He helped build an American sports industry. And you need to know his story.
Needing summer school just to barely pass on to the next grade, he barely graduated from high school with a 1.41 grade point average.
That 1.41 GPA translated into a net worth north of $1.41, just a lot of zeroes at the end.
Known as the Teen Terror, Wild Billy Meyer is 66. His bushy mop and mustache are gone, replaced with silver hair combed back.
He is still one of the baddest men of his sport. Of the Texans who have thrived in sports, his career, and empire, rank among the best. You probably don’t know it because his sport is drag racing.
This weekend, the track he built on the 500 acres he bought in the 1980s for a total of $6.5 million celebrates its 35th anniversary season with the running of the annual NHRA Fall Nationals.
I grew up watching Billy Meyer race his Funny Car back in the ‘80s. On Wednesday, he slipped behind the wheel on a drag strip for the first time since 1988 — to race me.
Dueling Toyota Camrys is not exactly a Funny Car, but it’s close enough. He’s 66, and the man can get off the line like he’s 16.
Talking to Meyer about his career is a warm bed of nostalgia, with equal parts sadness and foreboding.
Our modern day sports machine was built by guys like Meyer. Personalities and stories built sports. Their stories are enviable insanity. They did and experienced more in two years than most people do in 50.
All of sport has to figure out a way to bring some of that back.
“Sport doesn’t, in general, [have] personalities now because of sponsors,” Meyer said in the Texas Motorplex offices on Wednesday. “So [drivers/athletes] are scared to make a politically incorrect statement.
“The world has changed. You get in trouble when you say the wrong word. As the world has changed, sport has gotten so neutered.”
American sports does not exist the way we know it today without a Billy Meyer, and, conversely, a Billy Meyer and all of his friends would never make it today.
“Probably everything I did would get me fired today by a sponsor,” Meyer said.
Note that some of what that generation of athletes and drivers often did is now illegal. (Although it was illegal then, too.)
For one, packs of Winston cigarettes were given away to fans like Halloween candy at events the tobacco giant Reynolds sponsored.
Meyer once bought an entire pallet containing 5,500 cans of Coors Beer. He had friends haul it all the way to Indianapolis at the U.S. Nationals. At that time, in the ’70s, Coors was an in-demand novelty as it was unavailable East of the Mississippi River.
The pre- and post-race festivities at events often looked more like a version of Woodstock, or some other outdoor festival where rules, laws and regulations were enforced by those with the focus of an hourly security guard sleeping on the job.
Athletes and drivers interacted with fans easily.
“It was rock ’n’ roll and sex, and it was crazy,” Meyer said of the scene in Indy. “I could not sell beer, because that was illegal. But I could give it away. Every T-shirt you bought, you got a free Coors.”
The story ended with a bunch of Meyer’s friends going to jail for an hour, and included him trying to bribe a cop with $6,000 just to end it all without having to use a local judge.
“That just made the cop mad,” Meyer said. “They did keep the beer.”
The story made it all the way to national news, because the confiscated beer was given to a retirement home.
In the 70s, Meyer was in L.A. to build a motor for a car.
“We were staying in a Holiday Inn, and when we left there we skipped the hotel bill. We left at midnight,” he said. “We ate at the Holiday in the morning and didn’t eat the rest of the day. ... All of us went through that.”
These are the stories, and the people, who made the modern day American sports scene possible.
They were comic book characters playing out on a track, a field, and a court. They were all willing to be themselves, because there was zero negative consequence.
Those men and women are pretty much gone today, replaced by trained robots who are coached in the art of saying nothing while moving their lips constantly to avoid the consequence.
“Money, at least our sport, it’s not necessarily the root of the problem as much as technology,” he said. “We are in such a politically correct [age]. It’s a big deal if someone says anything bad about anybody.
“Even our biggest rivals, we went to dinner every night We would just flip a coin to see who paid. We’d spend $1,200 on a dinner.”
Taunting, boasting and bragging can be a healthy activity. Sports need that. Professional sports isn’t what it is today without those people, their personality and their stories.
We need that fun back.
