A most necessary host

Let's hear it out there this morning, race fans. Let's hear it for this girl over here.

On this particular day some years past, she's wearing a Budweiser T-shirt that had once been white, near as anyone can tell. Mostly she's wearing infield.

It's mid-morning at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and rain is coming down like God left the tap on, the sky an unrelieved gray and the garages back in Gasoline Alley shuttered tight. Boredom and, yes, copious amounts of Budweiser are the mothers of this invention, a touch football game played on a slick of grass-flecked mud just inside turn one.

And so here comes Budweiser Girl, football cradled in one arm, slipping and sliding and whooping loudly. She is Earth Mother Walter Payton, Swamp Thing Earl Campbell. And now she slips one more time and goes down with a wet sploosh and a shriek of laughter, and a guy in mud-smeared jeans plunks down on top of her, and now three or four others plunk down on top of them ...

And now you see. Now you see what Roger Penske is getting at.

Now you see Earth Mother Walter and the throwback Snakepit as a tiny slice of the mighty host that defines the Indianapolis 500, and always has. So many people descended on Indianapolis for the first 500 in 1911, Charles Leerhsen tells us in "Blood and Smoke," his chronicle of the birth of the 500, that the crowd became a story in itself, part and parcel of the event's narrative. Traffic trying to get into the track on race day came to a gridlocked standstill then; traffic trying to get into the track on race day still comes to a gridlocked standstill 109 years later.

It's an Indy tradition like "Back Home Again In Indiana" and a cold bottle of milk are Indy traditions.

And so when Penske says there will be no Indianapolis 500 without the fans -- that if the Bastard Plague makes it impossible on August 23, they'll bump the race to October -- it's because he understands the nature of the event. He's stood down there at 11 o'clock in the morning and looked up at that jaw-dropping sea of humanity along the frontstretch, seen it curling around the fourth turn to the north and disappearing around turn one to the south. And he understands it's what puts the Spectacle in the Greatest Spectacle in Racing.

To be sure, you can hear Penske say they won't run the 500 without the fans and figure it's just the Speedway trying to wring every last dollar out of the thing the way it always has. It's a cash cow, the 500 is, and the Speedway's overseers have always been excellent farm hands. No one fills a milk pail more efficiently.

But Penske saying no fans, no 500, is also merely recognizing an imperative. This is why you put him in charge of the place, because he is the Captain and he recognize imperatives. And if the 500 is the rising shriek of 33 exotic machines getting on it at the sighting of the green, it's also the hurricane roar of a quarter million voices that accompanies it.

Indy is not Indy without that moment. You take away the roar -- take away the sea of humanity and replace with a vast emptiness filled only with ghosts and the sigh of the breeze -- and it's not the 500 anymore. It's just a very fast drive on a Sunday afternoon.

The Captain says that won't do. Salute the man.