Troy Buff’s most recent appearance on the Mello Yello Drag Racing Series was in early August, at Seattle, where he qualified No. 11 and fell to Leah Pritchett in the first round. But his most recent visit to The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway was a bit of an odd experience. Team owner Bill Miller had said at the NHRA Finals in November 2017 that he was stepping away from competition. Then Miller had second thoughts. He decided to go to the Phoenix race, No. 2 of 24, this February – where Buff started 13th and also ran up against Pritchett in Round 1.

Buff said, “Then we said, ‘Let’s go to Vegas.’ When he called me and asked me about it, I said, ‘I’m ready.’ And I was scared to tell him: ‘You know it is four-wide, right, because you don’t really like the four-wide?’ And he said, “What do you think about that?’ I said, ‘I want to do it once.’ I’ve never done it. So we went there. My first run at four-wide [in qualifying] was a single [run].” But he got the full four-wide experience soon enough. Buff recalled, “In the first round, I had three of the baddest dudes on the planet [Clay Millican, Steve Torrence, and Billy Torrence]. I don’t have very good luck for some reason.”

However, all that wasn’t half as scary or disturbing as what he went through last year off the track. He had a throat cancer scare.

At one race, he had laryngitis.

“I couldn’t even talk. I lost my voice. I went to my doctor, and he said that my stomach acid is coming up at night and burning my vocal cords. I had heartburn. He gave me whatever for heartburn and then a month later it was getting worse so I went back to him. He repeated the same thing, actually upped the dose of the heartburn medicine. And I thought, ‘This is weird,’” Buff said. “I finally went to a specialist, because I went to three doctors. I went to a specialist, and he said the same thing. I said, ‘Nobody will look at my throat. I really feel like there’s something in my throat.’

“He looked down my throat and he scared me,” Buff said. He said, ‘I’m not sure, but I’m 99-percent sure you have cancer.’ I said, ‘That’s how you tell someone?’ He said, ‘There’s no easy way to say this.’ But then he sent me to a specialist that he said could remove it and I could actually talk again. If he touched it, he said, ‘You would never talk the same if you could talk at all.’ It was right in between the vocal cords, attached to both. This doctor performed a biopsy after following Buff’s hometown race, at Houston, last year, and the Bill Miller team sat out for a couple of races.

The results showed a benign diagnosis. “It was a cyst on my vocal cords,” Buff said. “It was the weirdest thing. They don’t know what caused it. I said, ‘Maybe cigarettes?’ The doctor told him, “I’d love to lie to you and tell you that’s what it was, but that’s not what it was.”

So Buff’s next question was “Should I quit smoking?” Her answer surprised him. He said she told him, “I’d love if you would, but that has nothing to do with it. And I’d hate to tell you, that because I don’t want to be not honest with you. But I have to be honest with you.”

He said, “That was probably the worst thing she could have told me. I went out and bought a pack of cigarettes and started smoking again. I’m just addicted to cigarettes, and it sucks.”

He said he has tried on two occasions since then to quit smoking but “obviously, I’m not very successful at it. I come to the races and I want a cigarette.”

But he has a heartfelt message, especially for young people: “That’s not cool. I wouldn’t suggest any kids start smoking, because this is that hardest thing in the world to give up, I think. I’ve tried. It’s hard.”

The addiction of driving a race car, Buff said, is “even worse than cigarettes.”

Standout NHRA crew chief Aaron Brooks is back in the mix and keeping busy at NHRA national events https://t.co/4ixORs4vFx’s-fc-in-vegas

— Competition Plus (@competitionplus) October 27, 2018