Last of the American Racing Cowboys<META NAME="description" CONTENT="Real racing cowboys like Jack Hewitt hard to find at Indy"><META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="Indianapolis 500, preview, column, short-track drivers, Jack Hewitt">

"WHERE HAVE ALL THE COWBOYS GONE?

Published, in edited form, in Indianapolis Monthly magazine, May 2000 ©

The folks who run the Indianapolis 500 talk a lot these days, like prospectors around a campfire, about returning to "the good ol' days."

In IndySpeak, that means those thrilling days of yesteryear when rough-and-tumble drivers from the dusty little tracks around the country showed up every May, like cowpokes at the end of a cattle drive, to compete in the goldarndest motorsport shoot-out of them all, the Gunfight at the OK Corral and Cheyenne Frontier Days all rolled up into one.

A romantic memory worthy of all the Western movies ever made, and definitely the old-made-new look the retro gold-panners of the Indy Racing League want for the 89-year-old auto race out there on West 16th Street. At least in May, when the sounds of the heavy equipment installing a 21st-century-friendly grand prix venue are silent.

Weary of 500-mile races populated by what they see as effete squatters with foreign names and more interest in art galleries and Eurodollars than kicking up a little dust at the Saturday night barn dance, Speedway president Tony George and the other IRL trail bosses wax nostalgic about the prospects of the annual showdown once again becoming an all-American gunfight at high noon the way it used to be. They'll take "Unforgiven" and let someone else have "The English Patient."

It hasn't quite panned out that way yet. The good old days of racing, and the colorful characters that made them that way, are as hard to find as the simple "Pleasantville" times of presidents like likable Ike Eisenhower and role models like Ozzie and Harriet.

At the end of the millennium, not much real gold has sifted out of the plain gravel found in the creek beds of Indy racing's tried-and-true tributaries. So far, they've mined more pyrite than gold nuggets of the good old gold-rush days, recruiting more untried, fuzz-faced young gunslingers-in-waiting than the tight-jawed, steady handed shootists who have been the last ones standing in the middle of a dusty street emptied of everything except a little gunsmoke and a dead body or two for Matt Dillon's cronies to remove.

They have really pulled in only two genuine cowboys, Steve Kinser and Jack Hewitt, who still fit the mold of those old stand-up guys who used to swagger in from the cattle trail, ready to slap leather at the drop of a few shots of rye at the local saloon. And, while Kinser has pretty much ridden off into the sunset as quickly as he rode into Naptown from the World of Outlaws, Hewitt -- his fans like to call him "Do It" Hewitt -- has laced up his holsters for one last face-off against the black hats who don't swear by Mom, apple pie and two-tone Chevrolets.

This month, he is likely to be the lonesome cowboy at the place that used to be filthy with them. For the truly good ol' days, drivers like Hewitt were a dime a dusty dozen. They were, and are, legendary for their rough edges, raw grit and readiness to jump on a motorized bronco and ride it like the wind.

They were as solid as the Rockies, like Eddie Johnson. Johnson, epitome of the journeyman racing driver, hailed from the Cleveland area. He drove midget cars for years and still held down a steady job -- or as steady as a cowboy ever gets -- selling plastic products.

And, though he never won the 500 or even came close to it, he built a legend on his ability to ride into the Indy speedway anytime he felt like it, his driving suit rolled up behind his saddle, and put his brand on a starting position quicker than you can say Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Johnson made 13 starting fields at Indy in his day, often by just showing up, taking a few laps in a car that was vacant and then qualifying it for the race. He was the good ol' days' equivalent of the cowboy who could be called in to break a horse nobody else could handle. He didn't whisper to those mechanical horses; he willed them to go fast enough, and they obeyed.

The real cowboys also made their reputations back then with their fists, not just their fast draws with a steering wheel. They were quick to use their dukes and decisively efficient with them. When Eddie Sachs, a character in his own right with a tongue and a wit as hair-triggered as a Colt .45, wouldn't let off about winner Parnelli Jones spewing oil during the 1963 Indy race, Jones decked him with one punch the day of the victory banquet.

And the father-son tag team of Don and Rich Vogler was known to settle a few of its short-track disputes out behind the concession stand after the race. That didn't stop the younger Vogler from making it to five Indy roundups; if anything, it made him stand taller in the eyes of those in the crowd who followed him around to the smaller-town rodeos where he raced those old-style, hump-backed midgets and sprint cars.

Jan Opperman didn't rely on his fists, but he brought a battered prospector's hat, a past as a drug-ingesting hippie and a born-again Christianity that he wore on his sleeve like a sponsor's patch along in his luggage when he wended his wanderer's way to the big speedway in May. He got a haircut, drove for the very same Parnelli Jones who was 180 degrees removed from the Woodstock nation and, after two starts in the 500, shuffled back to the tumbling-tumbleweed ways of a short-track driver, unswayed by the faster cars and faster life of an Indy driver.

"I don't dig talkin' nice and dressin' nice just to impress people," he said at the time, like the gypsy campfire follower he was who, when he did leave the trail occasionally, parked his boots under a bed in Beaver Crossing, Nebraska. "I'd rather just be me."

Johnson, Jones, Sachs, Vogler and Opperman have passed from the racing scene now, and their likes are harder to spot than a safe place in a cattle stampede. But Hewitt may be the one lingering hope for the chuckwagon gang that wants the Indianapolis 500 to take us all back to the wild West days of old.

Hewitt, sporting a bushy moustache that would do Wyatt Earp proud and 27 years of a short-track history right out of Zane Grey, is definitely "old school." He drives hard and often and still shoots straight with his second most powerful weapon, his tongue.

In short, he is a contemporary corporate PR man's worst nightmare, an old hand with no desire to learn the new tricks of the image-conscious game that is played at all the top-rung racing levels these days. "I'm not gonna play the game," he says, back home in Troy, Ohio, before heading off for Indy again. "Tony George told people he was glad to have Jack Hewitt at his race track, but he just never knew what he was gonna say."

He had certainly proved that the May of 1998. Hewitt had come to Indy in '97 with his helmet and his history, all he figured he needed to get a chance at the biggest barn dance of them all. An old friend, Bob Parker of Parker Machinery, tagged along in case Hewitt needed some financial help to land a ride, but "Do It" refused to let Parker's money speak for him.

"If my ability and my accomplishments in racing aren't enough to earn a ride, then I don't want one," he said more than once that month three years ago.

When it turned out that his two biggest racing assets weren't enough to lasso a ride, Hewitt stayed true to the cowboy ways. He settled for racing at a short track nearby and, as an act of both disappointment and pointed humor, he shaved off his moustache for the occasion.

"I shaved it off because I had to kiss a lot of asses over at the Speedway this month and I couldn't get the smell out," he said over the Indianapolis Raceway Park loudspeakers to an audience that was first stunned then loudly amused at the telling and un-PR-like remark.

That's the thing with Jack Hewitt. He still shoots straighter at 48 years of age than all the aspiring young whips from the short tracks that make the IRL "vision" look more like a casting call for "Young Guns XIII."

"As most people can tell, I don't mind talkin' a lot," he acknowledges. "I've got a big mouth, I know, but I figure you can either laugh or get pissed off about something, like that deal in '97. Instead of gettin' mad, I just joke about it."

And make potential sponsors and their PR people very, very nervous. But Hewitt came back to Indy in '98, with a sponsor behind him, hooked up with the PDM Racing entry, made the race and finished a respectable if unspectacular -- compared to his virtuoso short-track performances -- 12th.

He says he was able to pull it off without making his moustache smell funny enough to shave off. "I really didn't have to clean up too much," he says, with a sharp laugh. "We still shot our mouth off, but we survived."

Even the PR people, Hewitt notes, weren't ducking for cover. "They all knew I wasn't gonna just say 'yes' or 'no,' he says. "Evidently we didn't offend too many of 'em because they're still speaking to me."

And now, on the eve of the annual roundup at Indy, Hewitt is again in hot pursuit of a sponsor for his second 500 effort, one he hopes will be more exciting than his first. "I'm a short-track guy, you know," he is quick to point out, referring to his ongoing career in sprint cars and the like. "We're used to getting in there and mixing it up with people, so I'd like to be able to be competitive this time."

All he needs is "a sponsor for my big mouth," he advises, and he will be back in the racing cowpoke's paradise. "I'll be there this year, regardless, with no regrets either way. 1998, to me, was fun, talking to people, signing autographs. I loved it."

Hewitt clearly revels in his role as the old gunslinger who can still teach the young would-be successors to the dream of restoring the good ol' days a thing or two. In its first three years at Indy, the IRL revisionist formula for the 500 brought some young drivers up from the short tracks, still wet behind the ears and not yet up to challenging the old guard of top drivers with road-racing backgrounds, foreign bank accounts and trophy wives and picture-perfect families.

The young guns, like Jimmy Kite, Andy Michner, Tyce Carlson and J. J. Yeley, haven't really found the range to run down the Goodyears, Cheevers, Rays and Salazars of IRL racing. The new additions on the horizon - Jay Drake, Sarah Fisher and Ricky Shelton -- may fare no better.

The gaps in the next generation are visible to any dead-eye. They have spent only a handful of years on the short tracks, not Hewitt's quarter of a century. They come from more well-to-do families that make their racing adventures well-heeled but not always as hard-earned. They have lap-top computers, not dirt under their fingernails.

Home for the new breed is the big city, not the backroads places like Troy, Ohio, which numbers about 19,000 citizens and is arrived at by turning south at Piqua and asking the guy at the Sohio station for directions. The sudden wannabes come from places like Atlanta and Detroit and southern California and spend their spare time golfing, riding jet-skis or jogging, instead of selling plastics to make ends meet or standing out in front of the gas station on Saturday night crushing beer cans with one hand to impress anyone who notices.

Only Tony Stewart traveled the same road as the true cowboys like Hewitt, and now his trail has led away from Indy and toward the siren of the South, NASCAR, and others from the same bunk house have followed his hoof prints - Kenny Irwin Jr., Dave Blaney, Jason Leffler, Mike Bliss, Dave Steele, Randy Tolsma.

To no one's great surprise, Hewitt is outspoken about the fresh-faced young drivers being brought along too fast to Indy-cars. "A lot of 'em haven't been asleep long enough to be dreamin'," he reckons.

Hewitt sees the rightful recipients of the IRL dreams as the guys, like himself, who have spent years on the outlaw trail, winning races and building a solid fan following. "Somebody came up with Viagra; Tony George came up with the IRL," Hewitt says, as only he can say it. "We should have been too old for Indy-cars, but we just made it under the wire."

But age catches up with even the straightest of the sharpshooters. This May's cattle call on at 16th and Georgetown could well be the last for racing's Bronco Billy if no one provides him with the horse flesh to strap his well-worn saddle onto. "This will be our last year," Hewitt says, his voice as flat and wide as Texas. "We'll try it this year, and, if I can't get there, then I get to say, 'Hey, I did it once.'

"They can't take the one that we did away. If I look down Gasoline Alley, I can always remember walking down there with my uniform on."

The Ohio range rider will give it his best shot this time, no doubt. "I'm gonna give it an all-out effort," he asserts, the support of Parker and Parker's son already packed away in his saddle bags again. "We're still workin' and definitely haven't give up hope. We'll be there most of the month - just being there is important."

Even if he can't catch the last stage out of the Indy-car equivalent of Dodge, Hewitt and his infamous facial hair will still be quite visible. If not in the race, he plans to drive the new two-seater sprint car he built over the winter to give his bravest fans a taste of short-track racing wherever he goes in the 500 Festival Parade the day before the big 500 roundup.

But the lone gunman for the well-seasoned set doesn't see the lineage ending if he has to hang up his Indy gun belt. "I'm just the latest one," he insists. "First it was Kinser, then me. There'll be somebody else come along, like Jimmy Sills or maybe Jac Haudenschild. They need us to flavor the soup."

His last statement is surely the truest. If the good ol' days are ever going to be restored at Indy, it will be the time-tested Gary Coopers of the short-track racing world who will do it, not the overnight Leonardo DiCaprios. Otherwise, the 500 will be no more authentically the way it used to be than modern-day Dodge City, Kansas, with its artificial old West main street, staged gunfights on the hour and requisite gift shop, is the real West of yesteryear.

It will have to be a place where a guy like Jack Hewitt can come and shoot from the hip and never have to shave off his dark moustache. "It'll still be there," he assures everyone as he looks toward Indy 2000. "If it comes off again, it'll be because it's got crabs in it or something."

And only the PR folks and the people riding shotgun on the political correctness stagecoach will be shocked right out of their buckboard seats.

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(AUTHOR'S UPDATE: Hewitt's ride for the 2000 Indianapolis 500 never materialized and he returned to the short-track circuits. He also shaved off his moustache again.)

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