Robbins' two loves: singing and racing

By Gaylen Duskey, for Turner Sports Interactive
October 17, 2001
10:57 AM EDT (1457 GMT)

COMMENTARY

Gaylen Duskey

"A white sport coat and a pink carnation ..."

When you think of the late Marty Robbins, you naturally think of country and western music, since he was a Hall of Fame singer with such songs as "My Woman, My Woman, My Wife," "A Fool Such As I," "Running Gun," and his signature song, "El Paso."

But Marty Robbins was more than just a country and western singer -- he was arguably the best non-professional driver on the NASCAR circuit.

He averaged about three or four races a year and always seemed to take a car and finish higher than he started. He competed in 35 Winston Cup events, with a fifth-place finish in Motorstate 400 at Michigan in 1974 being his top effort. He had six top-10 finishes overall.

Robbins' most interesting race came at Talladega -- where the Winston Cup circuit will be this week -- during the Winston 500 on May 7, 1972.

In that race, he started ninth but ran into a few problems along the way which required the hood go up on his Dodge. After that, he came charging back and ended up with an 18th-place finish and would have been named rookie of the race.

He did not accept the award, however, opting instead to disqualify himself for running about the last 100 miles of the race without carburetor restrictor plates.

He was relegated to 50th place after his admission and fined $250.

He did come back two years later to post a legitimate top-10 finish on the Alabama superspeedway by grabbing ninth in the Talladega 500. It was his best finish at the track.

Robbins started dabbling in racing in 1965 but it was not until 1968 until he started racing a more full-blown schedule by driving in five races. His best finish that year was 12th in the National 500 at Charlotte.

He had some medical problems and drove little, if at all, for the next couple of years. But in 1971, he competed in seven races with his best finish being a seventh-place performance in the Southern 500 at Darlington.

The next year, he had an eighth-place finish in the Miller High Life 500 at Ontario, Calif., and a ninth in the Southern 500 to go along with his infamous 50th-place finish at Talladega.

He raced on and off for the next decade and posted a 33rd-place finish in the Atlanta Journal 500 on Nov. 7, 1982. He died a month later on Dec. 8, 1982, following a heart attack. He was 57.

Robbins may have had his life saved by auto racing years earlier. He had had a severe heart attack while performing in Warren, Ohio. He toughed it out.

Six months later on Jan. 24, 1970, he decided to go to his personal doctor -- Dr. William Ewers -- for a routine checkup to see when he could return to racing.

Instead of a green light, he got some awful news when Ewers told him that test showed he had two arteries completely blocked and another about 75 percent stopped up.

His doctor suggested open-heart bypass surgery, only this was not regular open-heart surgery ... it was triple-bypass surgery.

In 1969, open-heart surgery was a new procedure. Robbins was about the 300th person in the world to have open-heart surgery and the first to have a triple-bypass.

He overcame that operation and returned to both the stage and the racetrack. The love affair with both continued until he died.

Robbins raced because he wanted to. He obviously did not need the money. He needed the enjoyment. But the pedestrian nature of his racing career did not mean he was not respected as a driver.

Perhaps Buddy Baker paid him the extreme compliment.

"I never thought of Marty Robbins as a country and western singer," Baker said. "I thought of him as a driver."

To the general public, Marty Robbins will always be thought of as a singer. Yet those who saw him drive know that if he could not sing, he had another career waiting -- a career as a NASCAR driver.

NOTE: Gaylen Duskey's column appears weekly on NASCAR.com. The opinions expressed here are those solely of the writer.