He’s Following Dad but Wants to Pass Him

It is the fondest wish of most fathers that sons follow in their footsteps, take over the family business, maintain the tradition.

Few do. Ministers’ sons often become world-class playboys or tango dancers.

Parents try everything. Take the boy down and show him the family factory, the office with the rug on the floor, promise him the good life. “Some day, son, all this can be yours,” they whisper seductively. He can, they assure him, have an expense account, condos in Florida, a yacht, he can be a pillar of the community.

He doesn’t want it. He may even run off to join the circus. He’ll sell the family business to the first corporate raider and go off to the south of France and play baccarat the rest of his life.

Great authors and painters never seem to replicate themselves. You don’t find any Hemingways on the best-seller lists. Only one Rembrandt hangs in the Louvre.

There aren’t any Ty Cobb Jrs. on the base paths, Jack Dempsey III’s in a ring.

But, then, it comes to auto racing, and the older generation can’t keep away the younger generation with a club.

It’s boggling. You close your eyes and imagine a father taking his son to the nearest grease-filled garage with gaskets all over the floor, a naked girl on a calendar, more drain oil than West Texas, a pile of retreads. “Some day, son, all this can be yours,” he tells him, waving his arms over the mess. The kid is thrilled.

Then, he takes him out to the nearest dirt-track or high-speed oval and says: “Just think, some day you can break an arm or shatter an ankle here. You can burn, crash, get heat prostration. The possibilities are limitless. When you’re not in a race car, you’re in an airplane. Raises hell with your home life. You’ll get bored doing anything under 200 miles an hour. You’ll be breathing methane for the rest of your life.”

And the kid can’t believe his good luck.

There’s no love affair in the world that can match one between a young racer and his car. Not Romeo and Juliet, Camille and Alfredo, Scarlett and Rhett. It’s more than a romance, it’s an obsession.

Young Al Unser is the prototype of the breed but not the only one. There’s a grandson of a race driver who is the son of a race driver in here. This sport deals in royal families. Billy Vukovich’s grandfather died on this race track at Indianapolis before he was born. He is Billy Vukovich the Third. His grandfather won this race twice before he was killed. His father drove it 12 times. Gary Bettenhausen’s father died here. Al Unser’s uncle died here. You’d think they’d rather go in a haunted house than to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. You’d think the sight of a turbo-charged race car would make them turn white and cross themselves. Guess again.

Al Unser Jr. is a deceptively-mild-appearing young man, freckled, dimpled. He doesn’t really look like an Unser. But he drives like one.

He didn’t get in a race car till he was well up in age--9. For an Unser, that’s practically in his dotage. Unsers usually go directly from the cradle to a cockpit.

Little Al’s father, Big Al, put him in a go-cart when he was big enough to see over a dashboard. After that, he was pretty much on his own. The Unsers are not big on sharing secrets. “My father taught me everything I know,” Little Al concedes. “But he didn’t teach me everything he knows .”

Why do the sons and grandsons of drivers follow in the family business while chain-store magnates can’t bribe their spoiled brats to show up for work?

“It’s addictive,” Al Unser the Younger explains. “It’s hard to explain the excitement.” It is, he adds, a feeling that you are more alive, more alert, more challenged in a race car than you will ever be again. The rest of life is vanilla ice cream.

Wouldn’t his family rather he be a lawyer, an accountant? “I went to work in a machine shop when I was 16,” young Al reveals. “I worked eight hours a day, five days a week. On the weekends, I was very glad to go racing.”

Of course, an Unser out of a race car is like a camel out of sand, a cowboy off a horse. John Wayne in a three-piece suit. Legend has it Unsers don’t come equipped with heart, lungs and bloodstreams like the rest of us. They have cylinders, fuel pumps and they bleed petroleum. If you check an Unser, you find a tachometer. In a few more generations, they’ll be born with tires.

Is it likely they’ll have to be numbered like popes or English kings or Super Bowls?

As the scion of a family that has won seven Indy 500s and on a track on which his uncle, Jerry, died in practice, does he feel any pressure to excel?

“The public may feel I don’t have my own identity,” young Al concedes. “But when you’re in a race car, your name won’t help you.”

Are his loyalties split? Will he be rooting for his father to win his unprecedented fifth Indy? “I will be rooting for me to win my first before I want him to win his fifth,” Al Two insists.

Is he gaining on his father? Can he break the family tradition and impart secrets? “A 27-year-old cannot teach a 50-year-old anything,” young Al claims, endearing himself to a whole generation of father-knows-bests.

“Me and Dad talk a lot. But, you have to understand the Unser family is very competitive within themselves.” In other words, if you’re an Unser, you learn, crash-by-crash.

He’s had five trips around this race track in the 500 now. Will he not feel like an Unser till he wins the race? “I wouldn’t feel like an Unser if I weren’t in the race.”

Except that Unsers get in Victory Lane as well as the starting grid. Victory Lane is like Buckingham Palace, the ruling family’s ancestral home. Being a racer is getting to be like being a Hohenzollern. You reign by divine right. The Indy 500 museum is going to become like Westminster Abbey, the resting place for a few monarchical families. And, the father whose son won’t take over the garment industry can only look on in envy. He’s facing a losing battle. You can’t get killed selling dresses. So, who wants to spend his life doing that?