Too Soon Gone
A Tribute to Darrell Russell By Susan Wade
Photos by Chris Simmons, Ken Sklute and Roger Richards
A.E.
Housman never knew Darrell Russell.
But the British poet knew of young athletes
like Russell: the bright, talented, handsome, clean-cut . . . blessed . .
. ones who made their hometowns proud.
The time you won your town
the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.
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That’s how Housman pictured youth and
glory and honor in his ode "To An Athlete Dying Young." The
folks of Hockley, Texas, didn’t carry Russell literally down Main Street
when he won his first NHRA Top Fuel race, the 2001 Winternationals at
Pomona, Calif., or each time he won at drag strips across the USA, at Las
Vegas, Topeka, Denver, Seattle, and Columbus, Ohio. But they couldn’t
have been prouder of Burnell and Gwen Russell’s boy and Julie Russell's
cowboy husband.
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He was driving a 7,000 horsepower dragster
that leaves the starting line with a force nearly five times that of
gravity and travels the length of more than four football fields in less
than five seconds. And he was beating the best of the best. And when he
wasn’t winning, he was pushing his opponents to be their best.
Darrell Russell died June 27 in an accident
during final eliminations of the NHRA national event at Madison, Ill. Two
thousand members of his family, racing family, and admirers packed the
First Baptist Church in tiny Tomball, Texas, July 2, to pay their respects
and bid their Darrell one final good-bye at the cemetery in nearby
Pinehurst.
To-day, the road all
runners come,
Shoulder high-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.
Time will crawl on as 2004 fades, but
Darrell Russell will be forever 35 years old. He’ll be that quiet young
man with the easy and eternal smile, the busy man who always had time for
somebody else, the famous rising star who seemed to know everybody’s
name in return. He was so boyish and enthusiastic that it would seem
completely natural for him to ask spontaneously for an autograph, yet his
was one of the most popular signatures on hero cards in the pits. He
worked in an environment with loud, obnoxious noises, yet he was a
soft-spoken gentleman.
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Smart lad, to slip
betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.
Eyes the shady night has
shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears:
Now you will not swell
the rout
of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.
Darrell Russell was taken from us,
unscarred by time or cynicism or the way we tend to forget or neglect our
elders.
Race-car drivers often are accused of
thinking they're indestructible or somehow immortal. The truth is that we
all think that way most of the time or we'd be paralyzed by fear. Darrell
Russell, like his Top Fuel drag-racing colleagues, had a zeal. He wasn’t
reckless; he was passionate.
But the truth also is that he is
immortal. Henry Van Dyke offers every sad and grieving soul some hope in
his "Parable of Immortality," an expectant so-long to our
special friend, Darrell Russell:
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"I
am standing upon the seashore. A ship at my side spreads her white sails
to the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean. She is an object of
beauty and strength, and I stand and watch until at last she hangs like a
speck of white cloud just where the sea and sky come down to mingle with
each other.
"Then someone at my
side says, 'There she goes!' "Gone where?
Gone from my sight . . . that is all.
She is just as large in
mast and hull and spar as she was when she left my side and just as able
to bear her load of living freight to the place of destination. Her
diminished size is in me, not in her. And just at the moment when someone
at my side says, 'There she goes!' there are other eyes watching her
coming and their voices ready to take up the glad shouts: 'Here she
comes!' "
