© 2002 Dwight Drum

JACK ROUSH

"I'm in my second half of life. I won't pull back. I won't work less. I won't be less competitive."

I've never met Jack Roush, but I don't have to meet him to know he has incredible fiber. I have talked briefly to Roush during a recent teleconference and listened to him for 45 minutes of the conference while difficulty in his breathing was noticeable. At times I wondered if the media should be asking him questions right now; just eight days after his airplane crashed off a wire and turned upside down to slam into an Alabama pond. After that conference I knew I had just listened to an extraordinary human.

"You have to be right on time to have an accident."

"I ran into a wire about 75 feet off the ground and landed upside down in eight feet of water across from Larry Hicks' house." Roush said. "He rowed across the pond to help. Hicks spent 33 years in the Marines and had training to pull pilots out of airplanes under water. He dived three times to find Jack and on the third attempt he unlatched the harness and pulled me to the surface on the upside down wing and performed CPR."

"Life hasn't always been kind to Larry Hicks. He has nose and throat cancer. I don't know what we're going to do for Larry Hicks. He's certainly in our prayers. When he and his wife come to see me I have a big hug for him.

"First contact with me was that they had to tame and chain the down the beast," Roush said. "They had work to do and didn't have time to put up with my foolishness. They induced a coma and strapped me down, as well they should have. They reset my bones and kept my lungs from being collapsed."

Roush's indomitable spirit: Just eight days after traumatic injuries Jack Roush holds a press conference.

"A lot of people would say that I'm a risk taker. Throughout my life the risks I've taken where I was out-of-control where I wasn't able to assess the outcome in advance for a positive result. Those risks I've taken are less than I could count on my hands and feet, including the ones I drove in our race cars that were too fast. I'm going to step back into my zone."

"I was out of my zone of comfort. I didn't anticipate that kind of equipment I was around when I was no longer able to operate in full capacity. I'm going slower in light of this, to get in someone else's airplane or drive someone else's race car or do something else that would take me out of my zone.

"I'm thankful. I'm humbled by the experience. You can't plan for it."

"My problem was whether it was airplane-oriented or pilot-oriented. I can't be sure. My problem was I'm doing something I was unfamiliar with and something I didn't readily assess the risk of. Every policeman, every race car driver, everybody every day survives the day by assessing risks that they've got and by making reasonable judgments. Either I was faced with risks I didn't understand or the judgments I made were bad. One or the other. When I learned to fly in my mid-forties I decided I was going to fly a lot, get good instruction, pay attention to the hardware and assess the risks. My risk management was flawed here. Whether it was something went wrong or I made a mistake, I'll probably never know. I'm going back into a zone of not making leaps of faith from where I am. In the last 30 years I decided I wasn't going to drive race cars that were too fast. I didn't do well with this."

Roush had no recollection of April 18th-24th. Memory returned on April 25th.

"Only five people in a hundred recover as fast as Jack Roush," Dr. Wyndham said. "Loss of memory is typical common response to the head injury he sustained. It's not just the crash but the time spent underwater without oxygen. I would anticipate him not being able to remember the events of that day at all. That's normal, not remembering the I.C.U. day. It may take him up to a year for memory to come back and for the amnesia to go way. That's often a frequent course."

Doctor Wyndham's statement about recovery:
Fractures: two to three months.
Other injuries: four to six weeks.

Roush mentioned driver Mark Martin's two visits to the Alabama hospital and how important it was for his team to have Martin's great character. Martin is also an avid pilot.

Dwight Drum's question for Jack Roush from Zoomster.com:

"Breathe," Roush said. "There was a big premium on breathing here for a while. A moment ago I coughed and the (taste) was strong with gasoline. So I still have gasoline particles and water particles in my lungs."

"I want to go around thank those who have been so generous with me, the ones I haven't been able to thank like the good folks at the University of Alabama, Birmingham division here. We'll have a chance to thank them before we leave, but we'll get to thank the fans and supporters and the people who kept our businesses running. The folks in our organization who have parts to play in times like these, in tragedy. They've all stood their base, done their jobs and we've continued to make the quality of competitive effort, the quality of industrial effort that we're committed to make. The managers have done their jobs. I'm going to tell all of them thanks when I can.

Zoomster.com thanks Jack Roush for his words and inspiration.