Murder On the Last Turn

Mickey Thompson was a renowned race-car driver and promoter. Mike Goodwin was the brash, egocentric creator of motocross. They became business partners. Then all hell broke loose.

Comments (0) By Paul Ciotti Wednesday, Oct 18 2006

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While such competitiveness (if not recklessness) made Thompson a dominant force in off-road racing, it also “pissed off, alienated and offended many people,” said Sal Fish, president of Score International, a sanctioning body for off-road races, shortly after Thompson’s death. “In his negotiations, Mickey got the job done, but in getting it done, he left a lot of carnage around. Mickey was the kind of guy who would pound on you and pound on you till he won.” You could spend all day negotiating with him, and then, by 10 p.m., when everyone would be exhausted, “Mickey would say, ‘We’re going to settle it right now. Let’s do it. Let’s do it right now.’ And 99 percent of the time,” said Fish, “the people would fold. I’d put him up against any graduate of Harvard, Yale or MIT, and Mickey would consume him. He was a street fighter.”

Thompson was so incredibly competitive that when he couldn’t find an even match, he’d challenge people to competitions he knew he couldn’t win: tennis, badminton, bowling. He’d challenge kids to races in swimming pools. “If you were flicking peanuts,” his son Danny Thompson once said, “he wanted to win that too.”

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With Thompson, the term “Fightin’ Irish” wasn’t just a football metaphor. Once when he was still a teen, five kids in a car shouted obscenities at him. He jumped in his car, ran them off the road, knocked out two and scared off the others. On another occasion, a former concessionaire said, Thompson punched out a security guard who ventured one word too many about his wife. “I wouldn’t want to get in a fight with him,” said former Coliseum general manager Jim Hardy. “You wouldn’t beat him on points.”

On the other hand, says Fish, “Once you had a deal, Mickey kept his word. If he said you were going to get [paid a certain amount], you would get it and you would get it on time — no hanky-panky, no ‘Can you wait 20 days?,’ no ‘Can you take it on installment?’ But when you negotiated, you better get what you wanted, because what you got was what you agreed on.”

“I really liked him,” said another former Coliseum general manager, Joel Ralph. “He was a very imaginative guy. He was enthusiastic, exciting. He wasn’t afraid to take a chance.” And it wasn’t just Thompson himself. Both he and his second wife, Trudy, were warm, outgoing people who would attend any social event, even a retirement affair for an accountant. “They didn’t just pop in and shake your hand either,” Ralph said. “They would stay and talk. He would talk to the maintenance guy. Even the guy who handles the gate came to his funeral.”

It was obvious to everyone who saw them together that Mickey adored Trudy Feller. She was a Jewish kid from the Bronx who came out West and got a job as secretary to the publisher of Hot Rodmagazine, where the first thing they told her was, “Here’s your desk, here’s your typewriter, and whatever you do don’t date Mickey Thompson.” She was feminine, petite and very engaging, and before she quite knew what happened she was married to him.

Thompson didn’t just adore Trudy. He depended on her. She protected him from himself. He was a wild man. She was a systems person who made everyone feel a part of the plan. She wrote the checks. Mickey never made a decision without running it by her first. “She was his bullshit detector, his eyes and ears,” says Thompson’s attorney, Phil Bartenetti. “She kept him grounded.”

In 1984, Trudy had orthoscopic surgery for a problem with her knee. Her doctors said there was a good chance she might end up in a wheelchair or lose her leg altogether. For Mickey, that was the last straw. “That’s it,” he said. “I’m going to spend more time with Trudy.”

The problem was what to do with his business. Ever since Thompson quit racing himself (Trudy told him she’d divorce him if he entered another off-road Baja race), he’d been putting on races in stadiums with pickup trucks and Baja buggies, much as Goodwin had been doing with motorcycles. “He took a hunk of Baja and put it in [a stadium],” Danny Thompson said at the time. “He would lay down 1,100 sheets of plywood to protect the field and cover that with 25 million pounds of dirt.” Then, to keep the spectators from being bored, he ran off something like 18 off-road truck and buggy races in three hours.

But even though the shows ran like clockwork, they still didn’t make any money. Sometimes, Thompson lost hundreds of thousands in a single night. It wasn’t until 1984 (and the cumulative loss of $3 million) that Thompson’s races began to break even. That was also the time when he learned that Trudy might never walk again. “All I could think of was, the heck with everything,” Thompson would later say in a deposition. “I just got to take care of her. I didn’t know what I was going to do. Then the idea came up to merge the companies. I would get paid a good salary and I wouldn’t have to work.”