Indy memories profane and profound

ByED HINTON
May 23, 2014, 10:10 PM

— -- My most memorable moments from covering the Indianapolis 500 since 1975 aren't all pretty.

The profoundest are profane. So rate this column R, for real race-driver language.

My last 500-Mile Race will be May 25, if it doesn't rain. What I'll miss most, I've already been missing for some years anyway.

The no-nonsense guys are long gone.

The most no-nonsense driver of them all was Arie Luyendyk. It wasn't even close. I don't recall so much as a trace of B.S. in anything he ever said.

Take that morning the week before the '96 race, soon after pole sitter Scott Brayton had been killed during practice.

Luyendyk said this only to my old friend and colleague Robin Miller and me. We asked him his first thought upon learning of Brayton's death.

"I didn't think, 'He died doing what he loved to do,'" Luyendyk said, in his dour Dutch way mocking the platitudes of racing death. "I didn't think, 'He would want us to go on,' and I didn't think, 'He's in a better place.'

"I thought, 'God damn it!'"