The Best American Sports Writing 2014(59)

“Today, had he been 25 years old, his looks would have gotten him into a race car,” Wheeler says. But today, he would have had to deal with sponsors who squirm at habits like smoking cigarettes or personalities that aren’t squeaky clean. Dick Trickle was the last NASCAR driver to keep a pack of smokes in his car. Imagine that now. These days sponsors create a whitewashed version of the drivers that fans fell in love with when racing was racin’, and stock cars were actually stock cars. “Today, they would have tried to put him through the clothes wash, and he wouldn’t have gotten in the clothes wash,” says Wheeler. “If you start off and you don’t have perfect size, perfect weight, perfect teeth, perfect hair, and perfect speech, you’re probably not going to get in a Cup car.”

Dick Trickle could have. But he didn’t. To understand why, you need to look at his life in reverse. That way the quirks become more commonplace, the near misses become wins, and the legend becomes real. The pain he endured at the end of his life washes away. He was a family guy from Rudolph, Wisconsin—a workingman whose work just happened to be racing cars.

“He liked the simple life, he liked the simple people, he liked the working people,” Wheeler says. “And that’s where racing’s always been, and despite all the people today that have entered this sport, particularly working for companies, that have led cloistered lives and don’t understand working people, Dick Trickle sure did. And that’s why they didn’t understand Dick Trickle.”





Up All Night





It was 6:30 A.M. on a summer morning in 1996, and Dick Trickle threw the door open and walked into the conference room at the Chose Family Inn in Stoughton, Wisconsin. He had a somber look on his face. He stood on a cooler and looked around.

“You all are a bunch of drunks,” he said.

The men in the room laughed. They weren’t up early. They were up late. They were Rich Bickle’s race team, which had beaten Trickle the night before at Madison International Speedway and clinched the championship in a series of races called the Miller Nationals. Once the race was over, they drank in the pits. It was always a contest between Bickle and Trickle to see who would leave last.

Once the track kicked them out, Bickle’s team found a bowling alley and drank there. Then they found some bars that were still open. They drank there. When the bars closed, they ended up back at the motel in Stoughton. And that’s where Trickle found them. At 6:30 A.M.

“Give me a beer,” he said.

Dick always seemed to have a brewing company’s logo on his car, and a can of beer in his hand. He joked about a sponsorship deal that gave him $100,000 and 350 cases of beer. But there are 365 days in the year, he said. What am I supposed to drink on the other 15 days?

The fans and friends who drank with him tended to miss something—Dick didn’t actually drink all that much. Once he got down to the end of his PBR, he’d just stand there, holding a nearly empty can for as long as he could. Everybody else kept drinking. Dick kept holding. If someone threw him a beer, he’d take it. But people don’t tend to do that when you’ve already got one in your hand.

His close friends had never seen him drunk, even though his close friends got drunk with him. Kenny Wallace finally figured out his trick. “You know how many times I’ve gotten drunk because of you?” he asked.

Dick would much rather talk. He’d stay up late to talk racing. Cars. Anything. If you’d ask him how on earth his parents named him Dick Trickle, he’d matter-of-factly tell you that his parents named him Richard. If you asked him how often he smoked in the car, through a special hole he’d drilled in his helmet, he’d ask: How many yellow flags have I had in my career? If you’d seen him rolling up to the track in the morning and asked him how late he was up the night before, he’d probably say it would depend on the race. The rumor about him, spread by him, was that he needed one hour of sleep for every 100 miles he’d have to drive the next day. He once said he probably drank 40 cups of coffee a day. The man ran on caffeine and conversation.

You could tell when Trickle was going to say something important. “My boy,” he’d start off, and then he’d tell you something simple that made a lot of sense. Don’t say you finished sixth, he’d say. You won sixth place, because guys who finished seventh and eighth would love to have had the race you did. Don’t race the other drivers. Just race the leader. Race the track. Don’t crash. To finish first, he’d say, you must first finish. Guys like Mark Martin made that their mantra.