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Ex-SUPR champ facing his toughest foe in ALS
By Todd Turner
DirtonDirt.com managing editor
Rusty Cummings and his son Kyle after a 1996 SUPR victory in Baton Rouge, La.
A few weekends ago at Champion Park Speedway, Kyle Cummings steered his modified race car to victory at the little dirt track near Minden, La., hugging the quarter-mile's inside groove on his way to capturing the checkered flag on another Saturday night.
But for the Cummings clan this racing season, there's no such thing as just another Saturday night victory. Kyle's father Rusty, a former Dirt Late Model racer, was diagnosed April 26 with ALS, the debilitating disorder commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease. | Slideshow
So heading back to his pit stall, the 28-year-old Kyle found his emotions getting the best of him, realizing that his ailing father watched his victory from a golf cart along the track's fencing.
"It wasn't necessarily just winning the race," Kyle said of his misty-eyed reaction, "it was because the way the race was won was typical him ... he was the best person at running around the bottom of the track.
"He's taught me that, and now people say that about me, and that's the way that race was won. Just slow down, stay right around the bottom of the track, and hit your mark every lap — and that's what I did. I can just remember him coaching me as I was coming up driving."
Brenda Cummings, Kyle's mother, saw her husband's obvious pride after Kyle finally climbed from his race car and walked over to the golf cart to greet Rusty, whose deteriorating muscle strength prevents him from walking without assistance.
"His dad was just kind of glowing," Brenda said, choking up at the memory. "I can't even describe it. It's different than how it used to be, but then it isn't. I guess he's just so excited to see his son following his footsteps."
Since Rusty's devastating diagnosis rocked the family, racing has taken a back seat to surviving, coping, living. But for Rusty and Kyle, racing remains the fabric of the relationship they've shared since Kyle was just a boy.
"I got pretty emotional. ... I didn't let everybody else see it, but I did," Kyle said. "I had to stay in the car a little while longer with my helmet on. Because, I mean, it means so much more now to me now for him to be there, and to watch me win. Because I credit most of everything I know about racing to him.
"He taught me what I know, and I'm proud to say that, proud to show him, 'Look, this is what you taught me, and this is what I want to do, and I'm so happy that you taught me this.' And I'm so happy I was raised into this environment of racing and being part of everybody around here."
The 56-year-old Rusty's glory years in Late Models came in the 1980s and '90s, including a 1998 championship on the O'Reilly Southern United Professional Racing circuit. While Kyle's modified and Late Model career blossomed in recent seasons, Rusty raced only occasionally.
"One of the first things he said was, 'I won't be able to race anymore.' That's kind of stuck in my mind," Brenda recalled. "He really wasn't racing any more anyway, but if he had the opportunity, he would get in a car and he would race. But that's kind of strange. That's one of the first things he said: 'I won't be able to race any more.' "
More than back pain
When he turned 56 last September, Rusty Cummings was in strapping good health, staying in shape by jogging up and down the family's 1,500-foot driveway on their 8-acre tract on the eastern edge of Minden. At 6-feet-4, 250 pounds, the blue-eyed, gray-headed driver has long been a calm but hulking presence in the pits at Louisiana dirt tracks. Growing a salt-and-pepper beard as he did on occasion, he could've been a stunt double for Kenny Rogers in the movie "Six Pack."
But Rusty knew something was wrong last fall when his back began hurting. The pain grew worse. The diagnosis of a herniated disc, treatment with injections and eventual surgery never solved issues that made it more and more difficult for him to walk.
Amid the search for answers, Rusty was losing weight along with hand strength, and doctors eventually referred him to a neurologist. It was on April 26 he received the diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a date that lives in infamy for Brenda, Kyle, his older sister Dana, their spouses and four grandchildren.
"It was such a shock," Brenda recalls. "It was an extreme shock because Rusty was a strong man."
While they'd heard of Lou Gehrig's disease, the family had nothing but questions about what to expect from the unexpected.
"What am I up against?" Rusty recalled asking the neurologist. "I know nothing about this. How long will it be before I'm in a wheelchair? She said a few months. How long do I have to live? She said you could have three to five years ... but people live longer. Nobody knows what causes it, and there is no cure for it. ... It was just a nightmare for the first few weeks.
"Thinking about the three- to five-year thing, it just stuck in my head. I had so much more living that I want to do, and you just don't know with this how long you have. ... What this disease does to you by taking your muscles away and stuff, it's a really hard lick.
"I always thought if I ever got cancer or something like that, that I would be one of the stronger ones, that I could take it or something," Rusty continued. "But with this disease, it just does the opposite. It doesn't let you be strong. It takes the muscles away."
A few days after his diagnosis, Rusty sat on the front porch with Kyle's wife Cheree, who is due to deliver their second child, a daughter, in late September. He confided his deepest fears.
"He was just afraid that when the baby got here, he wouldn't be able to hold it, and do the things that he wanted to," Kyle said. "Each day he's going downhill a little bit, but I don't see him getting to that point."
He paused a moment.
"I see it getting to that point ... but just not that soon."
From baseball to racing
Russell Jay Cummings was born Sept. 18, 1954, in the northwest Louisiana town of Minden, but he grew up about 15 miles further east in Gibsland, a rural community of about 1,800 residents in Bienville Parish.
His father drove a truck for a gas company, and his mother was a homemaker. The boy everyone called Rusty remembers watching his older brother Joe at the drag races. Rusty himself dabbled a bit with oval racing as a 10th-grader, getting the chance to hot-lap his brother-in-law's dirt car at Minden's Bayou Raceway.
But during his teenage years, Rusty focused on baseball in summer leagues and with his high school team. When schools in the Deep South began integrating, it appeared the all-white private school Rusty began attending wasn't going have a baseball squad. So halfway through his junior year, he transferred back to the integrated Gibsland-Coleman High School to continue playing.
Although Rusty pitched six victories without a loss during the regular season of his junior year — then shot up another 4 inches and filled out at 220 pounds his senior year — his chance for a baseball career never developed. Gibsland-Coleman didn't field a team his senior season and an arm injury hampered his success.
Rusty was 17 when a girl named Charlotte Gordon, on a whim, set he and Brenda up for a blind date to go to a ballgame in Minden one evening. "And we just kind of dated ever since," Brenda remembers.
After going to trade school to learn welding, Rusty married his high school sweetheart and worked for the city of Minden before landing a job with Brammer Engineering more than 20 years ago. Meanwhile Brenda followed her father into a career as deputy sheriff, starting in the tax division and eventually joining the criminal division as Webster Parish's only patrolwoman.
For Rusty, checking oil and gas wells for Brammer turned out to be the perfect career.
"I had offers to take other jobs, to kind of move up into an office or something like that, or take a crew, but I always turned those down because I always enjoyed doing different things every day," he said. "Going from one well to the other, and you wouldn't never do the same thing every day.
"I could never see myself working at a factory where you looked at the same walls each day, and you had to watch the clock, watch it crawl until 4 or 5 o'clock."
In the mid-1970s, Rusty began racing more seriously, if buying a '56 Chevrolet with a buddy for $25 is taking it more seriously. Rusty laughs at memories of methodically teaching himself the mechanics of cars and racing. "It was quite a few years before I won my first race," he said.
"We cut up a lot of '55, '56 and '57 Chevrolets. I should be beat for doing that," he said, reflecting on automobiles that would be considered showpieces today. "I cut up a '57 two-door hardtop one time, and it just had a little rust in the bottom of the floorboard. That was the good ol' days there when you could go to a junkyard and get one and race it."
Modern-style Dirt Late Models weren't around Louisiana until the early '80s, and Rusty eventually bought an asphalt Late Model car from a driver in Texas, converting it for dirt and steering it to the 1983 championship at Bayou Raceway.
A few years later he bought a used Larry Shaw Race Car chassis from a young, up-and-coming driver from Batesville, Ark., named Billy Moyer. Rusty won frequently at Bullet Raceway in Bastrop and often competed at Boothill Speedway just west of Shreveport with regional standouts like Ronny Adams and Doug Ingalls, who became a three-time SUPR champion.
"They had the newer cars and stuff, and I was just kind of working with what I had, and older motor and all. They were the guys to beat, so when I got to where I could run with them, that was when I knew I had something going," Rusty said.
"One of the turning points, I guess, was when I had a pretty good motor and they had a big race at Boothill. I had Larry Phillips, Billy Moyer, Wayne Brooks and there was about two other hotshots in (a preliminary race), and everybody was saying, 'Man, they're fixing to really wax you.' I was starting on the second row, I think. Anyway, I ran off and left them in the heat race. I can't remember what happened in the feature. I didn't win it. But everyone came up and congratulated me and said, 'You know who you beat in that heat race?' "
Frustrations of the disease
Simple, mundane tasks that most of us take for granted are daily challenges for Rusty as his muscles continue to fall victim to ALS. He's taking Rilutek, a $2,000-per-month drug that has been found to slow some of the disease's symptoms, but its affects are limited.
"If it's leveling off, it's maybe in the last week or so, and he's still going downhill," Brenda said last week. "It may not be as fast, but he's still going downhill every day."
While the use of a walker, electric scooter and golf cart help him maintain a degree of mobility, rituals like showering or standing up from a sitting position are frustrating.
"Frustrating is a good word for it," Rusty said. "Simple things. I'm losing some of my hand strength, and just cleaning my glasses or something like that, or eating has become difficult. Not really difficult, but just I have to change the way I do things because of my hand strength."
Between his most recent doctor visits, he lost 9 more pounds, most of it muscle mass.
"You don't know — from what I've talked to people — exactly what you're up against," Rusty said. "But people have lived with it for years, some have lived with it for years and are in pretty bad shape, even though they're still living. But some people it kind of plateaus and you're able to keep going and maintain some level of getting around pretty good.
"We're just hoping that it says where it is. For the past few weeks, I don't feel much weaker. So maybe that's a good sign."
One day last week, Rusty spent five hours on a riding lawn mower, covering a large portion of the 6 mowable acres on the family property where Brenda has always lived, and where they built their house 28 years ago.
Mowing is among chores his father probably shouldn't do, Kyle said, "but I think for him, it helps him out mentally, because it gives him a little bit of independence that he can still do some things. But then again, the next day he paid for it. He's really tired today."
Kyle and his wife Cheree, along with their 4-year-old son, recently moved to adjoining property so they can be closer to Brayson's grandparents. Dana Haynes, her husband Hank and three children — 17-year-old Coltan, 8-year-old Hollan and 4-year-old Hadley — live nearby, too.
Brenda "has just been an angel after finding out what I've got here," said Rusty, grateful to have such a network of loving family and friends.
"Everybody's kind of gathered around. I'm blessed in that way, for sure. The grandkids, they're here all the time, and keep things jumping. It's something I'm not dealing with alone. I've got plenty to keep me busy, so that's a blessing there with those grandkids.
"People that I haven't seen in years are dropping by. The more company I have, the better."
Roxy Dancy, former owner of Boothill Speedway and the former SUPR tour director, can't imagine his long-time friend not wanting to enjoy a visit from anyone, no matter what he's facing.
"You've always heard about these people, 'Oh, he doesn't know a stranger.' That was always him," said Dancy, who is among a group of several couples with the Cummings that go on camping trips. "In our travels, we'll go places and he'll just talk to anybody, and talk to them with the ease and comfort of someone he's known for 20 years. ... I promise you, I've been around him a lot the last few years, and he knows no strangers."
Added Kyle: "A lot of people will say, 'We don't want to call, and we don't want to bother him, and we don't want to hound him about everything.' But that's not him. He's the type person, he wants you to come. He wants you to come by and visit. That's his way of passing the time is for him to have visitors and have company to come see him. Because Dad's been the type person, he very seldom took off work, and when he was diagnosed with this, that was the end of work ... he's been at home and he's never been a homebody."
The helping hands in recent months have been gratifying, Brenda said.
"You just cannot imagine how good (family members) have been, and the friends, everybody has just been so good," she said. "It's just absolutely amazing how good friends have been. They've been coming to see us. Rusty, for a while, he didn't want to be left alone, and friends and family would spend the night and stay in the other bedroom. He just didn't want to be left alone. The more he was left alone, the more he thought about what was fixing to happen, and what it would bring — or what it wouldn't bring."
Rusty and Brenda are grateful that Rusty's health crisis hasn't been accompanied by a financial crisis. Insurance, healthy retirement plans and unparalleled generosity from Brammer Engineering, where Rusty worked more than 21 years, cushioned the blow. Brammer, whose president has visited several times, extended Rusty's disability benefits beyond what's required, plus added a lucrative retirement bonus.
"We just love them immensely," Brenda said.
Still, Rusty had planned on working a few more years at Brammer and continuing his bail-bond business before joining Brenda in retirement. So being at home full time has been an adjustment for the man who boasts he never took a single sick day with Brammer.
"Since I was diagnosed," Rusty said, "every day is a sick day."
Father and son racers
It wasn't long before Brenda Cummings knew that not only had she married a dirt track racer, but she'd given birth to one, too. As a 10-year-old, Kyle would soak in everything at the race shop and the racetrack, she remembers.
"Everything he watched his Daddy do, he might've just been standing there in the background watching, but he was taking it in," Brenda said. "There's a lot of things that Kyle can't do, but he can drive a race car. You can put him in a piece of junk and he can drive it, just about."
In the late '90s, he put his 14-year-old son into his backup Late Model. While Rusty's car was No. B1 (the "B" for Brenda), Kyle's car was No. 31, in part so it would be easily changed to Rusty's number with well-placed vertical duct tape.
Kyle eventually went back to the modified division, developing into a successful racer and once reeling off a record-setting nine straight victories at Champion Park.
The younger Cummings returned to the Late Model division in a Raymond Childress-owned car in 2007, making his division debut at the Texas Motor Speedway dirt track in a SUPR event, outrunning his father.
After Kyle's 17th-to-eighth run in his Late Model debut for Childress, Rusty was proud of Kyle, but he remembered some trying times when father and son raced together years earlier.
"The driving might be hereditary, but the working on (race cars) isn't," Rusty said after that 2007 race. "I never could get him to work on it when he was at the house. I had to help him out."
Nearby in the pits at the Fort Worth track, Kyle laughed when he heard his father's words. "Daddy used to put me through hell. We had our feuds, but I tell you that man has taught me just about everything I know."
Kyle, who split with Childress last fall and has made only a few Late Model starts since, has five career SUPR victories, three fewer than his father, who weaned himself off racing the past 10 seasons after a long career.
Rusty has an attic full of trophies from a career that included a 20-victory season. But his 1998 championship SUPR season ranks among of his best. Three of his four series victories came in the first 10 races as he built a comfortable points lead before holding off Eddie Taylor's last-ditch challenge in the final race.
Among his most dramatic victories came at Cowtown Speedway in Kennedale, Texas, when he took a provisional starting spot and rallied from the 11th row. A Louisiana racing buddy who had moved to the Carolinas, Dennis Fiebel, helped him with some newfangled, adjustable Ohlins Shocks. Rusty boasts he was the first Dirt Late Model racer to use Ohlins.
"They were a little bit advanced for the normal dirt racer back then," said Fiebel, who still works with NASCAR and ARCA teams as a shock consultant. "He started dead last and won the race, and from then on, he took a little more interest, you might say, in how the shocks really worked."
Fiebel wasn't the only friend to lend Rusty a hand during that special season. Slick Jenkins served as a dedicated crew member. Engine builder Clyde Cook of Oakdale, La., frequently met Rusty at the halfway point of a three-hour drive to exchange parts or pick up a motor that needed freshening. Charlie Brown of Brown's Trucking loaned a motor that powered Rusty's car late in the season. And Rusty was able to give his own car a midseason rest when he briefly drove a car owned by Roy Lindsay, guiding the No. L51 to victory at Battleground Speedway in Houston, Texas on June 20.
After his championship, Rusty said something in a '98 interview that rings true today.
"You find out who your friends are when you're down. You also find out who your friends are when you're up."
A short bucket list
Brenda knows her husband would dearly love to climb onto his Harley Road King and enjoy a long motorcycle ride, but that's beyond his capability for now.
"Certain things just break his heart," Brenda said. "And that's one of them ... racing and motorcycles."
The 2007 movie "The Bucket List" popularized people coming up with all the things they want to do, places they want to see and things they want to accomplish in their lives, but Rusty says he isn't necessarily interested in such a compilation.
He obviously still wants to follow Kyle's racing, and he's proud of grandson Coltan's standout performances as wide receiver for Minden High School, showing visitors the framed photo of a last-second, game-winning touchdown catch.
Rusty did accelerate one lingering project by self-publishing a novel — "For a Million Summers," a boy-meets-girl love story that sheds light on his upbringing — that he'd first started eight years ago but had never found a publisher.
Otherwise, he's focusing on what's typical for a people-person. People, of course.
"I'm kind of satisfied with being close to family and friends right now," Rusty said. "There's a lot of places I'd like to see and do. I was thinking of something the other day. ... I know there's a lot of things I wanted to do that I won't get to do. Right now, I don't really worry about that, because we have everyone here to rally around."
A great place to enjoy people is the local dirt track. Among Rusty's visits to Champion Park Speedway was for a SUPR Late Model event earlier this season. Drivers Bubba Mullins and former SUPR champion Rob Litton were among many who came by to speak.
"You could tell by their gestures that they wanted to speak to me and all that ... that was good," Rusty said. "It was good to see some of the old guys that would come up and speak to me, and spend time with me. That meant a lot there."
Not everyone in the racing community had heard about Rusty's plight.
"When they had the last SUPR race out there, everybody really realized that he does have something, that he's not doing that good," Kyle said. "Because when we go to the races, he stays in the golf cart most of the time. He can't get in and out of the bleachers."
On Saturday at Champion Park, those who don't know about Rusty, or about Lou Gehrig's disease, can learn more by being part of the Race to Erase ALS, which the night's SUPR event has been dubbed. Rusty's daughter Dana has helped organize the event as a fund-raiser for the ALS Foundation. Most of the night's proceeds will go to the organization funding clinical trials and research projects to battle the disorder.
Among fund-raisers are $10 raffle tickets for a package to November's NASCAR racing at Texas Motor Speedway in Fort Worth, including a two-night hotel stay and three-day racing tickets donated by Cameron and Michelle Branch.
Although Kyle doesn't have a current Late Model ride, he'll drive Nicholas Brown's backup car for the team owned by Rusty's long-time supporter, Charlie Brown of Hodge, La. Brown's Trucking also boosted the purse with extra money. The winner receives $3,000 and every feature starter at least $500.
It's certain to be a special night as the racing community lifts up one of its own, someone going through the most difficult of times.
"There's gotta be so many ups and downs — more downs — than you and I will never understand," said Roxy Dancy, Rusty's long-time friend. "We can sit here and say all the things you're supposed to say, 'I know how you feel, I know what you're going through' — no, we don't. We have no idea until someone tells that (bad news) to you."
Rusty does his best to offset the downs with ups. Enjoying time with four grandchildren. Riding the lawn mower for a productive afternoon. Putting the finishing touches on the cover of his novel. Sitting in the garage watching Kyle work on his race car. And most especially, keeping a vigil of hope.
"As of right now, I just hope I can maintain what I've got, and hope I can keep going how I am right now at least," Rusty said. "Another scary thing is not knowing what's down the road, and how close it's going to get here. ... It's just kind of frightening what the future holds, but you just have to go day-by-day with it."
