Enjoying the View From the Front

I’ve finally figured out what they’re going to put on my epitaph. Are you ready for this?

“He Led the Long Beach Grand Prix for a Lap and a Half.”

You heard me. I was in front of the pole sitter and all 25 drivers in that sucker. I had an Unser, an Andretti, Fittipaldi eating my dust. I had Johnny Rutherford shaking his fist at me.

Lots of guys have led the Long Beach Grand Prix at the start. But how many of them did it riding backward? I expect the Guinness Book of World Records to be calling any minute.

Look! I never hit a Koufax fastball, hit a Raider line, served to Rod Laver or aimed a punch at Muhammad Ali. But I kept Danny Sullivan in my rear-view mirror, I went into the corners ahead of Rick Mears, I kept A.J. Foyt in my slipstream.

Was it a dream? No, not exactly.

What it was, I have to tell you, was, I was in the PPG pace car. Well, pace truck would be more like it. I sat in the back facing the field. Patty Moise was the driver. Patty Moise, in case you never heard of her, is the driver who holds the woman’s world speed record of 217.498 m.p.h.

We didn’t go quite that fast Sunday but, as I looked back, there was young Unser, Emmo, Sully, all those legends dialing in their tires with zigzag movements so you had to ask yourself, how many guys in racing history could look back and see drivers like that slipping and sliding around the race track and not gaining an inch?

I’m sure Patty hankers to lead that bunch in a Lola-Cosworth or its equivalent someday, the way she streaked down the straights and slammed into the corners. We periodically lost Johnny Rutherford, another pace car driver, in the corners and John has won, count ‘em, three Indy 500s. It was the fastest I’ve gone at sea level since Eddie Sachs took me around the Indy Speedway back in the ‘60s. That was my last white knuckler because Patty, unlike Eddie, did not talk with her hands all the way around the track. Eddie only grabbed the wheel as sparks were flying off the hubcaps.

It’s a great way to see the Long Beach Grand Prix, even though the tall buildings seemed to be wheeling through the air as we slammed into the corners or went shrieking down Shoreline Drive, Long Beach’s equivalent of the Mulsanne Straight.

The Long Beach Grand Prix is less a sporting event than an institution. It is perfectly astonishing the way it has worked its way into the fabric of the Southern California sports scene. I wasn’t around to see the formation of the Rose Bowl and Parade or the early SC Trojan and Coliseum events. But I was on hand at the genesis of the LBGP.

I didn’t give it a chance.

I had noted in print in my free-swinging, take-no-prisoners days of sports columning that Long Beach was a community sinking several inches a year under the skeletal work of its infrastructure and slant-drilling oil wells and the only reason to go to Long Beach was to see if it was still there.

Then it became the permanent home of an ocean liner that would never sail and a cargo plane that would never fly.

I, and thousands like me, thought the LBGP would never fly, either.

You have to remember 40 miles to the east a gaudy, flossy, state-of-the-art race track in Ontario was busy going broke at the time and millions had been sunk into making it the Taj Mahal of auto racing.

So, how could a bunch of cars tooling around the streets of Long Beach at 90 m.p.h. be deemed a tourist attraction in a community that had traffic like any midnight on the Pomona freeway? If it was auto crashes you craved, you could get your fill on Mulholland Drive at no charge. The downtown interchange was a permanent Grand Prix. You didn’t need to import cars or drivers. You had the added excitement of not knowing which in the field were sober.

There have been some great winners at Long Beach. Clay Regazzoni, Niki Lauda, Nelson Piquet in its Formula One phase. Mario Andretti, four times. Now, young Al Unser, three.

But the big winner at Long Beach has been a guy who never got a checkered flag in his life and never drives in anything that doesn’t have a stereo, car phone and back-seat bar in it.

The first time I saw Christopher Pook, he was this curious freebooter who had this English accent, where they say “chube” for the subway and what was required of one was a “jooty,” and he had this perfectly outlandish idea of running race cars through the streets of Long Beach. “Long Beach is just where they drop off the imported cars and off-load the oil,” he was told. “No one goes there.”

Well, Pook, who had dabbled in race driving in Europe till he found he was never going to be another Stirling Moss, bargained for his road course in downtown Long Beach anyway and brought in the Continental sporty-type set, monocles and all, to Long Beach.

None of them had ever been east of the Beverly Hills Hotel before and they thought L.A. was a series of sound stages surrounded by Indians. Long Beach never had so many diamond tiaras in its history before. Prior to that, its most exciting event had been the annual Iowa picnic.

Still, Formula One cars were supposed to race through the streets of Monte Carlo before ex-crowned heads of Europe driven by guys trailing white scarfs and World War I goggles and not through the streets of Long Beach in front of a whole bunch of retired people or under the noses of the oil scows and the horses-head oil wells nodding in the sun.

But, Long Beach had lost Disneyland to Anaheim and Marineland to Palos Verdes and was in the mood to try something devilish. Pook was able to enlist the community into a Committee of 300, an invaluable cadre of volunteer workers who comprised the intellectual and social elite of the area.

“We borrowed the idea from the Tournament of Roses,” admits Pook. “We were not terribly inventive.”

Nor terribly successful. At first. The checks didn’t exactly bounce. But sometimes the money was coming in the back door as the checks arrived at the front.

It took some time for the suspicious natives to realize that Pook was really a patriotic Long Beacher and not in cahoots with the international racing federation, which claimed some 40% of almost all the proceeds from the event for the use of its drivers and “Grand Prix” label.

“You listened to Chris Pook for a while and you knew where England got that empire,” one journalist was to observe.

Pook eventually came to the conclusion he didn’t need the European sporty car set to put his race over and, in 1984, he switched to CART Indy cars and drivers.

Long Beach proved to prefer them to the race car royalty. Attendance dipped the first year, from 75,000 to 56,000, but shot back up within three years to 85,000. Over this last weekend, 195,000 attended the races and festivities for the three days of the fete. Pook estimates the Grand Prix brings $50 to $100 million in business to the harbor city.

Other North American cities have borrowed the Long Beach idea and have street races of their own--Detroit, Cleveland, Denver, and Vancouver. Pook’s company has a new 10-year agreement with Long Beach. It’s an American fixture, like the Boston Marathon, New Orleans Mardi Gras, the Masters or the Super Bowl.

Little Al Unser won it Sunday, if you’re into trivia. But, of course, I was off the track by then.