By Bob Markus

The Indianapolis 500 is my favorite sporting event of the year. It's the one day that I warn my wife a week in advance not to accept any social engagements. I covered 20 of them for The Chicago Tribune, including the 1988 race when I did double duty, working in Teo Fabi's pit crew and filing a story after the race. It was the most unforgettable day of my professional life. How many times in 36 years of covering sporting events did I stand for the National Anthem? A thousand? Two thousand? Three? And how many times did the singing of "The Star Spangled Banner" move me to tears? Just this once. Standing next to my team's race car just moments before the command to "start yer engines" I felt the tears begin to well up and I just let them go. The day didn't last long for our team. Just 30 laps into the race Fabi brought the Quaker State-Porsche into the pits for his first and, as it turned out, last stop. Using the long-handled stop sign assigned to me, I brought Teo to a tire-screeching halt, then picked up the fire hose with which I was supposed to wash down the fuel cell door after refueling. It was a scary moment for me because my target was located behind the driver's head and I had not been able to practice it. What if I squirted Teo instead of the fuel cell? I thought I had done the job properly, but when I turned my back to hang up the hose I heard cursing and I saw everyone's head turned to the left as in the tennis crowd shots in Hitchcock's "Strangers on a Train." "What happened?" I asked. "Teo crashed," came the laconic response. For a tense irrational moment I thought it was my fault, that Fabi somehow had spun the tires in the water I had laid down. When I learned that Teo had been sent out before a rear tire could be secured and had crashed just a few hundred feet down pit lane when the wheel came off, I was relieved. When two or three of my pit crew mates began pushing the car toward gasoline alley I decided to join them and so there I was, a slightly overweight man in his 50s, running nearly a half mile under a broiling sun, wondering if I was crazy or just plain stupid.

Instead of reaping the thrill of victory I had been saddled with the agony of defeat, but what mattered most was that I had, in a small way, competed on the biggest stage in the sporting world. But I was besotted by the Indy 500 long before I ever dreamed I could play a part in it. I remember the first time I was really aware of the Indy 500 was Memorial day of 1946 when, sitting in the grand stand in Wrigley Field watching the Cubs play somebody, the P.A. announcer, Pat Pieper, came out with the news that George Robson had won the first Indianapolis 500 since the war started. After that I usually would listen to the race on the radio, never dreaming I would ever actually see a race, let alone participate in it. I was working as a reporter on The Moline (Il.) Dispatch on Memorial Day of 1955 and had gone to my room at the YMCA, which was virtually next door to the newspaper, where I heard on the radio that Bill Vukovich, winner of the two previous Indy 500s, had been killed while again leading the race. I hustled back to the office and told the city editor the news and they managed to get a few paragraphs on a page one replate. I'm not certain when the race was first televised, but I remember that in 1964 it was being shown in a local movie theater. My wife and I went to see it and that was the day that Eddie Sachs and Dave MacDonald were killed in a fiery wreck on the second lap. We didn't wait around for the restart almost two hours later. My only other contact with the Speedway was a telephone interview with Jim Clark from his garage in Gasoline Alley just a few days before the Scotsman won the 1965 race. So I really didn't know what to expect when I went to my first race in 1968. I fell in love with it. All of it. The Purdue band playing "On the Banks of the Wabash", Jim Nabors singing "Back Home in Indiana," "Gentlemen, start your engines," the balloons going up, the jets buzzing by and the incredible rush of adrenalin when those 33 cars scream into the first turn. I've had some bad days at the race track, none worse than in 1973 when Swede Savage, one of my favorite drivers, was fatally injured in a flaming wreck that pretty much summed up the entire month of rain and ruin. Yet, like General Patton's feelings about war, I do love it so. Still.

Obviously, it would take a lot to make me miss seeing the Indy 500. This year it almost happened. Instead of watching the start of the race from the comfort of my living room, I watched it from a hospital emergency room cubicle. Before I go any further let me assure you everyone's all right. But for a moment the Indy 500 didn't seem very important to me. My wife, who had opened a cut over her right eye brow in a fall on Saturday night, decided she'd made a mistake by refusing to go to the hospital and when she called her doctor Sunday morning, he agreed. So off we went to the emergency room where, ultimately, the doctor in charge ordered a cat scan--just in case. I waited in the room, with the TV set tuned to the race and, although I wasn't really into it, saw the start. After awhile I heard a nurse across the hall say, rather excitedly, "the patient in 37 has a cervical fracture." That pretty much went by me until I remembered, "this is room 37." When my wife was wheeled back into the room she wore a cervical collar and we both prepared to hear the worst. But a little while later the ER doctor came in and said, "You're fine. You can go home." It was nearly 3 o'clock and we hadn't had lunch, so we went to the McDonald's right in the hospital. I don't know what went on in the race during tht time, but we got it on the radio on the drive home. We had to leave the car for 10 minutes at the pharmacy, so there went another gap. But being the long-running event that it is, there was still plenty of racing to be seen when we got home. I wasn't thrilled with ABC's coverage--too much, side-by-side coverage which makes it hard to follow the action. I don't really know any of the drivers any more, but I do know all the owners. Roger Penske. Chip Ganassi. Michael Andretti. Those are the big three in Indy car racing. I like them all, but Michael is my favorite. I've known him since he was a rookie and I've known his dad Mario since he won the 1969 race. I remember a long one-on-one interview with Mario the morning after the race. He did not appear to be comfortable and he spoke with a decided accent. Since then Mario has become so fluent in English that whenever any one asks me who my favorite interview subject is, I truthfully answer: "Mario Andretti."

So I was hoping one of Michael's drivers would win the race, although they had all looked so bad in qualifying that it didn't seem likely. But both Tony Kanaan and Michael's son Marco put on enough of a charge to make it interesting at the end and even Danica Patrick stopped complaining long enough to motor to a respectable sixth place finish. Under the circumstances it was a good day for Michael's team. Ganassi had the race winner, Dario Franchitti, and Penske would win the World 600 in Charlotte that night, so everyone should have been happy. I know I was.

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Note to my readers: I've always had a strange method of writing a column--or blog if you insist. I don't always know how a story is going to come out. That's why when I used to go into the sports editor's office and he'd ask me what I was going to write about, I'd have to say, "I don't know." Today's is an extreme example. I did three hours of research for a blog that I had intended to be about the ten greatest race drivers who never won the Indianapolis 500. But I never quite got rolling in that direction. So I'm thinking of doing it next week. Or next year. See you then.