The Best American Sports Writing 2014(63)

Almost all of the other drivers had day jobs. They had to go home after the races. Trickle could hang out at the track all night. He could hit the bar. He could hang out with fans. “Just because the races were over didn’t mean pulling up the shades and going to bed,” he told Father Grubba for his book The Golden Age of Wisconsin Auto Racing. “You are still pumped up. What are you going to do, stop at a corner church?” When Trickle left the track, people would follow him. They knew he’d stop somewhere for a drink.

The things that made Dick Trickle old-school later were quite ordinary then. He drank canned beer because that’s what most bars served. He smoked because people smoked. He wore cowboy boots in his stock car because they were thick and durable, and that’s what people wore to race.

He started to get a reputation. One time, at an ASA race, the fans booed him when he was introduced. Doesn’t that bother you? another driver asked. “When you get introduced there may be 500 or a thousand people that cheer,” Trickle told him. “But when I get introduced, 100 percent of the crowd reacts, one way or the other.”

He was always racing, stock cars, snowmobiles—anything. In the beer garden after a race at the Milwaukee Mile in 1969, Trickle got to talking with another short track racer, Dave Watson, and they decided they needed to race again. The two drivers and three crew members grabbed mats and walked to the top of a nearby giant blue carnival slide. They sat, counted down, and pushed off. Dick Trickle won.

In 1972, he entered 107 races, and won 68. He got his 49th on August 4 in his 1970 Mustang, starting at the back of the field, taking the lead on lap 9, and taking the checkered flag on lap 30. By this time, he was starting to make the number 99 car legendary. He was called the White Knight, named for the mascot of Super America, his sponsor. He won seven ARTGO short track championships in 11 years, from 1977 to 1987. He was the ASA champion in 1984 and 1985.

There was a point, in 1979, when Humpy Wheeler tried to bring Trickle down to NASCAR full-time. Trickle had driven in 11 Winston Cup races up to that point, starting at Daytona in 1970. He ran four Cup races between 1973 and 1974 and won at least eighth place every time. The big question about a short track guy like Trickle was focus. The longer the race, the longer you’re required to maintain that intense concentration. That was never a problem for Dick Trickle. Focus ran in his family. “They could focus so hard,” said his brother Chuck, “and forget there was another world and get things done.”

He made the calculations. There wasn’t big money in NASCAR. Not yet. He could make more money in short track. So he told Wheeler, I can’t afford to come down there. Promoters are paying me to show up at the tracks up here.

He had all the ingredients to be a great Cup driver. He just didn’t need to be one. All he needed to do was win.





The Start





Rudolph, Wisconsin, where Dick Trickle was born in 1941, was race-crazy in the 1950s. At one time, Father Grubba says, there were 26 race cars in a town of just a few hundred people. Nearly every driveway had a race car in it.

When Dick Trickle was nine, a neighbor took him to a race at Crown Speedway in Wisconsin Rapids, and he thought that was the greatest thing he’d ever seen. For the next seven years, he focused on how to get behind the wheel of his race car. Problem was, the Trickles were on welfare. Dick’s father, Lee, came down with an ear infection that led to medical problems and was hospitalized for years. There was no money for racing. Dick had to work for his money, on farms and in his father’s blacksmith shop. He swept the floors, but he also learned how to use the arc welder.

In 1958, at age 16, when he’d welded together enough parts and came up with enough money to buy a 1950 Ford, he dropped the engine from a 1949 Ford in it and started racing. It was slow, and during his first race, in Stratford, Wisconsin, he finished way back in the end.

When the nearest racetrack, Griffith Park in Wisconsin Rapids, found out he was too young to race, he was kicked out for a year. After that, Dick never took racing for granted. Whenever he raced, he raced hard, and smart, as if he might not have another chance.

But he still had a day job, working 66 hours a week at a service station in Rudolph while racing four nights a week. With his free time, he worked on his cars at night, using what he’d learned about fixing cars during the day.

He married Darlene in 1961, paid $8 for a motel room the night of the wedding, and then ran two races the next day at Wausau and Griffith Park. Dick started working for a telephone company, and hated it, being up high on the poles. So he started doing the math: Gas was cheap. Parts were cheap if he scoured through the junkyard and did the work himself. If he owned his own car, he wouldn’t have to split up his winnings. Dick could bring in the money, and Darlene could stretch it as far as it would go, but the racing season in Wisconsin ran from only May to September, so he didn’t have all year to make money, and the payouts for winning races were maybe $100 one week, maybe $300 another. He would have to be on the road constantly, going from track to track, from LaCrosse to Wausau, from Madison to Wisconsin Dells. He couldn’t afford to lose. Wherever there was a race, Dick Trickle would have to go there and win.