Tradition runs deep for Henderson’s Nickl

I will steer the rental car onto the Dan Ryan Expressway or, if the weather's nice in Chicago on Saturday, onto Lake Shore Drive, and head south. Eventually, I will merge onto Interstate 65 from Cline Avenue. I might stop in Merrillville for gas, or in Lafayette, for a White Castle hamburger or two. Or four. Or maybe even six.

By then, the gleaming candlelight still will be burning bright through the sycamores for me.

I will be Back Home Again in Indiana.

And I won't be alone. For this is the weekend they hold the Indianapolis 500, the Greatest Spectacle in Racing; the Ultimate Test of Man and Machine, as Jim McKay liked to call it, as David Letterman still calls it today, at the famous Brickyard in Speedway, Ind., on the outskirts of Indianapolis.

This is where the rubber has met the road since 1911.

A.J., Mario, the Unsers and Johnny Rutherford no longer are pounding the pavement at Indy, and perhaps the race has lost a bit of its luster over the years. But then, haven't we all?

It's still Indy. Upward of 350,000 spectators still will be in the massive grandstands and sprawling infield, munching on fried chicken and beer brought through the gates in coolers, one of the few places in sports where one still is allowed to bring his own beer and cooler, so long as it is not larger than 14 inches tall and 14 inches wide.

Anything more than a 12-pack, and they make you buy a ticket for your cooler. A lot of guys do. Because unlike the racecars, not everybody tries to conserve fuel on race day at Indianapolis.

For guys such as 74-year-old Carl Nickl of Henderson, the Indy 500 is still the Greatest Spectacle in Racing; still the Ultimate Test of Man and Machine - and it has nothing to do with bringing a cooler into the track.

Nickl is the neighbor of longtime UNLV public address announcer Dick Calvert. They play golf together, and during the football season, Nickl serves as Calvert's spotter. If Nickl can tell the subtle difference in paint schemes on the Target Chip Ganassi Racing cars from a half-mile away, identifying who made the tackle for Wyoming is a piece of cake.

This will mark the 31st consecutive year that Nickl will paint his face like the checkered flag and pile into a tour bus with 50 or so like-minded gearheads from Pittsburgh to partake in the annual carnival of speed at Indianapolis.

They will convene in Pennsylvania, head east across Ohio and tell their Indy stories, the ones they never get tired of telling, such as when crusty ol' A.J. threw a laptop computer halfway down the pit road when his driver ran out of fuel, or when crusty ol' A.J. took a mallet to his gearbox.

Almost all of Nickl's favorite Indy stories are about crusty ol' A.J. Foyt, who from 1958 to 1992 started 35 consecutive 500s. Only four more to go, and ol' Carl finally will catch his favorite driver.

"The older you get, the more you want to enjoy every moment, because you don't know when it's going to be your last," he says with a touch of melancholy, sounding a lot like ol' A.J. himself when the young lead-foots from overseas started coming over to beat him.

Yes, Indianapolis has tradition to uphold, gobs of it, so Nickl and his pals will stay in the same hotel in Newcastle, Ind., about two hours north of the Speedway.

"It used to be a Holiday Inn, and then it was a Best Western, and now, well, it's just a dive," he says.

But it's a reasonably priced dive on race weekend, and there's a field out back, where Nickl and his pals will shoot potatoes out of these homemade potato launchers, after the traditional dinner at - where else? - the Newcastle White Castle on Friday.

It might not be the yard of bricks at the start-finish line, or the bottle of milk in Victory Lane. But on Indy weekend, sometimes tradition is mostly about what you can get away with when the front desk isn't looking.

On Saturday, Nickl will paint his face like the checkered flag and put on his checkered flag outfit - checkered tails, socks, shoes and miter, one of those hats like the pope wears - and he'll go to the big Indy 500 parade downtown on Meridian Street, in the shadow of the Indiana War Memorial.

And the Gordon Pipers will invite him to march with them, for this is tradition, too, like pulling the name of Dick Simon or Bud Tingelstad or Mel Kenyon out of a hat in the race day pool and asking if you can pull again.

Before long, Jim Nabors will sing, and the cars will come hurtling down the track, and they'll drop the green flag. And they'll be racing again at Indianapolis, only you won't be able to hear the track announcer say it over the throaty roar of the 33 turbocharged engines.

And then the little hairs on the backs of our necks will be standing up, just as they always do at Indianapolis.

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