Stewart’s Curtain Goes Up

Everybody has to start somewhere.

Napoleon was a corporal. Hogan was a caddie. Willie Mays was an infielder. Ronald Reagan was an actor. Babe Ruth was a pitcher. Bill Shoemaker mucked stalls.

Bobby Unser crashed in the first lap in his first two Indianapolis 500 races. The best A.J. Foyt could do in his first race was 16th, in his third, 25th.

But every sport has a “comer, “ an athlete to watch grow. Everyone knew Jack Nicklaus was going to take over golf, Mickey Mantle baseball, John McEnroe tennis. It was only a matter of time.

And at the confused, beleaguered, bewildered 80th Indianapolis 500 this week, the fair-haired pinup boy of the Brickyard is a brash young chauffeur with 20/10 vision, the wide eyes of a point guard, eager, bushy-tailed attitude of the youngster born to race and destined to be famous for it. A latter-day Barney Oldfield, Johnny Rutherford redux.

The name Tony Stewart will some day be as identified with the Indianapolis 500 as any Unser, Andretti, Ward, Foyt or Mears, the pit crews believe. Tony Stewart has four victories written all over him, say veteran 500 observers. All he needs is the car.

He has all the tools, all the Cs--charisma, confidence, coolness and capability. Like Shoemaker on a horse, he moves a car up several lengths--maybe laps--just by being in it.

He could have been a baseball player. Like Ted Williams, he has the vision of a predatory animal and the reflexes of an All-Star.

But he got infected with the speed virus early. Dad started him in a backyard go-kart in his home in Columbus, Ind., as soon as he was able to walk, and he tore up the backyard, foliage, fencing and all, till the family came to wonder why they didn’t get him a tennis racket instead.

He has one thing in common with all race drivers. They can’t bear to stand still. They can’t bear to go slow. They live life on the edge. They don’t exactly defy death, they ignore it. They treat danger with a shrug. They’d rather be crashing than not participating. Indeed, even back in the days when one of every three who climbed in a race car would die in a race car, there were plenty of volunteers.

Anthony Wayne Stewart is one of them. The game is safer now with the engine (and thus the fire) in back of the driver and the cars in breakaway construction where they don’t fight the walls, they get away from them. They have roll bars and flameproof suits and helmets bullets would bounce off of. But there are still plenty of accidents you don’t walk away from. You can never make it like croquet, or lawn tennis. A lost game here is not called “love,” it’s called “death.”

Everyone says Stewart has the best chance to buck the odds, to be driving around here as long as any Foyt, Unser or Rutherford or other durable don of the Speedway.

He has been driving Indy cars only a year, and already the field dreads to see a Tony Stewart in their rearview mirrors. “Stewart’s moving up!” bids to be as familiar a Speedway catch phrase as “Andretti is slowing down!”

He treats his career lightly. “I became a race driver because I was too lazy to work,” he grins. “I didn’t want to get up early in the morning and get the lunch pail.”

Still, race driving is no 9-to-5 day job. Driving a Lola-Menard around these corners is not like taking a Sunday spin down the 405 in the family Buick. You are going almost 250 mph in a machine that thinks it’s an airplane and is straining to get to get airborne on you. Or, at least to turn right. It makes riding a bull seem like canasta with your aunt. And facing a 100-mph fastball or hitting the Chicago Bears’ line a piece of cake by comparison.

But there’s nowhere Tony Stewart would rather be than hitting 250 mph, an inch from a wall or weaving through traffic on Lap 190. “It’s a rush,” he says. The rest of life seems in slow motion or instant replay next to it.

They’re not in a hurry to die, they’re in a hurry to live. The logical successors to the guys who drove chariots with Ben Hur or fought lions in the Colosseum.

It should surprise no one that Stewart flies airplanes in his spare time. Or will as soon as he gets enough money to buy one. He has to be going 200 mph somewhere.

But most future idols start at Square 1. No one takes his first start batting cleanup in the World Series, quarterbacking in a Super Bowl or top-seeded at Wimbledon.

Stewart, in a sense, does. He is starting his Indy 500 career at the top, the pole, the position reserved for the No. 1 driver in the field. Only two other rookies in history have started Indy on the pole. Walt Faulkner in 1950 and Teo Fabi in 1983. And Fabi, a seasoned European campaigner, wasn’t really a rookie.

Stewart is one of 17 rookies who will start this race. Only twice in history have more started (19 in 1930 and 1919). Ordinarily, Indy fears rookies the way the Titanic did icebergs, or a golfer, lightning. But the veterans are outnumbered this year.

Without the Tony George’s splinter group, the Indy Racing League, Tony Stewart wouldn’t be starting anywhere this year.

Only five rookies have won this race from anywhere on the grid (discounting the first race where they were all, in a sense, rookies). And one of these “rookies” was the Brit, Graham Hill, who, like Fabi, had been a European champion first. The reality is, a rookie hasn’t won it since 1927 and only four have really won it.

So, if you have to start somewhere, the pole at Indy is as good a place as any. The stage is set, the curtain going up on a weird, wacky, wonderful Indy. No one knows what today holds. Will this be known as the year the great drivers of the past couldn’t win their second or third Indy or the year a great driver of the future was winning his first? If he has to start somewhere, how about Victory Lane?