It’s Not Like Him to Simply Drift Away

The first time I saw Bobby Unser, he was hanging on the wall in Turn 2 of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. He had driven a whole lap and a quarter before he totaled his 750-horsepower Novi.

It was a familiar position for Unser. He had crashed twice in practice that week. “Bobby’s in too great a hurry to wait for the car,” a colleague, Bob Collins, explained.

Unser had always gone through life at Mach 1. He was a rookie that year. Most of the veteran drivers wouldn’t even get in a Novi, a brutish, hard-to-handle monster that went around the track like a thunderclap.

Unser would have ridden a buzz bomb. He could never stand to stand still anyway. They didn’t make the machine Bobby wouldn’t grapple with.

Racing was a contact sport with Unser. He didn’t go around you, he went through you.

He had one brother, Jerry, who was killed at Indy, and a younger brother, Al, who was the opposite of Bobby in most ways. Bobby was confrontational, loquacious, hyperactive and, above all, daring. Al was reserved, self-effacing.

You go a long way to telling them apart when you remember the conversation an airline stewardess had after meeting the two Unser brothers on a flight once. One of them, she said, slept with a newspaper over his face the whole flight. The other was up in the flight kitchen the whole time, checking the meals, the magazines, bothering the help, checking in the flight deck, his seat belt never used, his seat hardly ever. “I didn’t know which was which,” she said. But everybody who had ever been around a racetrack knew which was which.

There are two ways to win an Indianapolis 500. You can lead it. Or you can survive it. Bobby made his race the way Dempsey made his fights. He won three Indy 500s. Al waited for the field to eliminate itself. He won four 500s. There’s a moral there.

Bobby was good copy, though. One year, the night before the race, he got in an argument with a traffic cop. Bobby didn’t like anyone to tell him how to drive. He was cuffed and booked. The next day, I started my column: “The front row of the Indianapolis 500 today will have a graduate of Cornell University (Peter Revson), a graduate of Brown University (Mark Donohue) and a graduate of the Indianapolis City Jail.”

It was caddish of me, but I really had great affection for Bobby. He was fun. An ironic postscript is that both Peter Revson and Mark Donohue were to die in a race car later in their careers, a fate most people predicted for Bobby.

In the light of all this, no longtime Bobby-watcher was surprised a month ago at the news that Bobby Unser and a friend were missing after going snowmobiling in the trackless snowdrifts of the Rocky Mountains of northern New Mexico. You figured Bobby would die in something with wheels on it or a motor in it. Bobby’s never going to die on a golf course.

The world figured Unser had finally hit a wall he couldn’t walk away from.

But Unser, who had survived wrecks in Novis, Offenhausers and sprint cars that had flipped five times on him, was not about to let a snowmobile get him.

I had breakfast the other morning with the Unsinkable Bobby Unser, in town to launch the 41st Southern California Boat Show, which will be held this week at the L.A. Convention Center.

Snowmobiling in the white hell of the Rockies can make the back straightaway at Indy seem like a ride in a limo.

“First, there was all that snow blowing,” he said. “Winds of 70 miles an hour gave us a whiteout where you couldn’t see where you were or where you were going. We were at 12,000 feet and the temperatures were below zero and the windchill 40 below. Only our helmets kept us alive in that cold.”

One of the snowmobiles was lost when it tumbled into a ravine, and Bobby’s companion, Robert Gayton, climbed on with him. “We couldn’t see to follow each other anyway, the drifts covered our tracks as soon as we made them.”

The remaining snowmobile soon began to conk out, something vehicles driven by Bobby Unser often used to do. Since both Unser and Gayton were skilled machinists, they tried to restart it, but the altitude and cold soon stalled it permanently. They headed out on foot in snow six feet deep.

“I dug a tunnel in the snow with my hands next to a tree and we reinforced the roof with branches from the tree. See, a tree stays warm. It is a living thing. We had to make the tunnel small to be able to keep it heated by our body warmth. We spent the night there, but I began to upchuck and when I went outside, my gloves froze solid in three minutes.

“We could only sleep in five-minute intervals. And as soon as it was daylight, we took off. We had no idea which way we were going, but I knew we had to keep moving or die. We had to go through this deep snow. The winds wouldn’t die. They kept blowing the snow. It was like a sandstorm except snow is lighter than sand and there was more of it. “

They didn’t know they had become a national story. “I kept thinking, ‘They won’t even miss us!’ I wasn’t supposed to go snowmobiling till the next day.”

His companion began hallucinating the second night, and Unser lost his voice as well as his bearings. “We could be going in circles,” he remembers thinking.

Toward the end of the second night, though, Unser saw the most wonderful sight he ever saw. Forget the checkered flag, this was a barn! With lights on it.

They found a truck with the keys in it, but Bobby promptly slammed this into a snow drift. Force of habit, no doubt. Another yellow light.

They broke into the barn and, when they found a fluorescent light fixture, Bobby was sure there was a phone. There was. But, when they phoned the operator for the number of a nearby motel, she huffily hung up on them because they didn’t have the name of the motel.

Of course, with one caller incoherent and the other inaudible, she probably thought she had the town drunks on the line. Even when he reached his friend in Chama, N.M., Unser--exhausted, sick to his stomach, energy gone from sleepless nights and no food for two days--could hardly make himself heard and his friend got testy. “Look, we’re busy here organizing a search for my buddy. . . . Wait a minute! Bobby, is this you?!”

Unser had won the biggest race of his life. It won’t go on the Borg-Warner Trophy, the 500 princess won’t greet him with the traditional bottle of milk and a kiss but, for once, Unser survived a race, not stormed it.

Will it change Bobby Unser, now 63? Not likely. Someone asked what Unser wanted with a boat and a friend’s answer was, “Probably to go over Niagara Falls in.”