The guy is standing there on this corner just a block from the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, has been standing there–in fact–each day for the last fortnight.
“Buy and Sell Race Tickets,” says the sign next to him.
“Slow. The interest isn’t there,” he says when asked how his business is going.
This is no doubt true because his right hand is clutching a wad of tickets three inches thick.
“We’re selling ’em at face value,” he says when asked what those tickets are bringing.
This, too, is no doubt true, because his own face features a sad and sorrowful look.
“Look, I don’t want anything to do with you. I don’t want you asking about my business,” his partner says when he is asked what he was getting for those tickets at this time last year.
That ends this conversation, but what is finally no doubt true is he surely was getting more than what he had paid for them.
Twice face value is what scalpers were getting 48 hours before the start of last year’s Indianapolis 500. But this year, in the wake of the feud that has split the racing world, the sport’s best-known drivers are up in Michigan for the Michigan 500 and the Indy field is littered with 17 rookies and even more unfamiliar names. All things are very different at Indy now.
The scalpers’ sad state is one of them, as is the availability of hotel rooms. These are usually tighter than a company’s controller. They traditionally must be reserved months in advance and must be purchased annually in a three-night package. But Friday morning, rooms could be had for individual nights and at normal race-weekend rates ($350 at the downtown Hyatt); at discounted race-weekend rates ($200, down from $350, at the downtown Omni); and at regular rates ($92 for a suite at a Residence Inn, 11 miles north of downtown).
There are far fewer of those souvenir stands that normally pop up just outside the Speedway grounds, and those open for business are doing significantly less business than in years past. This is true, too, at many restaurants. The maitre d’ at famed St. Elmo’s steak joint says its take would be off about $100,000 this May.
But inside the Speedway, the feud’s effects have been felt most strongly. The place is missing the electricity and the madness that have characterized it in the past. Those feelings regularly ripple through anything labeled an event, anything called a spectacular, and they transform that occasion from a mere sporting contest into a moment to be savored.
Some of this may return Sunday, when the stands are filled with fans who bought their tickets before the feud erupted. But two Saturdays ago, Pole Qualifying Day, attendance was down significantly from the annual 80,000 to 100,000 to about 55,000 to 60,000 (official attendance figures aren’t released).
Fewer folks also dropped by for the weekday practice sessions, an estimated 40 percent fewer than in years past, and even last Thursday’s Carburetion Day was bereft of the mania that usually accompanies this start of the racing weekend. The wet and rainy weather, to be fair, helped diminish the crowds, yet it hardly could be blamed for affecting the final place the feud clearly touched.
That would be Gasoline Alley, where the garages were filled not with names such as Michael Andretti and Emerson Fittipaldi and Al Unser Jr. but with little-knowns Brad Murphey and Paul Durant and Racin Gardner.
The tension that fairly crackles when the very best are getting ready to meet was missing.
“It’s not like you have everybody out there,” said veteran Arie Luyendyk. “You have to size yourself up against the competition, and sizing myself up to the competition has been easier than in the past. It’s just not there.
“So that urgency, that competitiveness, that `hyperness’ that’s around is not there as much.”
Not there, he may well have concluded, or anywhere else, either.
