Not Hard to Tell Who the Real Hustler Is Here

I don’t know if you’ve ever met your double in life, but I found it nerve-racking just sitting there chair-to-chair in a Hollywood hotel room talking to my mirror image, although I must say it didn’t seem to bother Paul Newman.

I had been looking forward to this because he still owes me six bucks, and while he gave me that Paul Newman sheepish smirk as if he had no idea what I was talking about, I told him I wasted two hours of my life watching him in “Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson.”

“The worst movie I ever saw,” I told him.

“You should see ‘The Silver Chalice,’ ” he shot back.

We were going to get along just fine.

*

WE CHATTED some more about the obvious separated-at-birth comparisons, and then moved on to his fascination with auto racing, which certainly separates us as adults. In fact, if it wasn’t Newman talking about auto racing, he’d have left me behind.

Newman not only drives fast cars, placing third at age 79 last week in a race in Atlanta, but he owns cars along with Carl Haas. And Newman/Haas Racing will run two cars beginning today in qualifying for the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach, the kickoff to the Champ Car season.

“You are going to see cars in this race that could stick to the ceiling at 150 miles per hour,” Newman said. “It’s a sport that ... on the outside might appear graceful and sliding across the snow like skiing, but the punishment that is going on in the cockpit in terms of G-forces would sink the average man in one lap.

“It’s all about excellence, isn’t it? That’s what acting is about. When you see excellence, whether it’s a guy washing windows faster and better than anyone else or whomever, it’s fun to just sit back and watch. I watched a golf tournament for the first time in my life, and oh my gosh, what an incredible performance by Phil Mickelson; that was excellence.”

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

“Am I excited about racing in Long Beach? You bet your ... ,” Newman added with a cough, so I couldn’t be sure how he ended that sentence. “It’s not just the race, but the carnival that precedes it and all the people....”

I don’t imagine, though, that folks will have much of a chance of spotting Newman.

“As I reach my dotage, people don’t pay that much attention to me anymore,” he said, which is odd because Claire Noland, one of our editors, volunteered to come along for the Newman interview and I don’t ever recall her volunteering to work as hard as a reporter before.

“I can slip through a crowd practically unnoticed with a baseball cap and dark glasses,” Newman said, and here’s a hint (for Noland): His baseball cap says, “Old Guys Rule.”

“My wife kicked me in the shins when I got it,” he said. “ ‘That’s what you’d like to think,’ she said.”

*

THERE HAS been a lot of controversy swirling around the kind of racing they do in Indianapolis, and the kind of road racing that Champ Car regularly features. Too complicated for me, but Newman has remained faithful to road racing, which explains the massive 2002 championship ring on his finger and his devotion to Long Beach.

“I wear a $29 watch on this hand, so I might as well have something gaudy on this one,” he said. “Here’s what I’d like to tell the people. Our fans have been fiercely loyal, and I’d ask them to remain patient. This is going to be the best race Long Beach has ever seen, and we’re committed to rewarding their loyalty.”

Newman’s appearance in “Winning,” the precursor to “Days of Thunder,” got him started in auto racing, and he stuck with it, he said, “because it’s the only sport I did fairly well at.”

That’s when I brought up his football career at Kenyon College in Ohio.

“Oh, what a mess,” he moaned. “I was a 152-pound linebacker. I was second-string and we played Otterbein, which got all the runoff from Ohio State, and I was in for two plays. I saw this guy coming through off tackle, and I thought, holy ... this is going to be bad. I left by stretcher.”

*

LATER HE would go on and do some acting, and if you don’t count “Buffalo Bill,” he did all right. He began racing at 47, and I wondered what kind of driver he had been before that. “Ask my wife,” he said.

Am I going to get a positive or negative answer?

“You’ll get a scream,” he said. “When I first started racing I got passed so often ... well, I knew I wasn’t doing well.”

Four years later he won the first of his four amateur national championships as a driver. Now he’s added four more championships as part of a successful racing team, and just finished “Empire Falls,” which will be on HBO later this year.

“I take naps now,” Newman said with a grin. “I never used to ... that’s humiliating.”

*

ASK NEWMAN who is going to win in Long Beach, and he snaps, “Us.”

Ask him anything about racing and his blue eyes become alive with excitement. (I wrote that for the ladies in the audience.)

“There’s something imprecise about an acting award and judging performances, but there is nothing subjective in auto racing. It comes down to one thousandth of a second; first car to hit the finish line wins. And what a feeling.”

We shook hands, and I think he wondered why I didn’t leave. I was waiting for my six bucks.

“I love that movie,” he said.

“Did you ever watch it?” I asked. “That’d change your mind.”

“Well, I’ve read some really [crummy] political editorials in The Times,” Newman replied, “so the way I figure it, you owe me money.”

That’s when I left.

*

T.J. Simers can be reached at t.j.simers@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Simers, go to latimes.com/simers.