Brickyard memories

It's either a measure of my own squishy mind, or the continuing diminishment of one of NASCAR's crown jewels, that the Brickyard 400 just flat snuck up on me this week.

It was Thursday before I realized the stock cars were at Indy again this weekend, and that's a hell of a note for someone who spent the first 20 Brickyards sweating through his shirts in the midsummer IMS heat. Covered Jeff Gordon's first win at Indy in the first Brickyard, and covered his last win there in the 20th. Not that I was going for symmetry or anything.

In any event, they're runnin' the big track again today, and it's not Gordon or Dale Earnhardt or Jimmie Johnson bringing them to the green. It's some kid named Carson Hocevar, who hails from Portage, Mich., just south of Kalamazoo. Carson Hocevar is 23 years old, which is the same age Gordon was when he won the first Brickyard in 1994.

Not that I was going for symmetry or anything.

Anyway, I know next to nothing about Carson Hocevar, except that if you'd asked me I'd have guessed he centered the second line for the Montreal Canadiens or someone. I also know next to nothing about the team he drives for -- Spire Motorsports -- except that it's not Hendrick or Gibbs or Penske or Michael Jordan's team.

What I do know is I'll probably watch it anyway, on account of those 20 years I covered it and the memories they stir. Which I suppose means this is as good a time as any to resurrect what I wrote two years ago on the 30th anniversary of the first Brickyard ...

Thirty years on now, and ye gods, time is a mighty river. It rolls and rolls and now it's 2024, and 1994 seems as far away sometimes as Model Ts and bathtub gin.

It  is not, of course. I know this even though Rick Mast is 67 years old now and owns an environmental cleanup service down in  Rockbridge Baths, Va., and he hasn't strapped into a stock car in 22 years.

Rick Mast, you see, brought the field to the green as the polesitter in the first Brickyard 400 on the first Saturday in August in 1994. This weekend the Brickyard turns 30, but Rick Mast is where this all starts for me, because I was there for the first one and somewhere I have a photo of Mast in his black-and-white No. 1 diving into the first turn on the first lap. 

If I dug that photo out of whatever box it's in now, it would all come back to me: The 250,000 Mass O' Humanity; the newness; the blare of Detroit iron rocketing off those cliffs of grandstand running the length of the most famous main straightaway in motorsport. 

I close my eyes now, and I see a forest of Confederate stars-and-bars fluttering above the campers along 25th Street, because NASCAR gonna NASCAR. I see the thin smoke rising from the morning campfires. And I see the men and women in their Dale Earnhardt Goodwrench shirts and Ricky Rudd Tide shirts and Terry Labonte Kellogg's Corn Flakes shirts watching the morning bacon sizzle, and cracking open the first cold one of the day. 

Oh, it was some show, that first Brickyard. The Journal Gazette sent four (or was it five?) of us down to cover the thing, and all four (five?) of us crammed into one tiny hotel room clear across town from the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. It was just about the only lodging left in the whole blessed town.

Out at the track, meanwhile, there was this prevailing sense of wonder ("Holy gee, Martha! Stock cars at Indy!") to everything, and not a little out-of-body weirdness. It wasn't just looking up and seeing Rudd or Earnhardt or Rusty Wallace rumble out of the garage area in their Fords or Chevies or Pontiacs. It was looking up and seeing Indy 500 veterans Danny Sullivan and Gary Bettenhausen and Stan Fox wheeling stock cars around, and A.J. Foyt trying to stick a Barney-the-Dinosaur-purple car in the show.

Eighty-six entries showed up looking to get in the field, and some of them were driven by  ancients. Fifty-two-year-old Morgan Shepherd was there. Fifty-seven-year-old H.B. Bailey.  And then there was 66-year-old Hershel McGriff, who'd started racing when he came back from the war in 1945.

Everyone wanted in on this, in other words. Everyone was acutely aware history was riding shotgun with them in a way it perhaps never would again -- and that included me with my little cheapo camera, and all the other media who crammed into the tiny cinderblock building  that served (inadequately) as the media center then.

What we all got from that first Brickyard was not only history but a decent race besides, and none of us then understood how rare a thing the latter would become. The stock-car boys barreled down those long, long straightaways and through the squared-off, one-groove turns, and there were some fascinating storylines. 

Who could forget the Battlin' Bodines, Geoff and Brett, who wrecked one another and then went public with their brotherly feud? And who could forget the finish, when it got down to Ernie Irvan, Rusty Wallace and young Jeff Gordon?

Irvan was leading when he had a tire go down, opening the door for Gordon, who grew up eight miles down the road in Pittsboro. The kid blazed home to the checkers, and it was as if the narrative was ordained by the racing gods: (Almost) hometown boy wins the first Brickyard 400.

Now it's 30 years later, and Jeff Gordon is a 53-year-old racing exec and elder statesman. And I haven't been to a Brickyard 400 since 2015, long after the shine wore off and the multitudes stopped coming because the racing frankly stinks, becoming a really loud parade of sponsor billboards more often than not ...

But 30 years ago?

Well, I've got this photo here to remind me how different it was. And hanging in my closet I've got an inaugural Brickyard 400 polo I bought that weekend, with a gold-and-purple crest that forever reminds me of the date: Aug. 6, 1994 ... 

Time like a mighty river, carving its path.