Rocket man

I have met a few folks, because of what I did for nearly four decades. Sports is entertainment, and entertainment confers celebrity. And if celebrity is mostly empty calories -- if, as Patton said, all fame is fleeting -- it still affords you grand opportunities to lord it over your buds by saying "Guess who I met the other day?"

On one of those days it was Muhammad Ali, sort of.

On another it was Arthur Ashe.

On still others it was John Wooden or Gale Sayers or A.J. Foyt or Billie Jean King or Eric "Butterbean" Esch, upon whom fame landed because he was a five-time Toughman national champ and once lost a 10-round decision to 52-year-old Larry Holmes, the former heavyweight champion of the world.

And one day, the best of all the days, it was Chuck Yeager.

Chuck died yesterday at 97, and if you didn't know who he was you either never saw "The Right Stuff" or weren't a space-program fanboy in the '60s, which I was. Who Chuck Yeager was, see, was a platinum-grade, hot-damn American hero. One day in October 1947 he climbed into a contraption that wasn't much more than a seat strapped to a bomb, and a few minutes later he became the first human being to break the sound barrier.

But it wasn't just that that made him a platinum-grade, hot-damn American hero, or all the Nazi ME-262 jets he shot down in his prop-driven P-51 Mustang when he was barely 22 years old. It was the style with which he did it all.

He was a West Virginia boy with a lollygagging drawl straight up from the hollers, and there was nothing he couldn't nonchalant. The day he broke the sound barrier, for instance, he announced it on his radio by joking that his machmeter had gone screwy on him. This was after he had to use a sawed-off broomstick to slam shut the hatch on his orange Bell X-1, on account of he'd broken a couple of ribs in a fall from a horse the day before.

Yes, that's right, folks. Chuck Yeager didn't just bust the sound barrier, he did it with busted ribs.

So of course when Chuck came to Indianapolis years later to drive the pace car for the 500, I had to meet him.

Now, I'm not particularly proud of how I shenanigan-ed my editor into letting me do a feature on the pace car driver. It wasn't entirely professional of me. Bottom line, I was still a fan-boy, and if there actually was a semi-legit story there, the real reason I wanted to do a feature on Chuck Yeager is because I wanted to meet Chuck Yeager. 

And so one afternoon I was ushered into an empty garage at the Speedway, and there sat Himself in a folding chair, a small rumpled man with a gunfighter squint and a lopsided grin. He was in his late 60s then, and when he opened his mouth and all that West Virginia fell out of it, I was instantly mesmerized. I half-expected him to ask if he could borrow a stick of Beeman's, as he famously used to ask his engineer Jack Ridley before a flight.

We talked mostly about the then-revolutionary head-up display in the pace car, technology with which Yeager was familiar from all those years punching holes in the sky testing jet aircraft. We spent five or 10 minutes together, and the only question I remember asking is whether or not he ever felt fear when climbing into aircraft that like as not used to kill their pilots.

He'd likely been asked that question a million times before. But he just grinned and said, no, not really. It was just his job. That's how he saw it.

I came perilously to asking for his autograph then, the cardinal sin of all cardinal sins for a sportswriter. But I didn't.

All these years later, I'm still kinda proud of that.

And now Chuck Yeager is gone, and damn 2020 thoroughly for that.

Godspeed, sir. Punch a hole in eternity for us.