The Best American Sports Writing 2014

by Glenn Stout

  Dick Trickle had a crown on his head. He’d just won the 1983 World Crown 300 in Georgia and the $50,000 that came with it. Dick looked over at the guy who’d just presided over his coronation in the victory lane. “I’m not a king,” he said. “I’m a race car driver.”

  This was, at the time, the largest prize Dick Trickle had ever raced for. He spent a month preparing the car. If anyone else did any work on it, he went back and did it over. “I never look at the purse,” Trickle told Father Dale Grubba, a Catholic priest and chronicler of Wisconsin racing who’d known him since 1966. “My wife does. I come to race.”

  But for the World Crown 300, Trickle broke his rule. He did look at the purse. The race itself had been nearly rained out, and instead of thousands of fans at the Georgia International Speedway in late November, there were only a couple of hundred. It was a problem for Ron Neal, the engine maker who owned the speedway. He promised a huge purse for the short track race, one that now, because of the weather, he might not be able to pay for in cash. It’s okay, Trickle said. I’ll barter with you. So instead of getting the entire purse, Trickle also got new engines, and engine service, for his cars. He did things like that.

  There are tons of stories about Dick Trickle from the short track days. He once told a Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reporter about the time when he blew a water pump in a race, got on the PA, and asked if anyone in the crowd had a Ford. A guy drove his car down to the pits. Trickle pulled the water pump off, put it on his car, won the race, and gave it back. Another time he blew an engine, pulled one out of a tow truck, dropped it in his car, and won that race also.

  Trickle won a lot on the short tracks. Maybe more than any other driver. The number of wins that Trickle is supposed to have is 1,200, legitimized by a Sports Illustrated article in 1989. But unlike NASCAR, which has precise records, Wisconsin’s short track racing record book isn’t a book at all, but a patchwork of newspaper clippings and memories and word of mouth. One man, who has tried to piece together records of every race Trickle entered, says he’s found evidence of 644 wins up through 1979. He’s not sure of the ’80s. Trickle would have needed 556 more victories before heading off to the Winston Cup in 1989 to hit 1,200.

  Might have happened.

  He was good at the little things. He knew how to power through the corners. He always kept his car in control, even in traffic. Pit stops were critically important, because when a race was long enough to require one, one was all you got. At the 200-lap races at Wisconsin International Speedway in Kaukauna, he would pit on around lap 70 or 80 when everybody else thought about heading in around 120. After his stop, he’d drive conservatively, waiting for a yellow flag. When everybody else went in to change tires, Trickle would stay out, take the lead, and a lot of times take the checkered flag. He won at least 34 races at Kaukauna. At least.

  In central Wisconsin, the same drivers went to the same circuit of tracks, which all ran races on different nights of the week. Drivers didn’t bump and grind because they couldn’t afford to, and you didn’t have a week between races to fix your car. You only had a matter of hours. If Dick Trickle couldn’t get around you cleanly to win, he’d settle for second. It wasn’t worth the risk.

  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.

  I think I can make it, Dick told Darlene. And he did.

  The End

  Chuck Trickle doesn’t want to talk much more about the suicide. He’s on the phone from a water park.

  “It’s not the right thing to do, and I’m upset the way he did it, but you know, I wasn’t in his shoes,” Chuck says.

  “Now they’re turning on the music,” he says, changing the subject.

  “That’s my story anyway.” The music gets louder.

  “The park is closing in 15 minutes,” he says.

  “Anyway, that’s about it. Is there anything else you want to know here?”

  Tom Roberts says he struggles with Dick Trickle’s suicide. So does Father Grubba. John Close, who partied with Dick Trickle in Stoughton, is saddened by it. Humpy is too. Kenny Wallace put a Dick Trickle sticker in the cockpit of his dirt car in memory of Trickle. But he had to take it off. It bothered him too much. He had a hard time driving.

  Kenny Wallace tries to justify it like the others. He doesn’t agree with suicide, but he’s not going to question it. Dick had been through a lot over the last couple of years, he said.

  Kenny has been talking about Dick Trickle for about two hours when he stops for a second. “You know, this has been like therapy for me,” he says. His voice sounds tired. “I want to make sure you understand that he was a good man,” he says. “I want to make sure you know the full story.

  “Don’t you fuck it up,” he says.

  So he tells me what was in the envelope.

  There were medical records inside. Computerized forms. Test results. Findings from doctors. Charts. They detailed a day-by-day, doctor-by-doctor struggle with pain.

  Dick Trickle chain-smoked for his entire life. But he didn’t have cancer. Aside from some stents, his heart was healthy.

  To understand the end, maybe you have to go understand the beginning, way before racing, back to 1949, when Dick was eight years old. He was playing tag with a cousin up in the rafters of the house his uncle was building in Rudolph when he fell and broke his hip. He dragged himself home, and his mother took him to the hospital. He spent six months there, and missed a year of school. Doctors weren’t sure if he’d ever walk again.

  Once he got home, he wore a cast on his leg for months before he and his brothers got tired of the thing and cut it off. He’d walk again, but always with a slight limp.

  In 2007, 58 years after the fall, that hip needed to be replaced. The limp was becoming too painful. He also had stents put in, doctors put him on blood thinners, and told him he ought to stay off the track. In 2009, he told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel he still felt good enough to race, but he admitted to feeling the wear and tear from years of bumping cars and hitting walls. “I’m paying for some of my good times,” he said, “but at the same time, I’m getting better and better with old age.”

  But sometime after, only his family knows when, he began feeling a stabbing pain two inches under his left nipple. Dick Trickle didn’t cuss all that often, but when the pain became too much he started to really let the words fly. His phone conversations got shorter because he just couldn’t go on. He went to doctor after doctor, looking for help, for years. We can’t help, they told him, because we can’t find the pain.

  The problem with pain is that most doctors need to know what’s causing it before they can treat it. Prescribe the wrong drug, and you might mask the real problem. Prescribe the drug to the wrong person, and they might abuse it. One study found that chronic pain increases the risk of suicide by 32 percent. It can leave people desperate. It can change people.

  After the pain started, Dick Trickle stopped smoking. But by that point, he was already dealing with another kind of pain too.

  In 2001, Vicky’s daughter Nicole, Trickle’s granddaughter, was on the way home from volleyball practice. She stopped for gas at a minimart and was pulling back onto the road when a pickup truck smashed into her side of the car. She died instantly. Dick never talked about it with Kenny all that much. That wasn’t surprising. “You are never going to get a feeling out of Dick Trickle,” he said. Still, Kenny knew he was grieving. Other friends said he never got over her death.

  They buried Nicole at Forest Lawn. Her death came just three years after his nephew, Chuck’s son Chris, died after being shot in Las Vegas. Police there have never solved the crime. Chris was an up-and-coming race car driver. He called Dick for advice all the time.

  “You never know what a man is thinking,” Kenny said. Maybe it was grief. Maybe it was pain. Maybe it was a combination of both.

  Race car drivers don’t like to talk about pain. It shows vulnerability. And besides, it might keep them off the track. Dick Trickle endured a lifetime of crashes and hard hits. He wasn’t a complainer. But he’d been through a lot of pain. His chest. His hip. His granddaughter. His nephew. Dick Trickle was always a guy who looked ahead. He didn’t dwell on the past. He always raced so he could race again. But there were no more races. Ahead, all Dick saw was suffering.

  A week before his death, Dick called Chuck. I don’t know how much longer I can take it, he said.

  On May 15, Dick Trickle went to the Duke Heart Center in Durham. This was his best chance to get better. Doctors ran more tests. But it was the same answer. We can’t find anything wrong with you.

  On May 16, he was dead.

  Kenny thinks everything was done deliberately. Dick Trickle didn’t kill himself at home. He didn’t do it on a piece of property that somebody else could buy sometime. He ended his life at the same cemetery where his granddaughter was buried, where he would be buried. He made sure Darlene and the family had enough money.

  The Trickle family is still private. Chad Trickle politely declined to talk about his father. Vicky didn’t return an email. Their racing days are done. But they still know there are a lot of people out there who loved Dick Trickle. Two weeks after the funeral, Kenny got a package in the mail from Darlene. It was an old Dick Trickle T-shirt.

  Most of the grave markers at the Forest Lawn Cemetery are flush to the ground, so from a distance, one looks the same as the next. You almost have to know where you’re going to find the spot where Dick Trickle is buried, on the gentle slope of a North Carolina hill. You can barely see a gas station across Highway 150. Beer, coffee, and cigarettes aren’t too far away.

  His grave is right in front of Nicole’s. There are a few trinkets on it. A little number 99 checkered flag. A toy John Deere tractor. A Titleist golf ball with the words MISS YOU DAD. Some flowers. There’s an oak tree nearby. It’s sunny. The driveway through the cemetery is a small asphalt oval.

  Fitting, really. Dick Trickle always liked a short track best.

  STEPHEN RODRICK

  Serena the Great

  FROM ROLLING STONE

  WHO IS THE MOST DOMINANT FIGURE in sports today? LeBron James? Michael Phelps? Please. Get that weak sauce out of here. It is Serena Williams. She runs women’s tennis like Kim Jong-un runs North Korea: ruthlessly, with spare moments of comedy, indolence, and the occasional appearance of a split personality.

  Here are the facts. Serena is the number-one tennis player in the world. Maria Sharapova is the number-two tennis player in the world. Sharapova is tall, white, and blond, and, because of that, makes more money in endorsements than Serena, who is black, beautiful, and built like one of those monster trucks that crushes Volkswagens at sports arenas. Sharapova has not beaten Serena in nine years. Think about that for a moment. Nine years ago Matchbox Twenty and John Edwards mattered. The chasm between Serena and the rest of women’s tennis is as vast and broad as the space between Ryan Lochte’s ears. Get back to me when LeBron beats Kevin Dur
ant’s Oklahoma City Thunder every time for nine years.

  Serena’s dominance has been fueled by not giving a shit what you or anyone else thinks about her methods. Serena has been giving tennis the two-finger salute for more than half her life. Not that she cops to it. “Lots of my friends have been telling me lately that I’m spoiled,” Serena says with a baffled look on her face. “And I’m like, ‘Really? I’m not spoiled.’”

  I almost spit Coke through my nose. Serena does what she wants, when she wants. If she’d pulled a Jamesian I’m-taking-my-talents-to-South-Beach event, she would have put it on pay-per-view and hawked her Home Shopping Network all-under-a-hundred-bucks fashion line during the commercial breaks. And she would not have given a flying fuck what you thought. This is a woman who one minute is reading inspirational notes during changeovers and then, in the 2009 U.S. Open semifinals, threatening to personally make a line judge eat a tennis ball.

  Tennis ninnies chided Serena for taking months off earlier in her career to flirt with fashion and make cameo TV appearances, you know, like a normal person might do after making tens of millions of dollars. Chris Evert, an icon of the game, questioned Serena’s dedication just 18 months ago.

  Evert couldn’t have been more wrong. The players Serena entered the game with are long retired, burned out, and discarded. Meanwhile, Serena came back last year from foot problems and blood clots that could have killed her. Instead, she has gone 74-3 since losing at the 2012 French Open and won three Grand Slams and an Olympic gold medal. After each one, tennis gurus whispered, “That was Serena’s last hurrah.”

  Not quite. This year she has won the past four tournaments she’s entered and is on a 31-match winning streak, the longest of her career. If she doesn’t pocket her sixth Wimbledon and her fifth U.S. Open titles this summer, check the ground because the world may have spun off its axis. She’s never been more dominant than now, at the age of 31, which is about 179 in tennis years. (Evert now says Serena is the best of all time.) Hell, even dating Brett Ratner couldn’t stop her. Neither could older sister Venus, merely the second-best tennis player of the past 20 years.