The maestro of NASCAR

RIP Humpy Wheeler

My favorite Humpy Wheeler story is not the one where a guy named Jimmy the Flying Greek jumped a school bus over 20 motorcycles and crash-landed on the other side, carving up the track in Bristol so bad they had to delay the race.

It’s not the one where he brought in an old movie prop called a Robosaurus that picked up junk cars and chewed them to bits in its metal jaws while shooting flames 60 feet out of its nostrils.

It’s not even the one where he re-enacted the U.S. invasion of Grenada on the Charlotte Motor Speedway infield with a fleet of helicopters from the actual 82nd Airborne. The mortars were blanks but the dynamite that blew up two houses placed on the infield was very real.

No, my favorite Humpy Wheeler story was from back before he became one of the greatest promoters in the history of sports, and the greatest storyteller I ever met.

He was just 24 and had taken over the lease on an old racetrack at the Gastonia, NC fairgrounds. It wasn’t much of a track but it had good lights and a pretty infield with a lake. Humpy thought he could draw crowds there. He advertised a demolition derby with 100 cars and a $1,000 prize to the winner—big bucks in the early ‘60s. Drivers lined up to enter and tickets started flying out the door.

Two days before the race, the sheriff showed up with an injunction. Buddy Davenport, the guy who had been running the track, said he still had a valid lease. Humpy knew Buddy was full of it. He also knew Buddy knew there was no time to sort out the legal stuff before the race. So they cut a deal. Humpy would give Buddy half the proceeds from the gate, minus expenses. And he’d give Buddy the crashed cars after the race to sell to a junk dealer.

The next day, Humpy slipped away and arranged to have a separate gate built on the backstretch of the track.

On race day, his highway patrol buddies diverted most of the fans around to the new back gate. Buddy wondered what the hell was going on. Humpy explained that they agreed to split the money from the front gate—not the new one.

The race was a huge success, the money rolled in, and afterward Buddy was furious. After splitting the front gate money, and subtracting expenses, he was left with basically nothing. But there was still the matter of the crashed cars he could sell.

I want my damn cars, Buddy said.

They’re all yours, Humpy said. While we were settling up, I had my guys dump them in the lake.

You did not out-think Humpy Wheeler.

***

Humpy died Wednesday at 86. He was born Howard Augustine Wheeler Jr. but he was destined to be called Humpy. That’s the nickname his father picked up as a football player for the University of Illinois. One day the coach caught the elder Wheeler sneaking a Camel cigarette and made him run extra laps before every practice. The other players started calling him Humpy, after the camel. As soon as Howard Jr. was born, everybody called him Little Humpy.

Humpy Sr. ended up in the cotton-mill town of Belmont, NC, coaching several sports at tiny Belmont Abbey College, and so that’s where Little Humpy grew up. The mill kids were lean and hard. If Humpy and his buddies went to the movie house on the other end of town, they knew they’d have to fight their way back home. Humpy learned to box and was a Golden Gloves champ. He was set to go to Michigan State on a boxing scholarship. But then Al McGuire, the basketball coach at Belmont Abbey, took Humpy on a recruiting trip to New York. McGuire drove through the Bowery and pointed out all the broken-down fighters. McGuire went on to win a national title at Marquette and broadcast games for years on NBC. Humpy went on to play football at South Carolina. But what he really loved was racing.

He was a race car driver for a while. He wasn’t very good. But as a promoter, he was a genius.

I’ve always loved everything about NASCAR except the races. The drivers are fantastic characters with incredible courage. The engineering of the cars is nerd heaven. The fans are just on the good side of crazy, much like college football fans. But a four-hour race can be an ordeal, and a race weekend is a damn commitment. It’s not just the Sunday race, it’s the qualifying and the prelims. Even in NASCAR’s best days, it took a lot of work to fill the stands every weekend. That’s where Humpy made himself a legend.

After one race in the ‘70s, Cale Yarborough called fellow driver Darrell Waltrip “Jaws” because he talked so much. So before the next race, Wheeler arranged to have a dead shark delivered to the NASCAR garage to drum up publicity. The shark had a dead chicken in its mouth. Yarborough was sponsored by a poultry farm. Humpy always thought of the little details.

(The one promotion Humpy said he always wanted to try was to put a diver and a shark in a giant tank and bill it “Man vs. Shark: One Must Die.” He was kidding. I think.)

Humpy ran Charlotte Motor Speedway for 33 years, and during that time NASCAR went from a niche Southern pastime to a sport so big that driver Jeff Gordon hosted “Saturday Night Live.” He did help expose NASCAR to different audiences—he brought driver Janet Guthrie to Charlotte in the ‘70s for the World 600, where she became the first woman to qualify for a NASCAR race at a superspeedway. But I never thought of him as being the guy who brought people to the sport. I always thought of him as the guy who kept people coming back.

He’d ride an elephant or stick his head in a tiger’s mouth or blow up half the infield to convince fans that the tickets they bought were worth the money, even if their favorite driver wrecked on the first lap. He understood that many NASCAR fans came from tough little towns, just like he had, and needed a little something special to jolt them out of their everyday lives. He kept jars of moonshine on his desk to remind himself of NASCAR’s roots.

He did an episode of Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s podcast a few years back and talked about some of his famous stunts. He said he encouraged everybody who worked for him to pitch him with ideas, no matter how offbeat. He mentioned one guy who kept trying to get Humpy to raise cattle and chickens in the infield. Mike Davis, Dale Jr.’s co-host, busted out laughing. Humpy just cracked a little smile.

“You never wanna tell anybody they’ve got a bad idea,” he says. “Because the next one may be great.”

***

I’m afraid I’ve gotten this far without making clear how much pure joy it was to just sit and listen to Humpy tell stories. He had the gift of so many Southerners who grew up without a whole lot of money or options and had to find ways to entertain themselves. He would start off on one story that would divert into a long tributary and maybe two or three little creeks before finally coming back around to the main channel where he started. You never just got on the phone for a couple of minutes with Humpy. Every conversation was a performance.

One time I called him up about something and happened to mention that Alix and I were about to spend our anniversary at Seabrook Island on the South Carolina coast. It turned out that Humpy and his family had a house down there. He told me everywhere we should eat and everywhere we should visit. He also said we should stop by his property—they wouldn’t be there, but we were welcome to walk around the grounds and go out on his dock.

So we did. It was a gorgeous place on the marsh, one of the rewards for having the fertile mind of Humpy Wheeler. We walked out on the dock. It stretched out over a beautiful creek. A perfect place to sit and think and relax.

I wondered if Humpy Wheeler ever went out there, and looked at that creek, and imagined how great it would be if somebody jumped a Jet Ski over it.

—TT