By Hec Hancock
Reprinted from the Tri-City Herald, July 26, 1986
Reprinted from the Tri-City Herald, July 26, 1986
We don't know who the winner of this year’s Columbia Cup is until late Sunday afternoon.
But if the Water Follies offered a trophy for the comeback of the year, there wouldn’t be any question about the choice.
John Walters would win hands down.
Three years ago, driving the Pay ‘N Pak turbine boat, Walters was badly injured in a crash during the Seafair race on Lake Washington in Seattle. He was more dead than alive when his body was lifted from the water and flown to the hospital. For a long time it was touch and go. It took 11 operations, a year-and-a-half in the hospital, and a few truck loads of tender loving care, but he made it.
Actually, it was Walters’ second brush with death. Two years earlier he survived a spectacular, blowover accident just prior to the Columbia Cup here in the Tri-Cities.
Now Walters is a sight for sore eyes. He’s tanned, relaxed and back to doing what he likes best – going boat racing.
“I had this inner feeling that this was where I wanted to be,” he explained. “I was accomplishing some things, but I wasn’t having fun. I was in a Pay ‘N Pak management program but I talked to Dave Heerensperger and he was very supportive of what I wanted to do.
As a result, when a position with the Miller American crew opened up he grabbed it. Walters was no stranger to the working side of thunderboat racing. He served his apprenticeship in the sport as a member of Bill Muncey’s Atlas Van Lines crew. He also helped build the Pay ‘N Pak turbine boat.
“I’m really enjoying this,” he said. “It’s great to be able to go boat racing without the pressure of driving.”
But there are times, he admits, when, for a minute or two, his thoughts turn to what-might-have-been.
Sometimes, when he climbs in the cockpit, starts the engine and hears the mighty roar of the Miller American’s turbine engine, he remembers what it was like to drive a big boat 160 miles per hour down the straightaway. He watches Chip Hanauer and the memory of roaring into a turn at 140 mph comes flashing back.
“That’s the most difficult time for me,” said Walters. “I really have mixed feelings about ever driving again.”
The pain from the injuries is still there, but so is the allure that attracted him to driving in the first place.
“I had more bones broken than I can count on my fingers and my elbow is more man-made than otherwise. But other than a limp because of my hip there’s no problem.”
He can even play the drums, one of this first loves. “I really pay for it the next day but it’s worth it. I really love music.”
His present arrangement allows him more time with his wife Arlene and their daughters Katrina and Maciva.
“I miss the physical aspects of driving, the sensation of the speed and I miss the mental part, the head-to-head competition with the other drivers. It would be a lot of fun to take the boat out and qualify it,” he said. “However, for the time being, that’s only a dream.”
For now, the Miller American’s turbine engines are this responsibility. “When increases in power or adjustments are needed it’s up to me. For example, we’ve come to a two-mile course where the water was rough and now we’ll be racing on a fast, two-and-a-half mile course. That calls for some adjustment in the engines,” he said.
As he and the rest of the crew go about their chores in getting the Miller American ready for Sunday’s Columbia Cup, he insists no special attempt will be made to break a speed record.
“A lot of people don’t believe us, but it isn’t our intention to set a record every time we put the boat in the water. We want to go as fast as Chip feels comfortable with, fast enough that if problems are going to happen they happen now when we can fix them and not during the race,” he said.
As the second person to drive turbine powered boats, he’s convinced that jets are the way to go.
“The thing that people don’t realize is that piston boats are going as fast as they did five years ago. The speeds I qualified at in 1982 are faster than any of the speeds being run today. There’s a pretty good spread between turbine and piston engines – but part of it is the piston engines are going slower by seven or eight miles than they did then.”
It’s different now. Walters isn’t driving turbines, he’s fixing them.
But in the meantime, he can still dream.