Quitting Was Never an Option

April 3, 1966, was "Johnny Rutherford Day" at Eldora Speedway, and the track officials found me slumped over in my car with my hands in my lap.

I was a mess: my goggles were down around my mouth and my flip shield was hanging off the back of my helmet. At least that's what they told me later. I don't remember anything, because after it happened I was in a daze.

As I came to, I could hear the rocks being kicked up by the guys leaping over the guardrail and running down the embankment toward me. I can even remember the voice of the first man who reached me, my old friend, Roy Reed.

"John! John! Are you okay?!"

Confused and groaning, I somehow mumbled, "I think my arms are broken. They hurt like hell, and I can't see."

Because of all the ruptured surface blood vessels in my head, I had temporarily lost my vision. It felt as if a couple of handfuls of sand had been thrown into my eyes. My eyes were irritated and every time I blinked it hurt, so I kept them closed as best I could.

The guys unhooked my belts and started to pull me from the car so they could lay me on a stretcher. It was a heck of a way to celebrate a day in my honor. There I was, the reigning United States Auto Club's National Sprint Car Champion of 1965, carrying the number "1" on my car for the 1966 season, and I was being carried out on a stretcher while thousands of fans, including my wife of three years, Betty, watched. It was only the second race of the new season, a season, as it turned out, in which I wouldn't race again.

* * *

The first race of the '66 season had been at Reading, Pennsylvania. It was cold that day and I was driving a brand new car. The owner, Wally Meskowski, had built the car for me earlier that winter, and he had put Mario Andretti in the car in which I had won the title the year before. I was excited about having a new sprint car, but it was March, and I didn't know yet how the changes Wally had made to the new car would affect its handling on the track.

The crew prepared the car for warm-up laps at Reading, but in all the excitement, the crewman whose job was to change the gears and put things together in the center section of the rear end forgot to replace the lubricant. When I went out to drive some slow warm-up laps, the car didn't feel right. It was kind of sluggish. I returned to the pits, and when we checked the car we found that the lack of lubricant had caused the ring gear and pinion in the rear end of the car to overheat. They were ruined, and our race day was over before it began. I had no idea what the car would be like in an actual race; it was still brand new.

The race at Eldora Speedway in Rossburg, Ohio, came a week later. Track conditions were typical of Eldora in the spring, coming into a thaw. A lot of rocks in the dirt came to the surface in the spring, so the racetrack was unpredictable and always rough. In fact, I heard that Earl Bates, the track promoter and owner would have the track plowed and then he'd take a potato picker out to the track and pick the rocks out himself.

The racetrack was built on the side of a hill, and the dirt was pushed from the infield and built up to create the backstretch of the track. This formed about a sixty-foot drop from the guardrail to the normal terrain level outside the track. A small creek ran along the bottom of that sixty-foot bank.

I really liked the Eldora racetrack. It's a half-mile, high-banked, dirt track that is fast and a lot of fun to run. I had done fairly well there over the years. In 1964 I won my first USAC sprint car race at Eldora, and I set a new track record there in '65 when I won the title. I was confident about returning to Eldora. Plus, I had the extra incentive of racing there on "Johnny Rutherford Day." Boy, was it ever.

The car was not handling well, but I was able to make the feature event. I had barely made the feature through my heat race, a qualifying race. I was running about seventh in the field of eighteen cars that had started the feature event. Mario was behind me, driving the car I had been so successful with the previous year.

Wally Meskowski was on the front straightaway, giving us hand signals to tell us "You're stretching the guy out" or "He's closing in on you." Wally stepped out to where I could see him and signaled me to move up. I thought, Well, I can't see what everybody else is doing, but he sees something, so I moved up a little bit. When I did, my car hooked a rut and I bounded around slightly as Mario drove by me on the inside.

I came around again and let Wally know with my own hand signals what I thought of his moving me up. I went into the first turn and then ran a couple more laps. On lap thirteen I was closing in on Mario, trying to set myself up to pass him, when his car kicked up a rock or dirt clod. Whatever it was, it hit me right between the eyes and gained my undivided attention.

I had my goggles on, of course, and attached to my helmet was a shield made of clear, heavy, acetate plastic. I would throw the shield over the front of the helmet to protect my eyes from the rocks, clods of dirt, and mud that would fly up during the early stages of a race. When the shield became too dirty to see through, I'd just flip it back over my helmet. I'd still be protected by my goggles, which had what were called stack-ups — extra lenses on elastic straps. When they became covered with mud and dirt, I would just pull a stack-up down to expose a clean lens. That's the routine over the course of a dirt race.

I had just flipped my shield back when that rock or clod struck my face just above the bridge of my nose. It must have knocked me unconscious for a moment. At the very least I was stunned. The impact of that rock was the beginning of the end of my day at Eldora Speedway. The right rear of the car bounced as I hooked a rut. In that split second, when I relaxed and my foot came off the throttle — which is a cardinal sin in dirt track racing, because in the rough stuff you have to keep the back wheels churning and buzzing so you can work through those tough spots — my car hooked the rut and was jerked into the air.

As a result of that movement...