BENNY PHILLIPS - 03/08/1936 - 01/24/2012
A Boonville High and High Point College graduate, Phillips began his 48-year career in 1959 at the Thomasville Times. Writing wasn't in his plans as a youngster. At the age of 16 he was the star running back on the Boonville High football team. Out there in North Carolina’s Yadkin Valley, Benny Phillips grew up with tobacco fields that rolled over the hills and uncles who wandered around barns to take a swig at night. Benny had big plans, though — Chapel Hill, probably, then the NFL. He was that good. That summer he went for a swim, and a few days later, damned if the doctors didn’t say he had polio. They sent him to a hospital in Greensboro and he spent a few days in an iron lung, a nearly obsolete machine that wraps around a person like a Twinkie around filling. He’d get out of that machine, doctors said, but he wouldn’t walk again. The football star was a paraplegic. Benny begged them to let him die. The Polio vaccine came one summer too late for him. Benny always reckoned he'd contracted the polio virus in a country swimming hole, the way so many kids did in the 1950s. He went off to Warm Springs, Ga., to the therapy center established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and encountered an old Marine Corps gunnery sergeant who'd been shot through the spine in the Pacific. Just as Benny got his bearings with steel braces on his legs, the gunny would sneak up behind him and knock one of his crutches away. "You're gonna fall," the gunny would say. "You're gonna fall a lot for the rest of your life. Might as well get used to it." All those years Benny traveled the Cup tour, he never would accept a room fitted for the handicapped. All that stainless steel stuff got in his way. He'd been taught by
the gunny to "improvise; improvise; improvise." Outside racing, Benny had enough narrow escapes from death in the outdoors to rival big-game hunters and soldiers of fortune. Countless cowboys, backwoodsmen, poachers, bootleggers and hunting guides called him a friend. He had tumbled ATVs down mountainsides, been thrown off horses, fallen out of tree stands, saved panicked friends in small boats in winter tempests off the Outer Banks, had a skiff go upside down on him in a raging, freezing river … As it turned out, Benny Phillips was the grit and the guts of the NASCAR media corps for more than 40 years. It was he who dubbed Darlington Raceway "The Lady in Black." He was the writer Richard Petty trusted most down through the decades. He co-authored Dale Earnhardt's autobiography. He so captivated Formula One legend Ayrton Senna upon their first meeting that the great Brazilian shooed away all his handlers and gave the North Carolina reporter all the time he needed. For 40 of the 48 years he wrote for the High Point Enterprise, all 27 years he wrote for Stock Car Racing magazine, even his 12 years with Turner Broadcasting, Benny "walked." That's what he called lumbering along on crutches through the garages and through airports and onto planes. Seven times he was National Motorsports Press Association writer of the year. He deserved the Henry T. McLemore Award, given for courage in auto racing journalism, more than any other winner. ATVs, which he discovered in the 1970s, set him free to hunt, from the quail fields and turkey thickets of the South, up to Montana and even on up to Hudson's Bay in Canada. But for all those decades he never would abandon those crutches and heavy steel braces for a wheelchair. The braces almost took him under once, when a boat capsized on him while he was duck hunting on a river. When he went to interview Senna for TBS, Phillips and his crew were told they had 15 minutes. Senna was a deeply caring and sensitive man, virtually a priest, and so immediately he told Benny he didn't mean to be nosy but wanted to know what had happened to him. Benny told him. Senna said he had a sister who'd been disabled by disease. Before they knew it, the McLaren publicists came and told Benny the interview time was up. Senna told them no. To go away. That they would take as much time as they wanted. Finally, the cartilage in Benny's shoulders just wore out from what he called "40 years of walking on them." Finally he yielded to years of advice from his doctors to get into an electric wheelchair. He was hell on it, just as as he'd been on the ATVs in the mountains and fields. More than once he turned the scooter over, one time suffering a compound fracture of a leg. While hunting, Benny was injured just trying to get onto the scooter, and needed surgery. The aftermath didn't go well, and besides, he was seriously diabetic by this point. He fought the complications for more than a week in intensive care. But this time all the grit and all the guts weren't enough. Benny spent 48 years with the High Point Enterprise in North Carolina, serving as sports editor for 32 years. He also wrote for Stock Car Racing magazine for 27 years and spent 12 years with TBS. Phillips was named the National Motorsports Press Association (NMPA) Writer of the Year seven times and earned many accolades including the NMPA Joe Littlejohn Award in 1977, the International Motorsports Hall of Fame (IMHOF) Henry T. McLemore Award in 1978, the Buddy Shuman Award in 1986 and the NMPA George Cunningham Award in 1988. Phillips' byline appeared in numerous publications, including Stock Car racing magazine, Time, Sports Illustrated, Southern Motorsports Journal and National Speed Sport News. He also appeared in the nationally televised "MotorWeek Illustrated" as an on-camera reporter for several years. Phillips wrote numerous books focusing on auto racing. The books include: "Dale Earnhardt: Determined," "Bristol Motor Speedway: 40 Years of Thunder," and "NASCAR 1959-1971: Growth, Change and Challenge."