The Best American Sports Writing 2014(61)

“I’d like to thank Champion and Sears DieHard Batteries for giving us young racers a chance to come up through the ranks,” he said. More laughs.

He thanked his kids for coming. He thanked Darlene for putting up with 31 years of racing. He thanked his sponsors. And he thanked Bill and Mickey Stavola, who owned the car. He had no contract. No guaranteed ride. He drove all year on a handshake.

“If you’d have told me last December that I would be on the stage at the Waldorf Astoria, I’d have said no way,” Trickle said. “But one phone call last spring changed it all.”

It started one year before, in 1988, actually, with the crash that ended Bobby Allison’s career. Allison blew a tire at the Miller 500 at Pocono in June, and then Jocko Maggiacomo came along and T-boned him so hard that Bobby still doesn’t remember the crash, nor winning the Daytona 500 the February before. Mike Alexander drove Allison’s car for the rest of the season. Afterward, at the Snowball Derby in December, Alexander hit an embankment with the driver’s side of his car. Something happened to him. But he didn’t tell anyone for months.

A few days before the 1989 Daytona 500, Alexander did a media tour during the day but was too worn out to keep going through the evening. His PR guy, Tom Roberts, thought that was strange. On Sunday, after 188 laps, Alexander hit the wall in turn two and that was it.

The next race was the Goodwrench 500 at Rockingham in early March. Alexander and Roberts were having dinner and Alexander confessed he shouldn’t be out on the track. He’d had blurry vision and severe headaches since the Snowball Derby. Roberts told him to fess up to his crew chief, Jimmy Fennig, and he did.

Now Stavola’s car needed a new driver. A few years before, Fennig had been Mark Martin’s crew chief when Martin was running American Speed Association races in Wisconsin. That’s how Fennig knew Trickle. He convinced Stavola to bring him in for the race, and that Thursday night, Dick Trickle got The Call.

He started in the last row. During the race, he kept pitting on yellow flags, and one of his pit crew members kept leaning way in through the passenger window. The TV announcers thought there was a problem with the transmission. The transmission was fine. But the heat near the throttle was causing Trickle’s right foot to swell, and the guy from the pit crew was trying to pull off his snakeskin cowboy boot. He kept trying until they finally swapped it out for a regular driving shoe.

Trickle finished 13th at Rockingham, ahead of Richard Petty. The next week, in Atlanta, Trickle finished third. He went on to nine top-10 finishes. Larry Pearson, son of NASCAR legend David Pearson, had been the favorite to win Rookie of the Year. That changed when Trickle came along.

Roberts knew Trickle could drive. But he also knew Trickle didn’t have that much pressure on him. Opportunity just came to him. Trickle was just the fill-in guy and knew it.

Off the track, he hedged. For the first month, Trickle lived in a motel off of Interstate 85 in a rough area of Charlotte, just to be ready to go back home to Wisconsin Rapids with some cash in his pocket if NASCAR didn’t pan out. But at the track, he was still the same guy he’d been up north, smoking and drinking coffee and talking to everybody. His family came to every race. He didn’t want people to line up for his autograph—he wanted to buy fans beers and talk with them and work the crowd. Sometimes, after two-hour meet and greets, he’d ask if he could stay longer.

He didn’t always qualify well, but he knew how to pass. He never tired out. He said he didn’t need to work out. Got his workout in the race car, he said, and since he’d been driving so much in so many features on so many short tracks, he was in pretty good shape. At the gas pumps after the race, Roberts would see the other drivers worn out and sucking down oxygen. Trickle would just be standing there, cigarette in hand. I could go another hundred laps, he’d say.

He smoked outside of the car. He smoked in the car. When the yellow flag came out, so did the lighter. Trickle was a Marlboro man, but had the sense to put them into an empty pack of Winstons whenever he was at a Winston Cup race. He’d show up at races with a briefcase, just like the one Alan Kulwicki, another short track racer from Wisconsin who was named NASCAR Rookie of the Year, in 1986, made popular. Kulwicki would keep shock charts, setups, and notes from the last race in his. Trickle’s carried a schedule, a ball cap or two, cheap Miller High Life sunglasses, and a carton of cigarettes.

By the time he was named Rookie of the Year, Trickle had already lined up a full-time ride for 1990, driving for Cale Yarborough’s Phillips 66 team. Two months after his trip to New York, Dick and Darlene bought a modest, 11-year-old Cape Cod house in Iron Station, North Carolina, along with the eight acres of land that came with it, leaving Wisconsin behind. Their new home was less than an hour away from Charlotte, near where most all the other drivers kept their race shops.