Wednesday night, as part of its annual
Hall Of Fame ceremonies, NASCAR announced the creation of a new award; the
Squier-Hall Award for NASCAR Media Excellence. Named for broadcast
pioneers Ken Squier and Barney Hall, the award will recognize deserving members
of the media for their efforts in the sport.
I
feel like I have already won it, and here's why.
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| Barney Hall (L) and Ken Squier |
In the summer of 1978, I was preparing
for my senior year of High School, cooking burgers at a local restaurant,
chasing race cars around New England to whatever extent my meager income would
allow and writing a weekly column called Notes
From The Northern Circuit for Val Lesieur’s Speedway Scene trade paper.
My main haunt was Thunder Road
International Speedbowl, just a few miles up US Route 302 from my home in
Montpelier, Vt. Dubbed “The Nation’s Site of Excitement,” Thunder Road was
owned by Ken Squier, best known then (and now) as the man who first talked CBS
Sports into broadcasting the Daytona 500 live and flag-to-flag. After years of
manning the public address microphone at his rustic little short track, Squier faced
an increasingly hectic travel schedule with CBS, and needed someone to fill-in
on the microphone at Thunder Road.
Somehow, he chose me.
I didn’t really know Ken at the
time, and I’m sure he knew very little about me. At best, he had read a couple
of my newspaper columns, and found me to be an enthusiastic kid with a semi-workable
vocabulary. More likely, he looked around the pits one Thursday night, saw me
standing around with my finger in my nose and thought, “There’s a kid with some
time on his hands.”
Either way, I was Thunder
Road’s new track announcer.
Every week that summer, Ken
would slip me the microphone for a couple of heat races, while handling most of
the heavy lifting himself. The following morning, I would sit in his office
staring at the carpet while he systematically stripped the flesh from my bones.
“You’re doing it all wrong,”
he would say. “You’re telling people things they can already see for
themselves. Here’s the way you should
be doing it…”
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| Learning at the "Site of Excitement" |
Squier took a typical,
know-it-all teenager with a low tolerance for criticism and found a way to
break through. I soon realized that a golden opportunity had been laid at
my feet; an opportunity to learn the racing game from one of the premier voices in the history of the sport. I wisely decided to check my ego at the
door and listen – really listen – to
what Ken was teaching me.
Early on in the process, Squier
ended our weekly disembowelment with the first in a summer long series of
homework assignments.
“Go home and create a list
of 15 ways to say, `side by side,’” he ordered.
“Bring it to the track next week.”
I spent the next few days
playing amateur wordsmith, arriving at Thunder Road the following week with my
finished list, ready to deliver.
“Door to door, nose to nose,
elbow to elbow, wheel to wheel,” I said, rattling off all my new descriptors.
“Fantastic,” said Squier
afterward. “Now use `em all tonight. Never say the same thing, the same way
twice.”
In subsequent weeks, I
crafted similar lists of ways to say, “on the inside, on the outside,
nose-to-tail” and many of the other catch phrases announcers are called upon to
use. In time, those phrases became a normal part of my race-night vocabulary,
and before long, I developed a sort of “inner ear” that allowed me to monitor
my own play-by-play banter and change the phraseology from lap to lap.
Squier was also a stickler
for preparation.
Whenever he boarded an
airplane for a NASCAR race, he did so with a briefcase filled with dozens –
perhaps hundreds – of 3x5 index cards. Ken had a card for every driver,
featuring his name, hometown, sponsor, crew chief, car owner and as many
details of his career as could be jammed onto 15 square inches of paper. The
top owners and crew chiefs all had a card, as well.
Ken’s personal assistant,
Della Truax, culled through every racing magazine and trade paper in the
country – every single week – updating information and re-writing those cards.
He would study them endlessly, memorizing every bit of information for instant on-air
recall. That preparation, combined with a God-given talent for storytelling, put
Ken head-and-shoulders above the competition and made him the best in the
business.
I learned from Ken’s
example, and emulated him in every possible way.
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| Squier taught by example |
At the height of my
short-track career, I called races four nights a week from Memorial Day through
Labor Day; chasing race cars from Ontario, Canada to northern Maine, from
upstate New York to southern Connecticut. Each track had multiple divisions of
race cars, and in all, I had memorized somewhere between 800 and 1,000 drivers.
I drilled names, hometowns, sponsors and car makes into my brain with endless
hours of pre-race practice, until I could introduce the main event field without so much as a glance at the written lineup sheet.
If you arrived at the track five hours before show
time, you’d see me in the pits, waiting for the drivers to unload their cars so
I could pick their brains. Squier taught me – mostly by example – that if I was
going to do my job correctly, I needed to know what was going on in that
garage. I needed to know who was angry at whom, who was nursing a balky powerplant and who was distracted with a kid in the hospital.
I owed it to the fans to
educate, entertain and inform them; every single night. Ken Squier taught me
that.
Squier’s influence went far
beyond my early days in the sport. He was the one who insisted I send an
audition tape to Motor Racing Network; an organization he helped found. He
followed up (I’m told) with a telephone call to then-MRN President John
McMullen, using his influence to lobby for a kid from Vermont he believed
worthy of an audition.
He didn’t have to do any of
that. In fact, it was in his best interest to keep me under wraps
and hidden from the world. By the time he brought me to the attention of MRN, I
was working full-time for Squier as PA announcer for both his racetrack and
touring series, and as Sports Director and play-by-play man for his group of
Vermont Radio stations. He could have kept me under his thumb forever, toiling away
merrily in the Green Mountains of Vermont.
He could have, but he
didn’t.
Instead, he remembered the
people who helped him when he was an up-and-coming youngster. He believed he
owed it to them – and to me – to pass that help along.
I will never forget it.
When I first began to get some national
exposure with NASCAR and Motor Racing Network, I stepped
into the realm of yet another mentor.
Barney Hall has been the
central voice on MRN’s broadcasts since Day One; a comfortable pair of shoes
that fans across North America have happily slipped into since the 1960s.
Barney is a quiet, gentle man, and people who know him only through his radio
work are shocked to discover he doesn’t say much when the microphone is
turned off.
In my first few years with
the network, my interaction with Barney was fairly limited and mostly business.
We’d discuss who we should interview during the pre-race show or compare notes on a story we’d picked up in the garage, but that was about it. Barney studies
people, taking his time to decide whether they're alright or not. He probably
needed a little longer to make up his mind about me, and that’s completely understandable.
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| Hall enjoys respect and trust |
Once you receive the Barney
Hall Seal of Approval, however, you’ve got a friend for
life and an invaluable sounding board. Barney is old-school in every possible way. He writes out his race notes
in longhand on a yellow legal pad, and gets his information the old-fashioned
way; by getting out in the garage and actually talking to people. There’s not a
crewman in the garage who won’t lay down
his tools when Barney Hall stops by, and no one in NASCAR commands more
respect.
People respect Barney
because they know they can trust him. He knows things most reporters never hear about, simply because he is worthy of people's trust.
Secrets are safe with him, since he’d sooner throw himself under a jet dryer than break a confidence. He has served as an intermediary for dozens of major deals over the years, pulling a driver aside to say, “You know, you
really ought to go talk to so-and-so. He might be looking for a driver next
season.”
Barney taught me early on
about the importance of earning respect in the NASCAR garage. “There are things you can talk about on the air, and things you can't," he’d say. “You can break a confidence and get a really big scoop, but it’s the last story you’ll ever
break. If you don't have the trust of the garage, you've got nothing.”
Over the years, there has been
a handful of reporters who betray a racer's trust to get a big
headline. They trade their integrity for a fleeting moment in the spotlight and an opportunity to say, "I reported it first." Invariably, they regret that decision. In fact, there are individuals in the garage today who intentionally plant
bogus stories with certain media members, simply because they know they’ll run
with it without doing their homework.
I tell drivers, crew chiefs
and team owners all the time, “I want to talk with you, before I talk about you.”
Barney Hall taught me that.
Photo Credits: Getty Images/NASCAR, ESPN.com
