JohnHKart
03-07-04, 08:20 AM
Was very surprised to get up Saturday afternoon and see Schuey given a Column One article on the front page of the news section of the LA Times. I've been getting this paper for 24 years and have never seen racing or a racer given such treatment. Here is the article, can't link because you have to register.
John
From the LA Times, March 6th, 2004:
COLUMN ONE
Racing From Fame at 200 MPH
Formula One legend Michael Schumacher is the highest-paid athlete ever. But he prefers to hide his celebrity safely underneath his helmet.
By Dan Neil, Times Staff Writer
IMOLA, Italy — He is pound for pound perhaps the most famous athlete since Muhammad Ali and the highest paid in history. From Singapore to St. Petersburg, he cannot show his mandible-intensive face with- out being mobbed on sight. At 35 years old, he is the reigning six-time world champion of the world's biggest televised sport.
What's that name again?
Michael Schumacher drives a red Ferrari in Formula One racing. Formula One, or grand prix, racing has its roots in the European road racing of the early 20th century; the "formula" refers to the specifications each car must meet. The single-seat race cars are the most extreme machines on four wheels, capable of accelerating from zero to 100 mph and back to zero in less than six seconds — less time than it takes to read this sentence.
No one has ever been better at driving an F1 car than the German-born Schumacher — though the violent, wrenching, low-altitude aerobatics of an F1 car can barely be called driving. There are only 20 cars on the starting grid of a typical F1 race. In this ruthless meritocracy, brilliant drivers come and go, sometimes on a weekly basis. Schumacher has been at it for 13 years.
Last year, Schumacher surpassed the legendary Juan Manuel Fangio, whose five-championship record, set in 1957, was once considered unbreakable, like Roger Maris' 61-home-run season.
All of that wouldn't get Schumacher a cup of coffee in the United States. Formula One — like soccer — is a world sport, and Americans typically don't pay much attention.
"That's lucky indeed," Schumacher says. His wife and kids like to visit friends in Texas, where they ride quarter horses. Schumacher also has been spotted at ski resorts in the Rockies. "When you are in Europe most of the time, people recognize you and watch," he says. "In America that happens very rarely. And I enjoy that very much."
When he starts in the Australian Grand Prix on Sunday — tonight our time — he will again be the odds-on favorite to win the world championship, at an age when most Formula One drivers are shuffling off to Monaco. Every time he touches a wheel he adds to his fame.
The trouble is, Schumacher doesn't like being famous — actually, to read him a little closer, it's fair to conclude some part of him hates it. As the Man becomes the Legend, the hardest part of his job may not be riding the flame tip of his Ferrari at 220 mph but carrying the gathering weight of his own achievements. And yet Schumacher is driving on.
He looks like a young, demitasse-size John F. Kerry. Schumacher stands about 5 feet, 8 inches, and weighs 160 pounds, deep-chested like a Labrador.
By common agreement F1's fittest man, he works out obsessively, combining weight training, cycling and soccer in daily routines that take many hours. His handshake is soft-skinned but hard-muscled and, like his driving, precisely executed.
During a rare interview in the lounge of his personal gym — a tractor-trailer that follows him to all the racetracks — Schumacher is relaxed and cordial but obviously wary. He acknowledges that he is "very reserved and very careful, until I trust, which takes awhile."
"He's quite a shy man in normal life," says Sir Jackie Stewart, himself a three-time F1 world champion and one of the most recognizable figures in the sport. "He's not pedantic about being a celebrity."
"That was never, when I arrived in Formula One, what I was looking for," Schumacher says, his voice quiet, his English exact.
"It was fine when I was in sports cars," he says, referring to a less rarefied form of European road racing. "It was no problem when people recognized me. In fact, it was a nice conversation. You could be proud of what you do. But coming to Formula One, you get into the land where it's not fun to talk about what you do."
"My personal life is all about finding privacy," he says.
When it comes to the burdens of fame, even golfer Tiger Woods sympathizes.
"I'm not in the same situation that Schumacher is in," Woods said during an event in San Diego before the recent Buick Open. "He is much more globally recognized than I am. Formula One is the most-watched sporting event in the world, so a lot of eyes are always on him all over the world. Not a whole lot of eyes are on me playing golf."
Woods is right. On any given race weekend during the season, 350 million or so souls in 150 countries tune in, making Formula One the most-watched televised sporting series. Only the summer Olympics and soccer's World Cup have higher viewership, and they happen only once every four years. By comparison, NASCAR's biggest race — last month's Daytona 500 — pulled in about 18 million viewers; typically, only about 8 million watch that series' races.
Indeed, measured in cubic dollars, F1 dwarfs NASCAR. A well-heeled NASCAR team has an annual operating budget of about $15 million. Although the finances of F1 teams are well-kept secrets, it is widely estimated that the McLaren and Williams-BMW F1 teams spend 10 times that and more. Ferrari is thought to be in another league, perhaps spending as much as $400 million.
Championships are won by accumulating points in races: 10 points for first, eight for second and so on. Money is made through the sale of media rights, merchandise, track fees and sponsorships. Although the dimensions of the finances are unpublished, it is estimated that Formula One pulls in as much as $10 billion annually.
Sitting Buddha-like atop this mountain of money is Schumacher. He is the highest- salaried athlete in the world — $35 million a year, by Forbes magazine's estimation. Including endorsements and other income, Schumacher earned $75 million in 2003, just behind golfer Woods, at $78 million.
Not only is Schumacher the sport's biggest star, but he drives for its most fabled team. Ferrari has been in Formula One from the beginning, 54 years. According to legend, founder Enzo Ferrari sold his famous sports cars for the street only as a way to finance victory at the track. The small company — based in Maranello, Italy, and now owned by automotive giant Fiat — has dominated the sport for decades. Other teams may be fast, but the poetry, the romance, of F1 racing belongs to Ferrari.
Did Schumacher ever wonder what his life would have been like had he not found himself in the red cars?
"For sure, it would have been easier in terms of fame," he says. "But I would have lost all the good times I got. I know the people there in F1, the team bosses and so on, and I think that nowhere else, first of all, would I have become as successful as I am, and have such a good time as I did."
As it is, Schumacher is not only the face of Formula One but also its shoulders.
"He's the center of this world," says his media liaison, Sabine Kehm, a former reporter for German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. "The whole of F1 concentrates around him. It works through him. Michael carries this sport."
Schumacher did not arrive at the top by grace alone. He has twice rammed opponents in do-or-die efforts to win world championships. European media have been fond of painting him in various shades of Teutonic villainy, as soulless cyborg and heartless Hun. And arrogant. The fact that the young German was reluctant to speak Italian summoned awful passions among the tifosi, Ferrari's rabid fans.
Schumacher says he was simply afraid of making a mistake in the language.
"The Italians are very proud of themselves," he says. "It was some trouble for some time until they understood me and I understood them."
Of course, now that Schumacher has brought four world championships home to Maranello, all is forgiven.
He has acknowledged feeling misunderstood but refuses to indulge in image management.
"I was never comfortable giving the camera what it wanted," he says. "I was always happy to give it what I am."
"He's a very warm human being," says Ross Brawn, the Ferrari team's technical director, who has worked with Schumacher for more than a decade. "People who don't know him very well think he's just an archetypal German. He's very caring, especially about the team. The team is family."
Indeed, Schumacher craves family. His pauper-prince beginnings are well-known to Formula One followers. His father, Rolf, a Cologne bricklayer, gave him his first ride when he was 4 years old — a pedal kart that Rolf later fitted with an old moped engine. Michael's father and mother, Elizabeth, took jobs at a go-kart track in nearby Kerpen, where Michael and later his brother Ralf could practice and race (Ralf also races in Formula One, for the Williams-BMW team, based in England).
Michael quickly progressed through lower classes of open-wheel racing and in 1989 signed with a team in Formula 3, one of formula racing's minor leagues. When at the end of the season Michael received a big bonus, he gave his father a suitcase filled with cash.
In a glamorous realm in which rich young drivers can bed them and shed them at will, he married early, at 26, and settled down with his wife, Corinna, to the quiet life of a German gentleman farmer. The couple and their two children live on a spread near Lake Geneva (they are building a much larger house on the lakeshore now), where they keep horses, dogs and other animals.
Schumacher's love of family and the media's fascination with him collided last year, when his mother died hours before the start of the San Marino Grand Prix. The Schumacher brothers rushed to Germany. They were followed from the airport into the hospital's underground parking deck by harassing paparazzi. The morning of the race, the F1 press corps gathered around the Ferrari compound, waiting to catch a glimpse of the grieving driver. How was he taking it? Would he still be fast?
Later, Schumacher stood on the winner's rostrum while the German national anthem — always a lugubrious tune — played over the loudspeakers. Iron-jawed, blinking away tears, he seemed to have aged 20 years in a day. The heart he was alleged not to have was broken.
After such a day, it is easy to imagine Schumacher wanting to be alone, Garbo-style. As the new season begins, a new kind of fascination descends around him. Ferrari's bosses have said that Schumacher can drive for the legendary Italian team as long as he likes (his contract runs through 2006).
But having achieved the impossible, rewritten the record books and carted off unspeakable sums of cash to his chalet in Switzerland, he would seem to be fresh out of challenges. Why doesn't he quit?
Schumacher's answer, offered often and with evident sincerity, satisfies no one: "I still enjoy the challenge of driving the car. As long as it's fun and I am competitive, I have no reason to leave."
It has been 13 years since he joined what is known in racing circles as the F1 circus — one of the longest careers in the history of the sport. He has won 70 grand prix races, more than any other driver. Perhaps he has fallen in love with winning.
"After all this time, still, he's the guy on the rostrum who is most excited," says Brawn, the Ferrari team's technical director, "more than the other guys, who should be over the moon."
Or maybe Schumacher can't bring himself to give up the car. He has no interest in other kinds of racing.
"I like precise cars," he says. "I don't like these heavy things. They are so slow, and I think they are going too slow for me. I try always to do more than they can do."
The consensus around Schumacher seems to be that he races not for fame and fortune but in spite of it.
"You hear people talk about the records," Brawn says. "They talk about the money, but I know that if this were a Sunday afternoon kart race with no one around, he would still be racing."
John
From the LA Times, March 6th, 2004:
COLUMN ONE
Racing From Fame at 200 MPH
Formula One legend Michael Schumacher is the highest-paid athlete ever. But he prefers to hide his celebrity safely underneath his helmet.
By Dan Neil, Times Staff Writer
IMOLA, Italy — He is pound for pound perhaps the most famous athlete since Muhammad Ali and the highest paid in history. From Singapore to St. Petersburg, he cannot show his mandible-intensive face with- out being mobbed on sight. At 35 years old, he is the reigning six-time world champion of the world's biggest televised sport.
What's that name again?
Michael Schumacher drives a red Ferrari in Formula One racing. Formula One, or grand prix, racing has its roots in the European road racing of the early 20th century; the "formula" refers to the specifications each car must meet. The single-seat race cars are the most extreme machines on four wheels, capable of accelerating from zero to 100 mph and back to zero in less than six seconds — less time than it takes to read this sentence.
No one has ever been better at driving an F1 car than the German-born Schumacher — though the violent, wrenching, low-altitude aerobatics of an F1 car can barely be called driving. There are only 20 cars on the starting grid of a typical F1 race. In this ruthless meritocracy, brilliant drivers come and go, sometimes on a weekly basis. Schumacher has been at it for 13 years.
Last year, Schumacher surpassed the legendary Juan Manuel Fangio, whose five-championship record, set in 1957, was once considered unbreakable, like Roger Maris' 61-home-run season.
All of that wouldn't get Schumacher a cup of coffee in the United States. Formula One — like soccer — is a world sport, and Americans typically don't pay much attention.
"That's lucky indeed," Schumacher says. His wife and kids like to visit friends in Texas, where they ride quarter horses. Schumacher also has been spotted at ski resorts in the Rockies. "When you are in Europe most of the time, people recognize you and watch," he says. "In America that happens very rarely. And I enjoy that very much."
When he starts in the Australian Grand Prix on Sunday — tonight our time — he will again be the odds-on favorite to win the world championship, at an age when most Formula One drivers are shuffling off to Monaco. Every time he touches a wheel he adds to his fame.
The trouble is, Schumacher doesn't like being famous — actually, to read him a little closer, it's fair to conclude some part of him hates it. As the Man becomes the Legend, the hardest part of his job may not be riding the flame tip of his Ferrari at 220 mph but carrying the gathering weight of his own achievements. And yet Schumacher is driving on.
He looks like a young, demitasse-size John F. Kerry. Schumacher stands about 5 feet, 8 inches, and weighs 160 pounds, deep-chested like a Labrador.
By common agreement F1's fittest man, he works out obsessively, combining weight training, cycling and soccer in daily routines that take many hours. His handshake is soft-skinned but hard-muscled and, like his driving, precisely executed.
During a rare interview in the lounge of his personal gym — a tractor-trailer that follows him to all the racetracks — Schumacher is relaxed and cordial but obviously wary. He acknowledges that he is "very reserved and very careful, until I trust, which takes awhile."
"He's quite a shy man in normal life," says Sir Jackie Stewart, himself a three-time F1 world champion and one of the most recognizable figures in the sport. "He's not pedantic about being a celebrity."
"That was never, when I arrived in Formula One, what I was looking for," Schumacher says, his voice quiet, his English exact.
"It was fine when I was in sports cars," he says, referring to a less rarefied form of European road racing. "It was no problem when people recognized me. In fact, it was a nice conversation. You could be proud of what you do. But coming to Formula One, you get into the land where it's not fun to talk about what you do."
"My personal life is all about finding privacy," he says.
When it comes to the burdens of fame, even golfer Tiger Woods sympathizes.
"I'm not in the same situation that Schumacher is in," Woods said during an event in San Diego before the recent Buick Open. "He is much more globally recognized than I am. Formula One is the most-watched sporting event in the world, so a lot of eyes are always on him all over the world. Not a whole lot of eyes are on me playing golf."
Woods is right. On any given race weekend during the season, 350 million or so souls in 150 countries tune in, making Formula One the most-watched televised sporting series. Only the summer Olympics and soccer's World Cup have higher viewership, and they happen only once every four years. By comparison, NASCAR's biggest race — last month's Daytona 500 — pulled in about 18 million viewers; typically, only about 8 million watch that series' races.
Indeed, measured in cubic dollars, F1 dwarfs NASCAR. A well-heeled NASCAR team has an annual operating budget of about $15 million. Although the finances of F1 teams are well-kept secrets, it is widely estimated that the McLaren and Williams-BMW F1 teams spend 10 times that and more. Ferrari is thought to be in another league, perhaps spending as much as $400 million.
Championships are won by accumulating points in races: 10 points for first, eight for second and so on. Money is made through the sale of media rights, merchandise, track fees and sponsorships. Although the dimensions of the finances are unpublished, it is estimated that Formula One pulls in as much as $10 billion annually.
Sitting Buddha-like atop this mountain of money is Schumacher. He is the highest- salaried athlete in the world — $35 million a year, by Forbes magazine's estimation. Including endorsements and other income, Schumacher earned $75 million in 2003, just behind golfer Woods, at $78 million.
Not only is Schumacher the sport's biggest star, but he drives for its most fabled team. Ferrari has been in Formula One from the beginning, 54 years. According to legend, founder Enzo Ferrari sold his famous sports cars for the street only as a way to finance victory at the track. The small company — based in Maranello, Italy, and now owned by automotive giant Fiat — has dominated the sport for decades. Other teams may be fast, but the poetry, the romance, of F1 racing belongs to Ferrari.
Did Schumacher ever wonder what his life would have been like had he not found himself in the red cars?
"For sure, it would have been easier in terms of fame," he says. "But I would have lost all the good times I got. I know the people there in F1, the team bosses and so on, and I think that nowhere else, first of all, would I have become as successful as I am, and have such a good time as I did."
As it is, Schumacher is not only the face of Formula One but also its shoulders.
"He's the center of this world," says his media liaison, Sabine Kehm, a former reporter for German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. "The whole of F1 concentrates around him. It works through him. Michael carries this sport."
Schumacher did not arrive at the top by grace alone. He has twice rammed opponents in do-or-die efforts to win world championships. European media have been fond of painting him in various shades of Teutonic villainy, as soulless cyborg and heartless Hun. And arrogant. The fact that the young German was reluctant to speak Italian summoned awful passions among the tifosi, Ferrari's rabid fans.
Schumacher says he was simply afraid of making a mistake in the language.
"The Italians are very proud of themselves," he says. "It was some trouble for some time until they understood me and I understood them."
Of course, now that Schumacher has brought four world championships home to Maranello, all is forgiven.
He has acknowledged feeling misunderstood but refuses to indulge in image management.
"I was never comfortable giving the camera what it wanted," he says. "I was always happy to give it what I am."
"He's a very warm human being," says Ross Brawn, the Ferrari team's technical director, who has worked with Schumacher for more than a decade. "People who don't know him very well think he's just an archetypal German. He's very caring, especially about the team. The team is family."
Indeed, Schumacher craves family. His pauper-prince beginnings are well-known to Formula One followers. His father, Rolf, a Cologne bricklayer, gave him his first ride when he was 4 years old — a pedal kart that Rolf later fitted with an old moped engine. Michael's father and mother, Elizabeth, took jobs at a go-kart track in nearby Kerpen, where Michael and later his brother Ralf could practice and race (Ralf also races in Formula One, for the Williams-BMW team, based in England).
Michael quickly progressed through lower classes of open-wheel racing and in 1989 signed with a team in Formula 3, one of formula racing's minor leagues. When at the end of the season Michael received a big bonus, he gave his father a suitcase filled with cash.
In a glamorous realm in which rich young drivers can bed them and shed them at will, he married early, at 26, and settled down with his wife, Corinna, to the quiet life of a German gentleman farmer. The couple and their two children live on a spread near Lake Geneva (they are building a much larger house on the lakeshore now), where they keep horses, dogs and other animals.
Schumacher's love of family and the media's fascination with him collided last year, when his mother died hours before the start of the San Marino Grand Prix. The Schumacher brothers rushed to Germany. They were followed from the airport into the hospital's underground parking deck by harassing paparazzi. The morning of the race, the F1 press corps gathered around the Ferrari compound, waiting to catch a glimpse of the grieving driver. How was he taking it? Would he still be fast?
Later, Schumacher stood on the winner's rostrum while the German national anthem — always a lugubrious tune — played over the loudspeakers. Iron-jawed, blinking away tears, he seemed to have aged 20 years in a day. The heart he was alleged not to have was broken.
After such a day, it is easy to imagine Schumacher wanting to be alone, Garbo-style. As the new season begins, a new kind of fascination descends around him. Ferrari's bosses have said that Schumacher can drive for the legendary Italian team as long as he likes (his contract runs through 2006).
But having achieved the impossible, rewritten the record books and carted off unspeakable sums of cash to his chalet in Switzerland, he would seem to be fresh out of challenges. Why doesn't he quit?
Schumacher's answer, offered often and with evident sincerity, satisfies no one: "I still enjoy the challenge of driving the car. As long as it's fun and I am competitive, I have no reason to leave."
It has been 13 years since he joined what is known in racing circles as the F1 circus — one of the longest careers in the history of the sport. He has won 70 grand prix races, more than any other driver. Perhaps he has fallen in love with winning.
"After all this time, still, he's the guy on the rostrum who is most excited," says Brawn, the Ferrari team's technical director, "more than the other guys, who should be over the moon."
Or maybe Schumacher can't bring himself to give up the car. He has no interest in other kinds of racing.
"I like precise cars," he says. "I don't like these heavy things. They are so slow, and I think they are going too slow for me. I try always to do more than they can do."
The consensus around Schumacher seems to be that he races not for fame and fortune but in spite of it.
"You hear people talk about the records," Brawn says. "They talk about the money, but I know that if this were a Sunday afternoon kart race with no one around, he would still be racing."