May 30, 1973: Roger McCluskey finishes third in Indianapolis 500
For about 15 years, from 1965 to 1980, the Star employed a full-time auto racing writer. It was known as the McCluskey Beat.
Over those years, there were probably more words written about Roger McCluskey in this newspaper than any other Tucson sports figure.
Late in 1979, the Star selected him as its Sportsman of the Decade.
His career comes off as a tale from the days of black and white television. He was a high school dropout who built and raced cars on Tucson’s old dirt racetracks, became A.J. Foyt’s partner and ultimately the vice president and chief operating officer of the USAC, then the most powerful organization in auto racing.
McCluskey’s story doesn’t have a happy ending. He struggled with bladder cancer the last three years of his life and died when he was only 63.
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But for 45 years, he always had his foot on the accelerator.
“Somewhere along the line,” Star auto racing writer Calvin Reynard wrote in 1973, “they forgot to tell McCluskey that nice guys finish last. Or maybe they told him and he just didn’t listen.”
By 1973, McCluskey was Tucson’s most prominent sports figure, beyond anyone in the UA athletic department. What didn’t he win?
McCluskey won 23 USAC Sprint Car championships, 22 USAC Stock Car titles and five USAC national championships. The only thing he didn’t win was the great Indy 500, although it wasn’t because he didn’t try.
From 1961-79, McCluskey raced in all but one Indy 500 when it was America’s premier auto racing event and probably one of the four leading sports spectacles in the country.
Something bad always seemed to happen just as McCluskey seemed poised to win it all: a broken radiator, an oil leak or a crash that engulfed his car.
“I’ve had bad luck at Indy, but so has everyone else,” he said in 1972. “But my time will come.”
McCluskey led at Indy in 1962 and 1963, and started as high as No. 4 in 1970.
His time arrived in 1973. McCluskey was third at the Indy 500 on a day he might’ve won it all. Unfortunately, after a five-hour rain delay and a tragic month in which racers Art Pollard and Swede Savage were killed on the track, the race was stopped after 332.5 miles.
In 1966, he drove near the lead in lap 126 of 200 laps when disaster struck.
“I saw nuts, bolts and wheels flying at me,” he said. “Cars were coming at me from all sides.”
He would finish 13th.
Over a racing career that began in 1947, when he would whiz up and down the streets adjacent to Tucson High School, McCluskey was involved in so many crashes he lost count.
He broke his cheek, his jaw, his nose, his shoulder, his collarbone, but only in 1964, recovering from a crash in California, did he miss the Indy 500.
“If you don’t want to go 200 mph, you should quit,” he said. “And after you get to 200 mph, if you don’t want to go 205 mph, you should quit.”
McCluskey retired from racing in 1979, at 49. He won his last big race, the Tony Bettenhausen 200 in Milwaukee, and then became one of USAC’s top executives for the rest of his life.
Where are they now? In 1993, dying of cancer, McCluskey was given the honor of telling the Indy 500 racers: “Gentlemen, start your engines.” He died three months later.
How he did it: In 1930, McCluskey moved to Tucson from San Antonio after his mother was diagnosed with tuberculosis. He learned welding from his stepfather, which led to his interest in racing and building his own cars.
In 1947, after leaving high school a year early, he built a jalopy from a 1937 Ford coupe that he raced on an old cotton field near Romero Road on the northwest side of Tucson. His first paycheck, in a dirt-track race at the Tucson Rodeo grounds, was for 91 cents.
