Tim Richmond - ESPN 30 for 30

Anyone going to watch this show on ESPN tonight? I watched the last 30 for 30 (on Drazen Petrovic - I have been a lifelong NJ Nets fan) - it was great. I heard this was really good as well.

I've never been a NASCAR die hard, but I do love all forms of racing. Around 1986/87, it was hard not to know Tim Richmond, and as an avid Indy 500 viewer, I remember him racing there.

His story is pretty well known, but I've often felt the "good ol' boys" gave him the short shrift. I imagine this show will expose some of that.

 

Richmond's career ended about the time I got into racing, so I didn't get to see him race much. I'm looking forward to ESPN's take on his life and career.

IIRC, Days of Thunder was loosely based on Richmond and his relationship with Harry Hyde and Rick Hendrick; Hendrick called Jeff Gordon "Tim Richmond version 2.0".

 

Correct - it was based on them.

If you missed his career, I can tell you he was exciting to watch. Definitely rubbed the establishment the wrong way.

 

I watched the show, very good story I didn't know about.

Amazing how NASCAR had the first/only athlete with full-blown AIDS participating.
He drove like Ricky Bobby from 'Taladega Nights'...I really liked how Jackie Steward sang his praises while he was commenting at the Indy 500...that says a lot.

 

True story. I could not make this up.

Ten years or so ago, I worked for an automotive aftermarket company that sold products to independent garages through a distributor network. Part of my job entailed traveling around the US and Canada training the distributors' salespeople about our products and how to sell them. To do this, I often accompanied them on their sales calls to repair shops. On one call, I think it was somewhere in Ontario Canada, the salesman I was training whispered to one of the guys who worked in the garage to "show him (meaning me) the poster". They both grinned and the garage guy went off to another part of the shop and soon came back with a rolled-up poster, which he proceeded to spread out on the counter. I wish I could remember exactly, but I think it was a Goodyear promotional piece. In any case it was a group shot of NASCAR drivers circa 1987. At first glance, I didn't notice anything unusual They instructed me to look very closely. There were, as I recall, two rows of drivers; the ones in front were kneeling with the rest standing behind them. Then I saw it, HOLY SH*T!, Richmond had his d*ng hanging out and a big sh*t-eating grin on his face! Let me just add that once you saw it, it was not easy to miss.

Apparently Goodyear (or whoever it was) had printed thousands of these posters before anybody noticed Richmond's (ahem) "over-exposure". Of course they were immediately recalled and dumped in a landfill, but a very few of them escaped destruction. The whole incident was very hush-hush, for sure. I probably would have forgotten all about this were it not for this thread.

 

I saw the special and though it was OK.

But they never really addressed the issue. Over the years, it was rumored that he got AIDS from a gay encounter--and that NASCAR covered it up. Not that he was gay (not that there's anything wrong with it) but that he "experimented." Later the story was that it was a woman who infected him.

So, which is the story?

 

He was a mega-playboy. There was a really sad story of a model that contracted aids though him and later died. I was at Wtkins Glen in 1986-89 and saw him with beautiful women every year.
Kevin

 

LMAO: i never heard the poster story; google it there are alot of images; here's one.
http://www.posters57.com/images/nascar(1).jpg

 

Apparently, the story is that it's a cane, not his junk.

 

There was a story about Richmond and his old girlfriends on 20/20 or some other TV magazine show a few years ago. They interviewed several of the girls. He knew he had AIDS and continued to slut around and they are now HIV positive. The current press seem to ignore this. He's a POS in my book.

 

Yeah, right.

 

Some stories are just too good to spoil. The poster is one of them...

 

I hung around with Tim a bit when we both lived in Charlotte. There is no way he ever had a gay encounter, but he was every bit as wild as they say.

One Friday night during the National 500 weekend Tim came into a local nightclub with a race queen on each arm. I walked up and asked , "What the hell are you doing? You have a race this weekend and you're drunk as hell." Tim looked at me and answered, "Bill, don't you understand? I just don't give a ****!"

Tim was handsome, talented and spoiled as hell. For his sixteenth birthday his parents gave him a Pontiac Trans Am, a speedboat and a Cessna! It's no surprise he thought the rules didn't apply to him.

 

The 30 for 30s are extremely well done. The Petrovic/Divac one was truly heartbreaking.

 

I think that by the mid-eighties, although HIV had spread into the general heterosexual population, many (if not most) people were in denial about that. They clung to the false notion that AIDS afflicted only gay men, and that if someone had HIV, the infection had to have come from a homosexual encounter. As we now know, this was totally incorrect, and to make things worse the belief undoubtedly led to a large number of people not taking the proper precautions and becoming infected through heterosexual relations. I believe that Richmond fell into this category.

 

He was rumored to enjoy the company of professional women on occasion. Remember the scene in Days of Thunder where the team is pulled over by a women police officer who proceeds to strip and take on Tom Cruise? Who do you think that scene was based on?

 

I can see Nascar trying to smeer it at the time because they wanted to believe it was a "gay disease".

I think so too. I don't watch Nascar at all and have no interest in it, but when I saw the previews I wanted to watch it.

The Petrovic/Divac episode was very sad and very well done.

 

This is not a thread about gays. I don't want to go there.

However, I think the use of the word "totally" is incongruent here.

In the 80s our understanding of AIDS was just beginning. Heck, when I was in Medical School in the early 80s, we called the HI Virus by another name. We called it HTLV-3.

At the time, I read a study that the woman to man transmission odds were over 100 million to 1. As the disease has spread and as we learn more, the generally accepted number is about 5,000,000 to 1. (There is a famous formula of 1 in 16,000 infected over 500 encounters--which actually works out to 1 in 8 million).

But in the 80s over 99% of all cases involved drug use (sharing needles), contamination, and gay sex.

We have learned a lot. See the book "The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS."

But, it was not "Totally" off base to presume that TR had encountered a man. (Not that there is anything wrong with it.)

 

Not so sure about that, he was more accepted than Tony Stewart was in his early years, and Tim still was in his early years.

 

Richard Petty was outright in his disdain for TR - on the show he still believes Richmond was driving while on drugs. There could be no worse indictment - NASCAR's most successful driver and a living legend basically dismissing Richmond's talent. Petty says something to the effect of "there's no telling how much more I could have done on drugs"...ouch!

The Frances did not like him - the drug test he failed was a ruse to keep him from driving, and Bill France later admitted they "messed" up the test. I remember when this whole scene happened - it was bad PR for NASCAR, but they swept it under the rug. This is about 3 years before Magic announced he had HIV, and even then (1991) HIV / AIDS wasn't entirely understood. If anyone "accepted" him, it was Earnhardt and Waltrip (team mate).

I agree Tony Stewart wasn't accepted much at first either - similar to Richmond as he wasn't from the South and started his career as an Indy driver, but he was much more accepted than Richmond.