Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 27, 1990 TAG: 9005290185
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
"I was young, I was eager and I desperately wanted to learn the ropes of the public relations business," Cotter says.
"I was a guy who came up with a lot of crazy ideas, a guy who thought he had a vision of things, a guy who felt he knew a lot."
Cotter stops. He begins to laugh.
"Yeah, that's what I thought," he says, chuckling again.
"Then, of course, I met `Humpy' ".
"Humpy."
Like other professional sports, NASCAR racing has a small cast of prime-time characters who are identified by a single name.
There's Richard and Junior. Cale and Dale.
And "Humpy."
Lesser known as Howard Augustine Wheeler II. Better known as Charlotte Motor Speedway president, race promoter extraordinaire, the Bill Veeck and Charlie Finley of stock car racing.
"A genius," Cotter says.
"A showman," Richard Petty says.
"An innovator," Dale Earnhardt says.
"The Don King of stock car racing," Geoff Bodine says.
Humpy is all those things.
A head for racing
Sitting in his plush, seventh-floor penthouse office at CMS, golden-haired Humpy Wheeler, 52, gazes out the window and talks with pleasure about how his idea machine got its first jump start in 1951.
"I actually promoted my first race when I was 13," Wheeler says. "I had a bicycle shop in Belmont, about six miles from the old Charlotte Speedway.
"We had a field across the street from my house. So I laid out a one-tenth mile track - I didn't know it was one-tenth of a mile, but I've gone back and measured it since.
"It also was the first integrated race run in the Southeast. A Little Rascals type of a deal, but I would give prizes and stuff.
"It was a unique business. They'd tear their bicycles up over there, see. They'd take 'em home to try and let their daddies fix 'em. They couldn't, so they'd bring 'em in to me to put back together.
"Had to make a living some way back then."
In the small, poor, cotton-mill town of Belmont in the 1940s and early '50s, Wheeler said the automobile supplied about the only action around.
"There was nothing to do in Belmont, so we'd got out and watch cars go down Highway 29 on Sundays," Wheeler says. "When I was about 10, I kept seeing these race cars go by.
"You could hitchhike back then and nobody would capture you. So I'd hitchhike over to old Charlotte Speedway every race and walk up to somebody and walk in free with 'em, because kids under 12 got in for nothing."
By the time he was 15, Wheeler had driven in his first race. Pretty soon, his family's backyard was filled with battered race cars the kid had picked up at the track.
"There was something about racing that zeroed in on me early," he says. "But, at the time, the last thing a mother wanted her son to do was get involved in any kind of stock car racing.
"But, thank goodness, my mother eventually realized that racing was an outlet for me. She always encouraged me from that point."
His father, Howard Augustus Wheeler, was a teacher, coach and athletic director at Belmont Abbey College. The younger Wheeler inherited his father's nickname, which originated when he was caught smoking a Camel cigarette after a football practice at the University of Illinois.
"My father never liked racing at all. He wanted me to play football and box," says Wheeler, a state Golden Gloves champion at 17.
At 18, Wheeler hooked up with publicist Russ Catlin and worked a summer job at Darlington (S.C.) Raceway.
"It was kind of a rat's nest bunch of people like Richard Petty, Cale Yarborough and Bobby Allison. We were all the same age group and we knew each other while we were coming up," Wheeler says. "Nobody ever thought that anybody would amount to much."
Still, young Wheeler's saw beyond what, on the surface at least, appeared to limited boundaries.
"I don't know what it was, but I just saw something in racing. There was spectacle waiting to happen," he says. "And that was always in my head."
Learning the ropes
After graduating from the University of South Carolina in 1961, Wheeler quickly traded in his journalism degree to operate dusty, dirty Robinwood Speedway in Gastonia, N.C.
"The dirt tracks back then were real rough-and-tumble," Wheeler says. "But it didn't take me long to make a lot of money.
"During that time, I went through and operated about five different little tracks.
"And I thought I knew what I was doing.
"I lost all the money; I didn't have a dime. It wasn't because the races weren't successful; it was judgments against me for accidents and not having enough insurance. It took me a long time to pay off those debts."
But Wheeler, a fighter, wasn't on the canvas long. He stayed in the racing game by taking a public relations job with Firestone in 1964.
It proved to be a great move. In his six years with Firestone, Wheeler was given the opportunity to see numerous forms of auto racing at facilities all across the country. He was inquisitive, studying the pros and cons of each track.
"I really got a great education on the racing facility," he says.
But there was a flip side.
"That period was one of the bloodiest periods in the history of auto racing," Wheeler says.
"These guys were riding in bathtubs full of gasoline. A lot of people got killed. I was the last person to talk to three different drivers before they got killed. I knew a lot of them very well. Emotionally, it was a very bad time for me."
When Firestone pulled out of racing in 1970, Wheeler moved his wife, Pat, and their three children back to North Carolina.
After briefly operating a couple of dirt tracks, Wheeler went to work for a major real estate developer in the Charlotte area.
"For the first time in my life, I was totally removed from racing, and that was good for me," Wheeler says. "I needed those old wounds to heal."
Vision of success
In 1975, Wheeler was contacted by an old friend, Bruton Smith, who had recently regained control of Charlotte Motor Speedway.
"I had known Bruton forever," Wheeler says. "He built the track here in 1959, then he lost it through bankruptcy in 1962.
"In '75, he was getting control back and was looking for somebody to work for him.
"At the time, the place looked so bad. The thing never was finished. There had been very little money put back into the track, and it showed.
"I asked Bruton, `What can we ever do to this place?' "
When Smith committed himself to putting all the profits back into the facility, Wheeler says he knew he had found a home.
A dream home.
"Bruton and I shared the same philosophy," Wheeler says. "Racing must be the greatest sport in the world because we've dusted people to death . . . we've given them terrible rest rooms . . . they sit out in the rain, snow, sleet and hail . . . lousy parking . . . traffic jams.
"But they kept coming back, and they kept multiplying.
"What would ever happen if you ever did it right? And I had seen it done right at a few places, so I was ready."
Close friends of Wheeler say he has believed for a long time that he can see into the future. In 1975, he made a prediction.
Insiders snickered when Wheeler looked into his crystal ball and said stock car racing would grow into the multimillion-dollar business it is today.
"Oh, not many people believed me," Wheeler says. "But in the back of my head I just had this thought and it would never leave.
"The thought was, take a great stadium like the Los Angeles Coliseum or the Rose Bowl. If you take those kind of facilities and, instead of putting a football field there, put a race track and spread the seating out. You could have incredible crowds . . . incredible things could happen."
Wheeler only questioned one thing about his vision.
"I was concerned about how we were going to get the females involved. It scared me to death in 1975 when we discovered that only 15 percent of the people coming here were women.
"You look, entertainment/sports does well in the down periods of recessions and depressions, but only if the females are interested. That type of entertainment will keep going," Wheeler says. "If it's just male, or just female, you split people in half and neither one wants to do it."
The solution, Wheeler says, was no stroke of genius.
"We just copied what filling stations did in the '40s. Clean the rest rooms. Clean the place up. That's really all we did," he says.
"That, and the drivers cleaned up. The tire companies and the automobile manufacturers put a lot of pressure on the drivers to clean themselves up."
Put on a fancy face
Now it's stock car racing that's cleaning up.
At no place is it more evident than Charlotte Motor Speedway, the Taj Mahal of big-time stock car racing.
"Just look at it," says driver Brett Bodine. "It's the show palace of our sport."
Almost yearly expansion has increased the track's grandstand seating capacity to 107,281. Another 11,000 or so can be placed in the track's 63 VIP suites, exclusive Speedway Club and first-turn condominiums.
Including the spacious 100-acre infield area, the speedway can handle 170,000 fans, Wheeler says.
That number will mushroom again soon, when construction is completed on a new 12-unit tower of luxury condominiums in turn one. A 40-unit complex was built in 1984.
Wheeler says half of the new condos, which went on sale 18 days ago, already have been sold despite a price tag of $500,000 each.
The Smith Tower, the result of a $20 million expansion project finished in 1987, is impressive. The 100,000 square-foot, seven-story building includes the speedway's corporate offices, a movie theater, souvenir shop, ticket outlet, privately leased office space and two restaurants - the Speedway Club and The Club.
For an $8,500 lifetime membership fee, sponsor representatives and other high-rollers can watch Dale Earnhardt battle Darrell Waltrip while eating a gourmet meal and drinking a $100 bottle of wine.
"I believe we've helped change the scene of stock car racing," Wheeler says. "Hopefully, some of the things we've done have set a little bit of an example."
When it comes to promotion, Wheeler and his aggressive publicity team lap every track in NASCAR.
No facility sends out more prerace news releases. No facility holds more prerace news conferences. No facility spends more money.
Anything to fill all the seats, anything to turn a stock car race into an event, Wheeler says.
CMS promotes and advertises heavily, going after the borderline race fans by providing extravagant prerace entertainment.
The prerace shows have contained everything from boxing matches to a three-ring circus to an aerial dogfight, including a Soviet MiG.
"How did I get the MiG?" Wheeler says, grinning. "You won't believe this, but a friend of mine found one in Pasadena, Texas. I guess the thing had been captured in Korea. After the Air Force found out it couldn't fly very well, they sold it as surplus. A guy I know bought it, restored it and brought it here."
Today, Wheeler's show includes a school-bus jump over the "Berlin Wall" and an appearance by Robosaurus, a 40-foot-tall, 60,000-pound, fire-breathing, robotic dinosaur that will roam the speedway grounds and eat cars.
"It's going to be a hell of a show. It will blow your mind," Wheeler says.
When it comes to the prerace show, Cotter says no idea is deemed too absurd.
"I'll never forget going in for my first `brainstorming' session with Humpy in 1985," Cotter says. The theme that year was "Buy American."
"There were about eight of us sitting around and Humpy says, `Why not get a brand new Honda Civic, shoot it out of a cannon and have it crash and burn beyond the track's third turn?'
"At that point, I knew nothing would be considered a joke. And that was neat. Everywhere else it would have been stupid, but here it was considered.
"Humpy just doesn't think conventionally. He came out of left field throwing a curveball."
Wheeler's outrageous prerace productions have made NASCAR nervous at times.
"Some of 'em we get are little controversial," Wheeler says. "You know here at Charlotte we get off the beaten path right often.
"NASCAR has to go through a pruning session. We had the circus here one year and [former NASCAR vice president] John Riddle didn't think we'd get the race started on time.
"They [NASCAR] look the other way. [Current vice president] Les Richter will call me and say, `Just tell me how bad it is.' I'll say, `It's terrible. You don't want to hear the details.'
"I think [NASCAR president] Bill France Jr. takes a comical look, to say the least, at what we do and wonders how we get away with it. He would never do that."
Wheeler says the idea of a lengthy, entertaining prerace show originally was planned to help keep all the fans from arriving at the track at the same time, thus avoiding a nasty traffic snarl.
While the people wait for the engines to start, Wheeler says they need to be doing something besides twiddling their thumbs.
"It's got to be a happening, a social event," Wheeler says.
"I've sat around thousands of races waiting for the race to start. People watch the grass grow and the asphalt heat up. Nothing happens, so your drama and tension don't build.
"Ever been to a heavyweight championship fight? I don't care who is fighting, there is an aura about it.
"Tension. You pay for that. You pay to become tense. You pay to become stimulated. It's a sensory stimulation. You need a warm-up for the event.
"You have to take people all the way up here," says Wheeler, holding his right hand at chest level, "and they're ready for the event.
"Then, when the event starts, they can go higher and they're going to come back more often."
Wheeler says he has a simple philosophy about promotion.
"You've got to create the illusion that what you're doing is so unique, so different and so unbelievable that you've just got to go see it.
"Now, a lot of people can do that," he says, "but you've got to make that illusion become a reality, and that's what we try to do at Charlotte Motor Speedway."
Bigger is better
Humpy Wheeler is not surprised by the number of people coming to his stock car races.
"For one," he says, "it's [the race is] a spectacle.
"The county fair doesn't exist anymore like we knew them. It's a little bit of the circus, a little bit of the fair, its a lot of color, it's a lot of spectacle.
"It is big. Americans like big. And they come to see people walk the line, and these guys [drivers] certainly walk the fine line.
"They come to see cars running close together. They come to see bump and grind. They come to see them wreck. They don't want to see them get hurt.
"Plus, I believe there's a lot of subconscious audience participation in stock car racing because everybody can drive a car, and the car they drive looks something like Dale Earnhardt's Lumina. I think they transfer themselves subconsciously into that car."
If Wheeler looks at prerace ticket sales figures on his computer and sees the numbers are lagging, he orders his troops into his office. They don't leave the room until a solution is found.
"Whoever said you can't force creativity is not right," Wheeler says. "You can. You just sit here and think of an idea that will really blossom forth."
People who are not dreamers and thinkers don't work for Wheeler very long. Besides, the boss has a violent temper.
"I'm terrible to work for; absolutely terrible. I put a lot of pressure on people," Wheeler says.
"He'll rip the phone out of the wall and hurl it across the room," says Joe Whitlock, who worked as the track's public relations director from 1976-80.
"But the next morning, he'll come by in the boat and say, `Let's go fishing.'
"Humpy is intense. He's impatient. But all along, he's forward-thinking.
"Let's face it. He's a boon to stock car racing."
The drivers' respect
Stock car racing's main players, the drivers, don't necessarily agree with all of Wheeler's tactics, but they never discount his value to the sport.
"I'm in the racing business and he's in show business," Petty says.
"He keeps things stirred up. He does some crazy stuff. Sometimes we don't see eye-to-eye, but whether you like him or not, he gets the job done.
"He's a promoter who comes up with a lot of off-the-wall stuff that works. Some of the stuff doesn't work, but he sure doesn't leave any stone unturned."
One of the publicity department's promotions came before the 1988 running of The Winston.
Cotter, trying to capitalize on the controversial finish of the previous year's race, sent out a series of mailings.
"Dale Earnhardt, Bill Elliott and Geoff Bodine had been involved in a wild finish in 1987, so we wanted to take off on it," Cotter says.
"I sent out a packet of grass seed that included a bill for Earnhardt for where he had run through the frontstretch grass.
"I sent out a crushed Coors beer can, a crumpled Levi Garrett chewing tobacco pouch and a crushed Goodwrench brake pad, depicting all three drivers' sponsors.
"Later, I sent out a yellow piece of metal, which actually came off Earnhardt's car.
"None of the three drivers were too pleased about it.
"I had done this on my own, but when Humpy heard about it, I knew where I stood. He said to keep mailing the stuff out and that he'd take the heat."
Earnhardt shrugs off the incident as simply "typical Humpy."
For the all his controversial, unconventional ideas, Wheeler has a charitable side, young driver Brett Bodine contends.
"Humpy has always tried to help and steer me in the right direction," Bodine says.
"He helps the young driver breaking into the sport. He helped me get into Winston Cup racing. He promoted me. I really believe he is the one who helped me get in Hoss Ellington's car, helped me get in Junior Johnson's car and helped start my career.
"I still remember when I was driving the double-zero car on the Grand National circuit. Humpy kept telling me I needed more exposure.
"So before the Charlotte race, he told me to paint my car Day-Glo orange. He said that would grab attention.
"Know what? He was right. Just look at all the Day-Glo colors you see out here now. He has tremendous vision, tremendous foresight."
Master mentor
It was early in 1989 when Cotter walked into Wheeler's office to announce his resignation as public relations director.
"Leaving Charlotte Motor Speedway was the toughest thing I've ever done in my life. Asking my wife to marry was the second-toughest thing," says Cotter, who now owns his own stock car racing public relations firm in Charlotte.
"I turned into an absolute workaholic while working [at CMS]. Humpy made it very difficult for me to leave this place.
"I learned so much from him. He was my mentor.
"He's the master of PR. He's a brilliant man. The man is a genius."
Keywords:
PROFILE AUTO RACING
by CNB