Writing an angry letter to the editor of the local paper is a fairly pointless exercise, but sometimes it feels good. I wrote two, years ago, to the Sports department of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, whose sports columnists never had anything good to say about the Seafair Unlimited races. This was in the '80s and '90s, after the U-boats had almost entirely gone to turbine power, and some old-time fans like me had lost most of our interest even though the modern hulls had incredible cornering ability, like slot-cars on water. Nevertheless, the races remained a well-attended annual event, even despite fans now having to buy tickets to it. It irritated me that two P.I. writers, Art Thiel and a New York transplant, Laura Vescey, always welcomed Seafair Week with derogatory columns about the hydros.

So, I wrote 'em a couple of nasty letters. Found my saved copies recently (of course the P.I. never printed them, but they were too long and I knew it). I thought maybe a few of you might share the good feeling of bashing those who bash us . . . .


This one's from the mid to late '80s, I think:

"When two P.I. sportswriters, Art Thiel and Laura Vescey, devote entire columns to suggest that we terminate the Seafair hydroplane races, some explanation is necessary. Not only manners but common sense is violated when a newspaper sports department trashes a sport enjoyed by at least fifty thousand local newspaper readers.

Why do sportswriters ignore or dislike hydroplane racing, and motorsports generally? Your typical sportswriter got his education in some college liberal arts department, possibly Journalism, the faux-scholarly analogue of those "Recreation Science" courses endowed by varsity sports programs to provide university degrees to barely-literate inner city high school jocks on full athletic scholarships (neat oxymoron, that). This is a person who wouldn't know which end of a screwdriver to use, who has to pay someone to change the oil in his car or sharpen his lawnmower blade. Such a person has no concept whatever of the technical skills and labor involved in creating, maintaining, and operating a racing boat, car, motorcycle, or airplane.

By contrast, your typical hydroplane fan, whose sport Thiel and Vescey wish to eliminate, is a Boeing engineer or assembler or toolmaker. He is a machinist for Kenworth, a welder for Todd Shipyards, a laminator at Heath Tecna, a mechanic at Metro. He is an airline pilot, a cement truck driver, a ferryboat engineer. A hydro fan spent his childhood building model airplanes, soapbox cars, ham radio kits. As an adult he probably has a well-equipped home workshop and good tools with which he does most of his own maintenance of house and car.

Seattle sportswriters are forever telling us that the Blue Angels were/are the only worthwhile part of Seafair Sunday, yet they have no more than a child's understanding of what they saw. But avid hydro fans can tell you at a glance whether the Angels are flying A-4s or F-14s or F-18s, can detail how to drill and chamfer rivet holes in an aircraft fuselage, or how to make a minimum-ceiling approach into Juneau.

That the Seattle sporting press provides only grudging coverage of hydroplaning on Seafair weekend, and nothing the rest of the year is no longer a surprise or disappointment to the fans. What can a stick-and-ball sportswriter say about motorsports anyway? Some melodrama about the drivers' longsuffering wives, or a temporary antagonism between rival camps that the writers can blow all out of proportion? Perhaps writers like Thiel and Vescey are a little uncomfortable that they have spent their working lives covering schoolboy sports played by men in their twenties and thirties, games that all of us played happily as kids with no adults needed. Motorsports are for grown-ups, and require hard-won technical knowledge and skilled craftsmanship, and may not be discussed intelligently by everybody with a junior high letterman's jacket in his attic.

A sportswriter's career goal, after too many years interviewing narrow, spoiled, inarticulate, monstrously-overpaid steroid junkies, is to write a restaurant review or recipes column, and spend afternoons pursuing his personal favorite sport: golf. By comparison, a hydro fan hopes for more time to restore an old Hudson, build a cedar-strip canoe, bracket-race his motorcycle at S.I.R., and learn to fly. Or, perhaps, to work on one of the hydros. Indeed, a surprising number of people in Seattle have done some kind of work on the Unlimiteds, something the P.I. ought to ponder. Sure, our sport has an amateurish quality at times; it is Seattle's citizen sport, and deserves respect as such. And if the newspaper wasn't always ignoring or scorning it, our sport would be more attractive to sponsors and could field more competitive boats.

Instead of banishing hydroplanes from Lake Washington, how about banishing Thiel and Vescey from the Sports desk and move them to the Food section where they will be happier in any case."



Out of time. I'll post the other letter (shorter) tomorrow.

--Smitty