ABC-TV broadcasted the Indianapolis 500 race for the 50th year Sunday.

I’m not a big race fan, but the Indy 500 was one of the few races I always tried to watch each year, at least until high school commencements on Sunday afternoons intervened. Somewhere there is a photo of me in a race car in the Indianapolis Motor Speedway museum, and on my one and only UW Marching Band bowl game our buses took a lap on the track. Indy is not considered a very steep track, but even an 11-degree banking is noticeable, particularly in a bus.

The race also was the final time Jim Nabors started the race by singing “Back Home Again in Indiana.” (Nabors’ singing voice is nothing like his “Gomer Pyle” voice. Surprise, surprise, surprise.)

Nabors told a hilarious story about how he started singing the song:

People tend to forget Nabors was actually born in Alabama. He moved to California when he started out in show business, and was performing in Lake Tahoe one day for an audience that included Bill Harrah. The casino magnate happened to be a car aficionado, and he invited Nabors to attend the Indy 500 for the first time.

Nabors was supposed to be there as a fan, but [track owner] Tony Hulman had also seen Nabors perform in Lake Tahoe, and the speedway’s owner asked if he would sing along with the Purdue marching band prior to the race. With that, Nabors picks up the story:

”So to the conductor of the Purdue band, I said, ‘What key do you do this in?’ And he looked at me funny and said, ‘We only have one key.’ I said, ‘No, the ”Star-Spangled Banner” has two keys.’ And he said, ‘You’re not singing that!’ And I said, ‘Well, what the hell am I singing?’ It was only five minutes to race time, too, and there’s 500,000 people here,” Nabors said.

”He says, ‘It’s the traditional song that opens the race, ”Back Home Again in Indiana.”’ I kind of looked at him and go, ‘I’m from Alabama!’ And he started laughing and asked if I knew it. And I said, ‘Well, I know the melody but I don’t know all the lyrics.’ So I’m writing them on my hand. The first time I ever sang it, I wrote it on my hand.”

Racing — animal or vehicular — is one of the events I’ve never had the opportunity to announce. It must be an enormous challenge to announce given that fans have a hard time determining who’s in first place except for the scoreboard since the lead participants often end up lapping slower participants.

There is one more challenge specific to auto racing, though it’s something that could happen in other sporting events. No sports broadcasting program I’m aware of trains you how to cover death during a sporting event.

I have had a couple of instances where games I was announcing were stopped because of player injuries that were serious enough to require ambulance trips for the participants. All three of the games were tape-delayed, so we’d watch for a few minutes and then turn off the camera until play resumed.

One year before ABC started covering the 500, in 1964, drivers Dave MacDonald and Eddie Sachs were killed on the race’s second lap.

The YouTube video merges newsreel footage with the live radio coverage of the event. Radio race coverage is interesting to observe. For races on big tracks such as Indianapolis or the Daytona 500, there are one or two main announcers, and additional announcers in each of the turns. The announcers describe what — more accurately who — is going past them.

Nine years after the 1964 500, ABC’s broadcast of the 1973 500 demonstrated the unpredictability of live sports, even though ABC’s broadcast wasn’t live. In those days ABC tape-delayed the 500 to the evening after the race, which has been  run on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend (weather permitting) since 1975. In 1973, the race was still on Memorial Day … or it was supposed to be on Memorial Day.

Those who believe in omens would have been disturbed two weeks before the race was to be held, when driver Art Pollard crashed in qualifying and was killed. But drivers and hardcore race fans have always accepted death as part of what can happen in racing. (I have a high school classmate who was killed in a race car crash in 1997. Ten years before that, I was an intern at WKOW-TV in Madison, sitting in the newsroom watching the 1987 500 when the Associated Press reported the death of a spectator from Wisconsin. A wheel came off of one of the cars, another car hit the wheel — as it happened, during a commercial, as I discovered in trying to find the incident — and launched the wheel and tire the air and hit the spectator, who was sitting in the top row of the grandstand, in the head, killing him instantly.)

ABC’s main announcer was Jim McKay, one of the most versatile announcers in the history of TV sports. There had  not been a death during the 500 since McDonald’s and Sachs’ deaths, though there had been deaths during practice or qualifying. (Including, in 1968, a driver who had been added to a team to replace legendary racer Jim Clark, who had died in a race crash one month earlier.) McKay’s on-the-job training for what he’d have to announce was the previous September, when, while covering the 1972 Munich Olympics, he had to announce the kidnapping and then murder of 11 Israeli athletes.

The 1973 500 turned out to be both the shortest (just 133 of 200 laps) and longest (over three days) race in Indy history. The race began three hours late due to rain. That would have made things a little exciting in ABC’s production facilities with the amount of time for pre-broadcast production shrinking dramatically. However …

… ABC carried none of the race Memorial Day. The 11-car crash seven seconds into the race, in which fuel sprayed into the crowd, severely injured driver David “Salt” Walther and at least two spectators. By the time track repairs and cleanup were under way, the rains resumed. and race officials postponed the race until Tuesday, even though ABC said it wouldn’t carry the race Tuesday.

(Having announced a three-day-long baseball game last year, I can relate. For that matter, 25 years ago I was supposed to provide reports from a softball sectional in the same town as a baseball sectional involving the same high school. Thanks to two days of rain not dried out by the third day, I covered exactly none of it, because by the time the games were actually played, I had to be at the state track meet.)

The action Tuesday was off the track, because the rain returned before the race was to restart. ABC reported on a heated meeting between race officials and drivers during which a driver told race officials that if the start wasn’t improved, “you’re going to get us all killed out there.” The problem was a too-slow start (which bunched up the field) combined with drivers’ not staying where they were supposed to stay before the race started, as was pointed out by driver Jackie Stewart, ABC’s analyst.

Stewart had to be back in Europe for a race, so he wasn’t there for the final start. Nor were many of the race team crew, since many had to return to their actual jobs. Nor were most of the fans, for the same reason.

What sportswriters were now calling “the 72 Hours of Indianapolis” got started for good Wednesday. The race got as far as 57 laps until …

… driver David “Swede” Savage crashed and was trapped inside his burning car. A crew member of one of Savage’s teammates started running on pit row toward the crash, was hit by a fire truck responding to the crash, and was killed. Savage survived the crash, but died a month later of complications. His wife was pregnant with their second daughter.

ABC carried the 72 Hours of Indianapolis the night the race finally ended.

One of the unpleasant truths of wars and disasters is that they represent learning opportunities. (Much of current emergency medical practice is based on what was learned in the Korean and Vietnam wars.) Fatal crashes in prominent races usually result in safety improvements. Indy cars were slowed down until chassis and safety technology caught up with engine technology. Emergency equipment was required to be driven the same direction as race cars down pit row. The track was also improved by removing the wall Savage hit and the seats where spectators were burned in Walther’s crash.

For instance, drivers now wear neck protection to avoid the kind of injury that killed racer Dale Earnhardt at Daytona in 2001:

The fact, however, is that the only way to eliminate deaths from racing is to eliminate racing. If a crash in which a car going 60 mph hits something can kill the car’s occupants, a crash at triple-digit speeds will be more lethal. Which doesn’t stop drivers from racing.