I wasn’t a sportswriter then, or ever during my big-league newspaper career, but was about to go full-time as a copy editor and rewrite man after working at the paper summers and part-time in winter while attending university. In those days, newspapers always covered the iconic events - the Kentucky Derby, the 500, heavyweight title fights - and Vipond had to find a replacement, fast. Vipond called me because Dick Beddoes, the newspaper’s sports columnist, had decided at the last minute not to go to Indy. So in winter, when they’d all be outside playing road hockey, I’d be in the basement, building a body for my wagon to enter in next summer’s soap box derby. All of my friends in my childhood hometown of Kapuskasing, Ont., had wanted to grow up to play for either the Maple Leafs or the Canadiens. I’d been crazy about automobile racing since I was a kid. He was a legend - and here he was calling me and making me an offer I couldn’t refuse. Men like Gordie Howe and Joe Theismann would drop by his office to visit.
He always had a stogie sticking out of one corner of his mouth and wore his reading glasses on the tip of his nose. He was a tall, tough guy who walked with a limp as the result of injuries suffered when the bomber he was flying was shot down over Germany in the Second World War. Jim Vipond was sports editor of this country’s original national newspaper. How’d you like to go to Indianapolis tomorrow and cover the 500 for me?” “Norris McDonald?” said the somewhat gruff male voice on the line. I remember this exactly because, as I answered the phone, I looked at the clock on the wall of the kitchen in my parents’ house in Willowdale. It was 3:30 in the afternoon on Thursday, May 29, 1969.
Return with him now to those thrilling days of yesteryear. So, while it’s Mario’s 50th anniversary, it’s McDonald’s too. He’s in Indianapolis this weekend to report on Sunday’s 103rd renewal of what’s billed as the Greatest Spectacle in Racing. It marked the first time he covered the Indy 500 as an assigned, accredited newspaper reporter. The Star’s Norris McDonald, although employed by another newspaper at the time, was there to cover the story. EDITOR’S NOTE: Fifty years ago, on May 30, 1969, Mario Andretti won the Indianapolis 500, the world’s most famous auto race.
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