Baker bounced back from blood clot, brain surgery

If there's anyone who knows what Brian Vickers has gone through, it may be Buddy Baker. In 1988, Baker had surgery to remove a blood clot from his brain following an accident months earlier at Charlotte Motor Speedway.

Elzie Wylie Baker Jr. was the son of two-time NASCAR champion Buck Baker. Born in 1941 in Florence, S.C., Buddy was 18 when he made his Grand National debut at Columbia, S.C., finishing 14th in a car owned by his father. He scored the first of his 19 Cup victories at Charlotte in 1967, driving a Dodge for Ray Fox.

Road to recovery

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Baker, who stood 6-foot-6, was known for being a hard-charger and sometimes hard on his equipment. However, the myths don't always mesh with reality, as he won the 600-miler at Charlotte three times and the 1970 Southern 500 at Darlington, two tracks where stamina is just as important as speed.

What is true is that Baker was at his best at the biggest races. He won four times at Talladega. And with his long-sought after victory in the 1980 Daytona 500, he completed what was considered to be the career Grand Slam. Since then, seven other drivers have done so, the most recent being Jimmie Johnson.

But Baker's career was inexorably changed in the 1988 Coca-Cola 600. With backing from Red Baron Frozen Pizza and co-ownership from Danny Schiff, Baker planned on running the entire season, something he had done only a handful of times previously.

With four top-10 finishes, including sevenths at Atlanta and Martinsville, Baker was in the top 15 in points when the series headed to Charlotte. And he was running in a tight pack just after the midway point in the race when Eddie Bierschwale blew an engine heading into Turn 1, setting off a multi-car accident.

Baker's Oldsmobile hit a slippery patch of oil and slammed hard into the concrete barrier. The accident wasn't serious enough to merit more than one sentence in the Associated Press report that day, but Baker began suffering from severe dizzy spells, and after Talladega, he knew he needed to see a doctor.

A scan showed a blood clot on the right frontal lobe of his brain. The clot was just under the covering of the brain, and pressure from the clot had caused the right side of Baker's brain to almost overlap the left side.

He underwent surgery at Charlotte Memorial Hospital on Aug. 16, 1988, performed by neurosurgeon Dr. Jerry Petty.

"We'll keep Buddy in the intensive care unit overnight and hopefully move him to a regular room Wednesday if everything goes well," Petty said the next day. "I expect him to be hospitalized about a week.

"I'd say the healing process will take six weeks minimum, but these race drivers are amazing people and often they're not on the same timetable as others."

Baker, known for his sense of humor, joked about having the right side of his head shaved for the operation.

"They've taken a perfectly decent looking head and turned me into the Frankenstein monster's brother," Baker said.

The team lasted one more season, putting a young Jimmy Spencer behind the wheel, before closing up shop. It would be almost two years before Baker would feel well enough to drive. He returned for the 500-miler at Atlanta in the spring of 1990, driving for Junie Donlavey.

"I've missed driving and I got an opportunity to run, so here I am," Baker said.

It was as if he hadn't missed a beat.

"I qualified 30th and drove it up through there to fifth," Baker told Rick Houston in a NASCAR.COM feature in 2007. "Junie radioed me and said, 'I ain't never seen anything like that.'

"Going down the backstretch, I told him that I'd done what I needed to do, that I proved to myself that I could still do it. The next thing I know, Mark Martin goes straight up into the air and I get caught up in the wreck."

At the same time, Baker knew his days as a driver were just about over.

"When you come back, the good rides are gone," Baker said. "There had been a time when I made moves on the track without even thinking about it, on instinct. I'd see an opening and just go for it. When I came back, I had to think about doing something before I did it."

Baker hung up his helmet for good in 1992 after crashing during a qualifying lap at Atlanta, and promptly found an outlet for his folksy brand of humor, becoming a race analyst for TNN. He also acted as coach and spotter early in Ryan Newman's career and continues to work as a consultant and test driver on occasion.

He was inducted into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame in 1997. Baker keeps his hand in broadcasting, co-hosting Late Shift with Alex Hayden on Sirius Satellite Radio.