Tim Richmond - All But Forgotten (Cont.)
by LIZ CLARKE, Charlotte Observer — 1994
ONE LAST SHOWDOWN
Harry Hyde had heard the complaints around the garage. Some drivers wanted NASCAR to keep Richmond from competing, and they grew more vocal after Richmond was late to qualify at Michigan and rode out to his race car in a golf cart.
"The door latch on the trailer jammed, and we couldn't get in," Evelyn Richmond says. "He had 5 minutes to get to his car, so he took a golf cart over to get him there. He was sick in the truck, and never should have raced."
He checked back into the Cleveland Clinic about the time Hendrick got a call from Les Richter, then NASCAR's competition director.
"Your driver doesn't look in any shape to drive," Richter said. In September, 1987, Richmond resigned from Hendrick Motorsports. His final showdown with NASCAR came over the 1988 Busch Clash.
"You just couldn't go in and tell Timmy to get off this," Evelyn Richmond says of her son's obsession to race again. "He had enough strength left to drive that Busch Clash. In a way, I thought, if this is what Timmy wants, he's had enough jerked out from under him, and since he only had so much time left..."
He had no race car. And NASCAR had developed its first drug-testing policy, which Richmond felt was designed with him in mind. He stopped taking his AIDS medication, AZT, six weeks earlier so it wouldn't be detected. He also asked his doctor to give him a drug test to make sure he was clean. He sealed the sample in a safe deposit box in Daytona Beach Shores. He knew he was clean when he signed NASCAR's drug-testing consent form in the Daytona garage area, so he asked to take the test right then.
Two days later, NASCAR announced Richmond was suspended indefinitely for testing positive for substances on its list of banned drugs.
"It tore him apart," says Terry Magovern, a friend in the music business whom Richmond called after getting the news. "It tore him apart, and nobody would listen to him."
CHARACTER ASSASSINATION
Richmond met with Richter, told him there was a mistake and demanded another test.
Five days later, NASCAR announced Richmond's first test actually showed nothing more than over-the-counter cold medicine, though in large doses. The second test was clean.
"We were under a certain amount of pressure to release some sort of information as soon as we reasonably could," says Williams, the former NASCAR spokesman, of the initial suspension. "Tim Richmond wasn't going to be there (for the race). He was suspended. There had to be a reason. What we offered was the best information we had at the time. When we received further information, I got a call from (NASCAR president) Bill France Jr., who asked me to come down to his office. He had just gotten off the phone."
Williams said that's when NASCAR learned what the first test actually showed (Sudafed and Advil).
"And a few hours later, we released that," Williams said. Dr. Forrest Tennant, NASCAR's drug testing consultant, says no scientific mistakes were made in analyzing Richmond's drug test.
France won't discuss Richmond, saying through a spokesman that a court order prohibits it.
Richter says Richmond was a great talent with a great personality. Asked about NASCAR's drug test or anything else about Richmond's departure from the sport, he says, "You're getting into that no-no land."
Hendrick is still bitter about the way NASCAR handled the drug test. "That's horrible to damage someone - to character assassinate without the facts," Hendrick says.
NASCAR lifted Richmond's suspension, but still wouldn't let him race until he turned over his medical records from the Cleveland Clinic. Richmond offered instead a letter from his doctor there stating he had not been treated from drug dependancy.
Richmond appears to be the first driver to have been given NASCAR's drug test, according to information gathered from interviews with drivers and others in racing. Neither Richter, now NASCAR's senior vice president, nor Williams will say whether any other driver has been drug tested.
"When NASCAR announced its drug-testing policy, they said if someone tested positive we'd announce it - mainly because the guy was going to disappear. So if somebody else took the test, it was negative," Williams said.
Asked if anyone else has taken the test, Williams declined comment. Richter said, "That's internally our business. We don't say we tested so-and-so. While we're sitting here, somebody might be tested."
'FANS, I MISS YOU'
Meanwhile, Richmond was front-page news and holed up in the Daytona Hilton with a personal manager and a 6-foot-2, 230-pound body guard. "You packing a rod?" Richmond asked when Joe Semas, the bodyguard, appeared.
Richmond spent most of Daytona's Speed Week on the phone, calling lawyers and looking for a ride, Semas recalls. Some owners told Richmond they wanted to give him a ride, but NASCAR "didn't want him in a car." Kyle Petty asked the Wood Brothers to let Richmond drive his car in the Busch Clash; they didn't want to get involved. Even Hendrick said no. "It was just going to make it harder on him - all that controversy," Hendrick says. "I think he needed it mentally to get back in the car, but it was going to be a tough, tough situation."
On the legal front, Richmond tried hiring F. Lee Bailey but settled on Barry Slotnick, who had defended New York subway gunman Berhard Goetz. Slotnick wanted $15,000 in advance, Semas says. Richmond agreed to pay if he'd come to Daytona for a press conference. Hendrick offered his airplane and pilot to pick Slotnick up. Semas can't recall any NASCAR drivers coming to see Richmond that week. But IndyCar champion A.J. Foyt did. So did drag racer Don "The Snake" Prudhomme, movie director Hal Needham, who hired Richmond for a bit part in "Stroker Ace," and Linda Vaughn.
Richmond wanted to hire a plane to fly over the Daytona 500 with a nasty message for NASCAR. Vaughn talked him out of it. "You get more with honey than vinegar," she said. He settled on a banner that read, "Fans, I Miss You. Tim Richmond." After the race, he stayed in Daytona for Bike Week with Semas and Donnie Cooper, a friend from Ashland. "He told me if he had been a good ol' boy and went out and drank Blue Ribbon with those hillbillies, nobody would have said anything bad about him," Cooper said.
Needham saw him one last time that spring, when he and Johnny Hayes, a marketing executive at U.S. Tobacco, tried to convince him to seek help for the drug problem they thought he had. "I baited him with U.S. Tobacco, and he really thought he was coming in to talk to us about a race car ride," Needham says. "Then we dropped the bomb on him." "He sat there very politely, and said he appreciated what we all said and the fact that we thought enough of him to do that, but I just have to work this out my own way."
Richmond filed his lawsuit against NASCAR and Tennant in April 1988, seeking $20 million in punitive damages for defaming him through the drug test. NASCAR countered by demanding reams of information: Richmond's tax returns from 1980-87; the results of every test of his urine, blood or other bodily fluids since 1980; records of every visit to a doctor, psychologist or counselor since 1980; and his medical records from the Cleveland Clinic and his personal doctor in Florida.
Next, NASCAR's lawyers went after his partying past, putting Richmond's friends under oath to find out more. "They wanted me to tell them that Tim did drugs," says Magovern, among those NASCAR deposed. "That's what they were looking for - to tear up Tim Richmond." Richmond's own deposition was taken in Charlotte in October. He gave his name, address, grew confused over where he had gone to grade school and the interview was postponed. Before leaving, he signed an autograph for the court reporter's son. He withdrew the suit three weeks after U.S. District Judge James B. McMillan ordered his medical records be produced.
THE FINAL MONTHS
Shortly before he died, Richmond talked with Hendrick about making his AIDS diagnosis public - a question he struggled with to the end. "He always said 'Maybe I should take a positive step and try to warn people'," Hendrick said, "but the country really wasn't ready for it. We all prayed there would be a cure. We chased everything we could find. And if he did come forward, it might have been even worse for him." His last months were filled with pain.
"He suffered," Hendrick says. "He hurt. He was ill. If he had a good day, he could see people. If he had a bad day, he couldn't see people. I don't think they had the wherewithal to keep you as comfortable as they do today, and he was really sick at times. I would go see him, and I would wait until it was a good time to go see him. If he wasn't having a good day, then I'd talk to his mom." Richmond died as dawn broke over West Palm Beach on Aug. 13, 1989.
Each January since, Jimmy Johnson turns his new desk calendar to that date and copies the words, so he won't forget: "Tim died, 5:12 a.m." Richmond was buried at Ashland County Memorial Park in Ohio following a private ceremony for the family. Charlotte Motor Speedway held a memorial service for him the next week. About 200 people attended. Later, Evelyn and Al Richmond asked their son's doctor to announce the cause of death. "I had the thing sold to CBS," Hal Needham says, "But his mother said she just wasn't ready to do that."
Now, it's too late. "Look at all the thousands of people who've got AIDS now. I couldn't sell it now. There are too many bigger stars - the Magic Johnsons that have taken the AIDS story over and above. Then, it was brand new."
Today it isn't.
MOST IMPERFECT WAY TO DIE
Many of Richmond's friends still struggle with thoughts of his final months."I think if he would have shared what he was going through, then people would have been supportive," says Clark, the Atlanta Speedway executive. "Tim was such a vain guy, I don't think he could stand it for anybody to see him that way." Wheeler says, "Tim tended to be a perfectionist, and at the time, this was the most imperfect way to die. He did not want to put people through it. In those days, it was such a scary disease. If he had come out and said that, number one, the sport would have been put in a tight spot. Owing to the conservative nature of stock car fans, he certainly would not have gotten the acceptance Magic Johnson got in the NBA."
Driver Kyle Petty talked to Richmond by phone that last year, but he and his wife, Patti, wish they had done more. "We had regrets the year before he died," Patti Petty said. "I think everyone should feel a touch of regret. They dropped the ball. They really let him down. It goes back to NASCAR did not want that. It was like at some point, his name was white-washed from the list... We're as guilty as the next. But if you went to see him, made a friend out of this guy, is NASCAR going to let you through inspection? They wanted it swept under the carpet at that point."
Kyle Petty says, "It all boils down to AIDS. I don't care what anybody tells you. Nobody knows how to handle AIDS - especially in a sport as backward-thinking on so many things as this sport is."