Today is the High Hiler Holy Day. It is Memorial Day Sunday.
It is the first Memorial Day Sunday that I have lived without my father.
This. SUCKS.
For those of you who don't know, the High Hiler Holy Day is so named because it is the annual running of the Indianapolis 500. I normally did not go to church on the High Hiler Holy Day. No, this is a day of deep celebration of my father's passion, open-wheel auto racing.
In the good old days (read: the 80s), when they started airing it on television live instead of the time delay, this was the day that nobody had a diet. Our standard foods were: Terrell's Potato Chips, Terrell's Pretzel Sticks (the thin ones), Heluva Good French Onion Dip, cold cuts, cheese. There were variants, but that was the basic menu.
There was also the obligatory nap.
In the days B.P. (Before Prozac), this was one of two days a year that I could count on hearing "I love you, Kathryn" from my father. (The other was either Christmas or my birthday, which are 8 days apart. If I didn't hear it on the first one, I'd hear it on the second and vice-versa). My father, who didn't cry, would always choke up at Mary Hulman tottering out to say, "Gentlemen, start your engines." It was his "I coulda been a contender" moment. My father loved auto racing, and he was passionate about open-wheel specifically. He got very angry with the CART split, with USAC pushing the owners to create CART in the first place, about the mismanagement he saw even as Tony George (Chairman of the Board for the Speedway, grandson of Tony Hulman, the man who put the Indy 500 on the map) brought NASCAR to the Brickyard.
Well, today would have been a helluva day for my father.
I turned on the pre-race festivities, because of course I did. I hate that we don't have Jim Nabors singing "Back Home Again in Indiana". There are days that I think we should just have him on recording in perpetuity. I do not know the classical tenor who sang it today. It was absolutely note-perfect. Tone was gorgeous. And it doesn't measure up to memory.
Then, the NBC (also, NBC!?! Apparently Disney sold away the rights and NBCUni/Comcast grabbed them) announcer team said, "And now, for the most famous words in auto racing...Roger Penske."
WHAT?!?!?!?!?!?!?
Some background here. Roger Penske (a billionaire) is a team owner who runs normally three drivers in the IndyCar series yearly. He also runs a three-car team over in NASCAR. He was once a respected driver, but was more slick than gritty, in Dad's words. He never raced the Indy500 (proof, my father would say, that he wasn't truly a great driver). He also apparently bought the Indianapolis Motor Speedway from the Hulman-George family 18 months ago. We just didn't know because of the postponement of the race last year due to Covid.
My father hated Roger Penske. I mean, deeeeeeeeeeeeeep loathing. He respected Penske, in particular his business acumen, but he hated the fact that Penske made racing far more about who had the best equipment. My father believed that, essentially, the cars should be an even playing field and the sport should be about the best driver. While it's true that the best drivers can take middling equipment and win (Hello, Michael Schumacher. Hello, Ayrton Senna.), that axiom has held less since our technological age melded with computers...you know, what my father did for a living.
My father hated that Rick Mears and Al Unser (Sr.) both won their fourth Indy 500s driving for Penske, and is probably arguing with someone right now about the fact that A.J. Foyt will forever remain the best driver this country has ever produced. Foyt won with inferior equipment all the time until Penske began changing the name of the game. But even Foyt couldn't compete with what Penske can afford in this day and age.
In order to compete with Penske in truly inferior equipment, you would have to be one of the two Great Ones of Open-Wheel Auto Racing (modern era), greeted above. I'm still praying for Schumi.
So to see Roger Penske, kind of my father's personal Antichrist of Auto Racing, saying the words that brought my father to tears in the BP days? Yeah, that kind of blew my mind.
The race itself? It was a fairly good race. It was a very safe race. And it resulted in another man getting into that inner circle of four-time winners. My father would have liked to see Helio Castroneves win his fourth Indy 500 not driving for Penske, as he had for his first three.
But I watched it solo.
I will probably watch the Indy 500 for the remainder of my days, and miss my father poignantly on those Memorial Day Sundays.
I love you too, Dad.
