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Making
things happen - with integrity. A weekly CyberMemo designed to keep you on task. Monday June 4, 2001 Volume III Number 23 |
FOCUS - The Brickyard
They call it the Brickyard.
It’s an appropriate name - thirteen thousand two hundred feet (two and a half miles) of red brick (three point two million of them carefully laid out straight and level by a legion of masons back in 1909) fifty feet wide on the straight-aways and sixty feet wide on the four corners. It’s a rectangular oval speedway. Two long straight-aways are five-eighths of a mile long. The two short straight-aways are one eighth of a mile long.
At
the first Indy 500 race in 1911, the cars hit a staggering, eye-popping seventy
miles per hour.
This year, last Sunday afternoon, it took Rookie winner Helio Castroneves three hours thirty-one minutes and fifty-four seconds in his Marlboro Team Penske Indy car through two rain delays and a couple of yellow flag crash clean-ups to complete two hundred and fifty laps (five hundred miles) and take home over $1.2 million in prize money. At full speed, it took him forty-one seconds to scream through a two and a half mile lap. Top speed? Over two hundred fifty miles per hour.
He beat the second place car by just five seconds.
They also call it racing’s greatest annual event, pulling in over four hundred thousand fans as eyewitnesses, not to mention a world-wide television audience.
I was in the neighborhood as those cars hurtled around the world famous track. We even drove through some of that Indianapolis precipitation last Sunday afternoon. But we were on the Interstate in a rented car, holding it to under sixty in the pelting rain. The rest of the car-racing world was downtown at the Brickyard.
We met two of those eyewitnesses at the airport. A married couple about our age. We chatted as the crew prepared our flight for boarding.
Joe and Patty live in a Chicago suburb. Both of them commute into the city every day and sit at a desk, jockeying paper and a telephone. When Patty won an office raffle and brought home two tickets to the 2001 Indy 500, Joe asked, “Does it include airfare and hotel?” When Patty answered, “No,” Joe said “Oh well… you think we can sell them?”
“SELL them!?” Patty was incredulous.
Joe knew he was in trouble. “I’ve NEVER won anything in my life,” she went on. “Until NOW. And this race, well, it’s the BIGGEST event of Memorial Day weekend. The WHOLE WORLD is watching. I’ve ALWAYS wanted to go. C’mon honey, let’s check it out.”
Joe shrugged, and said, “OK. OK. We’ll check Priceline.com and see what we can find.” And then he sighed one of those deep barrel-chested sighs. He stopped short of rolling his eyes.
Patty fired up the computer and logged in to the Internet.
* * * * * *
Spectators fuel the entertainment sector of the economy.
Where would rock concerts be without screaming, ticket-holding fans? How ‘bout the World Wide Wrestling Federation? Or a one-hundred-forty-million-dollar remake of the attack on Pearl Harbor? Or all that free television programming? Or five daily shows featuring the wet and wild watery leaps of Shamu the Killer Whale? Or the NBA? Or the World Series?
Not only the ticket sales but the concession stands and the parking fees and the hotels and the airlines and the car rentals and the ground transportation to and from. And the fine dining, too.
Not to mention the memorabilia of shirts and hats and photo albums and all manner of souvenirs and trinkets.
Visa. Discover. American Express. Master Card. Any one will do.
It’s all rooted in our perceived need to see the action. To be there. To watch the performance with a direct line of sight. To be close to the stars… and maybe even the Superstars.
We are willing to pay the price. And when we do, we’ve got a story to tell. Our friends sit on the edge of their seats to hear a first hand account from a real eyewitness. We were there.
Some of us watch because we are learning from the masters. We’ll go home and the next day incorporate some of the things we saw first hand into our own personal performance. The high school basketball player watches the Lakers. The college high jumper sits in the front row at the Track and Field event at the Stadium. The little leaguer accompanies his dad to the Dodger game. A pro-tour wannabe watches every move Tiger makes. And they’re all better for it. They work that much harder. Aim that much higher.
And sometimes, we are supporting the achievements of the people we love.
But all too often we can make no claim to these lofty ideals. When we go, rather than stimulating some high minded level of achievement, we are simply occupying space. We are consuming an over-supply of junk food. Over-exposing ourselves to melanoma inducing rays. Draining an already strained budget. Increasing the time spent living a sedentary life.
It may not be a bad idea to ask why.
* * * * * * *
When I think of the Indianapolis 500, I remember black and white images of cars zooming round the track. We’d tune in to Wide World of Sports on Memorial Day Weekend, and listen to the action called by the legendary Jim McKay.
Something about the Thrill of Victory and the Agony of Defeat always got us there, and we’d hear McKay relay names like A. J. Foyt and Parnelli Jones and Bobby Unser and Al Unser and Mario Andretti and Johnny Rutherford.
We’d
always wonder when one of the cars might lose control and slip into a
terrifying slide, leaving rubber burning smoke trails and black skid marks
spiraling across the pavement and into the wall… every year it happened.
And McKay would tell us about all the safety devices, miracles of modern
technology that protected this new generation of drivers in ways their
predecessors could never have imagined, and “isn’t it incredible that he
survived that bone crunching impact… and walked away?”
And we’d sit up and watch the replays… and we were hooked, all the
way to the finish.
And we’d cheer the winner from our living room.
A couple years back, we toured the Brickyard Museum. We saw the cars, from the old Stutz and the Duesenberg. The open cockpit and handbrakes and the first rear-view mirror. All the way to the modern high tech Indy Cars.
And we took a bus ride around the track. I don’t think we broke thirty-five miles per hour, but we got a view from the bricks. There are two-hundred fifty thousand permanent seats around the two and a half mile track. It’s the largest event venue in the world. One could only imagine a white-knuckle forty-five second two-hundred plus mile an hour revolution around the pavement before a couple hundred thousand cheering fans.
And next year, our second daughter will teach elementary school about ten minutes away from the track.
* * * * * * *
The alarm went off that Sunday at four in the morning, Chicago time. Patty, startled out of a deep sleep reached for the off button and flopped back into her pillow as Joe asked, “Are you SURE you want to go?”
Patty said, “Yes,” and then sighed. She sat upright. “C’mon Joe. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. This is the INDIANAPOLIS 500. Let’s go.” And she pulled the covers back and headed for the master bath.
Joe stumbled behind, looking for the light switch.
In thirty minutes, they were in the car pulling back out of the garage onto the street heading for O’Hare. It was pitch dark.
The plane tickets were stand-by. But the commuter flight from Chicago to INDY was so early that even on this Memorial Day weekend Sunday, there were empty seats. Joe and Patty settled in for the forty-five minute hop. Both of them wrapped their hands around a tall deep roast Starbuck’s. The caffeine jolt helped.
Patty looked into Joe’s weary eyes and said, “Thank-you, honey.” Joe managed a halfhearted smile.
Patty pulled the Internet printout from her purse. She reviewed her instructions. Breakfast at the airport. The shuttle run to the Brickyard. The location of those coveted seats on a map of the track, just past Turn Two around the bend from the legendary Gasoline Alley.
As Joe and Patty passed through the entrance along with a couple hundred thousand other fans, Patty took the coupons back from the ticket-taker, pushed through the one-way counter and turned to Joe. She was giddy. “We’re HERE,” she exclaimed, and she took him by the arm.
“We sure are,” Joe answered. They looked up to the direction signs and moved along with the crowd in the direction of their seats. “This place is massive,” Joe looked up at the underside of the great bleachers. They could hear the roar of high performance engines. There was excitement in the air.
Joe and Patty are a Chicago sized couple. They drive a full sized car. The weather in the Windy City is not conducive to morning jogs or early morning visits to the fitness center. Joe and Patty, like their neighbors, are likely to spend the evening lingering over deep dish Chicago style pizza and top it off with hot fudge sundae before dropping into bed for the night with Jay Leno’s monologue running on the bedroom TV. This is not necessarily a value judgment. It simply means that Joe and Patty appreciate wide seats and plenty of legroom.
That’s not what they found at the end of Turn Two. The Brickyard can boast two hundred-fifty thousand permanent seats. But they are not comfortable seats. Nor do they provide much of a line-of-sight view of the race.
There was plenty of time to watch the warm up laps. The cars were smaller, but faster and louder than either Patty or Joe had imagined. Their reserved seats were in the center of a long row, half way up the bleachers, and a long walk from the concession stand and the restroom. Their seats had a back, but were narrow. Joe and Patty squeezed in, and in the next half hour or so, the throng of race fans filled in the gaps. Their huge bleacher was jammed in with hard-core race fans.
Joe turned to Patty. He caught the number of the car whizzing past. He looked up the name of the driver in the program guide. “Never heard of the guy,” he told Patty who was already fidgety. She shrugged. “Can you get us some coffee?”
“Sure,” Joe said. “Did you bring the umbrella? Looks like rain to me.”
* * * * * *
“…so there we sat for four hours,” Joe told me as we waited at the Terminal to board our flight in Indy on Sunday afternoon. “Have you ever seen a car fly by at two hundred miles per hour? It’s a blur of color. We couldn’t tell who was in the lead. There was no leader-board in our section. We saw smoke, but we didn’t see any of the crashes. We couldn’t see the pit. No Jumbo-Tron. No instant replays. When the rain came, all we could see was this guy’s umbrella in front of us, blocking the view.”
Patty added, “In the first hour, we snapped our heads back and forth so many times it felt like whiplash.” Joe raised his eyebrows. “Yep,” he said.
“Sounds to me like the big screen TV and the Lazy-Boy in the family room are a terrific alternative to being there,” I offered.
“No kiddin,’” replied Joe. And even Patty nodded in agreement.
That afternoon, they left the big race a couple hours early to beat the crowd, grabbed a Shuttle back to Indy’s International Airport, and there we sat, together, pondering some of the strange ironies of modern life. Is winning the raffle really a win?
The agent behind the desk announced the boarding sequence over the Terminal PA. For us it was a connection to a California flight. For Joe and Patty, it was the stand-by trip home.
Carolyn and I settled in, fastening our seatbelts and when we saw the open seats on board, Carolyn said, “looks like they’ll get on.”
Soon, the Chicago couple walked down the center aisle, looking road weary and worn, raffle ticket winners with a story to tell.
Just a guess… for Joe and Patty, this trip to the Brickyard really will be once-in-a-lifetime.
* * * * * * *
Candy will be Mrs. Ostrander in two months. Along with her sister and brother, the three of them have been training for the San Francisco Marathon. Kevin and Kristyn have suffered knee problems. Kevin will not run. But Kristyn will.
The two sisters, along with Kevin’s friend Sonya, have plans to run together on the Fourth of July weekend.
Carolyn and I will be observers at the big event. Candy, Kristyn and Sonya will be participants.
* * * * * * *
On this Monday morning, you’ve done your share of observing. You’ve been in those bleachers. You’ve stared at the screen. You’ve watched from the sidelines.
And as a leader, some of those hours have been an utter waste of time. And money. And energy.
But then there are other hours - meaningful hours, when you are there to cheer on someone you care for. Someone who you’ve watched grow up. You’ve shared in the Thrill of their Victories. You’ve felt the Agony of their Defeats. As you watch, there’s an emotional connection between you and the performer… and the performer knows – you are there. And it really does matter.
Pick and choose your events. Make them count.
And even better, be a participant. Be the one in the arena.
That’s where the real action is.
© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2001
Special Thanks to my good friend David Belcher, owner of Rhino Media Group and creator of WisdomGram
LeaderFOCUS is a service of Good Stewardship Associates
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