The darkness was deep and filled with foreboding on Sept. 13, 1969 at the race track then known as Alabama International Motor Speedway.
It was the eve of the inaugural Talladega 500, destined to be rated perhaps the most controversial event in NASCAR history because practically all the top stars had driven away in a boycott.
Only a few men remained in the garage area as midnight approached, mostly crewmen rushing to get cars ready to run 200 mph on the new speedway with banking nearly five stories high. Two of those lingering on were reporters – Benny Phillips and me.
I had hinted that I wanted to head to our motel in nearby Pell City. I was tired and more than a little worried about how fans would react the next day when they discovered they weren’t going to see Alabama heroes Bobby and Donnie Allison race against Richard Petty, Cale Yarborough, David Pearson, Buddy Baker, LeeRoy Yarbrough and the other regulars.
Would there be a riot?
Benny and I had ridden to the track together in a rental car and I wanted to go.
He encouraged me to stay a bit longer.
"No telling what is going to happen,” Benny said.
Indeed.
The memory of that momentous time in Alabama is much in mind right now because my old friend Benny Phillips passed away Tuesday after a brief hospitalization. He was 75.
Benny was a giant in many ways – physically at 6-4, and also in his determination, in his courage and in his journalistic ability.
Before his retirement in 2008 he spent 48 years at the High Point Enterprise in North Carolina, 32 of them as sports editor.
What we were able to chronicle so long ago by staying an hour or so more at the track now named Talladega Superspeedway was the anguish and pressure experienced by a young, virtually unknown driver named Richard Brickhouse.
He had joined the recently formed Professional Drivers Association, a union-like organization led by Richard Petty. All the PDA members had walked out, leaving with legitimate concerns about dangerous tire wear at the super-fast 2.66-mile track.
Now, Brickhouse was being offered the chance to drive a factory-fielded Plymouth. It was a sleek, needle-nosed No. 99, painted purple and nicknamed "Plum Crazy."
Brickhouse wavered as the night wore on.
“Son,” said Ronnie Householder, the powerful, no-nonsense chief of Chrysler Corp.’s motorsports program, “someone is going to drive that car. It can be you. I’ve got to know right now.”
Brickhouse, calling it the toughest decision of his life, agreed to take the ride.
In storybook fashion, he won the race, which proved to be the only big-league victory of his career.
Along with Benny, I was able to write some deep background stuff about Brickhouse’s agonizing decision because Benny had wanted to wait at the track a little longer.
Benny and I shared the same beats – outdoors and motorsports – for decades.
As the years went by, my admiration for the man grew immensely.
You see, Benny was lame.
He had been recruited as a bruising fullback out of little Boonville High in the N.C. Piedmont by the famous football coach Jim Tatum to play for the Tar Heels at Chapel Hill.
Sadly, between his freshman and sophomore years Benny was stricken with polio. He was paralyzed from the waist down. He was forced to use crutches and wear heavy leg braces for the rest of his life, much like Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
A lesser man might have crumbled.
Not Benny.
He pursued his passions with uncommon vigor, especially hunting and fishing.
We shared some outings afield and on the water.
The first time I went fishing with him we towed his small boat to Lake Tillery. I jumped from Benny’s pickup truck to start the launching process. He dared me to touch the boat.
“Just because I’m crippled you think I can’t handle that boat by myself,” he said in a strong voice. “I’m going to show you I can.”
And he did.
On another occasion, Benny took me to his favorite duck hunting spot on the Pee Dee River near the headwaters of Blewett Falls Lake. We boated to the blind and found it to be nearly flooded.
“There is no way we (I meant him) can get in the blind,” I said.
“We can,” said Benny. “I’m goin’ huntin’. Get me on your back.”
Reluctantly, and with great effort, I managed to lift Benny into the blind.
In the mid-1970s Benny and I were joined at Santee-Cooper Reservoir by Buddy Baker and Benny’s pal from High Point, Cincinnati Bengals lineman Ron Carpenter. Each of us weighed at least 250 pounds.
The boat rode so low that water nearly lapped over the sides.
Approximately 80 striped bass were boated and most were released that day, not a single one by me.
Benny never let me forget that.
And he never let me forget the time he tricked me into shooting a blackbird during a dove-hunting contest. Prizes were to be awarded to the hunter bagging the most birds with the fewest shells.
I was fetching a dove I had downed when Benny yelled, “Tom, over your shoulder!”
I wheeled and fired. The blackbird tumbled from the sky. I had wasted a shell.
I cussed and Benny laughed until his sides hurt.
Benny traveled all over North America to hunt and fish – to Texas with Terry Labonte and to Wisconsin with Dave Marcis, and to several locations with Dale Earnhardt, whose biography he authored.
And for several seasons he covered most of the races, toughing out the toll that travel takes.
The stories Benny wrote about motorsports and the outdoors were wonderfully crafted and brought him an avalanche of awards. Among his honors was NASCAR’s coveted Buddy Shuman Award in 1986 for contributions to stock car racing.
For years I encouraged Benny to join me at an Eden-on-this-earth, Fontana Lake in the Great Smoky Mountains of Western N.C, to fish for smallmouth bass.
For various reasons he never got to make the trip and gradually, as we aged, we saw each other less and less, talking by phone occasionally.
Someday, somehow, I fervently hope that we’ll finally get to wet a line at Fontana together ...
