Tales of the Talladega Curse ~ 2017
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Author’s Note: This article has been published in many versions over the
years as the tales continued to grow. To date, this is the complete and
unabridged version, and my fond hope is that it’s the final edition. Twelve
months out of the year, folks come looking for it, so every couple of years I
release an update. Please enjoy and send the link to friends.
I bid you welcome, gentle readers. This week, we leave
the 1.5-mile track in Charlotte that posed for all those look-alikes that came
later, and head for the heart of Dixie and the biggest track on the circuit,
Talladega, whose 33º banking affords a very different type of racing. Assuming
that many of you are aware of my views on restrictor plate racing, I’ll spare
you that rant. Instead, today let’s talk
about the legend of the “Talladega Curse.” Since the giant 2.66-mile track
opened in 1969, there have been some strange, if not downright eerie things
happen there. This is a compilation of some of them; a tale spun for your
enjoyment, though certain to make you a bit uneasy at the same time.
“You're traveling through another dimension -- a dimension not only of
sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries
are that of imagination. That's a signpost up ahead: your next stop: The Twilight Zone!” ~ Rod
Serling
There was a time in racing history when there was no
racetrack in Talladega, Alabama. What there was, in fact, was a huge, empty
plot of land that had been purchased by Big Bill France, with a dream in his
head of building a racetrack so awesome as to put to shame even his own Daytona
International Speedway. A little story goes along with that land though. Rumor
has always had it that it had belonged to a Native American tribe, and
depending on which tale you listen to, was either a burial ground for tribal
members or sacred ground used for tribal rituals. Whichever it was, the story
goes that the tribe was quite unhappy about its planned use and sent their
Medicine Man to try to change Big Bill’s mind, a feat that was tougher than
moving mountains. True to form, France refused to budge and they say that the
Medicine Man put a curse on what would soon become the new “Alabama
International Motor Speedway,” or Talladega, as we know it today. I’m sorry, I
have no idea what the fine for cursing was in those days, but Smokey Yunick
could have told you.
Now, I’m not sure that I believe in curses and in
reality I’m not even sure how much, if any, of that story is true. Still, the
legend lives on and gains strength and popularity every time something eerie
occurs at the giant racetrack.
The very first race was held there on September 14,
1969, and lent credence to the saga of the curse. The surface of the new track
was extremely rough and throughout practice and qualifying, it destroyed
several different tire compounds offered up by Goodyear and Firestone. The PDA
(Professional Drivers’ Association), headed by Richard Petty, confronted France
and asked that the race be postponed until the track could be repaved. Big Bill
of course, was having none of that, and more or less dared the drivers to do
something about it. When he announced over the track PA system on Saturday
night that any driver not competing in Sunday’s race should leave the grounds
immediately, there was a long moment of silence, followed by the engine of the
#43 hauler coming to life and pulling out. It was followed by every regular
driver at the track that was a member of the PDA. (Almost all of them) There
was a race on Sunday, but it was peopled almost entirely by drivers from the
companion series (Grand Touring, I believe) that had run on Saturday. It was
won by a driver named Richard Brickhouse, whom you’ve probably never heard of,
and now you know why.
It seems that 1973 was a particularly bad year at
Talladega. The Winston 500, held there in the spring, started with a field of
60 cars, but on the ninth lap, twenty-one of them were gone in a spectacular
wreck that would rival the “Big Ones” of today. According to Buddy Baker (who
had been the leader until getting caught up in oil from Ramo
Stott’s blown engine), “The whole backstretch was cluttered with engines,
transmissions, pieces of doors and other parts. I’ve never seen a bigger
pile-up anywhere.” Cale Yarborough, who had been right behind Baker said, “I
hit one car and sailed through the air. I didn’t ever think we were going to
stop.” Bobby Allison opined that much of the blame lay with the oversized
starting field. “The extra 10 or 20 cars were needed to fill up the track. They
did that all right….all over the backstretch.” That wreck would end the career
of pioneer African-American driver Wendell Scott, hospitalized with three
broken ribs, a lacerated arm and a cracked pelvis.
In the August race of the same year, Talladega claimed
the life of the 1972 Rookie of the Year, Larry Smith in a manner that seems all
too familiar today. On lap 14, Smith’s car hit the retaining wall, and though
damaged, looked quite reparable. The racing world was shocked to hear of his
death from such a seemingly innocent hit. The cause of death was listed as
“Massive head injuries and a basal skull fracture.” Later in the same race, on
lap 90, Bobby Isaac, in response to a voice in his head, radioed car owner Bud
Moore and told him to find a relief driver. CooCoo Marlin took over the wheel
and finished 13th. Isaac, on the other hand, retired from Winston
Cup racing on the spot. “Something told me to quit. I don’t know anything else
to do but abide by that.” (Twilight Zone stuff, to be sure)
If 1973 was eerie, then 1975 at Talladega was tragic,
but again in strange ways. On lap 141 of the spring race, the dominant car of
the race, driven by Richard Petty, hit the pits with a left front wheel bearing
on fire. Crewmember Randy Owens, Petty’s brother-in-law, came over the wall
with a pressurized water tank to extinguish the blaze. When engaged, the tank
blew up, sending Owens some 30 feet into the air and killing him instantly.
Petty said tearfully, “I had just gotten out of the car and stepped across the
pit wall. Randy reached over to turn the pressure on and the thing blew up.
That’s close to home. He was just a kid and had those two little, bitty boys.
The bad part about it is somewhere along the line it could have been
prevented.” Gary Rodgers, from Benny Parsons’ team suffered head lacerations
when struck by a jagged piece of the water tank.
On August 17 of that year, Tiny Lund was driving his
first Winston Cup race in over two years, but he only raced until lap six. Lund
lost control in the midst of a group of cars fighting for position and spun
down into the infield. As his car rested there, it was struck in the driver’s
door by rookie Terry Link. Lund was pronounced dead of massive chest injuries
in the infield care center. Link, who had been knocked unconscious in the
wreck, was hauled from his burning car by two spectators who jumped the infield
fence to assist him. It was reported that they had to fight off security guards
to get to him. One said later, “I just didn’t want the man to die.” Buddy Baker
won the race, but on hearing of the death of his friend Tiny, Baker dropped to
his knees and said, “We were fishin’ buddies. This is
terrible. It takes all the joy out of winning this race.”
On May 1, 1983, Phil Parsons (Benny’s younger brother)
and Darrell Waltrip got together on lap 71, touching off an eleven-car wreck in
turn one. Both cars hit the wall, but while Waltrip’s
stayed there, Parsons’ car became airborne, flipping and barrel-rolling a dozen
times before landing on the roof of Ricky Rudd’s Pontiac. Once more, there were
heroes (or angels) on duty, as two photographers ran to Phil’s car and pulled
him to safety just as it caught fire. Although I’m not positive that it’s still
there today, that car was housed at the Talladega Hall of Fame Museum for many
years, as a “Worst wreck” example.
After the May race of 1985, you could have gotten good
odds in Vegas that the curse had been lifted. Bill Elliott had started from the
pole with a qualifying record of 209.398 mph and seemed destined to win just as
he’d done on almost every Superspeedway that year. Then, on the 48th
lap, his Coors-sponsored Thunderbird began trailing a huge plume of smoke. Bill
came to the attention of his brother Ernie (Crew chief), who quickly repaired a
broken oil fitting and sent him back onto the track, just ahead of the lead
pack, but 5-miles behind them. Elliott put his foot in the carburetor and
though he was running alone, left the pack behind and set sail on an awesome
voyage. Unbelievably, he drove around that 2.66-mile track and made up a lap.
Without benefit of cautions, Elliott continued to fly around the track until at
lap 145, he caught and passed Cale Yarborough for the lead. He went on to win the
race with a record setting speed of 186.288 mph. If you ever wondered where
that “Awesome” nickname came from, now you know. Curses don’t always work!
By 1987 however, the track was up to its old tricks
again. On lap 21 of the spring race, Bobby Allison cut a tire and the car went
airborne. “Something bounced under the car and cut a tire” Allison said. “Up in
the air it went….around backwards. There was nothing I could do.” The car
struck the catch-fence with its underside, ripping the fence and spewing debris
into the crowd in the grandstand. Several spectators were injured, with a few
hospitalized, but it could have been so much worse, had that 3600-pound car
made it through the fence. The red flag period to repair the damage took 2
hours, 38 minutes and 14 seconds. The onset of darkness forced officials to
shorten the race by ten laps, and in some sort of poetic justice, rookie Davey
Allison, Bobby’s son, won the race. This was the race in which Bill Elliott set
a never again to be challenged qualifying record of 212.890 mph and the race
that precipitated the onset of those dreaded contraptions we call restrictor
plates.
At the spring race in 1993, there was a frightening
incident, which seemed to be more the creation of NASCAR than the result of any
curse, but it was scary nonetheless. After it rained at the track, NASCAR put
out the red flag, completed the track drying and set up a restart with only two
laps to go in the race. (Please bear in mind that it takes about that long for
these cars to get up to maximum speed) The resulting shootout made the OK
Corral thing look like a Girl Scout meeting. Lined up behind the pace care were
Dale Earnhardt, (Who had dominated the race until the rain came) Rusty Wallace,
Mark Martin and Ernie Irvan, four of the hardest racers of the time. After all
of the bumping and banging (at about 190mph), coming to the wire it was Irvan
in the lead, followed by Jimmy Spencer (Mr. Excitement). Dale Earnhardt had
fallen back just a bit but was coming hard. When he reached Rusty’s
car, Wallace tried to shut the door on him for fourth place, but the two came
together, sending Wallace around and into the air, flipping wildly as he
crossed the start/finish line. The finishing order showed Irvan, Spencer, Dale
Jarrett, Earnhardt, Joe Ruttman and Wallace. After
the finish, a distraught Dale Earnhardt circled the track and came back to the
crash scene, where he assisted the rescue workers with his friend. Wallace
wound up with a broken wrist, a concussion, facial cuts and a chipped tooth,
but readily accepted blame for the accident. Jimmy Spencer summed it up well
when he said that the two-lap shootout was “A bunch of bull….! I don’t care
what anybody says, nobody’s life is worth what was going on out there on the
last lap.” Ah, but Jimmy, it was Talladega!
On my birthday, July 12 of that same year, the curse
seemed to go to work in earnest and there wasn’t even a race. Young Davey
Allison, who many thought should have been Champion the previous year, flew his
helicopter to Talladega to watch Neil Bonnett’s son David practice for an
upcoming race. Along with Davey was longtime family friend, Red Farmer. As the
helicopter neared a landing, witnesses reported that it suddenly shot straight
up in the air, rolled to one side and crashed hard into the ground. Farmer was
seriously injured but recovered in time. Davey was pronounced dead from massive
head injuries the following morning. Eventually, some ten years later, a court
ruling was issued concerning the crash. The court found the cause of the crash
to be a stress break in the collective yoke, the device that controls the pitch
of the rotor blades on the helicopter. It never was pilot error as we were led
to believe for all that time. Could it have been the Talladega curse at work?
We don’t really believe in curses, do we?
Two weeks after Davey’s death, the Winston Cup teams
rolled into Talladega, still mourning the death of one of the brightest stars
on the circuit. This time, there would not be an Allison in the field. The
track without forgiveness hosted a horrendous crash on lap 70 that sent ARCA
driver Jimmy Horton cascading over the first turn wall and onto an access road
outside the track. Miraculously, Horton received no serious injuries and even
managed to joke later on that, “I knew I was in all sorts of trouble when I saw
dirt flying.” (He’d started the race on asphalt) Stanley Smith, a part-timer
who hadn’t raced since the twin 125s in Daytona, wasn’t as lucky. He had barely
grazed Horton’s car but was sent hard into the outside wall and was hospitalized
with critical head injuries, never to race in the Cup ranks again.
A bit later in the same race, Neil Bonnett, in his
return to racing after a three year hiatus brought about by a severe crash at
Darlington, lost control of his car while racing hard with Dick Trickle and Ted
Musgrave. The car turned sideways, and then became airborne, flying over the
hood of Musgrave’s car and directly into the catch fence in front of the main
grand stand. It was a scary repeat of the Bobby Allison incident six years
before, and the first time since then that Talladega had seen a red flag. This
time the fence repairs only took an hour and 10 minutes. Bonnett received no
serious injuries that time, but it prompted NASCAR to adopt Jack Roush’s “roof
flaps” as a means of keeping the cars from “flying.”
In August of 1996, with rain threatening to end the
race, we watched lap 117 with Dale Earnhardt leading the race. On his right was
the nose of Sterling Marlin’s car and on his rear bumper was Ernie Irvan. Slight
contact from Irvan turned Marlin just enough that his left front clipped
Earnhardt’s right rear, sending him from the lead straight into the outside
wall, then tumbling down the track as it bounced off the wall. Besides
Earnhardt and Marlin, nine other cars were swept up in the accident, but it was
Earnhardt who emerged from his car in obvious pain. With his right arm across
his chest so that his hand might grip his left shoulder, the seven-time
champion walked unassisted to the waiting ambulance. His injuries included a
broken sternum, a broken left collarbone and a bruised pelvis. The champion
that had been seeking his eighth crown would not win another race until the
Daytona 500 in 1998 and would never live to win another championship.
On April 6, 2003, the race was only four laps old when
Ryan Newman cut a tire and went hard into the outside wall at some 190+ mph.
Gravity and the 33º banking took over, caroming the car off the wall and down
the track. Newman’s car was hit at least four times by oncoming traffic before
bursting into flames at the bottom of the track. He managed to get free of the
car and walk away with minor injuries, considering what could have happened.
That wreck, before it was through, involved 27 cars and set a NASCAR record as
the biggest of the “Big Ones.” Had the curse reasserted itself?
Moving along to the spring of 2006, two fans in the
campgrounds of the Talladega infield were electrocuted while setting up a metal
flagpole. It’s a customary practice in the infield for fans to do that, so they
can fly banners announcing to the world their favorite driver. Unfortunately
for those two men, their flagpole came in contact with high voltage wires and
Talladega claimed yet two more unsuspecting victims. I doubt their families
found much consolation in the fact that no drivers were killed in the "Big
One" on lap 10 of the May Day race.
On November 1, 2009, we learned that despite all
attempts toward the contrary, cars still can and will fly, given the proper
impetus. Contact between Brad Keselowski and Carl Edwards sent Carl's #99
flipping wildly upside down and sideways into the catch fence, bringing back
yet another eerie reminder of Bobby Allison's similar flight back in 1987. In
the later incident, the catch fence held and no spectators were injured. It was
just Talladega, reminding us that she is alive and well… and possibly cursed.
As always, I view the race at Talladega with
trepidation. All of my friends are quite familiar with the fact that I inhale
at the green flag and exhale at the checkers. In between, I am a devoted,
card-carrying member of the white-knuckle brigade. Next Sunday will be no
exception. Perhaps it's some sort of fascination with horror or fear that
insists I watch racing at Talladega; for sure and certain, I don't enjoy
it. As always, I'll be praying for the
drivers… not just for one driver, but for every one of them brave enough to go
out there and risk his or her life for my "entertainment." Somehow,
that word refuses to fit this track, though the word "cursed" seems
to fit perfectly.
This is where these tales at one time ended, but the
big track refused to give up. Nicholas “Nick” Bower disappeared May 4, 2013 after
being seen the night before the race at Talladega Superspeedway. Talladega
County Sheriff Jimmy Kilgore said Bower's body was found shortly before noon on
May 14 in a creek at the Jackson Shoals area downstream from an old dam. He
said Bower's body was found in tall grass in the middle of the creek by a
search team using a helicopter to search the creek area. Sheriff Kilgore said
in a statement that "no foul play" was suspected in Bower’s death.
Strange…
but then again, it is Talladega.
Now
gentle readers, we have only to move from the May race to the October race of
2013 to see that Craig Franklin Morgan of Murfreesboro Tennessee perished in an
RV set up at the South Campground outside the track. Morgan and his wife, Jami
Allison Morgan were found unresponsive inside their motorhome, victims of
carbon monoxide poisoning. Other campers went looking for them when they didn’t
come out on Saturday morning. Jami Morgan was found unconscious and transported
to UAB hospital for treatment. She survived but Craig was not so fortunate.
Authorities said the couple’s RV had a broken exhaust pipe on its generator,
which ran all night Friday.
Yes,
things such as that do happen, but they seem to happen frequently at the big
track in Alabama.
Fast
Forward to the October race of 2014 and we’ll find a report of a 42-year old
woman, seemingly gone missing without a trace from the grounds of the
racetrack. Lincoln police Investigator Matt Hill said the woman, 42-year-old
Theresa Benn of Calhoun County, was last seen in the predawn hours on Sunday
near the track on Speedway Industrial Drive in Lincoln.
Authorities
said her husband, Kevin Dulaney, told them he dropped
her off around 2:15 am on Sunday because she wanted to go to the race but he
did not. Let’s sort through that one for just a moment, shall we? Am I getting
out of a vehicle and walking about the grounds of that giant track alone at
2:15 am? Not on your life… or mine either! From all reports I’ve found, Theresa
was not seen alive again from that moment. Her remains were found on November
22, 2014, in the Jackson Shoals area of Choccolocco
Creek. Once the body was identified and autopsy done, her death was
declared a homicide. To my knowledge, there have been no arrests made to date
regarding her murder.
Holy
autopsies Batman! Has the curse turned to the fans? If we go back to the 2
deaths from electrocution in 2006, that is 5 deaths in 9 years, all of them
fans and all linked to the Talladega track. When taken individually, each seems
innocent enough, but taken altogether, that’s one huge pile of coinkydinks
gentle readers; don’t you think? I know one thing for sure. Next time someone
goes missing, the place to begin the search is Jackson Shoals. Are the little
hairs on the back of your neck standing at attention? It’s not just the pack
racing that’s scary at Talladega.
These are merely highlights of selected races from
Talladega, spanning many years. How then do we look at this track? To what do
we credit these and many more unhappy endings that seemingly stem from its
cruelty? Is she truly unforgiving, or just too tough to tame? (Oops, that one’s
already been used) Think about it when the drivers start their engines this
week at the world’s fastest track. We don’t really believe in curses, do we?
Are you sure? We might want to key the theme from Twilight Zone one
more time.
Be well gentle readers, and remember to keep smiling.
It looks so good on you!
~PattyKay