"MIKE MOSLEY -- INDY'S            
QUIET, SENSITIVE LONER"                   

Published in the 1984 Indianapolis 500 Yearbook ©

         It was one of those times, one of those days that happened to Mike Mosley more than most, when he thought about quitting, going back to the sandy solitude of the California desert, spending time with his young son, forgetting the speed and the spotlight and the anguish that go with being a big-time racing driver.

         Bob Harkey, over half a century old and perhaps a decade late for his own retirement party, lay in the hospital with serious injuries. His car and Mosley's had touched wheels at speed in Indy's third turn. Harkey careened into the wall; Mosley, as racers do, kept going.

         Later, away from the pit lane, he talked quietly -- the only way Mike Mosley ever talked, if he talked at all -- to Indianapolis sportswriter Robin Miller. "If Harkey dies, I'll quit racing," he told him. "I promised myself that, if I ever hurt anybody racing, I'd quit."

         "Everybody who saw it agreed it wasn't Mike's fault," Miller recalls, back at the speedway a year later. "Harkey was doing 173 and Mosley was doing 203, and Harkey moved down on him.

         "But he cared about his fellow human beings, and it bothered him to think he might have hurt someone."

         Harkey didn't die, and Mosley didn't quit, as he had on two other occasions in his racing career. But ten months after driving in his fourteenth Indianapolis 500, Mosley was killed when his van and trailer veered off a desert highway and tumbled down an embankment.

         The irony of it is that, at three times the speed in his lightweight Indy-car, he probably could have saved it, and himself.

         The other irony is that, even though he was a thousand miles away from the spotlights and silver trophies of Indy, coming home after a day of joyriding across the desert sand dunes with his son, with only salamanders and the red eye of the sun for an audience, the same could be said of Mike Mosley that is usually said of those who go up in a shower of shrapnel and smoke on the mainstretch at Indy: "He died the way he would have wanted, doing the thing he loved most."

         "He was where he wanted to be, out in the desert, as far away from the spotlight as you can get," Tim Coffeen, an Indy-car crewman whose friendship with Mosley spanned fifteen years, says. "He loved it out there. He was with his boy, doing what he wanted to do."

         Mosley's son, Michael Dean Mosley II, thirteen, survived the crash that killed his father, who was thirty- eight. And, for those who took the time it always took to get to know him, Mike Mosley's memory as one of Indy's most enigmatic figures survives, too.

         "That guy, in this business filled with so much arrogance and ego, was incredible," Coffeen, a crewman on the Machinists Union car driven by Josele Garza and a sometimes sprint car driver himself, goes on. "He had an incredible amount of common sense and humility. And he wasn't a complainer; he was very, very honest. He never made excuses for what happened to him in a race.

         "He also was very quiet, very hard to get to know. Mike didn't hang out too much; he was very private. It was probably two years before we really got to be good friends. We always ended up here together, riding home together, things like that.

         "He was kind of a loner. He was always very polite, but he was never comfortable with all the crowds and the press. The last couple of years, he had gradually gotten over some of that."

         Carl Robertson remembers Mosley in much the same way. "He was a very quiet individual, kept to himself," the retired Indianapolis policeman recalls. "It hurt him more than anything else around here, because he wouldn't talk to sponsors, hustle sponsorship deals."

         Robertson, who is a member of Tony Lee Bettenhausen's Provimi Veal team at Indy, remembers the trackside chats, the family barbeques with Mosley and his wife, Alice, and especially the night he and another policeman took Mosley with them to the scene of a narcotics raid in Indianapolis. "There were bullets flying, it was quite a deal," he recollects, with a smile. "When the other officer and I got back to the car, we couldn't find Mosley.

         "We didn't know what had happened to him, whether he got shot or what. Then we heard these muffled sounds in the back seat. We looked and there he was, under a blanket in the back seat! He never rode with me again."

         Equally fond are the memories for driver Herm Johnson, who publicly dedicated his qualification run this May to a "kindred spirit," Mike Mosley.

         "I felt he was one of the last heroes here," Johnson quietly explains, standing in front of his Gasoline Alley garage, "someone who was capable of driving tremendously and someone I felt I had a lot in common with."

         Johnson, making the second Indy 500 start of his career, relates how he, like Mosley, tends to be quiet and private in a sport where drivers often race full-throttle for the spotlight and the headlines, and that probably helped make the two of them race-track friends about five years ago.

         "He was a little different than most of the other people here," Johnson says. "He and I were a lot alike, watching a lot of the things going on, rather than participating in them. We spent a lot of time together at the race tracks."

         "There's no camaraderie here that I'm aware of," Johnson adds. "There's only one other driver I've found that I could have a beer with and have a good conversation with, and that's Tony Bettenhausen."

         Quiet. Private. A loner. An enigma wrapped in a fireproof racing suit. Mike Mosley, with a boyish smile sometimes pushing his thin, blondish moustache up into a line as straight as the Indy mainstretch. The difficult, though polite, interview. Indy's first "pure race driver," who didn't want to work on the cars, only wanted to drive them -- fast.

         "Mike Mosley never had a job," Coffeen points out. "He was a professisonal race car driver."

         He began with go-karts as a teen-ager, ran everything in-between before he made it to Indianapolis in 1968. He finished eighth that year, good enough for Rookie of the Year if another neophyte named Vukovich Jr. hadn't finished seventh.

         His career from then on was marked with blazing speed, soaring potential, and the worst turn of luck since John Dillinger said, "I feel like taking in a movie -- what's playing at the Biograph?" He endured frightful, fiery crashes in successive years, 1971 and 1972, while either leading or contending for the lead.

         He drove for some of the best-known car owners and/or crew chiefs of Indy legend -- A. J. Watson, J. C. Agajanian, Leader Cards, Dan Gurney, Jerry O'Connell, Alex Morales -- but almost always after their glory days had been packed in mothballs and shipped to the speedway museum. His best finish was a third in Gurney's Eagle in 1979.

         He won five Indy-car races at other tracks, and lost a lot more that luckier drivers would have won. He was one of only thirty-one drivers in the history of American auto racing to win more than a million dollars racing, and about the only one who didn't call a press conference to announce it.

         He quit the sport twice, gave up the speed and the spotlight for the solitude and the salamanders, and twice relented. "He was hurt in race cars, broken up badly," Coffeen says, of his friend's decisions to retreat from racing. "He didn't like that."

         "He didn't like racing as well as people thought he did," Robertson notes. "It was a way to make a living, that's all."

         Mosley qualified for the middle of the front row at Indianapolis twice, including last year, when he gave a Kraco team that had been unable to qualify either of its cars for the field a year before a front-row seat for the 1983 show. The team then dropped him unceremoniously at the end of the season.

         "When he lost his job with Kraco this past year, he went into his shell," Robertson relates. "Even Alice had trouble getting through to him."

         Maybe he was working it out, out there with his son, the salamanders, and the good, clean eye of the California sun. His few, good friends won't ever know. They will only know that, like Bishop Pike and Ambrose Bierce, Mike Mosley went out into the desert and never came back.

         "I miss him, I really do," Coffeen says, leaning against the edge of one of the garage buildings at Indy. "It was an empty feeling when I came in here this year.

         "I just loved the guy."

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 Copyright 1984 by Jerry Miller ©

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