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The following is an edited excerpt from A.J. Foyt: Survivor, Champion, Legend.
It’s an often-asked question, but never more so than in 1964 when A.J. Foyt had perhaps the best year ever recorded by a race car driver. He won seven consecutive Indy car races—including the Indianapolis 500—10 of 13 overall and his fourth national championship in five years. He won the Daytona Firecracker stock car race, becoming the first non-NASCAR driver to win a major event in the series. He won in midgets, sprint cars and sports cars, on paved tracks, dirt tracks and road courses.
He won more than $300,000, easily surpassing baseball’s Willie Mays, football’s Joe Namath and soccer’s Pele, making him the world’s highest paid athlete.
But was he really an athlete?
The debate erupted at the end of the year as writers began voting for the Hickok Belt, presented annually since 1950 to the professional athlete of the year. Stick and ball players had typically won the award, Sandy Koufax most recently in 1963. Bob Gibson of the St. Louis Cardinals, football’s Johnny Unitas, golf’s Ken Venturi, and basketball’s Oscar Robertson were considered to be the favorites but thanks to Foyt’s incredible year, a race car driver was in the running for the first time.
“If A.J. was a baseball player or a football player or a golfer with this kind of record, he’d be a shoo-in for the Hickok belt,” wrote racing reporter Dave Overpeck in the Indianapolis Star. “But A.J. is a race driver and that automatically puts two strikes against him. Too often the athletic skill and condition required in racing is forgotten.”
Chief among the drivers-aren’t-athletes journalists was Dick Young, the abrasive and popular columnist of the New York Daily News, whose column was widely syndicated and read across the country.
“If a bunch of kick-seekers want to risk their lives in a race for money, fine, go ahead,” Young wrote. Remember, this was 1964 when Dave MacDonald and Eddie Sachs were killed in a fiery crash at Indianapolis. “If a bunch of sadists want to watch them break their necks, and maybe be cremated, that’s all right too. Just don’t go calling it a sport.
“It’s dangerous, no doubt exciting to large numbers of people, and the driving of the cars requires a certain amount of sensitized reflexes. I just don’t think that’s enough to make it a sport, nor do I think that makes A.J. Foyt an athlete. It is the machine that does the job, not the driver.”
It was a polarizing subject, and even writers for the same newspaper didn’t agree.
“A.J. Foyt is a pro athlete if there ever was one, the very best of the breed in the year 1964,” wrote another Daily News columnist, Gene Ward. “He [dominated] auto racing as it never had been dominated before. In fact, as no sport has been dominated in the memory of man. I make him my winner of the Hickok belt hands down and a whole hoot-and-a-holler ahead of all other contenders.”
In the end Foyt finished second to Jim Brown of the Cleveland Browns, the best professional football player ever (sorry Tom Brady, I’m old school). It was the closest tally ever: Brown totaling 161 points to Foyt’s 154. A.J. received significantly more first-place votes—thirty-eight to twenty-six for Brown—but as feared, some of the 200 writers, who cast votes on a 3-2-1 basis, refused to vote for a race car driver.
Foyt seemed unaware of the hubbub surrounding the Hickok Belt, but he would weigh in on the question, “are drivers athletes?”
“I’ve watched a lot of football games, and you know a player gets a rest whenever the coach thinks he needs one,” A.J. said. “When you start a 500-mile race, you don’t have no rest periods. It’s just a man and a machine. You call all the shots yourself. The biggest thing is just concentrating for three or four hours. You don’t have anybody sending in the plays. Or take a baseball pitcher. He can have a bad day and if his team’s hitting, you can still win. If a driver’s having a bad day, he has no chance of winning anything.”
A.J. Foyt: Survivor, Champion, Legend is available to pre-order on Amazon and from publisher Octane Press https://bit.ly/Foyt .