relayed by the announcers on the baseball broadcast just now. Former SID Jim Freeman passed this weekend.
UNIVERSITY NEWS Sad news
- Thread starter SpaceRaider
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Oh, no. Always loved being around Jim. A true gentleman who was always very interesting. Sad news indeed.
Echoes my thoughts. Always had a smile on his face. Very genuine. Always great insights. I was always glad to see him at various athletic events over the years. Will miss him.
Remember having dinner with Jim before a WKU game in BG several years ago...a real loss to the MT and NASCAR communities.
A nice article and remembrance from the Anniston Star:
Remembering Talladega’s fastest prankster
Sixty … seventy … eighty …
The odometer kept climbing as the backstretch at Talladega Superspeedway headed toward the horizon.
… ninety … 100 … 110 …
The car zoomed into the banking at turn 3, everyone’s weight shifting under their seat belts, as if about to fall off a teetering barstool.
That’s when Jim Freeman took both hands off the steering wheel of the Talladega pace car.
That’s when passengers typically yelped phrases of alarm and panic and profanity.
Somehow, the formula of speed and centrifugal force and gravity, all this stuff we’d have learned in 11th grade physics class if we weren’t preoccupied with the nearby distraction of pleated cheerleader skirts, all that managed to keep the car in such near-orbit that it could steer itself.
Lord, how Jim Freeman would laugh at his prey when he pulled his hands off the wheel.
Lord, how Jim Freeman would laugh.
That laugh has been silenced. Freeman, who served as public relations director at Talladega for 14 years then worked 10 years at the helm of the International Motorsports Hall of Fame, was 73 years old when he passed away Sunday in his beloved Murfreesboro, Tenn., where funeral services were held Wednesday afternoon.
Lord, how we laughed with him through the years.
“Freeman always had a joke or a story,” recalls long-time friend Les Mathison. “And he’d get so worked telling the joke, then he’d start coughing and couldn’t hardly finish.”
“He was outgoing, as friendly as about anybody you could ever meet,” says Grant Lynch, the chairman at Talladega Superspeedway. “His ability to tell jokes was unrivaled. The top two or three I ever met.”
It wasn’t just the jokes. He simply loved telling stories, even if some were embellished. Like stories about infield wildness in the primitive days. Like the chubby Cub Scout in new blue jeans who walked up the 33-degree banking in turn 2 and instead of walking back down at an angle as instructed, he panicked. He sat down. Recalled Freeman, “There were two blue parallel stripes all the way down the track, one for each butt cheek. He burned holes all the way through his jeans and his underwear.”
Lynch remembers a typically elaborate Freeman practical joke. A young Talladega staffer had been issued a company car that was purchased from a local dealership. Freeman finagled things where, unbeknownst to the guy, he got a matching key fob to the car.
When the guy arrived at work, Freeman would sneak around, click the button and flip the trunk lid open. So invested was Freeman in this prank, he’d follow him around town, to lunch and on errands, and zap the trunk open so it wouldn’t be just the Talladega office parking lot where it happened. Because Freeman got the car dealership in on the gag, workers there simply feigned disbelief at this recurring problem and assured the guy there was nothing wrong with his car.
Mathison told me about the April Fool’s Day when Freeman woke up before anyone in his house and set every clock an hour earlier, meaning his wife was dropping off their son at an empty school an hour early. Said Mathison, “He might have slept on the sofa a few days after that one.”
I was fortunate to have known Freeman well before his Talladega days. As a young writer in Chattanooga, I got to know him when he worked in Middle Tennessee’s SID office. When I started covering racing frequently in the 1980s, we renewed the acquaintance then became even closer when I was hired as The Star’s sports editor in 1989.
When I heard the news on Sunday, tears came to my eyes. Then, after a moment, the memories began flooding through my brain. The jokes. The stories. The corny emails he’d always send, the trips together, the relationship we forged. That 110-mph lap in the pace car.
Jim Freeman left me — left us — laughing, not crying. There is no better way to go out.
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