Humpy can't be replaced

I’ll tell you my favorite Humpy Wheeler story.

He was running Robinwood Speedway, in about 1961 or so. It was a dirt track in my hometown of Gastonia. Wheeler grew up over in Belmont, just a few miles down the road in Gaston County, where his dad was athletic director at Belmont Abbey College.

Like most people who ran dirt tracks back then, Wheeler did everything. He went around trying to drum up a crowd through the week and on race day he had to get the track ready for racing.

On this day, however, Wheeler had a problem. The old truck he used to water the track’s surface was broken down. It would not run. Wheeler was in a fix. To this day, Wheeler hates dust at a dirt track more than just about anything in this world.

He went to a couple of volunteer fire departments, hoping to borrow their water trucks. No luck. “It was the dry time of the year and they were afraid to let me use it,” Wheeler said. “I had reached the end.”

Wheeler had one last card to play. He had a buddy in the septic tank business, and he had a truck with a tank to hold, well, liquid.

They pumped water in and used the truck to work on the track. Wheeler went home to take a shower and get ready for a long night of racing. He got back to the track about 4 that afternoon.

“I am telling you, the smell was unbelievable,” Wheeler said. He couldn’t call off the race – tickets had been sold. As the crowd gathered, the complaining started. Wheeler had to think fast.

So he got on the public address system and apologized to his patrons. “The paper mill is at it again,” Wheeler said. It was the best he could do.

Wheeler’s retirement as president of Lowe’s Motor Speedway is official Wednesday. I don’t know for sure if he’s going to hang around through the weekend for his 33rd Coca-Cola 600 at the track in Charlotte, but I sure hope he does. A lot of people need time to tell him thank you.

He’s helped more people get their start or figure out their way through some of the travails of their careers in racing that anyone will ever know. He’s been kind to reporters who’re new at covering his sport. He’s thought more about fans than the fans will ever know and has helped build what I consider to be the template for the modern American racing facility.

I don’t know, not yet, why he’s leaving right now. But I do know he’s done enough for his sport that nobody should begrudge him the opportunity to do some things he wants to do.

I’ve heard that he has plans to write a book that I promise you I will be reading. He loves to travel and I hope that he and his wonderful wife, Pat, get the chance to do as much of that as they want to. He rides his bicycle and reads and thinks about the world in which we live in ways I wish I could.

I asked Wheeler a few years ago if he thought that when he retired anybody would be ready to step into the big shoes he’d be leaving. “Oh yes,” he said, “there’s nobody who can’t be replaced.”

I sort of laughed when he said that, and then I told him a story that applies here. I took the job as motorsports reporter for the Charlotte Observer in 1997, and the man who had that job before me was Tom Higgins. Higgins covered NASCAR for about 30 years and when he retired he received the Bill France Award for his contributions to the sport. He was – and still is, thank goodness – a legend.

I went to Daytona that year for my first race and somebody said, “So you’re replacing Higgins?”

It had never really been put to me like that before.

I thought a minute and said, “Well, not really. I’ve got the job he had, but nobody is ever going to replace Tom.”

Nor Humpy.