MOTOR RACING : Scott Was Pioneer, but Nobody Followed

Wendell Scott loved to tell how he became a race car driver in Virginia.

“I’d just got out of the service and was busy runnin’ bootleg whiskey on the back roads when I got a call from a promoter down in Danville,” Scott said. “Seemed he wanted to build up his attendance with some black folks, so he set out to find himself a black race driver.

“When he couldn’t find one, he went to the county police and they told him about this ‘darkie’ they’d been chasing through the mountains, driving awful fast. That was me.”

Scott, who died last Saturday of spinal cancer at 69, turned from running moonshine to racing cars--in much the same way as did most of the “good ol’ boys” who raced with NASCAR in its formative years.

In his first race, for hobby stocks at the Danville Fairgrounds, Scott finished third and pocketed $50.

The year was 1947. He labored around the short tracks of the South until 1959, when he won the Virginia state championship in a car he named Old Rusty. He won 22 races that year and decided he was ready to join the big boys of NASCAR.

For 13 years, from 1961 to 1973, the soft-spoken former World War II paratrooper was a large part of Winston Cup Grand National racing, right alongside Richard Petty, David Pearson, Cale Yarborough, Bobby Allison and others.

The difference was that he was usually refered to as stock car racing’s “first black.” The phrase should have been only black.

No other black, before or since, has been a regular on stock car racing’s major league circuit. Only two others, Willy T. Ribbs and George Wiltshire, have started even a single Winston Cup race.

It was never easy for Scott.

Detractors called him racing’s “token black.” Militants called him “Uncle Tom,” a black man who worked in the white man’s arena without making waves. Some promoters cheated or harassed him. Some spectators booed and threw things at him.

Through it all, Scott went about his business of preparing his blue Ford and racing it.

“Once I found out what it was like, racing was all I wanted to do as long as I could make a decent living out of it,” he said a few years ago. “I’m no different from most other people who’re doing what they like to do.

“It’s hard work, but what isn’t? I don’t figure anyone owes me a living. That’s the trouble with so many people today--blacks and whites--who want all they can get without working for it.”

Scott, although he rarely drove factory-quality machinery, finished sixth in NASCAR points in 1966, 10th in 1967 and ninth in 1968.

“Wendell ran pretty good at times, but he didn’t have any sponsorship, so it was hard for him to keep up,” Petty wrote in his autobiography, “King Richard I.” “He ran down low most of the time and stayed out of trouble, but when the race was over, here would be Wendell in the top 10.”

In 495 Winston Cup races, Scott won one, finished 20 times in the top five and 147 in the top 10. He had career earnings of $180,629.

Scott drove to his only NASCAR victory on Dec. 1, 1963, on a short track in Jacksonville, Fla.

“That was the biggest day in my career,” he said in a 1988 interview. “I needed $900 to pay some bills back home and the race in Jacksonville paid $1,000 to win, so we packed up and headed down to Florida.

“I won the race, but the promoter didn’t want to pay a black man the money, so he gave the trophy and the check to Buck Baker, who’d finished second. Buck was as surprised as I was. He knew I’d beat him. I filed a protest and they gave me the $1,000, but the fans left thinking Baker had won.

“I even got an extra $150 from Goodyear for running their tires in the race. But I wasn’t running Goodyears. I couldn’t afford them. I was running recaps.”

On another occasion, in a late-model sportsman race in Hagerstown, Md., Scott won a race with an announced purse of $350, but was paid only $36, whereas the winner of the semi-feature got $65.

At Darlington, he was once disqualified for having a racially mixed crew that included his wife, Mary, two of his six sons and two white mechanics.

“There were some places, when I was first getting started, where they’d put me out in a dark corner and wouldn’t let anyone come near me and my car but Mary. She was my whole crew,” he said.

Scott always said he believed he would clear the path for other black drivers, as Jackie Robinson had done for baseball players, but it never happened. Shortly after his retirement in 1973, after he broke his pelvis in a crash at Talladega, Ala., during the Winston 500, Scott offered this explanation in an interview with Associated Press:

“Most of them aren’t willing to work, to do the hard, greasy labor that goes into building and maintaining a race car so that it will pass tech (inspection) and run on the race track. There’s no such thing as ‘keeping hours’ when you want to be a race driver.”

Scott’s place in American history was made into a film in 1977 by Warner Bros. “Greased Lightning” starred Richard Pryor as Scott.