Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, August 24, 1994 TAG: 9408240051
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By LIZ CLARKE KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
There was a time not long ago when Dale Earnhardt and Tim Richmond were the flat-out coolest guys on the track.
Earnhardt was the heart of Southern stock car racing in his too-tough Wrangler jeans, denim shirt and cowboy hat. Richmond had his own style - Armani suits, silk shirts and Rolex watch.
And oh, how they raced - diving into the corners after each other on the brink of losing control, barreling down the straightaways door-to-door.
Then Tim Richmond got AIDS and died - five years ago (Aug. 13, 1989).
Does Earnhardt miss racing against Richmond?
He glares at the question.
``I miss him, period,'' Earnhardt says. ``He was a friend.''
Others in NASCAR would rather forget.
``It's something a lot of people in racing would like to forget happened - that there even was a Tim Richmond, that Tim Richmond died the way he died,'' says H.A. ``Humpy'' Wheeler, president of Charlotte Motor Speedway.
In a sport that memorializes its drivers, it's hard to find even a trace of Richmond around stock car racing's tracks.
Other fallen champions, like Davey Allison and Alan Kulwicki, have become heroes in death. Today, there's scarcely evidence Richmond competed among them, despite winning 13 races and $2.3 million in just six full seasons.
You won't find Richmond's car in any stock car museum.
``This is the first time I've ever heard his name, and I've been working the circuit four or five years,'' said a woman selling NASCAR souvenirs last month at Pocono Raceway, where Richmond won four races - the last, when he knew he was dying.
Kyle Petty, a friend and fellow racer, sums it up this way:
``If the good die young - and everyone from James Dean to Marilyn Monroe to Alan and Davey are those guys - when they die, there's an instant shrine. So why is Richmond standing on the outside looking in? Why is he not part of that group? Why did no one grieve for the lost potential of Tim?''
In 1986 he won won seven races and eight poles, more than any driver that season.
Richmond thrived in the spotlight, and in 1986 he was in it like never before. He was named NASCAR's Driver of the Year with Earnhardt at the season-ending December banquet in New York.
Within a week, he was hiding behind the name Lee Warner at Ohio's Cleveland Clinic, where he was diagnosed with acquired immune deficiency syndrome on Dec. 10 as Case No. 1-861-775-7.
He'd come back to win two more races, then disappear again.
In his second comeback attempt, Richmond found himself pitted against NASCAR and the sport's establishment in a battle as hopeless as his fight against AIDS.
This time, he was in the spotlight of his life: Wrongly suspended for a drug test NASCAR said he failed, although he hadn't; later reinstated, but barred from racing until he turned over medical records that would have shown he had AIDS.
Richmond refused, fired back with a $20 million lawsuit and slipped from view again, leaving behind nothing but innuendo and intrigue.
He died at age 34 in a West Palm Beach, Fla., hospital. His parents were nearby, but he was cut off and shut out from nearly everyone in racing.
It was a tragic ending. But the build-up - well, that was entertaining as Richmond himself. Having fun was the whole point. Every day was Christmas; every night, Saturday night.
Until dawn, at least, where his story ends.
Life at full throttle
Richmond never did fit stock car racing's mold.
He had a personality for every pair of sunglasses, every hat, every pair of snakeskin boots and Italian loafers he owned.
``I'd love to meet the man that knew me,'' he once said.
Winning races was Richmond's adrenaline, but he fed on anything fast - from a Harley-Davidson with a suicide clutch to helicopters, speedboats, water skis and airplanes.
He ran in wildly different circles that rarely intersected: bikers, actors, musicians, truck drivers and a millionaire businessman named Bob Tezak, his first major sponsor, who's in federal prison today for pleading guilty to two counts of arson.
``The WRFX rock 'n' roll crowd loved him. Girls loved him. Cool guys loved him,'' said Ed Clark, Atlanta Motor Speedway executive vice president and general manager. ``I don't know if the blue-collar guy that worked at Cannon Mills, if that guy ever fell in love with him, but that guy's girlfriend did.''
Richmond had his own ideas about how a Southern stock car ought to be driven. Never mind that he grew up in Ashland, Ohio, had a prep school education and got a Trans Am 455 with a bow on top for his 16th birthday to go with the Corvette he already had.
To many in stock car racing, Richmond's long hair, Hollywood friends and parade of gorgeous girlfriends were enough to arouse suspicion.
``In one sense, it was always there because he was different,'' says Chip Williams, a former NASCAR spokesman. ``A guy that good-looking, that cool, that much fun - he knew people in the movies and hung around with Huey Lewis - has got to be doing something wrong. I'm not saying that was the case, but that was the perception.''
A cocky streak
Richmond's driving was worth paying to see, especially in qualifying runs or on road courses, where he'd sling the car so hard into the corners it'd exit sideways with all four tires off the ground.
Earnhardt brought out his best.
``He'd rather race Earnhardt as eat,'' says Harvey Hyde, Richmond's veteran crew in 1986-87. ``He just enjoyed the hell out of racing Earnhardt. He'd pull up under Earnhardt and just sit there, lap after lap, they're side by side. He'd come on the radio and say, `That's all it'll do. I can't go any faster.'
``And I'd say, `Well, are you in a bind sitting there?'
``He says, `No.'
``I says, `How long can you stay there?'
``He says, `All day.'
Richmond never won a Winston cup championship, but had a tuxedo custom-made for the occasion, with a silk shirt patterned like a checkered flag. He pictured his race team riding up the East Coast from Florida on a cigarette boat to collect its trophy. He even charted the course to a dock on Long Island, where they'd hop into a limousine for the ride to New York's Waldorf-Astoria.
``He was going to start at the top and go from there,'' Hyde says. ``He wasn't going to wait for anybody else to decide the course he took. He was going to decide himself.''
That cocky streak never sat well with NASCAR, a family business run with a firm hand by President Bill France Jr.
Stock-car racing is as much a culture as a sport, and successful drivers play both games well. There's a way to behave: As assembly-line as the cars they drive, and every-day as the products they sell. There's a way to dress. And a way to speak, so pervasive that drivers who know better suddenly forget basic grammar when TV cameras start rolling.
But Richmond was team owner Rick Hendrick's only choice when Procter and Gamble offered its Folgers brand for a new race team 1986.
``At first they were a little reluctant,'' Hendrick says, ``because they were conservative and he was flamboyant. But I basically said if you won't take Tim Richmond, I'm not interested.''
Jimmy Johnson, the Folgers team manager, remembers the first time he met Richmond - about 10 a.m. in November 1985 at Richmond's Bahia Mar boat slip in Fort Lauderdale.
``He was sitting on top of the most beautiful Chris-Craft houseboat with this little old tiny bathing suit, with a champagne bottle filled with imported beer and a whole big plate of crab legs beside him,'' Johnson says.
Track magic
It took half the 1986 season before Richmond and Hyde clicked on the track. They were magic from then on, winning seven races, finishing second four times and taking eight poles.
Buddy Barnes, a friend and former crew member, remembers driving his boat up to Richmond's Lake Norman home that summer and finding him on the dock, a grin broad enough to split his face, holding a checkered flag he'd just won.
``He was waving it back and forth, and says, `This is what it's all about. This is the breakfast of champions,''' Barnes says.
It was September when Hyde first noticed something was wrong, around the time Richmond won Darlington's Southern 500.
``He looked awful bad, and he was taking antibiotics,'' Hyde says. ``It looked to me like he had the flu or a cold. After Darlington he got all right. I thought he was all right. But by Rockingham and the last two races, I could tell he was ... down. It was in his face and eyes.''
At NASCAR's December awards banquet, Wheeler thought he looked awful.
``I could tell it was something worse than stress; he said he was exhausted,'' Wheeler said. ``He was extremely disturbed about what he looked like.''
Within a week, Richmond was in the Cleveland Clinic, diagnosed with AIDS.
Question marks
Hendrick had never heard of AIDS before Evelyn Richmond, Tim's mother, called to explain.
``I didn't know what she was telling me,'' Hendrick said. ``It was like my first time. ... I was confused. I didn't know what it actually meant - what the prognosis was. The more you found out - the more you just ... it hurt and it killed you.''
Richmond spent Christmas and New Year's in the hospital, dwindling from 171 to 148 pounds.
Rumors about drug use had dogged him since his IndyCar days. Most friends say they never saw drugs around him. Others say he never used ``needle drugs.''
When Richmond missed the 1987 Daytona 500 with what was reported to be double pneumonia, the rumors flew. Some said cocaine addiction. Others said AIDS. Kyle Petty didn't believe them any more than he believed Richmond had pneumonia. He thought it was cancer.
Richard Petty, stock-car racing's King, felt then and now it was drugs.
``There's a question in my mind about drugs - that at the time he was driving that race car, he was pumped up,'' Richard Petty says. ``Whether he was or he wasn't, I'm always questioning that. I always will.''
Richmond's return to racing in spring 1987 triggered a media frenzy.
Hyde scheduled a secret practice at Darlington to see whether Richmond was physically able to come back. Word leaked out and reporters showed up with stop watches.
So Hyde slipped four left-side tires on to give the car an added edge. Newspapers reported the next day Richmond was back, setting track-record speeds.
Next came an endurance test at Rockingham. Richmond tried to run 500 miles, but couldn't last more than 127. Hyde covered again, telling reporters, ``Tim wanted to go on longer, but I pulled him in.''
Return to victory
Richmond had an edge when he returned to racing. ``Testy,'' some said. ``Not your normal Tim.''
``He never was accepted when he came back,'' Richard Petty says. ``Everybody knew he had trouble.''
Meaning AIDS?
``Yep. It was just one of those things. Whether it was true or not, everybody said that's it, and so everybody kept their distance.''
His first full-length race since the diagnosis was the Miller 500 at Pocono Raceway in June 1987. Just before the start, Earnhardt walked over and slapped him on the back.
``You ready to get it on?'' Earnhardt asked.
``Yeah,'' Richmond said.
And when Richmond won the race, he cried so hard he couldn't see the checkered flag. Earnhardt, Kyle Petty and Bill Elliott drove alongside to offer congratulations, and Richmond cried all the more. He made an extra victory lap to compose himself, but it didn't do any good.
In Victory Lane, Richmond couldn't utter a word - just hugged his mother, whipped a towel in the air and started pouring beer everywhere.
For Johnson, the team manager, there'll never be a moment like it.
``I've got a 5-year-old son,'' Johnson says, ``and if he ever becomes a race driver and wins a race, it'll still be second to Tim winning that race. Nothing would ever top that for me.''
Richmond won the next race, too, at Riverside.
It was Richmond's last win.
One last showdown
Hyde had heard the complaints around the garage. Some drivers wanted NASCAR to keep Richmond from competing, and they grew more vocal after Richmond was late to qualify at Michigan and rode out to his race car in a golf cart.
``The door latch on the trailer jammed, and we couldn't get in,'' Evelyn Richmond says. ``He had five minutes to get to his car, so he took a golf cart over to get him there. He was sick in the truck, and never should have run that race.''
He checked back into the Cleveland Clinic about the time Hendrick got a call from Les Richter, then NASCAR's competition director.
``Your driver doesn't look in any shape to drive,'' Richter said.
In September 1987, Richmond resigned from Hendrick Motorsports.
His final showdown with NASCAR came over the 1988 Busch Clash.
``You just couldn't go in and tell Timmy to get off this,'' Evelyn Richmond says of her son's obsession to race again. ``He had enough strength left to drive that Busch Clash. In a way, I thought, if this is what Timmy wants, he's had enough jerked out from under him, and since he only had so much time left.''
He had no race car. And NASCAR had developed its first drug-testing policy, which Richmond felt was designed with him in mind.
He stopped taking his AIDS medication, AZT, six weeks earlier so it wouldn't be detected. He also asked his doctor to give him a drug test to make sure he was clean. He sealed the sample and locked it in a safe-deposit box in Daytona Beach Shores. He knew he was clean when he signed NASCAR's drug-testing consent form in the Daytona garage, so he asked to take the test right then.
Two days later, NASCAR announced Richmond was suspended indefinitely for testing positive for substances on its list of banned drugs.
``It tore him apart,'' says Terry Magovern, a friend in the music business whom Richmond called after getting the news. ``It tore him apart, and nobody would listen to him.''
An assassination
Richmond met with Richter, told him there was a mistake and demanded another test.
Five days later, NASCAR announced Richmond's first test actually showed nothing more than over-the-counter cold medicine, though in large doses. The second test was clean.
``We were under a certain amount of pressure to release some sort of information as soon as we reasonably could,'' says Williams, the former NASCAR spokesman, of the initial suspension. ``Tim Richmond wasn't going to be there [for the race]. He was suspended. There had to be a reason.
``What we offered was the best information we had at the time. When we received further information, I got a call from [NASCAR president] Bill France Jr., who asked me to come down to his office. He had just gotten off the phone.''
Williams said that's when NASCAR learned what the first test actually showed (over-the-counter cold medicine).
``And a few hours later, we released that,'' Williams said.
Dr. Forest Tennant, NASCAR's drug testing consultant, says no scientific mistakes were made in analyzing Richmond's drug test.
France won't discuss Richmond, saying through a spokesman that a court order prohibits it.
Richter says Richmond was a great talent with a great personality. Asked about NASCAR's drug test or anything else about Richmond's departure from the sport, he says, ``You're getting into that no-no land.''
Hendrick is still bitter about the way NASCAR handled the drug test.
``That's horrible to damage someone - to character assassinate without the facts,'' Hendrick says.
NASCAR lifted Richmond's suspension, but still wouldn't let him race until he turned over his medical records from the Cleveland Clinic. Richmond offered instead a letter from his doctor there stating he had not been treated for drug dependency.
Richmond appears to be the only driver to have taken NASCAR's drug test before or since, according to information gathered from interviews with drivers and others in racing.
Neither Richter, NASCAR's senior vice president, nor Williams will say whether any other driver has been drug tested.
Richmond filed his lawsuit against NASCAR and Tennant in April 1988, seeking $15 million in actual damages and $5 million in punitive damages for defaming him through the drug test.
NASCAR countered by demanding reams of information: Richmond's tax returns from 1980-87; the results of every test of his urine, blood or other bodily fluids since 1980; records of every visit to a doctor, psychologist or counselor since 1980; and his medical records from the Cleveland Clinic and his personal doctor in Florida.
Next, NASCAR's lawyers went after his partying past, putting Richmond's friends under oath to find out more.
``They wanted me to tell them that Tim did drugs,'' says Magovern, among those NASCAR deposed. ``That's what they were looking for - to tear up Tim Richmond.''
Richmond's own deposition was taken in Charlotte in October. He gave his name, address, grew confused over where he had gone to grade school and the interview was postponed. Before leaving, he signed an autograph for the court reporter's son.
He withdrew the suit three weeks after U.S. District Judge James B. McMillan ordered his records be produced.
The final months
Shortly before he died, Richmond talked with Hendrick about making his AIDS diagnosis public - a question he struggled with to the end.
``He always said maybe I should take a positive step and try to warn people,'' Hendrick said, ``but the country really wasn't ready for it. We all prayed there would be a cure. We chased everything we could find. And if he did come forward, it might have been even worse for him.''
His last months were filled with pain.
``He suffered,'' Hendrick says. ``He hurt. He was ill. If he had a good day, he could see people. If he had a bad day, he couldn't see people.
``I don't think they had the wherewithal to keep you as comfortable as they do today, and he was really sick at times. I would go see him, and I would wait until it was a good time to go see him. If he wasn't having a good day, then I'd talk to his mom.''
Richmond died as dawn broke over West Palm Beach on Aug. 13,1989.
Each January, Jimmy Johnson turns his new desk calendar to that date and copies the words, so he won't forget: ``Tim died, 5:12 a.m.''
Many of Richmond's friends still struggle with thoughts of his final months.
``I think if he would have shared what he was going through, then people would have been supportive,'' says Clark, the Atlanta Speedway executive. ``Tim was such a vain guy, I don't think he could stand it for anybody to see him that way.''
Wheeler says, ``Tim tended to be a perfectionist, and at the time, this was the most imperfect way to die. He did not want to put people through it. In those days, it was such a scary disease. If he had come out and said that, number one, the sport would have been put in a tight spot.
``... Owing to the conservative nature of stock-car fans, he certainly would not have gotten the acceptance Magic Johnson got in the NBA.''
Driver Kyle Petty talked to Richmond by phone that last year, but he and his wife, Patti, wish they had done more.
``We had regrets the year before he died,'' Patti Petty said. ``I think everyone should feel a touch of regret. They dropped the ball. They really let him down. It goes back to NASCAR did not want that. It was like at some point, his name was white-washed from the list.''
Kyle Petty says, ``It all boils down to AIDS. I don't care what anybody tells you. Nobody knows how to handle AIDS - especially in a sport as backward-thinking on so many things as this sport is.''
Keywords:
AUTO RACING PROFILE
by CNB