The Luckiest Part of My Job Is That It Allows Me to Meet People like Brock Yates

From the July 2017 issue

Pamela Yates was kind enough to invite me to the final fete for her husband, Brock, the man we came to call “the Assassin.” The memorial service was held in upstate New York, in April, and I can assure you that there was nary a poltroon, milksop, or pecksniff in attendance.

As my bosses keep reminding me, I’m extraordinarily lucky to have this job. The luckiest part is that it allows me to meet guys like Yates. Through adventures as varied as the coast-to-coast Cannonball and the writing of such inflammatory genius as The Decline and Fall of the American Auto­mobile Industry, Brock embodied high-speed rebellion, shattering the rules that served to limit our freedom. He stoked young men’s fantasies of driving fast and not giving a shit. And he along with David E. Davis Jr. and Patrick Bedard formed the Holy Trinity of this magazine. When I met him, it was post-post-Cannonball, he had waxed famous, and I half expected him to be someone who thought his name preceded him. If anything, meeting Brock was better than worshipping him from afar. He had a way, as one of his doctors said at the memorial, “of bringing you in.” He made you a co-conspirator, his eye ever a-twinkle. Brock succumbed last year to Alzheimer’s disease, and what’s cruelest to me is that a guy so full of life could be saddled with a disease so intent on extinguishing its force.

His friends and family came from around the country to tell stories about him, about his essential humanity. As the oratory piled up, one of his oldest friends, the well-traveled executive Clint Allen, said: “I sort of feel like Zsa Zsa Gabor’s eighth husband on their wedding night. I know what to do, I just don’t know how to make it interesting.”

Brock was a guy who loved fast, loud, outrageous cars because he loved the guys who built and drove and mastered cars like that. His idol was the hard-living moonshiner-cum-NASCAR driver Curtis Turner. The story goes that Brock, while reporting on the Daytona 500, approached Turner’s car on the grid. Brock looked into the cockpit and found Turner asleep, five minutes before the race. Those were his drinking buddies.

We got the best of Brock, as did so many others. He wasn’t just a magazine writer—he was a screenwriter, an author, a broadcaster, an organizer, and the consummate husband and family man. What became clear to me as I sat in that room, amazed to find myself there, is that Brock wouldn’t have been Brock without Pamela. He called everyone “teammate,” but Lady Pamela was his crew chief. Like David E.’s Jeannie, she was his foundation. That teamwork allowed him to be who he really was, a guy hopelessly in love with life and all the best stuff in it.