SIMON SAYS “WIN!”
Simon Pagenaud wins Indy 500 on Penske’s golden anniversary
INDIANAPOLIS (AP) » Simon Pagenaud may have saved his job by giving Roger Penske a golden Indianapolis 500 victory.
Pagenaud gave the venerable team owner his 18th victory in “The Greatest Spectacle in Racing” by outdueling Alexander Rossi in a breathtaking 13-lap sprint to the finish Sunday. The two swapped the lead five times over the final stretch before Pagenaud stormed to the front for good seconds before he took the white flag.
Rossi chased him for the final lap around Indianapolis Motor Speedway but fell 0.2086 seconds shy of his second Indy 500 win — the seventh-closest finish in the 103 years of the race.
Instead, it was a milk-fueled celebration for Team Penske on the 50th anniversary of the owner’s first entry in the famous race.
Penske now has two consecutive Indy 500 victories — Will Power won last year — and two consecutives sweeps at the speedway in May. Pagenaud, in a contract year and underperforming, arrived at Indy with his job on the line. His rumored replacement is Rossi, but Pagenaud won on
the road course two weeks ago, won the pole to start the Indy 500 and now has given his boss a victory in the only race Penske truly cares about.
“What a guy, can you believe it?” Penske said. “He won that thing, I just can’t believe it.”
Neither could Rossi, who lost his cool several times in the race but twice charged to the front and had better fuel mileage than Pagenaud and the Penske cars.
“Horsepower, that’s unfortunate the way it is,” said Rossi, who was in a Honda for Andretti Autosport. “I think we had the superior car, we just didn’t have enough there at the end.”
Pagenaud was in a Chevrolet and the bowtie brand was the dominant engine maker all May.
He climbed from his car, let out a primal scream of relief, then dumped the entire winning jug of milk over his head.
“We’ve come through a life of trying to achieve this and I am just speechless,” Pagenaud said. “I never expected to be in this position and I certainly am grateful.”
Asked if he was on a mission — Pagenaud led a racehigh 116 of the 200 laps — to save his job, Pagenaud dismissed the pressure of free agency. Starr was known as the best Packer ever. The team retired his No. 15 jersey in 1973, making him just the third player to receive that honor. Four years later, he was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio.
After losing the 1960 NFL title game in his first playoff appearance, the Packers never lost another playoff game under Starr, going 9-0, including wins over the Kansas City Chiefs and Oakland Raiders in the first two Super Bowls.
Starr’s college career wasn’t very noteworthy and it wasn’t until Lombardi’s arrival in Green Bay in 1959 that Starr, living by his motto “desire and dedication are everything,” began to blossom.
Lombardi liked Starr’s mechanics, his arm strength and especially his decisionmaking abilities. Under Lombardi’s nurturing, Starr became one of the league’s top quarterbacks.
“If you work harder than somebody else, chances are you’ll beat him though he has more talent than you,” Starr once said. He credited Lombardi for showing him “that by working hard and using my mind, I could overcome my weakness to the point where I could be one of the best.”
The gentlemanly quarterback’s status as a Packers icon was tested by his struggles as the team’s head coach. In nine seasons from 1975-83, he won just 41 percent of his games, going 5377-3, including 1-1 in the playoffs, part of three decades of futility that followed the glory years.
After football, Starr, became a successful businessman in Birmingham, Alabama, not far from his hometown of Montgomery, where he was born on Jan. 9, 1934.
Starr was a four-time Pro Bowl selection and two-time All-Pro. He won NFL titles in 1961, ‘62, ‘65, ‘67 and ‘68. He was the 1966 NFL MVP and was named to the 1960s All-Decade team. He also was named MVP of the first two Super Bowls.
But the play he was most famous for was a run.
In the NFL championship on Dec. 31, 1967, Starr knifed into the end zone behind guard Jerry Kramer and center Ken Bowman with 16 seconds left to lift the Packers over the Dallas Cowboys 21-17 in what became known as the “Ice Bowl.”
The Packers had spent $80,000 for a heating coil system that was to have kept the field soft and warm, and forecasters said not to worry because the approaching cold front wouldn’t arrive until after the game.
“It was 20 degrees the day before,” the late Tom Landry once recalled. “It was great. Vince and I were together that night and we talked about how good the conditions were and what a great game it would be.”
They were half-right. When the grounds crew rolled up the tarpaulin, a layer of condensation had formed underneath and, with 40 mph wind, the field promptly froze like an ice rink. Packers running back Chuck Mercein would later compare the ground to “jagged concrete.”
With a temperature of minus-14 and a wind chill of minus-49, it was the coldest NFL game ever recorded. The wind chill had dipped another 20 degrees by the time the Packers got the ball at their 32 trailing 17-14 with five minutes left.
With one last chance for an aging dynasty to win a fifth NFL title in seven seasons, Starr took the field as linebacker Ray Nitschke hollered, “Don’t let me down!”
Starr wouldn’t, completing all five of his passes and directing one of the most memorable drives in NFL history.