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NASCAR HALL-OF-FAME INDUCTION CEREMONY

January 19, 2018

Ken Squier

Charlotte, North Carolina

THE MODERATOR: We'll go ahead and open it up for questions for Ken Squier.

Q. We heard about this infamous speech of yours. It was like 26 minutes and you had to cut it down‑‑
KEN SQUIER: That's not true. That damned governor. Well, you know, he's a Republican.

Q. How does somebody who has spoken for a living as long as you have take something that you have a finite amount of time and you have to make it work?
KEN SQUIER: Yeah, they said seven to eight minutes, and I just put some of my stuff down, and it was a lot of stuff originally because I wasn't sure exactly what I wanted to do. But I was having a terrible time. I bet I rewrote that thing five times. And finally, they said, look, you've got to talk about yourself, and I said, I don't talk about myself; what the hell is there to say about me. The whole game here is to talk about the people that do the job, and it was one of the reasons why I was deeply concerned about being put in the Hall of Fame. NASCAR was so decent, what, three years ago, four years ago, and they came forward and said, we're going to start an award, we're going to put it in Barney's name and your name, and it's a media award. I said, that's perfect. That'll work just fine, because the Hall of Fame is the Hall of Fame, and in the old days, you know, '60s and '70s, four people would get killed every year, and that was the reality of the sport, and it wasn't nearly as safe as it is now.
So that was a part of it that needed to be talked about because it was the kind of people, and that went back to World War II, and they didn't give a damn. If you said go, they went, gone. That was a whole different thing than any other sport in this country, where baseball and all that malarkey, sitting around scratching themselves. This was the one where the guys put it on the line, and if they failed, they got hurt, and sometimes very badly. But it was worth the gamble. They absolutely, positively wanted to do it. Petty is one of the great examples, Earnhardt is one of the great examples, because that was a mental attitude, and it was not the attitude of the American public, which more and more was shifting into a, was it safe or not, and that was always the difficulty the sport has had, motorsports.

Q. Throughout the course of the week, we've heard a lot of your students that have come through the Ken Squier University of Broadcasting‑‑
KEN SQUIER: Don't listen to Moody. Cut that out. Jesus, God.

Q. If you could give advice to everyone in the room, what would that one piece be that has really carried you throughout your career?
KEN SQUIER: Talk about people. I think people are sick and tired of hearing about tires and all of this stuff, which doesn't count for much of anything with anybody. What they want to know about are the people and what is their goal, what drives them, what do they see as their trials. And those are the stories.
We seem to have lost track of that, and there was a period of time probably when Motor Racing Network got started, and we did those interviews all the time and then cut them up and put them in 30 or 40 seconds at a shot with Petty and Bobby Isaac‑‑ even Bobby Isaac, who had the best‑‑ it was like interviewing Joe Louis, one of the best interviewees you could find. He had great answers, and so did Bobby Isaac. Those guys, if you could break and penetrate through, particularly if you were a damn Yankee, you could get some really good stuff that mattered to the American public.

Q. The NASCAR Hall of Fame honors media members quite a bit, and Benny Parsons got in through driving and TV, but I believe you're the first one to get in by being a full‑time media member. What's that like to be the one to represent us all?
KEN SQUIER: A little strange because the question remains the same. I mean, what does that gain you? I sure liked racing. Always did. Was a terrible driver. According to my daughter, I'm still a terrible driver, and I'll let it go at that.
But no, that‑‑ I don't know what that‑‑ I don't know what your question really means. I really like motorsports, and I love the people in it, and I treat them with a great deal of respect because I feel that they have a lot of merit that never gets touched, and it's what people should be looking to and for as we search around and try to grope and grope our way through what the public understands, and they need to understand more about risk.
Did you see the New York Times about three weeks ago? They did that story on those guys that tried Everest and they lost two of the five? It's an incredibly good feature, and they keep publishing those about every year or two, and it's always older men who go back up there, and they usually lose some of their aides, and they pay a great price. They die for it, like on the north wall of Eiger. Come on, nobody is telling them to go do that, they do it because they are committed to that, and at one time it was the same thing in motorsports. And I thought they were very respectable people.

Q. When you started broadcasting, when you look around, not even in race car technology but broadcasting technology, print technology‑‑
KEN SQUIER: I can't understand.

Q. When you started broadcasting first, I think the technology you had, microphones, etcetera, was not sophisticated like nowadays. Do you remember when your equipment failed, when you had troubles to broadcast something?
KEN SQUIER: Equipment? Oh, geez, I can't run anything. I usually break it. Yeah, I'm not good on equipment. And I don't know what that gains you too much. You've still got to ask the questions and write down the answers.

Q. You've seen a lot of the great drivers over the years; who's the best in your view?
KEN SQUIER: Petty, because he would take the time. He understood what your job was, and he respected it. He respected the media. And most of them didn't give two hoots. But beyond that were those others that really had incredible answers, and I go back to Isaac, because I found‑‑ penetrating Bobby Isaac and getting through the veil of a guy who couldn't read or write for years until Patsy Setzer taught him and he was in his late 20s.
When he got down to talking about why he did it, why it wasn't important to him, and his values, my God, his values just blew me away. I'll give you an example. We were in a‑‑ I think we were at Darlington and hanging around in the motel, and he never played any sports because by the time he was 10 years old, he worked in a lumberyard. He didn't get to play any‑‑ and he loved baseball. Didn't understand a damn thing about it, but he'd sit there in his room and watch it. And I thought that was fascinating, that he was intrigued by it.
We talked about‑‑ one night I said, where did you see your first races, and he said, over at Hickory. And I said, yeah, did you go on a team. He said, no, no, I didn't have any money, and I went down to the graveyard and I'd climb up on that apple tree and I could watch them over the fence. And I said, hey, what the hell was wrong with you? Everybody else slipped under the fence. I mean, that was the worst fence of any racetrack in the country. And he said, well, I could have, but it would have hurt too much if I got caught. And I thought, that's a hell of an answer because he was kind of a‑‑ I remember he had tough, T‑u‑f‑f on these knuckles, luck on this one. He was a tough boy. But he had enough sense to know that that was something that would cost him. They'd probably throw him out forever.
I gave him a lot of credit for that. And there was a lot of other stories like that.

FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports

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