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 My
Paul Newman moment wasn't really mine at all. It was my former wife's.
I'd taken her, she many months pregnant with our first child, to the
1973 U. S. Grand Prix auto race at Watkins Glen, N.Y., promising an idyllic
weekend at a farmhouse bed-and-breakfast that turned out to more closely
resemble the setting for one of those Halloween horror movies. While I
was covering the race, she was steaming, sitting on the ground, reading
a book, her back to the fence around the track.
Midway through the race she noticed the man standing next to her. He'd
been leaning against the fence all race, really focused on the competition.
For some reason she finally looked up at him and immediately those blue
eyes. It was Paul Newman, the most-handsome leading man and her favorite
actor.
Suddenly, the nightmare weekend turned all sunshine and flowers. Though
neither of them said a word to each other, she had spent something like
three hours next to Paul Newman, and an intolerable race weekend had become
a cherished memory.
Her Paul Newman story isn't included in Winning: The Racing Life of
Paul Newman, but many others are offered space in the book to share
their memories of the actor who loved auto racing, and who moved from
behind the fence to behind the wheel, racing - and winning - into his
80s.
Newman didn't start racing until an age at which many racers are retiring
(though he'd always liked cars and motorsports, he really didn't get personally
involved until preparing for his role in Winning, the 1969 movie
in which he and Robert Wagner played rival racers with Newman's real-world
wife, Joanne Woodward, as part of a love triangle.
Once Newman got going, he attacked the sport with a competitive nature
that marveled even many professional racing drivers, people whom psychologists
will tell you are among the most competitive people on the planet.
At the racetrack, Newman never had an entourage, never fit the Hollywood
star stereotype. Instead, he was one of the guys - often one of the prank-playing
guys. He worked at driving, often, it seemed, as though he were studying
for a role, to play a driver in a movie. He asked questions, asked those
who were faster what they were doing so that he could become just as fast,
and he won races and even national championships and major races as a
driver, and as co-owner of an Indy car team.
Winning, the book, celebrates Newman's racing career - actually,
Newman's life and unselfish charity -- in words and photos, and in stories
told by drivers, mechanics and others who became his friends.
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