King Kaufman

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In the pit area a few hours before the 11 a.m. race, the cars are towed into place by little Toro four-wheelers, and the crews are putting duct tape on the ground for everything: the route the driver will take steering into the pit, where he’ll stop, where the next set of tires will be placed on the ground, where the crew members will kneel. People are posing next to the Borg-Warner trophy, the 5-foot prize decorated with a bas-relief portrait of every winning driver. And meanwhile, high school marching bands are parading down the front straightaway, one after another. The flag girls of the Tyler High School Marching Titans of Kokomo wear black and white checkered skirts.

The monstrous stands — able to hold a quarter of a million people, two and a half Rose Bowls — are filling up, as is the infield area, which can be home to more than 150,000 more. It’s getting warm. The atmosphere has been one of building, building, building all month. On Saturday people began camping across the street from the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Sunday morning the gates opened at 5. By 6 the joint was hopping. For what seems like the first time in May, it won’t rain today.

Ice-T walks by. He’s one of the few black people I’ll see who don’t work for the track in maintenance, security or food service. There’s no getting around it: This is a very white event (or, increasingly on this sunny spring day, a very pink event). This year, George Mack has become the second black driver ever to qualify. The first was Willy T. Ribbs, who drove in 1991 and ’93. Once the race begins, I’ll search the stands for black faces. I can see most of the grandstand along the front straightaway, and I don’t see one.

This is the kind of crowd where Jim Nabors, here to sing the traditional “Back Home Again in Indiana,” creates a bigger hubbub than car owner David Letterman does, if that tells you anything, which it probably doesn’t.

Neither one would attract nearly the attention Ashley Judd would, but Judd’s playing it on the downlow, staying out of sight until her husband, Dario Franchitti, starting on the inside of Row 10, makes his appearance for the driver introductions. And even then the movie star is nearly incognito in a red cap and a plain striped shirt and black pants. Of course, she’s easy to spot as long as she’s next to her mom, Naomi, who has hair as big as the Ritz and an outfit that’s bright blue and sparkling. Once the race starts, Ashley dons a headset and hangs at the back of the pit, sitting on some used tires or a toolbox.

The start is the best thing the race has going. After track matriarch Mari Hulman George calls, “Lady and gentleman, start your engines” (Sarah Fisher, the third woman to run here, is in her third Indy 500 at 21), the cars roar to life and begin two parade laps. Watching them come down the straightaway, swerving sharply side to side to warm up their tires, I find myself getting tense and anxious with anticipation, as though I actually cared who might win, which I don’t.

Well, I’m pulling, vaguely and in no particular order, for Mack, because he’d make a good story; for Sam Hornish Jr., because he has a goatee and I like his bright yellow Pennzoil car; for Franchitti, because Judd might show up at the post-race press conference; and for Jimmy Vasser, who drives the Letterman/Bobby Rahal car, because Letterman might show up at the post-race press conference and be funny.

As the cars speed up for the pace lap, it’s nearly unbearable. The crowd near the starting line rises to its feet as the cars approach, and there’s nothing quite like it when they take the flag. They’re going breathtakingly fast, slashing through your field of vision as a series of blurs inches apart from each other, their high-pitched engine whine yowing as they pass. It’s astonishing that the drivers can react to anything at that speed. As the field goes by in anger for the first time, I find myself grinding my teeth madly, my heart pounding.

There’s something to this.

I can’t think of anything else that I ever see that goes that fast. Even airplanes, when they’re close enough to the ground for me to appreciate their speed, aren’t topping 200 mph.

One hundred ninety-nine laps after this dramatic opening, the Indy 500 comes down to a dramatic finish. At the end of a race in which two leaders have crashed and another has lost a tire, the defending champion, Helio Castroneves, is fighting off a challenge from Paul Tracy, who started way back in the middle of the 10th row. At first, it had looked like Castroneves, with two lapped cars and second-place Felipe Giaffone between him and Tracy, would hold off the challenge, but now Tracy has passed the other cars and drawn close with just two laps to go while Castroneves, attempting to drive the last 100 miles without a pit stop, may be running out of fuel. Will Tracy catch the leader less than a minute from the finish line?

Just as Tracy goes to pass, on Turn 3 of the next-to-last lap, two cars crash on another part of the track, drawing a yellow caution flag and effectively ending the race, because no one can pass during a yellow. The question is: Which happened first, the yellow flag or the pass? If the flag came out first, the pass doesn’t count, and, since the race will finish under the yellow flag, Castroneves, restored to the lead, is the winner. That’s the ruling at the track almost six hours later — though an appeal by Tracy’s team was to be decided by Indy Racing League officials Monday — and the Indy 500 has its first repeat champion in 31 years. After a victory lap — coasting, out of fuel — Castroneves parks at the finish line and, as is his custom, climbs the grandstand fence to celebrate.

How can you not love this exuberant, dimpled, 5-foot-5 Brazilian, who gushed through tears to an interviewer over the track P.A., “Oh, gosh, I did it again!”?

You can not love him if you’re caught up in the politics of open-wheel, or “Indy car,” racing, which is dominated by the rivalry between the IRL and the circuit it broke away from six years ago, Championship Auto Racing Teams, or CART. Castroneves jumped from CART to the IRL this year. Not caring at all about the rivalry (if you’re keeping score, it looks like the IRL is getting the upper hand), this doesn’t bother me in the least. I can’t believe it bothers too many other people not employed in the racing industry either, but I could be wrong. Castroneves seemed to be a crowd favorite even before his repeat victory.

The finish, with Castroneves taking the checkered flag at half speed under the yellow, was a little anti-climactic, but the run-up to it had been a humdinger.

The suspicion of non-racing fans is that people watch auto races just to see the crashes. I didn’t really think that was true coming in. Some people are just gearheads and love everything having to do with cars, especially fast cars. But I figured there had to be more than the crashes even to people who don’t know or care what makes a car go from stop to go.

That group includes me, and I think I know what that something is. It’s the green flag. Not just the green flag at the start of the race, but the green flag that follows every yellow flag (except one that continues through the end of a race, obviously, like the final one Sunday). The cars, moseying along while the track is cleared of whatever mishap has occurred, speed up again and zip down the straightaway and into the first turn. It’s the start of the race all over again.

And I noticed Sunday that it’s not just me who gets off on the green flag. Every time the race went from the yellow flag to the green, the crowd stood and cheered. The rest of the time, except at the beginning and the end, they looked bored. I surveyed the main grandstand crowd repeatedly throughout the day, and they looked like they were watching a pitching change or a TV timeout. Even when cars were whizzing past, most people weren’t watching them.

You can’t really follow the Indy 500 in person. The typing classes, the people who’ll tell you how the race came out in the morning paper and the monthly speed mag, mostly follow the race on televisions in the press box. There’s no way to see the whole course in person. On TV you can follow a duel for the lead or second place as it snakes around the track. The fans in the stands might not even know which of three cars near each other are fighting for that top spot and which is a car that’s been lapped.

So what makes the Indianapolis 500 such a great event? Why do all those people show up? For one thing, you have to be there to appreciate the speed and power that’s so thrilling in person and doesn’t quite come across on television. But that’s probably true for any old race.

The other thing TV doesn’t quite get across is the gigantism of the event, the energy of it, the feeling of being a part of something that huge. The Indianapolis Motor Speedway is the world’s largest sports arena. You can barely see from one end of it to the other. The straightaways are 11 football fields long. If the Indy 500 is like other major sporting events, it’s safe to say that a healthy percentage of those in attendance are in attendance more for the event part than for the sport part. The infield crowd, most of whom can see precisely none of the track, is a convincing argument for this theory.

It’s just exciting to be in a crowd that big — a crowd the size of Atlanta’s population, full of people who are excited to be in a crowd that big.

Or, as Letterman put it when I asked him what makes the Indy 500 so special: “Well, just look around. You can feel it, you know? It’s wonderful.”

It is wonderful, yessireebob (as Letterman might say), except for that sagging feeling in the middle. I feel like I do get it now, a little bit, not that the world’s largest single-day sporting event needs the stamp of approval from old King.

Still, the undeniable thrills of auto racing won’t sustain me to the point where I’ll follow it. I still don’t really care who wins, though I can’t argue with Castroneves, last seen by me 90 minutes after the race, still beside himself, interrupting TV interviews to beam down at fans from a balcony walkway next to the media complex.

I’ll remain a fan of what motor sports people refer to derisively (in their e-mails to me whenever I write about racing) as “stick and ball sports.” There are just more potential outcomes in the sports I’m fond of, and I like that.

But “drive fast and turn left.” It’s better than it sounds. I might even take a look at drag racing, which has, I imagine, an even simpler credo: Drive fast, period.

But it was Joyce’s response that turned this terrible tale into one that’s almost heart-warming. Not as heart-warming as a journeyman pitcher tossing a perfect game, mind you, but pretty toasty.

Having asked to see the video replay after the game, an emotional Joyce spoke to reporters: “It was the biggest call of my career and I kicked it. I just cost that kid a perfect game,” he said. “I missed it from here to that wall. I had a great angle, and I missed the call.” He also asked to speak to Galarraga, apologized to him and hugged him. Offered the next day off by his superiors, Joyce declined, saying he was ready to face what he assumed would be a hostile reaction from the Detroit crowd.

This eminently reasonable, grown-up reaction stood out because baseball umpires are ordinarily cloistered. They have what amounts to lifetime tenure. They don’t face reporters, rarely admit mistakes publicly and are not held accountable for their actions in any way that’s visible to the players or public. Don’t like that call? Replays showed the ump got it wrong? Tough.

Galarraga said he’d forgiven the umpire, and Joyce’s response to his error has been widely praised beyond baseball. He’s become a go-to example of how to handle mistakes in politics, religion and — especially because his straight-forward behavior came in the midst of BP’s oil-spill debacle — business.

Less than two weeks after the blown call, ESPN surveyed major league players for their opinions about umpires. Their overwhelming choice as the best in the business: Jim Joyce.

The entire conversation about umpiring has been predicated on the assumption that the only solution to the problem is a technological one, which is fascinating — and maybe just a little troubling — because everyone in the conversation knows two things: There are acres of room for improvement that has nothing to do with technology, and the technology itself is far from perfect.

We know from other sports, especially NFL football, that video replay is hardly perfect. Putting aside the unnecessarily long delays that accompany video replay in the NFL, it’s a simple fact about video that it does not always provide conclusive evidence of what happened. Camera angles can be as deceptive as the naked eye.

And more important, the NFL’s replay system is a laboratory of unintended consequences. Introduced for the same reason many people want to introduce replay to baseball — to put an end to egregious officiating mistakes — it has become the lord of officials. It has changed the way officials call games. Refs now err on the side of the reviewable call, or make no call at all so replay can be possible. They have changed the way they call fumbles and completions. Watch an old NFL game from before replay and you’ll be struck at the difference in officiating and rules interpretation.

People will argue over the specifics of those last two paragraphs, but there’s no one familiar with replay who doesn’t know that replay is far from perfect, that despite — I would say because of — replay being entrenched in the NFL for years, officiating is still such a problem that a huge number of fans can convince themselves that a recent Super Bowl was fixed by the refs.

Yet the only anti-replay argument that ever sees the light of day is the Luddite one: Instant replay would rob baseball, that most human of games, of an essential human element.

That’s a valid argument, but it’s a religious one. No one is ever going to be argued off of it, and if you don’t buy it, you’re not going to be talked into it.

But it’s interesting that the argument against it goes like this: Instant replay might not be perfect, but it’s better than what we have now, so we should use it. That argument ignores a vital question. Is instant replay better than some other solution?

If you’ve been around as long as most of the people who are in the most public part of this argument — media figures and baseball officials — technology has been a series of miracles in your life. You can carry a supercomputer in your pocket that connects you to anywhere in the world all the time? Are you kidding? I’m not even 50 and I remember when it was a big deal that someone could leave you a taped message when they called your house — the only place you could have a phone — and you weren’t there.

Got a problem? Technology can probably fix it, and if not, just wait a little. It’s coming. Marvelous times.

But I think we sometimes forget that technology isn’t the only fix, and it isn’t always the best one, and not just for squishy reasons having to do with idealizing human error. Human error is a bad thing, and technology is often fantastic at doing away with it. But it can also do away with some good human things, like judgment and holistic problem solving.

Think about law enforcement for a moment — and sports officiating is essentially law enforcement. Which is more effective at fighting crime, an elaborate system of video surveillance or a program of job training, substance abuse education and treatment, community investment and so on? Or if that’s too liberal-sounding for you, focus in tighter. If you’re a parent, which is more effective at getting your kids to behave like solid citizens, spy cams around the house or engaged, loving parenting?

If you wanted to design a system that would result in poor umpiring, you would design Major League Baseball’s system. It’s positively medieval. Umpires essentially have lifetime tenure. They are sequestered from the media and answer only to a review system that is as secretive as it is pointless, since it hardly ever results in umpires losing their jobs. Instant replay won’t change that lack of accountability.

“We never know why or when they are fined, or reprimanded or held accountable,” Oakland A’s pitcher Brad Ziegler told ESPN’s Amy K. Nelson last week. “Any time a player is punished, suspended or sent down to the minors, the public knows about it. It would be a lot easier to communicate with umpires if everyone was held to similar standards. Our statistics as players are a lot more quantifiable than the umpires’.”

I am something of a Luddite when it comes to instant replay, not because I’m anti-technology — I have a long-distance line to New York in my pocket, and the call is free? Score! — but because I think baseball has been smart about being slow to change over the last century-plus. Replay would suddenly, irreversibly alter a game that has a pretty good history of solving its problems without radical, game-altering solutions.

I don’t believe baseball should absolutely avoid instant replay because instant replay is evil. I believe it should try to tackle the organizational problems that are leading to the poor umpiring rather than slap an electronic band-aid on them.

Nelson’s ESPN story is about a planned winter meeting between the grumbling players association, baseball officials and the umpires. Nelson describes such a meeting as “rare,” which is a problem right there. Shouldn’t the three parties involved in this major issue for Major League Baseball talk to each other more than rarely?

It’s a good step. I’m not too hopeful it’s going to lead to a new era of transparency and reform. No one from the umpires or Major League Baseball would comment for the story.

So it’s that old TV thing. NBC does a story on “Dateline” about families struggling through the recession in rural Ohio, and letters and donations and job offers come pouring in from all over the country.

The retired Air Force vet has “job offers in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Arizona, Iowa.” Someone sent him $5,000. A woman reads through tears from a letter she’s received: “In a couple of weeks I will be able to send you some money to help with expenses. I hope this letter raises your spirits and that you know I really do care. Most of all, you have a friend in me. You are going to be OK, and so are your children. I will be thinking of you, sweetie, and praying that lots of other people send you much-needed money.”

She says, “It’s really hard to believe that someone you’ve never met could actually care that much.”  

The food pantry lady has gotten 500 phone calls and donations from Texas, California, Florida, Iowa, Massachusetts, Maine and Canada. She says, “I just can’t even describe how good it feels to know that there are so many people out there that really do care.”

This is absolutely par for the course, it’s what happens every single time there is a sob story on the TV, but here’s the thing: People don’t care. They just respond to what’s on television.

There are folks right down the street in Texas, California, Florida and Iowa who need food and basic supplies. There are good, capable people, some of them retired military, right down the street in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Arizona and Iowa who are looking for work. And, after NBC’s report, those people still need the basics and are still looking for work. And those people who sent the heartfelt letters and the donations and the job offers likely never moved a muscle for those people down the street.

A guy who drove to the food pantry with a Hefty bag of donations tells the food pantry lady, “Cincinnati Ohio’s thinkin’ of ya,” and she gives him a big hug. Really, guy who drove 170 miles to Lottridge to find someone to give your Hefty bag of stuff to? Because where were you and the rest of Cincinnati before NBC aired its report?

Curry, who is among the best in the business and whom I don’t mean to beat up on, gets “a smile” out of this, as she should. She did a good piece about people who are struggling, her viewers responded in overwhelming fashion and the people she reported about are deeply moved by their good fortune.

If you focus in tightly enough, it really is a wonderful thing. That a relatively tiny group of people in Ohio actually did get a lot of help they weren’t going to get without that TV report. It was like a little miracle, and you’d have to have a hard heart indeed not to be touched by the young mom reading the letter or the hardworking food pantry lady who is suddenly able to provide so much more help to so many more people. I love America too.

But back your view out to the larger picture and what you see is something much more depressing.

Obviously, the people who sent money and goods and job offers had both the means and willingness to help their neighbors in need, but instead they helped some people they saw on TV. Now, I suppose it’s possible that every one of them, from the donor of $5,000 to the Hefty bag guy from Cincinnati to the job offerers in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Arizona and Iowa, is doing just as much for lots of other people closer to home and not on the TV.

I would just be willing to bet a lot that they aren’t.

What Curry’s story suggests is that the generosity of the American people can solve the problems of a lot of folks who need help — as long as they can get on TV. Getting on TV is a lottery ticket, and the depressing part of it is that if you’re in trouble, your chances of getting on TV are about the same as your chances of winning the lottery.

What about all the desperate people who didn’t have a TV network drop out of the sky into their local food pantry? How do we turn their story into “a smile”? Because there are clearly people out there willing to help. There just isn’t enough TV to go around.

I grew up not listening to Ernie Harwell but to the man who replaced him in the Brooklyn Dodgers booth in 1950, Vin Scully. I hadn’t come to know Harwell until 1999, when baseball broadcasts were still streamed online for free and Harwell had returned to the radio side after five years on TV. Like generations of Michiganders, I quickly fell for his warmth, his charm, his knowledge of the game, his old-timey broadcast voice.

When he announced that 2002 would be his last season, I wanted to write about him, so I got in touch with him through the Tigers, asking if I could come to Detroit for a few days, hang out with him, shadow him. A day or so later there was a voicemail message. That incredible voice was right on my phone! I saved it for as long as I could. I wish I still had it:

“King, this is Ernie Harwell from Detroit. I don’t know that there’s much to write about me, but sure, come on up.”

I had planned to write about a fundamental shift in the way people follow baseball, about how Harwell was one of the last of the old radio men who were identified with a team as much as any player, often more than any player. Now, with most games on TV, far more games on national TV, larger squads of announcers and the Internet providing more baseball information than any one person could ever absorb, fans weren’t dependent on that one broadcaster to serve as the conduit to their team.

Yes. Well, it seemed interesting in my head. A little of that stuff made it into the piece, but after about 10 minutes with Ernie Harwell, I knew that my story couldn’t be about anything but Ernie Harwell.

It’s hard to talk about what kind of guy Ernie Harwell was without sounding like you’re talking about a guy on the night of the day he died. But it was just as hard when he was still alive. I spent three days with him, and he was unfailingly kind, generous, cheerful, energetic, positive and humble. And not just with me. At 84 years of age, he was tireless, making sure as he roamed the ballpark — which he did a lot — that every fan who wanted a moment with him — and there were many — got the moment he or she wanted.

I talked to a lot of people about Ernie Harwell that summer, and in the eight years since then I’ve talked to more people about him and I’ve heard and read many things said about him, and I’ve never heard a hint that the man I came to know in those three days wasn’t the genuine article. It may be that there has never been an unkind word said about Ernie Harwell.

Jon Miller, the ESPN and San Francisco Giants announcer, was hurrying across a field when I sidled up to him asking if I could talk to him for a minute. He kept walking as he asked what I wanted to talk about. “Ernie Harwell,” I said, and he stopped on a dime. All of a sudden, I had his attention and he grew animated as he told stories about Ernie.

Mike Shannon, the longtime St. Louis Cardinals broadcaster, was pressed for time just before a game one day but he told me to sit in the press box and wait for him. Minutes before the first pitch, he leaned out the door of his radio booth. “Where’s the guy who wanted to talk about Ernie Harwell?”

Ty Cobb liked Ernie Harwell, for crying out loud. Ty Cobb didn’t like anybody.

“He’s so generous with his time,” I wrote back then, “that a reporter in town for three days to research a story on him confesses on the third day that he’s just about run out of questions to ask.” That reporter was me, of course. We were sitting in an empty broadcast booth in the Comerica Park press box when I told him that. He looked out at the field for a few seconds, then started throwing out some suggestions, things I might want to ask about.

It sounds silly to say, but after spending time with Ernie I told myself that I would try to be a better person, more generous, more cheerful, more optimistic, more kind. More like Ernie Harwell. I failed miserably at this, of course, but I’ve returned to that thought fairly often over the years, and I like to think I’ve moved just a tiny bit in an Ernie-like direction.

Here’s the story I wrote about Ernie. I think I worked harder on it than on anything I’ve ever written. I did things I never do. I made outlines, wrote things on index cards and arranged and re-arranged them.

I swung for the fences, wanting to do justice to the living legend and the time I’d had with him. I used a flamboyant structure, organizing the piece around Ernie’s call of a single game, weaving his epic story between snippets of a thoroughly ordinary contest between two lousy teams, the Tigers and the Kansas City Royals.

I’m not sure it worked. But you don’t get to hang out with the greats that often, and it’s less often that you end up liking them. I wasn’t going to write just another piece about Ernie Harwell in his last year.

A few days after it ran he sent me an e-mail thanking me for the piece. “Best thing that’s ever been written about me,” he wrote. I’m sure he said that to every single person who ever wrote a story about him. And here’s the thing: I’m sure he meant it every time.