d survived on raw speed and guile.
But in the run-up to his 50th birthday, you saw things starting to change. He wouldn’t attempt the bold moves that once looked routine. The usual wins and top-five finishes became sevenths and eighths. There were flashes of brilliance, but they grew increasingly rare.
His rides now were nothing special and it gutted him to accept 30 percent of the winnings rather than the standard 40, or the 50 percent he’d commanded at peak form. He had no savings to speak of. His wife worked extra hours and Fast Phil took offseason jobs in body shops and garages owned by friends.
Two things kept him racing — a desperate hope that he had one more victory in him and a fear of dealing with the real world. The kids were grown and gone and that was good. But the mortgage still had years to go and his wife’s car was old enough to vote. Who wants to wake up thinking about things like that?
Easy Earl hadn’t been around to see his friend’s downhill slide, so it jolted him to see Fast Phil get lapped in the main event. He hadn’t been sloppy; he was just slow. A guy beside him in the grandstands, recognizing Easy Earl, whispered that Fast Phil had struggled for the last several years. In the end, time beats everybody.
Driving home, Easy Earl felt an emotion he never imagined he’d attach to Fast Phil. For the first time, Easy Earl felt sorry for him.
Fast Phil felt something new, too, on his own ride home. You could call it envy. Security, he found himself thinking, looked good on Easy Earl. He wondered what that felt like.
There’s a moral in there somewhere. I’ve known too many Fast Phils, short-track men who bet it all on racing and lost. They led loud, colorful lives and none of them ever worried about tomorrow.
But tomorrow always came.