Terrifying Accident In '82 Paved Way For Safer Boats
Reprinted from The Seattle Times, July 31, 1986
Sometimes the pain gets so bad, he can barely move by the afternoon. If it's his elbow that's troubling him, he'll wrap it in two ice bags and wear a brace the next day. If it's his back, his hip or his leg, or all of them, he often must resort to medication and then wake up at midnight to soak himself in a hot bathtub.
Four years ago, he was in and out of a hospital for seven months. At first, he clung faintly to life. Later, doctors told his family he might be a vegetable for the rest of his life, then that he would probably lose the sight in his left eye, have his right arm amputated and might not walk again.
Today, his back still is misaligned. He has artificial parts in his left hip and right elbow. His right leg is longer than his left. He is as medically recovered as he'll ever be, but every new day is certain to bring the same old pain.
But for John Walters, crew chief of the Miller American unlimited-hydroplane racing team, pain is not always measured in physical terms. It also is an aching of the heart. When the former unlimited pilot looks out onto a race course, he often sees in his colleagues the dreams he only partly fulfilled.
"There's no question I miss driving a lot," he said. "I don't necessarily lay awake at night and think about it, or have hard feelings toward the sport. But it does bother me sometimes to look at what's going on, and thinking I should be, or could be, part of it right now."
Part of the reason Walters is not driving today is indelibly etched into our psyches. Clips of his 1980 double flip on the Columbia River in the turbine-powered Pay 'n Pak are part of lead-ins to NBC's SportsWorld, ESPN race coverage promos and news broadcasts virtually every night in Eastern Washington. Walters suffered a fractured left hip socket and sprains to his left shoulder, elbow and knee. That accident, however, is not what pulled the plug on Walters' driving career.
Two years later, during Seattle's Emerald Cup regatta, Walters was injured critically in a three-boat accident that involved George Johnson in the Executone and Tom D'Eath in The Squire Shop.
For six years, Walters had moved his family from outpost to outpost, driving limiteds and working on unlimited crews, before getting his shot in an unlimited cockpit. In one brief moment of terror, it was all gone.
"When I got the opportunity to drive the Pay 'n Pak, I had many goals," Walters said. "I wanted to win races, the Gold Cup, the national championship -- all things possible, I wanted to do. In a short period, I did achieve some of the goals and had a reasonably successful driving career.
"But I feel a little like I've had a rug pulled from under me.
Just when we got to the point where the boat was doing what it was supposed to do, when winning Gold Cups and national championships finally were reasonable goals, it was over."
What is not over is Walters' career in unlimited racing. Two weeks before the start of this season, the sport's all-time winningest crew chief, Jim Lucero, left the Miller American team over a dispute.
Walters, already a member of the crew, took over.
It might have been less painful for Walters just to walk away from the sport. Pak owner Dave Heerensperger offered him a spot in the Pay 'n Pak stores' management-training program, and Walters accepted.
However, back in Harborview for follow-up surgery, he listened on the radio to the 1984 Gold Cup race in Tri-Cities, and knew he had made the wrong decision.
"Knowing what the Atlas Van Lines had to go through to win that race literally brought tears to my eyes," said Walters. "I knew then that it was not fair to myself or Pay 'n Pak if I was emotionally not pointed in that direction. I knew then that I wanted to get back into the sport."
Though Walters has had previous experience in almost every facet of the team he now oversees, his practical contributions to Miller American's success this year still are overshadowed by his emotional endowment. Earlier this year, driver Chip Hanauer joined Gar Wood as the only unlimited pilots to have won five straight Gold Cups.
He dedicated his historic fifth to Walters.
"I have a whole lot of admiration for John," Hanauer says.
"I'm proud I'm the driver for his first Gold Cup as a crew chief. He's really paid a higher price than I have. He inspires all of us."
In a bigger way, Walters has inspired the entire sport to reach the level it now enjoys.
In 1974, Jim Clapp's U-95 was the first, albeit brief and unsuccessful, attempt at harnessing the power of turbine engines in unlimiteds. The Pay 'n Pak hydro Walters drove was the real catalyst of the sport's turbine revolution. In 1982, on New York's Lake Onondaga, Walters became the first driver to win an unlimited race in a turbine-powered hydro.
"There's no question we were doing things no one ever attempted before," Walters remembered. "The boat ride in the Pay 'n Pak, compared to those of most boats today, was atrocious. The boat was totally unpredictable; it would never do the same thing twice.
"If I wasn't scared, I should've been. I was nervous an awful lot of time. I was concerned an awful lot of times, again, because of the unpredictability of the boat. The boat had real problems, but the bottom line is, it was a bad design from the very beginning.
"We had a new boat being built, but we continued to try to sort things out on the old one. We didn't want to quit on it before learning everything we could."
The second-generation Pay 'n Pak turbine hydro was scheduled for unveiling in 1983, but after Walters' accident, Heerensperger withdrew from the sport for good. The Lucero-designed hull now is one of the circuit's hottest -- the Steve Reynolds-piloted Miss 7-Eleven.
Walters' pain has been the sport's gain. In addition to 7-Eleven, the top turbine boats -- defending national-champion Miller American and the present high-points leader, Miss Budweiser -- and the top two piston entries -- Mr. Pringles and The Squire Shop -- all have direct lineage to the ill-fated Pay 'n Pak.
"All the mistakes we made with the Pay 'n Pak were modified, improved or corrected altogether in the boats today," Walters said.
"Unfortunately, we tend to learn more from our failures than our successes. I'd like to be able to say I wished there was another way to learn what we needed to know, and that I didn't have to get abused so badly.
"On the other hand, what happened to me helped us learn things faster and might be keeping a bunch of guys from paying the same price I did. So, yes, from that standpoint, it was worth it."
