Former CEO of Associated Press, Independent
NEAR Hall of Fame Induction | 2009 | Tom Curley
Induction of Tom Curley into the New England Auto Racers Hall of Fame on January 25, 2009. Check out more on Tom Curley: ...
About Tom Curley
Tom Curley, former president and CEO of the Associated Press, has been inducted into the New England Auto Racers Hall of Fame. During his induction speech, he recounted his career in auto racing, including his work as a technical expert for CBS at the Daytona 500, his role in forming the American Canadian Tour (ACT) and the Stock Car Connection, and the creation of a crate motor program with General Motors in 1999 to control costs in weekly racing. He also shared a personal anecdote about being punched by AJ Foyt while working as a photographer. Curley has also spoken about press freedom and the challenges facing journalism. He has criticized government secrecy post-9/11, stating that "the government is pushing hard for secrecy" and that journalists must "push back equally hard for openness." He has advocated for a focused lobbying effort for open government and has discussed the case of AP photographer Bilal Hussein, who was held without charges, calling it a clash between people and their access to information. Curley has also addressed the digital transformation of news, noting that by 2012, 250 million consumers would have touchscreen devices, and emphasized that while technology changes how journalists work, it does not change what they do. He has described the journalist as increasingly being targeted in conflict zones and political campaigns.
Transcript (25 segments)
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Steve Bliss0:06
Well, I don't know about going last on this. I think that means one of two things: either we've been handicapped to the rear for winning a lot, or we're just really crappy time travelers. Either way, I'll try and do my best.
I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday, a friend who like me grew up at Thunder Road up in Vermont. He said, 'I hear you're inducting Tom Curley into the Hall of Fame tomorrow.' Yeah, yeah, I am. He said, 'Well, what are you going to say?' I'm going to tell a couple of stories and try and let people know a little bit about him and let people know what kind of guy he is. And he looked at me and he said, 'Oh God, don't do that.'
There's no doubt, if you find someone who has no opinion, you can rest assured that they've never met him. And as somebody that has sat beside him in scoring towers around the Northeast for the better part of 30 years, I believe that I'm probably as qualified as just about anybody to try and paint you an accurate portrait of Tom Curley. I also believe that I'm qualified for hazardous duty pay.
I'm going to gloss over his driving career at his request, other than to share with you that here he's nicknamed T-Bone, and it was well deserved. He picked up the promotional reins at Thunder Road and at Catamount Stadium back in 1978. I started announcing as a high school student, I'd like to add, shortly after that. Over the 30 years that have followed, by my highly unofficial account, I've been fired twice, banned from the pit area once, and bawled out more times than I can possibly count. A tally that I'm very proud to announce puts me barely in the top ten.
There were days where if I'd had a gun, I might have used it, maybe on me, maybe on him. But there were also days, and I think this is probably more important because there are a lot more of these days, when I and everybody else that worked for him probably would have walked through fire or jumped out of an airplane without a parachute because we believed it would help the program.
Tom Curley has got passion. That's the good news and the bad news. His passion for this sport is very much infectious. It surrounded him with an incredible group of people, employees and workers, many of whom are over here at the couple of tables that have been with him for a lot of miles, a lot of years. They've given the sport their all for decades without ever questioning the incredible level of commitment that that requires.
That passion has made his pre-race drivers' meetings legendary around the Northeast. It's not a rumor that people have bought pit passes before, attended the drivers' meeting, and then gone to the grandstand because the show was over. It's given him the energy to at one point run three weekly race tracks and a major touring series all at the same time.
And it has, on more than one occasion over the years, prompted him to throw the red flag on a race after the sixth yellow flag flies in the first 10 or 15 laps, storm down the center aisle of the grandstands, pull every single driver out of their cars for an impromptu second drivers' meeting at the start-finish line in front of a standing room only crowd, tell them how dare they rip off the only people that matter in this sport, the people that paid their money to come and watch them race that night, banish the entire division back to the pit area for a half an hour to think about what they've done, as the crowd stands and cheers him all the way back to the tower because they knew that they were getting ripped off.
It also doomed him to about 30 years of lying awake at night trying to figure out where the sport was going to be five years from now so that he could be there a year early. I never really understand why anybody would want to do his job. I mean, think about this for just a minute. When he sits down in that race director's chair on Thursday night or Friday night or Saturday night or Sunday, he knows in advance that he's going to have to make split-second decisions that could cost any one of his racers a win or a championship or worse. He knows that just about every night, no matter what he does, somebody's going to be mad when it's over and accuse him of incompetence, idiocy, or simple bias. Not many people sit on red hot frying pans for a living. Fewer still actually seem to enjoy it. Tom Curley enjoys it.
And for those that don't know, that's roughly equivalent to tossing God out of church. He threw Ralph Nason out of a race, probably cost Ralphie the ACT championship, never gave it a second thought. He's made one incredibly difficult call after another over the years, and as far as I've been able to tell, and I've stood right next to him for most of them, he never once even considered the names or the numbers involved. All he cared about was that he was making the call that he believed to be right, and he was doing what he thought was best for the people that bought the tickets. He's one of the few promoters left in this business that cares more about fans than racers, and I think that's an important distinction.
Since the day he took over at Thunder Road, he's had four or five, maybe six, different headline divisions, and he's told every one of them, 'If you get too big for your britches, I'll toss you out and I'll start over with the street stocks.' And a couple of times he's actually done it. Over and over again, I've heard him tell individual drivers, 'You are part of the show, but you are not the show. This track was here before you or I, and it'll be here when both of us are gone.' And I've heard him tell his drivers that they owe a debt of gratitude to the men who paved the way before them, like Carol Hannaford. And I've heard him remind them that the modern day drivers are heroes to the people who plunk down their hard-earned money every Thursday night to watch them race. And at the start of every season, as long as I've known him, he reminds his drivers that the racetrack is in their trust, that it's their job to make sure that the track is still around in another 15 years when that eight-year-old kid in row 14 is ready to become the next track champ.
So yeah, he's probably a little bit fiery, might be a tad abrasive once in a great while, he'd probably admit to that. But that fire and that passion and that commitment to giving his fans the best stock car racing experience on the planet every single week has made him one of the best promoters around.
So I'm going to thank you. I'm going to give you a quick rundown of the national awards: 1981 winner of the Don McTavish Award for Lifetime Contribution to Racing, 1992 Trackside Magazine Promoter of the Year, 2003 Lowe's Motor Speedway Short Track Promoter of the Year, three-time RPM Northeast Promoter of the Year, and the 2004 RPM North American Promoter of the Year. And today, it's my great pleasure to help add to that list and introduce him as a member of the New England Antique Racers Hall of Fame 2009, Mr. Tom Curley.
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Tom Curley8:12
Before I start, I've just got a couple of quick things. Unlike Bob Bear, I'll speak to any group that's in a room, it doesn't matter whether you buy tickets or not. I also would like to ask the Hall of Fame committee if you could just make a tape of that music, because we have the fifth anniversary of Thunder Road coming up and I think it'll play really well for that crowd opening night. So that music we had earlier, you know, we all came in and we're doing the 'Shoop Shoop Song' and all those wonderful songs. David, thank you. Got him as a college kid or out of high school kid, beat him up pretty good for 10 years. Between Squire and I, he had his hands full. And it would take most of the night for David to tell stories about the many hours that we traveled across Canada and New England, but he was a big part of helping me get to where we got.
The best part of being an inductee versus a presenter, and I've done Beaver Dragon and Jean-Paul Cabana and a few others along the line in this Hall of Fame, for me the best part is number one, Bruce Cohen doesn't take you out in the alley anymore and tell you you got two minutes to introduce your people. So I know we're getting down. They've given me the last part, so if you have to go to the restrooms or you need to leave right now, please do it, because I'm going to talk as long as I want to because I don't have Lucy telling me what I gotta do.
I want to congratulate all of the inductees. It's a proud moment to be part of this particular year's class for a lot of reasons. As much as I have made relationships throughout New England and enjoyed modified racing, and I'll tell you about that a little while, one of the things that is most appreciated is the fact that we're recognizing quite a few Northern New England racers here today in this Hall of Fame class. And I congratulate all of the inductees today, people like Anthony and Don Hone, and Bob Bear, and Jack Aroot were really the foundation of what helped me to become a promoter.
I also, in 1979, was asked by Ken to be part of the CBS television team to go do the Daytona 500. I spent a decade doing television, and because of my relationship with Ken, was given this wonderful opportunity to be, quote, the technical expert. I don't know how many of you know the story, but when CBS decided to do the Daytona 500, that was a hundred percent Ken Squier's effort. He sold them on the idea they could do a live race flag to flag, which had never been done before. And when they did it and booked it, incidentally at the Steak and Shake on Route 1 down in Daytona, when Bill France Senior and the big shots from CBS went to sign the contract, they were a little surprised when they ended up down at the Steak and Shake signing things, but it was stock car racing after all.
And I remember I said, 'Ken, what am I supposed to do?' And he says, 'You just sit in the truck with these guys that are coming from the Doral Open that have done golf, and the other group was the one that just did the Super Bowl.' And there wasn't one single CBS television person who had ever been or seen any kind of a race at that first Daytona 500. And I said, 'That sounds sort of challenging.' And he said, 'Yeah, but you know enough about it, you can do it.' I said, 'Ken, I've never been in a television studio or truck in my life.' And he said, 'No, no, you can do it.' And that's where I sat during that 500. And I remember fondly to this day, as we got down toward the end when they went out of turn two and Donnie Allison and Cale Yarborough started beating each other up on that backstretch, and I was yelling at the producer and the director in that truck with 17 cameras, 'Stay on that, stay on that, they're going for the win.' And they stayed on it and they captured that wreck as he bounced off the wall and they headed into three. And then I started screaming at him, 'Get over to the front stretch, get over to turn one, turn one, pick up 43 Petty, got to do it, say why, why.' And I said, 'Forget the wreck, get over there, you got to find out who wins the 500.' And they followed them down the backstretch and they watched Petty win his seventh Daytona 500. And then I started screaming, 'Now get back to turn three as quick as you can, get there, take camera three.' And they took camera three over on turn three, and there was Bobby had shown up and all hell broke loose. And you still see it today almost on every clip. One of my prouder moments in television. But I had a lot of fun meeting a lot of people through the years working with Ken on various television between TNT and ESPN. And quite frankly, it also gave me the opportunity to get punched in the mouth by AJ Foyt when my assignment one morning was to go down and get headshots of all of the qualifiers at one of the 500s. And AJ had not qualified well. Didn't bother me, I still needed to get the headshot. And as I went over to pull the net down, it was the wrong thing to do. But at least it was documented.
We ended up in 1988, and we had a little split, which some of you may know about, with NASCAR in 1985. And we had to create a company called ACT, or The American Canadian Tour. What we ended up doing was we basically kind of ran for a year here in New England and then had to run out of town because we couldn't compete with NASCAR. They were just too big for us. And what we did was probably the smartest business decision that we ever made as a group, and that's that we headed across the border and went up into Canada and had half our races in the U.S., the way we were strong, and then went up into Canada and did extremely well up across the border.
At the same time, I got a call from Rex Robbins out at the ASA in the Midwest, and he invited me to come out and have a chit chat, which I did. And in 1988, we formed the Stock Car Connection. And the Stock Car Connection was a group of identical universal cars between the ASA Midwest, Bob Harmon's All-Pro down in Alabama, and our cars up here in the Northeast. What was great about it was it gave some of the ACT teams, Hall of Famers like Beaver Dragon and Robbie Crouch, JP Cabana, an opportunity to race at big tracks in those days like Sener, the Milwaukee Mile, Nazareth, and Nashville. New England's best got to race against ASA greats like Bob Senneker, Butch Miller, Ted Musgrave, Mike Eddy, and Dick Trickle, and All-Pro southern stars Bobby Gale and Jody Ridley. So we had quite a time.
In 1990, we bought Airborne, which was the half mile over in Plattsburgh, to help fill out what we thought was needed when Catamount went away. And in 1993, we went over and held Oxford for three years and managed Oxford when it was in somewhat trouble after Bob left. It took about five years before, unfortunately, all those years kind of were good. In 1995, we ran 84 events between Thunder Road on Thursdays, Oxford on Fridays, Airborne on Saturdays, and then an ACT tour race on Sundays. Most of that will be remembered by two tables full of officials in here, and I thank you all. As you all know how much I care about you, but some of them have been with me since day one, most of them have been there anytime we've called on them.
In 1996, change came again. The late model pro stocks were too expensive, so we changed to just the late models, and it took us some time to get that established. In 1999, we created the crate motor program with General Motors and a builder up in Maine, and we decided we were going to stick to it regardless of how difficult it was because we felt it would be the only thing that would be good for weekly racing was to keep costs under control, because the engine prices were getting so prohibitive. We did that and we also introduced it into touring.
In 2003, we were fortunate to have a universal set of rules with our company, which now includes tracks like Lee, White Mountain up in New Hampshire, Oxford, Seekonk, Waterford, Twin State, and New Hampshire, Ottawa Ontario, and Core, they're over by Toronto, plus both tours, the one that we run up in Canada and one that we run here in the U.S. And finally, in 2009, through the efforts of Ken, some help from Bob along the way, and certainly Jerry Gappens, these guys that run weekly are going to get a shot at running in New Hampshire, which could have only been a dream for them a few six or eight months ago.
It's been an amazing journey with lots of challenges and great rewards. Receiving this induction in the Hall of Fame is especially rewarding because my passion for this sport transcends a very long time frame. From the dirt days at Oxford and Beech Ridge, to a fan watching Harold Hannaford and Johnny Gammell and the Ingersons race flathead coupes at Thunder Road, to leaving on a Friday night from Central Vermont with half the office on a beautiful summer night to go to Stafford, where we'd watch Evans, Cook, Bugsy, Flemke, and those guys battle it out on a weekly Friday night show, and then we'd take that trip to Martinsville in '79. CBS Television entry. It's been a wonderful journey for me. I'll always remember and be grateful, and I'm humbled and thank you for this great honor.
And I'd like to leave you all with just this thought as we wind down this convention and these awards. I think today it's especially true for everybody in this room, regardless of your age, your ambition, desires, what you've accomplished or what you hope to accomplish, that I share with you what my philosophy of life since I was a little boy has been, and was punctuated for me with the death of President John Kennedy. His brother, when he eulogized John Kennedy, said, and I live by this and I invite you to do the same: 'Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not.' Thank you all very much.