The Best American Sports Writing 2014 (31 page)

Same thing if you watched
SportsCenter
in the early '90s. You'd hear Dick Trickle's name alongside a litany of middle- to back-of-the-pack finishes. Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann thought the name sounded like a joke, so they said it as often as they could after NASCAR highlights. “I thought,
Well, this guy's not any good
,” Patrick told
Spin
magazine in 1996, which pointed out Trickle's last-place finish in the Daytona 500 that year. “But he's a good old boy and he really represents what NASCAR used to be. He just loves to drive.” Patrick and Olbermann weren't the only people who kept referring to Dick Trickle by his full name. Announcers did it. Fans did it. At the track, only his wife called him Richard. To everyone else, Dick Trickle had that three-syllable cadence that made you want to say the whole thing, like Kasey Kahne or Ricky Rudd. At first, it's funny, then familiar, and finally it just feels easy, not formal. When you say Dick Trickle, you know a story is coming.

When Dick Trickle finally got to NASCAR, to the biggest stage he'd ever been on, he was fading. By that time, people had attached a lot of labels to him, some true, some half true, and some not true at all. Hard drinking. Hard partying. Hard living. Veteran. Journeyman. Chain-smoker. Respected by racers and loving fans who could appreciate who he was and what he'd done, he had become a caricature to many, misunderstood by a new group of people who only saw him as a coffee-drinking, cigarette-smoking, old-school racer. If you were one of them, you might think that Dick Trickle wasn't good enough to hack it in NASCAR. That he never got the chance to run in the Cup series as a young man. And that too, like so many of the labels, is not quite right either.

“He was definitely one of the most talented race drivers that we've ever had in America,” says Humpy Wheeler, the former promoter and president of Charlotte Motor Speedway. “He's up there with A. J. Foyt, [Richard] Petty, [Mario] Andretti, Cale Yarborough, Dale Earnhardt, Jeff Gordon.” Wheeler once stuck his face in a tiger's mouth. He knows hyperbole. But he's being serious.

“Today, had he been 25 years old, his looks would have gotten him into a race car,” Wheeler says. But today, he would have had to deal with sponsors who squirm at habits like smoking cigarettes or personalities that aren't squeaky clean. Dick Trickle was the last NASCAR driver to keep a pack of smokes in his car. Imagine that now. These days sponsors create a whitewashed version of the drivers that fans fell in love with when racing was racin', and stock cars were actually stock cars. “Today, they would have tried to put him through the clothes wash, and he wouldn't have gotten in the clothes wash,” says Wheeler. “If you start off and you don't have perfect size, perfect weight, perfect teeth, perfect hair, and perfect speech, you're probably not going to get in a Cup car.”

Dick Trickle could have. But he didn't. To understand why, you need to look at his life in reverse. That way the quirks become more commonplace, the near misses become wins, and the legend becomes real. The pain he endured at the end of his life washes away. He was a family guy from Rudolph, Wisconsin—a workingman whose work just happened to be racing cars.

“He liked the simple life, he liked the simple people, he liked the working people,” Wheeler says. “And that's where racing's always been, and despite all the people today that have entered this sport, particularly working for companies, that have led cloistered lives and don't understand working people, Dick Trickle sure did. And that's why they didn't understand Dick Trickle.”

 

Up All Night

 

It was 6:30
A.M.
on a summer morning in 1996, and Dick Trickle threw the door open and walked into the conference room at the Chose Family Inn in Stoughton, Wisconsin. He had a somber look on his face. He stood on a cooler and looked around.

“You all are a bunch of drunks,” he said.

The men in the room laughed. They weren't up early. They were up late. They were Rich Bickle's race team, which had beaten Trickle the night before at Madison International Speedway and clinched the championship in a series of races called the Miller Nationals. Once the race was over, they drank in the pits. It was always a contest between Bickle and Trickle to see who would leave last.

Once the track kicked them out, Bickle's team found a bowling alley and drank there. Then they found some bars that were still open. They drank there. When the bars closed, they ended up back at the motel in Stoughton. And that's where Trickle found them. At 6:30
A.M.

“Give me a beer,” he said.

Dick always seemed to have a brewing company's logo on his car, and a can of beer in his hand. He joked about a sponsorship deal that gave him $100,000 and 350 cases of beer. But there are 365 days in the year, he said. What am I supposed to drink on the other 15 days?

The fans and friends who drank with him tended to miss something—Dick didn't actually drink all that much. Once he got down to the end of his PBR, he'd just stand there, holding a nearly empty can for as long as he could. Everybody else kept drinking. Dick kept holding. If someone threw him a beer, he'd take it. But people don't tend to do that when you've already got one in your hand.

His close friends had never seen him drunk, even though his close friends got drunk with him. Kenny Wallace finally figured out his trick. “You know how many times I've gotten drunk because of you?” he asked.

Dick would much rather talk. He'd stay up late to talk racing. Cars. Anything. If you'd ask him how on earth his parents named him Dick Trickle, he'd matter-of-factly tell you that his parents named him Richard. If you asked him how often he smoked in the car, through a special hole he'd drilled in his helmet, he'd ask: How many yellow flags have I had in my career? If you'd seen him rolling up to the track in the morning and asked him how late he was up the night before, he'd probably say it would depend on the race. The rumor about him, spread by him, was that he needed one hour of sleep for every 100 miles he'd have to drive the next day. He once said he probably drank 40 cups of coffee a day. The man ran on caffeine and conversation.

You could tell when Trickle was going to say something important. “My boy,” he'd start off, and then he'd tell you something simple that made a lot of sense. Don't say you finished sixth, he'd say. You
won
sixth place, because guys who finished seventh and eighth would love to have had the race you did. Don't race the other drivers. Just race the leader. Race the track. Don't crash. To finish first, he'd say, you must first finish. Guys like Mark Martin made that their mantra.

By that day in 1996, he'd been racing for nearly four decades. He had plenty of fans. But he was still more popular in the Midwest than he ever was outside of it. In 1995, he flew to Minnesota for an American Speed Association race at the State Fair, and his PR guy remarked that he seemed more popular than Richard Petty.

Dick Trickle had always been a big fish in a small pond. Before the 1990s that was about the best you could hope to be, a local hero. But during the 1990s, NASCAR shook off its reputation as a regional, Southern sport and turned into a national phenomenon. Petty retired and Jeff Gordon debuted in the same race in 1992, the Hooters 500. North Wilkesboro Motor Speedway shut down and Las Vegas Motor Speedway opened up in the same year. Neil Bonnett died on the track. Alan Kulwicki died in a plane crash; Davey Allison died in a helicopter crash. Before the '90s, a lot of races were still shown on tape delay. By 2000, a half-dozen channels had broadcast live racing. The money started rolling in, and drivers who used to spend their time riding from track to track on the interstate began to buy their own private buses and airplanes. The King Air 200 became the most popular jet in racing.

Dick would fly with people, but he didn't buy a plane. He didn't even buy a big RV. He built a big garage behind his house in 1991, but that was it. “My boy,” he told Kenny, “I don't need none of that stuff.” The Wisconsin in him kept him incredibly frugal. Although he didn't like to talk money, he had a lot of it. In 1989, arguably his most successful year in the Winston Cup, he made $343,000. He struggled in 1998, with only one top-10 finish. It was his final full season. He still won $1.2 million.

His biggest problem was his age. By the time he ran his last Cup race in 2002, he was 61. Too long in the tooth, as Humpy Wheeler would say. At that age, your eyes get to you. When you're down at Daytona or up in Charlotte, you're running at 300 feet a second. Sooner or later, your age is going to creep up on you. “Your eyes are what bring you down,” Wheeler said.

Great race drivers don't hang around, Wheeler says, they fade away like old soldiers. When Trickle stopped racing in the Winston Cup, he didn't come out and announce his retirement. There was nothing official. He was just done. That was it. He didn't become a team owner like Junior Johnson. He'd get invited back up to Wisconsin every once in a while to grand-marshal a race, or he'd show up to sign autographs, but mostly he'd hang out in Iron Station with Darlene and his family. He went on a cruise for the first time in his life. He played with the grandkids, cut down trees on his property, picked up garbage along the road. He didn't need NASCAR. He never did. “Who knows,” he told now-defunct bgnracing.com after his final Cup race, “maybe I'll be revived and get the support of the right sponsor and team and be out there every weekend. But if I don't, life isn't bad.”

Trickle didn't need to win anymore. He didn't need the money. “I had a new challenge when I went to Cup,” he told
nascar.com
in 2007. “I had a refreshing life, from 48 to 60. I was excited. I was pumped up. I enjoyed it. I got a second lease on life.”

Back on that morning in 1996, at that little two-story motel in Stoughton, Wisconsin, the party was still going for Dick Trickle. Around 8:00
A.M.
, when it was time for either breakfast or bed, the long night started making memories foggy and Bickle's crew began to split up into two groups, those who fell asleep and those who passed out. One by one, they started heading off to bed.

Dick Trickle was one of the last to leave. He took a can of beer back to his room.

 

Rookie of the Year

 

It was 1989, and Dick Trickle was trying to buy a fake Rolex on the street in Manhattan. He was willing to pay $10. But he wanted a guarantee first. If it falls apart, the guy who was selling told him, you come and find me, and I'll give you another one.

This was a little bit of a stunt, done for the cameras.
Motor Week Illustrated
was putting together a story called “Trickle Takes Manhattan.” A television crew followed Dick and Darlene around New York City. He bought a hot dog. He took the subway to Grand Central Terminal. “Man, look at all these trains!” he said. “You think you've got one that goes to Wisconsin Rapids?”

A few days later, on December 1, Trickle stood onstage in a tuxedo at the Waldorf Astoria, listening to people talk about how old he was. “Luckily, this year's rules do not include any age restriction,” an executive from Sears said, to mild laughter. He presented Dick with a painting of himself and his car. Dick got a check for $20,000. He'd just won NASCAR's Rookie of the Year Award. At age 48.

“I'd like to thank Champion and Sears DieHard Batteries for giving us young racers a chance to come up through the ranks,” he said. More laughs.

He thanked his kids for coming. He thanked Darlene for putting up with 31 years of racing. He thanked his sponsors. And he thanked Bill and Mickey Stavola, who owned the car. He had no contract. No guaranteed ride. He drove all year on a handshake.

“If you'd have told me last December that I would be on the stage at the Waldorf Astoria, I'd have said no way,” Trickle said. “But one phone call last spring changed it all.”

It started one year before, in 1988, actually, with the crash that ended Bobby Allison's career. Allison blew a tire at the Miller 500 at Pocono in June, and then Jocko Maggiacomo came along and T-boned him so hard that Bobby still doesn't remember the crash, nor winning the Daytona 500 the February before. Mike Alexander drove Allison's car for the rest of the season. Afterward, at the Snowball Derby in December, Alexander hit an embankment with the driver's side of his car. Something happened to him. But he didn't tell anyone for months.

A few days before the 1989 Daytona 500, Alexander did a media tour during the day but was too worn out to keep going through the evening. His PR guy, Tom Roberts, thought that was strange. On Sunday, after 188 laps, Alexander hit the wall in turn two and that was it.

The next race was the Goodwrench 500 at Rockingham in early March. Alexander and Roberts were having dinner and Alexander confessed he shouldn't be out on the track. He'd had blurry vision and severe headaches since the Snowball Derby. Roberts told him to fess up to his crew chief, Jimmy Fennig, and he did.

Now Stavola's car needed a new driver. A few years before, Fennig had been Mark Martin's crew chief when Martin was running American Speed Association races in Wisconsin. That's how Fennig knew Trickle. He convinced Stavola to bring him in for the race, and that Thursday night, Dick Trickle got The Call.

He started in the last row. During the race, he kept pitting on yellow flags, and one of his pit crew members kept leaning way in through the passenger window. The TV announcers thought there was a problem with the transmission. The transmission was fine. But the heat near the throttle was causing Trickle's right foot to swell, and the guy from the pit crew was trying to pull off his snakeskin cowboy boot. He kept trying until they finally swapped it out for a regular driving shoe.

Trickle finished 13th at Rockingham, ahead of Richard Petty. The next week, in Atlanta, Trickle finished third. He went on to nine top-10 finishes. Larry Pearson, son of NASCAR legend David Pearson, had been the favorite to win Rookie of the Year. That changed when Trickle came along.