Tyler Morr crashed his black No. 17 into the wall at Auburndale Speedway in Florida last Saturday night. Emergency crews cut him from the car, then airlifted him to the hospital. He hung on for nearly four days. For a while, it appeared that the prayers were working. But at 3:12 p.m. on Wednesday, with his family at his side, Tyler Morr died.
He was 12.
Tyler wasn’t driving a kart or a quarter-midget. He was competing in the Auburndale Kid’s Club, a series that races at the little quarter-mile paved oval alongside modifieds and street stocks. The Kid’s Club cars are four-cylinder, front-wheel-drive cars like Chevrolet Cavaliers, Honda Civics and, a favorite at Auburndale, Dodge Daytonas. Drivers can be as young as five. At that age, they drive, and an adult rides in a passenger seat. As they get older and more experienced, the kids drive by themselves.
Like all of the others in his class, Tyler’s car had a roll cage, window net, belts and a steel-bar-reinforced front bumper. He was wearing a firesuit and a closed-face helmet. When he and fellow racer Justin Cribbs, also 12, got together, Tyler spun and crashed into the concrete wall. Their speed was estimated to be less than 50 mph, and based on the fact that I’ve raced at Auburndale in comparable cars—they are called “Scramblers” when adults race them, and one of the Cavaliers that I own was the series champion a few years ago—I’d think that’s probably right.
A caged stock car hitting a wall at an oval track on a Saturday night? That happens dozens of times at hundreds of tracks across the country. Almost always, the safety equipment does it job. Almost always, the drivers walk away.
And once in a while, they don’t. And we have a tragedy. And when the driver is 12 . . .
Critics, and count on plenty, will criticize the Morr family for allowing their child to race a real car at a real track.
Supporters, and count on plenty—though they won’t get nearly the ink and air time of the critics—will say that Tyler could have died playing football or baseball, or crossing the street. They’ll say that he died “doing what he loved,” which has likely been used to comfort the bereaved since the first caveman died while hunting a saber-toothed tiger. And the hunt, or the races, will go on “because that’s what he would have wanted.”
This Saturday night, there will be a race at Auburndale Speedway in Tyler’s honor. They will pass the hat. If I was home instead of at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, I’d be there, and I’d probably tow a race car down and compete. Because I reconciled a long time ago that the only sport I care about can be so cruel, so unfair. I decline to apologize or justify. You get it or you don’t. I prefer the company of those who do.
I’ve watched in person nine race-car drivers die. The worst—or the worst so far—was in a midget race. The driver was a paraplegic from a racing crash a few years earlier, and he drove with hand controls. His car flipped over a wall and into the front-stretch fence. I had been in the infield and walked up close. To my right there was the driver’s wife, pushing her husband’s wheelchair to the crash. Her face said “God, please, let him get out and climb into this wheelchair, and we can go home.”
He did not. It was a wrenching, profoundly poignant moment that I will never forget. But next week, and the next, I was back.
All that said, I can’t imagine what the Morr family is going through. To know that you enabled a child to participate in an activity that, by all accounts, he loved but that ended his life, must be almost unbearable. It took me a long time to understand why my father was so frantic and so angry that day when he bought me a brand-new Schwinn—and I promptly rode it right into traffic. My dad and I were lucky. Tyler, and his family, were not.
If you had been praying for Tyler, please, keep on praying for his family. And maybe for all of us who embrace a sport that kills.
