5-11-2005
Schmidt inspires with his attitude
Ben Smith - Posted on Mon, May. 09, 2005
Fort Wayne (Ind.) Journal Gazette
INDIANAPOLIS – The guy you root for this month of May has more seat time than any of them now, more than A.J. or Vukie, more than Rocket Rick Mears, more than Mario or the Unsers or any of the white-line ghosts who stroll here in this ancient warehouse of haunts they call the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
He’s the guy you see now, sitting as always, grinning out of the background of so many photos of race cars and men.
The guy you see tilting his head, pressing the buttons, putting himself in motion.
The guy you see racing away, making you small, leaving all your assumptions and your doubts and whatever misshapen pity you might be feeling right now to choke gloriously on his dust.
Say hello to Sam Schmidt, ladies and gentlemen. Fastest wheel man in the business.
The business being, hoping to walk again.
The hands speak to you.
They lie flat on the arms of the wheelchair, fingers aimed perfectly at high noon on the imaginary clock, looking like some doctor’s diagram of the human hand rather than the hand itself. Looking .?.?.arranged, somehow, which of course they are.
The hands speak to you. And what they say, what they scream at you in your head, is that they aren’t going to move, they aren’t going to twitch, they’re just going to lie motionless no matter how long you stare, no matter if it’s a minute or an hour or a week or a year.
Sam Schmidt wishes it weren’t so. But it is.
When they pulled him out of that mess of a race car in Orlando five years ago, he stopped being what he was, a hell of a hotshoe, and started being what he is, a hell of an inspiration. The crash took a sledgehammer to his spinal cord, left him paralyzed from the chest down. He was on a respirator for five weeks. He is in a wheelchair to this day.
What he is not is disabled.
Five years along he runs his own race team, Sam Schmidt Motorsports, and his own spinal-injury fundraising group, the Sam Schmidt Paralysis Foundation, and his own life. He flies commercial to all the races. He zips around in what his colleagues acknowledge is the fastest wheelchair they’ve ever seen, guiding it with controls built into the headrest. One of his drivers, Thianos Medeiros, won the points title last year in the Indy Racing League’s support circuit, the Infiniti Pro Series.
Starting this week, he comes to Indy with Travis Gregg spearheading his three-car entry in the Infiniti Pro loop, and with four-time Indy veteran Richie Hearn driving in the 500 on May 29.
“I don’t think I could do what he does,” observes Chip Ganassi of Target Ganassi Racing, who calls the 40-year-old Schmidt one of his heroes. “I think there’s a lot of tough days in this business, but probably my toughest day isn’t much on his scale. I have a lot of reverence for someone to still have that passion for the sport like he does.”
To which Schmidt would no doubt reply: What choice does he have?
“Do I like it? No,” he says. “I’d be lying if I didn’t say ‘Why did this happen?’ like a zillion times over the last five years. I don’t ever wish this would happen to anybody else, and if it wasn’t me it wouldn’t break my heart, either.
“I don’t like the challenges every day. But the alternative is much worse.”
Sure it is. He moves in a world, after all, where death hangs in perfect balance with denial, and the trick is to keep it that way. It’s the empty chair at the dinner table, death is, the dotty relative nobody talks about. And as such, it lends a sort of cockeyed perspective to everything.
And so Schmidt sits in his chair and turns on his TV set and there is Adam Petty, dying in a race car. There is Tony Roper, dying as well. There is Dale Earnhardt, turning left, then right, boom, gone, see ya, Motorhead Elvis gone to his reward.
And Schmidt thinks this: I’m a lucky man.
“They all died from not too much unrelated types of deals,” he says. “So with a 5-year-old and a 7-year-old at home, I’m just happy to be here.”
There is, after all, so much left to do. Fourteen months after his crash, he started the race team at the urging of his wife, Sheila, and his parents, and now here he is in a 10,000-square foot plant that once housed Treadway Racing, for whom Schmidt once drove, and it’s a booming, going concern. And now here is Congress nattering about stem-cell research, and that’s a concern, too, because there are so many people out there like Schmidt, so many people holding out the same hope he does, that one day they will rise and walk.
“We get tons of e-mails from disabled people and their families who say our program and what we’re doing out there has a positive effect on their lives,” says Schmidt, who used to do fund-raisers with Christopher Reeve, and whose foundation ramped up its efforts when Reeve passed away last October. “I realize now this is basically what God wants me to do. I’m here for a much bigger purpose than I ever was driving a race car.”
Oh, yes. The guy you root for this month of May is this guy, Sam Schmidt, and not just because he’s the fastest wheel man in the business. Not just because, from that seat of his, he races away from us, leaves us in his dust, outruns all our assumptions and our doubts and most of all our pity.
It’s because, from that seat of his, he lifts so many up. |
