The Old Prof Thinks Out Loud

Robert Frost wrote a classic poem about roads diverging into a yellow wood. The New England poet saw only two -- the one more traveled and the one less traveled.
For Tim Richmond, there was a third.
His own road was a fast and narrow one that disappeared into the trees, dark and deep, and never came out the other side. It reached its inevitable dead end twenty years ago this month, the last time Tim Richmond climbed into a racing car.
Richmond, perhaps the most charismatic of the modern generation of American racing drivers, never made it out of the three-way woods alive. On August 13, 1989, secreted away in a West Palm Beach hospital like a grand jury witness, he died at the age of just thirty-four.
Unlike his racing, his death was slow and held under wraps. His family, unable in the end to protect their son from long-standing rumors of a cocaine habit the size of the Indianapolis infield and the apparent culmination of his high-octane lifestyle in a terminal case of AIDS, managed to pull a curtain around his last days.
His name was kept off the official list of patients at the Florida hospital where he spent his final days of life. His death was kept secret for two days while his family prepared a private burial in Ashland, Ohio, his hometown. No cause of death was ever released.
This contemporary version of a Watergate cover-up, decidedly more effective than anything Richard Nixon attempted, succeeded only in stirring the pot of rumors about Richmond's crash at the end of the fast lane and in bewildering racing colleagues and fans to whom Tim had endeared himself with his aggressive driving and pixieish personality.
It was, ultimately, so totally uncharacteristic for Tim Richmond to make his exit under a shroud of secrecy and deceit. In his dozen or so years as a race driver, he had always been a genuine article who, rather than shrink from it and hide in a forest, basked in the spotlight of publicity like a sunbather on a Florida beach.
His ascent to public adoration was fast and flawless. The son of a well-to-do auger company executive won the first Super Vee race he entered. He won his first-ever sprint car race, as well.
His father, who had indulged his son with a Porsche and an airplane on his sixteenth birthday, bought him a year-old Indy-car to carry him into the biggest spotlight of all, the Indianapolis 500, in 1980. He was twenty-four years old.
And, in a sport where some of the biggest stars have all the personality of an oily rag, Tim Richmond was a refreshing splash of cool water in the collective face of the Indy crowd. He cavorted, he quipped, he unveiled an ingratiating smile that curled up under his thin, dark mustache -- and, oh yes, he went faster than a rookie driver is ever expected to.
His 193-mph lap early in May was the fastest practice lap of the month. He crashed on qualifying day, but quickly came back to make the Indy field easily. And, all the while, he exuded the kind of enthusiasm about racing you'd expect from a ten-year-old kid who had just found his "Rosebud" sled at the back of his closet.
"I want to be another A. J. Foyt," he exclaimed at one point. "I want to do anything he can do -- only better."
When race day dawned in 1980, while more veteran drivers were closeted away in their motorhomes going through the Indy version of opening-night jitters, Tim was laughing easily with well-wishers in the garage area, signing autographs and posing for endless Instamatic snapshots.
"I'm not nervous at all," he told me then, another smile carving a large crater beneath his mustache. "I feel good. I slept good. I'm gonna go over and eat breakfast in a minute, then I'm gonna go out and do my job."
He did just that. He ran in the top ten all day, led one lap under yellow, and finished ninth, even though he ran out of fuel on the last lap and had to hitch a ride with race winner Johnny Rutherford to get back to the pit area. The snapshot of Tim's life everyone will cherish is the one of him riding on the side-pod of Rutherford's bright yellow car, demonstrating considerably more joy over JR's victory than the three-time winner could from the cramped confines of the cockpit.
"I feel good, great. I had a great race," Tim would later say of his own efforts, which made him Rookie of the Year.
But it was sometime shortly after that when the road seemed to swerve off into the darker recesses of the woods. He crashed repeatedly in the Indy-type races that followed, and his father replaced him with a more seasoned driver.
He returned to Indy the next May but failed to qualify for the lineup. He bought a qualifed car out from under another driver, which took him to fourteenth place and also tarnished some of the glitter from the year before.
Soon, he was off for Southern climes to race NASCAR stock cars. And he was an instant winner there, too. Tim won a total of thirteen NASCAR races before he was done. His previous experience at road racing gave him an advantage at places like Riverside, California, where he could outrun the stock car regulars, who were more accustomed to circling around like 747 pilots over O'Hare Airport.
In May of 1982, he came back to Indianapolis during May -- but just as a visitor. "I miss being here," he confided, strolling through the garage area in his black polo shirt, jeans, and gray snakeskin winkle-picker boots. "But I'll be back. I'm still young, so I'll have a lot of chances to come back here."
The chances would never come, though. After winning seven NASCAR races in 1986, he sat out the first half of the next season with what was described as "double pneumonia." He came back to the circuit at mid-year and, with tears in his eyes, claimed a victory at Pocono, Pennyslvania. He won the next race at Riverside, as well.
But, the same year, he also failed to show up for the first round of qualifying at Michigan International Speedway because he was asleep -- or passed out -- in his trailer in the infield.
He missed the last part of the 1987 season with a recurrence of the "pneumonia." He showed up for the 1988 Daytona 500 but was prohibited from getting on the track when he failed a drug test. He retook the test -- which had initially shown high levels of cold remedies, not cocaine -- and passed, but, when NASCAR then demanded medical records for treatments received at a Cleveland clinic -- reportedly for cocaine addiction -- Tim refused. A lawsuit followed, but Tim never raced again.
He was deep inside the yellow wood by then. And on August 15, 1989, two days late, the announcement came that he had died -- of unspecified causes. His doctor later reported he had in fact died from complications of AIDS, which he acquired through heterosexual contact.
Tim Richmond, who never married and never became another A. J. Foyt, had chosen the third road, the one that never comes back into the sunlight. And, for those of us who knew him, but briefly, it made all the sad and terrible difference.