Rookie Exercises Indy Birthright

Rookies at Indianapolis are about as welcome as ants at a picnic, poor relatives at a wedding.

Veteran drivers would rather find a rattlesnake in their pocket than a rookie in their rear-view mirror.

Rookie racers are like rookies everywhere--overanxious, under-patient, in a hurry, oblivious of the consequences. They tend to think a 500-mile race has to be won in the first 500 feet, certainly no later than the 10th lap. It is nature’s joke that those of us with the most time in life are in the biggest hurry.

Rookies used to have a bad habit of triggering multicar crashes at the start or in early laps of Indy 500s, and old-timers can never forget it was a rookie, Dave McDonald, hitting the wall that touched off the fiery pileup in which Eddie Sachs burned to death in 1964. Rookies and race cars have been a bad mix, a combustible mix.

But the rookie with the best qualifying record at Indy this year is not apt to make the veteran drivers want to reach for the aspirin, holler for the track cops or feel the need to get as far away from him as possible in the corners.

Not since Fittipaldi in ’84 or Graham Hill in ’66 has a rookie come to Indy with the credentials of Eddie McKay Cheever, of the Rome, Italy, and Monte Carlo Cheevers. This man is no wild-eyed graduate of a dirt track in Tucson, a speed freak from a motorcycle gang or a rubber-burner from an Alabama drag strip.

He’s as American as cactus but European as caviar on toast. You picture continental drivers as chauffeurs in monocles and white scarves named Marquis de Portago or Graf von Trips or the Earl of Sussex, even the Count of Monte Cristo, but never Eddie Cheever. Enzo Fiermonte is a name for a driver out of Italy, Dario Resta. Somebody named Jochen. Eddie Cheever is a name for a rock musician out of Laredo, not a race driver from the Cote d’Azur. But where Eddie grew up and learned to drive, the kids on the block weren’t named Billy Bob and Tex and Bo, but Enzo and Vito and Carlo.

He was born in Arizona, but his father, an ex-serviceman, wanted to be a citizen of the world, and he took Eddie and his family first to Australia and then to, of all places, Naples, where he opened a series of health spas and gyms. Eddie Cheever was about as Neapolitan as hominy grits, but even though he grew up speaking three languages, he did exactly what he would have done in Phoenix: He got into a Go-Kart at an early age. All he ever wanted to do in any language was go fast.

Go-Karting is not the hit-and-miss recreational activity in Europe it is in the United States. In Europe, it is big business, and Eddie became The Americano, a celebrity in race-mad Italy. He even got the call from what passes for the highest office in the land in sunny Italy. No, not the Vatican. The office of the legendary automaker, Enzo Ferrari, the archangel of motor racing. “It was like entering the gates of Heaven,” Cheever recalls. “You went in, you were escorted through these secret passageways and you were in the presence of the great man himself. The week before, I had had some trouble in a Formula Two race with the curbing. My car kept bouncing off them. And the first thing Enzo Ferrari said was not hello or how-are-you but, ‘When you drive my cars, you will keep them off the curbs.’ ”

End of interview.

Eddie did not really drive Ferraris. But he drove in more than 130 Grand Prix races during the next 10 years.

It used to be that Grand Prix drivers gave American oval racing a wide berth. They preferred driving through the trees and cows of the Rhineland or the diamond-studded streets of Monte Carlo. The brutish, turn-left-till-you-ache Indy-car racing gave them nightmares. Even the great Fangio was said to have taken one spin at Indy and remembered he’d promised his mother he’d stay out of dangerous places.

Jimmy Clark came over in ’64 and taught the Speedway the art of driving. Graham Hill was the only foreign rookie to win the race, in 1966. The great Emerson Fittipaldi, two-time world champion, made the jump in ’84. He went immediately from Monsieur Fittipaldi to “Emmo.” He fit right in like a hood ornament. He rejoiced in the happy-go-lucky American circuit, glad to escape what he called the overpowering “politics” of the Grand Prix.

Cheever’s reason for going over the wall is less complicated. “You have ‘politics’ in everything,” he shrugs. “You get three kids in a classroom and you got ‘politics.’ ”

His reason for jumping is more basic: Eddie wanted to make up for a deprived childhood. He wanted to eat hamburgers-with-everything, chili dogs, taco shells, hot fudge sundaes and watch old movies on TV and see the game of the week. He wanted to have popcorn at Dodger Stadium, play golf at Pebble Beach.

And drive cars at Indy.

It’s an American’s birthright. But Eddie grew up to the sounds of mandolins and the strains of grand opera, not Willie Nelson. He never even had the pleasure of sitting in a Hollywood Freeway traffic jam.

Dad had even been a vegetarian. So, Cheever’s first six months in the good old USA was catching up with junk food. He admits he pigged out. “I put on 15 pounds. I never went by a McDonald’s or passed up a french fry. I put ketchup on everything.” Duck a l’orange or endive salad got the big go-by.

No one is scared to go into the corners with an Eddie Cheever. He has been behind as many steering wheels as any Unser. But Eddie admits to some misgiving about the circuit at Indy. “Those walls are awful close,” he concedes.

You’re pretty sure they didn’t consult the signorinas when they put this hunk in a race car. No one wants to think of those smoky blue eyes getting even bloodshot or those even white teeth having spaces in them or that raven hair flecked with gray. Eddie Cheever is Hollywood’s idea of a race driver.

But can he win? Well, Jimmy Clark did. Graham Hill did. Emerson Fittipaldi won a million dollars in this thing last year.

Cheever admits it’s asking a lot. But if he brings it off, immigration and naturalization may face a new problem. Race cars will be emptying out all over Europe. Eddie is only coming home, but for the others it will be arrivederci, Roma , and howdy, Hoosierland. A lot of good old boys will have Italian accents, the biggest foreign takeover since pizza replaced the hot roast beef sandwich.