Along Florida's muddy mile, buggy racers pursue tradition

NAPLES, Fla. -- Gator hunts and beach sleepovers? Vintage Florida. High-rise condos and society galas? That's the modern Sunshine State.

Dan Hoolihan, 41, has one foot in both worlds. By day, he's a fine-art installer. At night, he works in a swank restaurant overlooking the Gulf of Mexico in this growing resort city.

But for a few weekends each year, Hoolihan stretches a Confederate flag T-shirt over his ample belly, wraps a Confederate flag bandanna on his thinning hair, and cooks enough food to feed General Robert E. Lee's army.

Then he invites 40 or 50 of his closest friends and family members to sit atop three stories of scaffolding on a tow trailer -- a makeshift set of bleachers-on-wheels dubbed the "Redneck Stadium" -- to watch a one-of-a-kind motor sport few tourists can truly appreciate.

It's called swamp buggy racing, a fuel-powered homage to the days when hunters prepared for the start of the fall season by showing off their latest buggies, motorized contraptions with balloon tires and elevated suspensions built to maneuver into the most remote recesses of the Everglades.

Seventy years later, southwest Florida hunters continue to explore what remains of the once-endless River of Grass with swamp buggies. Since 1949, those pioneers and their descendants -- along with a few northern interlopers -- have carried on the tradition with state-of-the-art racing buggies that can cost more than $60,000.

"The motors in some of these buggies cost as much as a Mercedes-Benz," said Darryl Massey, 42, a former racer who plots his comeback in a machine shop behind his home each night after work. Racers in seven classes, from four-cylinder jeeps to modified high-performance monsters with 1,000-horsepower engines and names such as "High-Tech Redneck," encircle a bog known as the Mile of Mud, leaving behind 30-foot wakes of white foam as thick as smoke. Top performers can exceed 90 miles per hour.

Winners can earn a few thousand dollars in prize money, and the best racers have sponsors ranging from national beer companies to local auto-parts stores. After early exposure on ABC's "Wide World of Sports," the races flirted with relative fame several years ago via broadcasts on TNN, a now-defunct cable network.

Tuffy Garrett, 61, a telephone repairman from central Virginia, was so impressed by those telecasts he convinced his wife to drive more than 2,000 miles round trip in their recreational vehicle on race weekends.

A NASCAR fan, he credits the swamp buggy races with allowing drivers to rely on their own wits in the garage. On these tracks, you won't find any rules about restrictor plates, air-fuel mixtures, or other such nonsense.

"This is the last frontier [of racing]," Garrett said. "The rules are looser. It's one of the last sports left in the automotive field in which you can use your own ingenuity."

The sport isn't just for dyed-in-the-wool Southerners, attracting gearheads of all stripes.

Anthony Scott, 41, a drywall stucco contractor, learned about swamp buggy racing when he moved to Naples a decade ago. His next-door neighbor was once married to Eddie Chesser, one of the sport's top drivers.

Scott, who worked on stock-car driver Dick Trickle's pit crew while living in Chicago, joined Chesser and spent six years as his crew chief before striking out on his own in 2001. Despite a succession of high finishes, he still struggles to live down his outsider status.

On a spectacularly sunny mid-January day, the buggy races clung hard to their small-town roots. Spectators gorged on kettle corn, sweet tea, turkey legs, and boiled peanuts. Between races, the public address announcer pitched raffle tickets to benefit the nearby new high school being built in what used to be the swamp. While the races' place in Naples history is secure, its future is less so. Efforts to expand the sport in Georgia and Florida, including a modern track near Melbourne on the state's east coast, fizzled out.

Sprawling growth in Naples and surrounding Collier County earned the region the distinction of the second-fastest growing metropolitan area in the country, second only to Las Vegas, after the 2000 Census.

That growth forced race organizers to move once before, in the mid-1980s. A large golf course community is under development on the fringes of its present home at the Florida Sports Park. And while the race's nonprofit board assures supporters that a long-term lease will keep the event in Naples, others aren't so sure.

"Soon this is going to be gone," said Massey. "The condos are going to eat it up. The county or someone private should keep the sport alive."