1,000 Greatest Drivers: A.J. Foyt
I'm covering Indy legends for the rest of the month of May.
It has not been a good week. I’m still recovering from the cold I had last week and I think it’s mostly over, but I startled awake twice when my body thought it needed to make a bowel movement when it apparently didn’t. Then I visited Mom in the nursing home for the first time in five days and she’s apparently forgotten I’m her son. She was thinking at various times I was her brother, her nephew, and my own (nonexistent) son today and was apparently telling some of the staff at the nursing home that I wasn’t her son although they’ve all commented how we look alike. I only stayed there for an hour and a half and took the next bus back because I was worried I might still be contagious. On my way home, I was trying to buy my cats some treats (since he seems to refuse to eat his regular wet food a lot of the time) and it appears both of my bank accounts have been frozen by one of my creditors since I wasn’t able to use either bank card even though I had sufficient funds. A couple days ago, I was walking to the 7-Eleven while wearing a mask and some MAGA dude honked and pointed a finger at me, I guess becaus he assumed that I was wearing a mask as some kind of COVID Lib Solidarity than simply because I had a cold…
Me continuing to write these columns is basically fiddling while Rome burns, but granted, this and my RotoBaller columns are my only source of income. Given that, I know I should promote these articles more elsewhere (especially on my YouTube channel since I have 6,000 subscribers there). I’ve given up on the microblogging platforms. I only ever got 400 subscribers out of thousands of posts on Twitter back to 2015 and that wasn’t worth it. Even if I could log into my racermetrics account again, I’m probably not going to bother anymore. I feel I’m too liberal for Twitter and not liberal enough for any of the Twitter alternatives that have recently popped up, so I will let it go. I honestly prefer both Facebook and YouTube as platforms, and I think maybe I’ll start linking these off my Facebook instead.
While I was too sick to go in, I did call every recruiter in Syracuse looking for work. There must have been about 30 of them, but it looks like only 6 of them might be interested in me, although I did really hit it off with the guy at ISSI Technology Professionals. I have not heard back about the Rescue Mission job. I was called back for a job at an indoor karting arena at Syracuse’s largest mall Destiny USA but I told him I might be too sick to go in for an interview; when I attempted to reschedule, he never got back to me. The Scrabble game show also never got back to me when I was attempting to schedule a time with them, but that would have been a stupid thing to proceed with anyway. I also got a response from Wanda Shelton, who used to run the Mensa Scrabble-by-Mail Special Interest Group where I played dating back to when I was a little kid and later became its statistician and ratings compiler. She confirmed what I already expected: that the group no longer exists and that I can finally throw out all the paperwork I had on file that was completely unused. If I ever want any Scrabble action again, it’ll have to be tournaments, but obviously I’m not planning that anytime soon.
Anyway, I blew off the Roy Salvadori post for the time being but I’ll find somewhere to slot it in later. For the remainder of the month of May (and I know this is two days late), I am planning on covering IndyCar/Indy 500 legends for the rest of the month. I suppose you can debate whether Pagenaud, Stewart, and Ongais count as IndyCar legends, but I have them planned for their birthdays and they still fit the theme of the month. This covers most of the IndyCar big names that I have not done yet, and these drivers combined for 42 IndyCar titles and 38 Indy 500 wins. Foyt did so much that I really had to make it a cursory glance of his career and I couldn’t include any anecdotes as I normally like to do, but I got it done. It’s possible for the very top drivers like him, I will eventually expand my columns to be longer than 500 words, but for the moment, 500 words remains my limit.
5/13: A.J. Foyt
5/14: Mario Andretti
5/15: Rodger Ward
5/16: Scott Dixon
5/17: Tony Kanaan
5/18: Simon Pagenaud
5/19: Dario Franchitti
5/20: Tony Stewart
5/21: Danny Ongais
5/22: Josef Newgarden
5/23: Hélio Castroneves
5/24: Al Unser, Jr.
5/25: Bobby Unser
5/26: Danny Sullivan
5/27: Rick Mears
5/28: Sam Hornish, Jr.
5/29: Al Unser
5/30: Bill Vukovich
5/31: Mauri Rose
