Will Prince George Turn Into a Frog?

There is a gruesome military adage that sometimes it is necessary to destroy a village (or a country) in order to save it.

There are those who think this is what Anton Hulman George is bent on doing to the sport of auto racing--or at least the Indianapolis 500, which is only the fountainhead of the sport all over the world.

Tony George is (choose one): a) a misguided young man bent on squandering the family legacy bequeathed him: the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, home of the most famous auto race in the world; or b) a knight on a white horse riding forth to save the sport of motor racing and restore it in the image of his famous grandfather, Tony Hulman, by dispersing the evil forces who have taken it over and are bent on strangling it in money.

No one discusses who will win the 80th Indianapolis 500 this Sunday. The discussion centers around who will win the main event between Tony George and the franchise owners banded together as the Championship Auto Racing Teams. They’re in a wheel-to-wheel dice game with the future control of the sport at stake.

Tony George in person scarcely resembles either the black villain or the white knight. He is a tall (6 feet 3), lean (190 pounds), soft-spoken 36-year-old college graduate who believes his family heirloom sport has gotten too far from its grass-roots beginnings, where a young man with mechanical aptitude could come to the Speedway with a stock block engine, a homemade monocoque, three sets of tires and a screwdriver, put his creation on the front row and become the next Barney Oldfield.

George, like his grandfather before him, is not comfortable in the white light of publicity and notoriety, but he is willing to endure it to ensure his point of view gets across.

He sat at breakfast recently trackside and offered that point of view.

The facts are simple and straight-to-the-point, if only the tip of the iceberg: He has effectively disenfranchised and run out of the game the traditional hierarchy of the sport, the 24 franchisees who control the best cars and the best drivers. George pretty much ran them to the back of the grid. He gave them a keyhole, an eye of the needle, to get through to get into his race--eight spots out of 33. He pretended to be surprised they took their cars and went home. Or rather, to their own competing race in Michigan on the same day.

Why? Wasn’t there some other way to change things? Did he actually have to saw the baby in half?

“We tried the evolutionary approach,” George says carefully. “We met in Houston as early as 1991. We kept having a new set of officers to deal with. Their governing structure didn’t want to listen. They didn’t want a young kid like me to exercise any kind of influence. I wanted the Speedway to have as much a voice as the car owners. It wasn’t their sport. I recognize their significant contribution to the sport. I wanted them to acknowledge ours.

“When it became apparent that they as a group decided they wouldn’t support any of our races, that they just wanted to be able to cherry-pick Indianapolis, I had to take action. Any time you have an owners’ group controlling all aspects of the business, you have a potential conflict of interests and a monopoly presence.”

Races became less competitions than parades, George believes. The same cast of characters prevailed.

Whatever his intent, Tony George polarized racing. He put Indianapolis, the Vatican of racing, in one camp, the Roger Penskes of the sport in the other.

“They did nothing about the spiraling costs of the sport,” George says. “I wish they would quit telling the world that what we are doing to the sport is bad and casting it as negative. What we are doing to the sport is trying to make it grow. We want to attract and give hope to the thousands of drivers who have given up on racing because of its costs, the drivers who aspire to be here. If Penske has a $50-million budget, we want to let a guy with a $5-million one be able to compete. We want to maintain our heritage. Left to wane, Indy will become just another race in their series.”

George perceives a trend to internationalizing American racing, doing away with the oval racing that he says is the true backbone of the sport: “If they [CART owners] had their way, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway input would get as far as the chain-link fence around it and no further. We’re not content to stand in a corner and just do as we’re told.

“We detected a flat trend in interest in Indy car racing anyway. There was more and more emphasis on road racing at the expense of oval racing, which we didn’t perceive as a positive influence.”

The fight is Dempsey-Firpo--not apt to last long. At issue is whether the public pays to see men or machines. The Indy 500 this year rivals a motel registry for anonymity. It’s got a Jones but no Smith. If you want autographs, go to Michigan. If you want autos, go to Indy.

Tony George believes his Indy Racing League pilots are like kids on Christmas morning. They are getting to the summit of racing years ahead of schedule. It’s only a question of time before they become household names.

“I think you’ll find every driver at Michigan would rather be here,” he insists. “Our quarrel is with the owners, not the drivers.

“We have been accused of being anti-foreign. But our posture is not exclusionary or protectivist. We want an international race.” His xenophobic reputation, he says, centers only on his zeal for oval racing, which is perceived as anti-European.

That, in short form, is the view from Prince George. If nothing else, it has cast him in the role of celebrity. He’ll probably be the answer to a “Jeopardy” question any day.

He has put racing under the yellow light for the present. But he is ready to ride it out. He hasn’t tossed the gauntlet down to CART, he insists. CART is the one who drew the line.

“I didn’t do it!” says George in effect. It was those other guys. He hasn’t knocked the chip off anybody’s shoulder. They knocked it off his. He hasn’t turned the 1996 Indy into a mule race. The butler did it.

“It’s not Doomsday,” he tells you. Weeds won’t grow back in the Brickyard on his watch. Some people say, when the riffraff moves in, “There goes the neighborhood!” Tony George believes it’s the multimillionaires and their turbo-chargers who are ruining his. The public will have the final vote. “We’ll find out when we check the statistics on Sunday,” he promises.

The crowd count, not the laps run, will render the decision. In one respect, the question is: Even in absentia, will Roger Penske, in a manner of speaking, be winning his 11th Indy? Or will Tony George win his first?