Chris Economaki, dean of American motorsports journalists, dies at 91

He was a great motor sports journalist; heck, for the longest time, he was the only American motor sports journalist, or so it seemed.

When Chris Economaki died Friday, he was 91, which in auto racing years is longer than the 24 Hours of Le Mans and the Indianapolis 500 and the World 600 all rolled into one.

(Yes, I am aware that NASCAR now calls its Memorial Day weekend race in Concord, N.C., the Coca-Cola 600. But when Economaki was in the pits for ABC, when I was watching "Wide World of Sports" on TV as a kid, it was the World 600. And in deference to him, on this day, that is what I choose to call it.)

I met the man - sort of - only once. It was at the Long Beach Grand Prix, and it must have been in the 1990s. I had put in for credentials late, and when you put in for credentials late at Long Beach, or were from a smaller newspaper or radio station, they would put you in the auxiliary press room, which in this particular year was the visitors locker room in the Long Beach Convention Center.

On this day, it smelled of old basketball sneakers. And somebody from the Anaheim Bulletin must have forgotten to flush the toilet.

Anyway, I was the only one in there. Except for Economaki, who was writing on an old manual typewriter with white plastic framework. Probably a Royal or one of those brands.

That's right. A manual typewriter. As I said, this would have been in the 1990s. This was long after the advent of laptop computers. This looked more like the typewriter guys used when Sam Hanks won the Indy 500, which was in 1957, which was when the engines were still in front.

Economaki was not wearing his bright yellow ABC blazer, which is mostly how I remember him. He was wearing an old man's shirt with old man pants that were cinched up nearly to his chest by a skinny old man's belt, the kind some of us got whipped with as kids. And his hair was gray, not black, and it wasn't flying around in the breeze like it did on pit road, because it was stifling in the visitors locker room this day at the Long Beach Convention Center.

There was no breeze. And it smelled of old sneakers.

And then I felt sort of bad for Chris Economaki.

This was a man who had traveled the world in auto racing, had seen all the world's great races, knew all the world's great drivers. Knew A.J. and Mario and the Unsers and the Allisons and the Pettys and Jimmy Clark and Jackie Stewart; knew Big Daddy Don Garlits; knew every big daddy that ever turned a wheel.

And he knew the small daddies, too, the guys who spun around the dusty bullrings on sultry Saturday nights, who he would write about in National Speed Sports News, of which he was the editor, that was to auto racing what The Sporting News was to baseball.

"Anyone worth a damn in motor sports journalism - and I mean anyone, electronic or print - who doesn't acknowledge Chris Economaki as his or her mentor is either a liar or a fool," Ed Hinton, another auto racing writer of some repute, wrote on the dust jacket of Economaki's autobiography.

I wanted to introduce myself, wanted to ask what in the world was the great Chris Economaki doing down there in the bowels of the Long Beach Convention Center when Al Unser Jr. and Michael Andretti were upstairs where it was cool, talking about their setups.

But then the bell on his typewriter sounded, and he reached for another sheet of typing paper, and he slid it between the rollers.

He hit the carriage return and put his head down and began to hunt and peck at the keys, and he was hunting and pecking faster than Unser and Andretti had just driven in the Grand Prix.

It appeared Economaki was on a tight deadline, so I didn't bother him.

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski.