The ABCs of legendhood

A.J. Foyt once went on his head in a stock car out in Riverside, Calif., and would have died if Parnelli Jones hadn't jumped out of his own car to pull him out.

He drove stout old roadsters in a day when stout old roadsters frequently got a man killed, and whose frames created so much vibration at speed that Foyt used to take his hand off the wheel and bang it against the side of the cockpit to keep it from falling asleep.

At an age when most racers would have retired to their easy chairs, he lost his brakes coming into a tight corner at Elkhart Lake one time and turned into an unguided missile, arrowing into an embankment and pretty much destroying his feet.

He's been burned, bloodied, bruised and broken. He's fussed, feuded and told the holders of a few microphones to Get that (bleeping) thing out of my face. He's banged on his cantankerous race car with a hammer, fumed when he was wrecked by That Damned Coogan at Indy one year, impaled impertinent reporters with his fabled Texas Death Stare and charmed them, when the mood struck him, with his equally fabled Texas affability.

He's also the greatest American race driver who ever lived, unless Mario Andretti is. And he got that way, as you can surmise from all of the above, by being too damned stubborn to quit.

And so while Will Power was winning the IndyCar race out in Portland, Ore., this weekend, the word got around that the primary sponsor for Foyt's racing team, ABC Supply, was pulling the plug on him. After 15 years -- a lifetime in the racing biz these days -- it will sponsor only Foyt's entries in the Indianapolis 500 next May. Other than that, ABC is O-U-T.

Naturally, Foyt, 84 now, says to hell with that. He's not going anywhere regardless.

"I've been doing this my whole life, why would I quit now? What in the hell else would I do?" he told Robin Miller of Racer.com.

This is good news, and also as essential as essential gets. IndyCar racing without A.J. Foyt, after all, would be like ham without rye. It would be like Sinatra without the pipes, Bogie without Bacall, Rocky without the obligatory training montage.

In other words, it just wouldn't be IndyCar. It would be ... something else. Something less colorful, less vibrant, less moored to a rich history upon which it banks too little.

"We'll be back next year," Foyt vows. "I guarantee it."

Go ahead. You tell him he's wrong.