RSKNOTTS.COM

You can sample some of Knotts' magazine stories by clicking on the links provided here. The text of one of his Sports Illustrated pieces, not available online, also is below.

If you have trouble connecting with a link, please send him an email so he can correct the problem.

Many thanks!

You drive down the long, narrow, flat road that's clotted with tire-crushed clumps of soil blown off the farms and for a long time you see nothing. Only acres of lush Royal Palm nurseries mixed among more acres of sandy fields that yield potatoes and corn.

This looks like a tropical version of Illinois.

And you can smell the musty, acrid aroma of South Florida farmland as you keep driving and, abruptly, there it is. An unexpected juxtaposition of urban modern and rural traditional, a towering auto-racing track rising amid the crops of Homestead. And the weird, striking illogic of it all makes you wonder how anyone ever imagined people would trundle to the deserted tip of this peninsula for anything, much less to watch a sport better seen on TV.

Ralph Sanchez can explain all about that, mostly because the story of this place is really his story as well. It began in 1980, when Sanchez first dreamed of a big-time car race through the streets of his adopted hometown. He had no background, no reason to think he could launch such a complicated event. Within three years, he had created the Miami Grand Prix.

In 1986, he was dreaming again - this time of a permanent, world-class track somewhere in South Florida. Officials said it was impossible. But on
November 4 and 5, the first races were run around the much-acclaimed Homestead Motorsports Complex. All 63,000 seats for the NASCAR events were sold out days in advance.

This happened mostly because of Ralph Sanchez's skillful promotion, which included securing a string of big-name driver endorsements of the track and lining Miami International Airport and both sides of Florida's turnpike with banners. The fierce PR campaign elevated a second-tier NASCAR event to everybody's-talking-about-it status around Miami and attracted The New York Times and CNN and live national broadcasts.

In Ralph Sanchez, imagination is tempered by pragmatism, vision grounded by will.

And work.

"You dream, you paint the picture, then you start to develop the steps to get to that reality, that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow," Sanchez explained, gesturing behind the broad, black desk at Miami Motorsports, his race promotion firm in downtown
Miami. He is a tall, lean, handsome man who talks passionately about things that matter to him - his ideas, his family, his childhood. And racing.

"When you're around me you hear one word a lot - focused. Always stay focused. Keep your eye on the ball."

In the days leading up to the first race at Homestead, you could see that focus at work.

He was on a mission: Finish the track in time. He was everywhere at once, inspecting pavement, hounding contractors, running from here to there to here again with a cellphone in one hand and a notepad in the other. If you lost him for two minutes, it required
half an hour to catch up. Over that weekend, he did everything from chatting up top NASCAR officials to erecting chain-link fences by hand under moonlight.

Everyone who knows Sanchez describes him with these words: Intense. Determined. Focused.

"I've known him for 12 years now. Ralph's always been someone who thinks big and makes things happen," said Emerson Fittipaldi, a two-time Indy 500 winner after Sanchez introduced himself in 1983 and coaxed the former world champion out of retirement for
the second Miami Grand Prix. The two men now are friends. "Most people in race promoting only know. Ralph does."

Both sides of Sanchez, the dreamer and the doer, are driven by the wounds of his impoverished background, when he became a young orphan of Latin American politics.

He was baptised Rafael Augustin Sanchez, born in Sancti Spiritus, Cuba. His father worked as a corporate comptroller and owned a small farm where young Rafael skittered toy cars around the house, piloting imaginary Ferraris into imaginary victory lanes. It was a tranquil life - for a time.

When he was 10, everything changed. Fidel Castro seized power and loyalties among the Sanchez family were split furiously down the middle, half pro-communist, half anti-communist. In the towns and in the mountains, revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries battled for the allegiance of people like the Sanchezes. And children often were drawn into the struggle.

"At 12-years-old in Cuba, you were already a man," Ralph Sanchez said. "If you went to public schools, it was communist indoctrination. If you went to the Catholic schools, it was the other way and you heard many things about Castro."

Rafael Sanchez attended a Catholic school, where the brothers who taught literature and religion by day printed subversive leaflets by night. Young Rafael was secretly recruited to distribute the fliers and lug supplies to opposition forces. It was risky work,
with some children thrown summarily into jail. When a relative warned the elder Sanchez that his son was in danger, the family arranged a seat for Rafael aboard the Pedro Pan airlifts from Havana to Miami.

At 13, he landed in the United States, poor and unable to speak English. After his uncle and aunt in Miami moved to Nicaragua, Rafael Sanchez was placed in a Catholic orphanage, where he lived until required to leave at age 18.

"When I walked into that orphanage, I didn't know if I'd ever see my parents again," Sanchez remembered. "It was a rough place. You had to learn how to defend yourself."

The other boys at the home were all like him, child exiles, orphans of the great revolution. But Rafael never really adjusted. He suddenly felt an outsider, among the residents of his new country, among his own countrymen. The sting from that lonely time stays with him today, Sanchez acknowledged.

Eventually his parents, a brother and a grandmother joined Sanchez in Miami, leaving by U.S. Freedom Flights in 1966 and 1967. They all squeezed into a one-room apartment while Ralph attended Miami-Dade Community College and flipped Royal Castle burgers
to bring in some desperately needed money.

"We had doctors bills and my grandmother was sick. When I tell you we didn't have food to eat, I'm not kidding," Sanchez said with the intensity of pain remembered. "Every time we had to pay the bills, there was an uncertainty."

The years of poverty ended after Sanchez graduated from Florida Atlantic University, but not the years of uncertainty. A comfortable accountant with the Keyes Company by age 24, he threw himself into real estate sales. A top salesman at 26, he borrowed money
to develop small housing projects. A wealthy developer when he was 34, Sanchez risked everything on one auto race in Miami. And this time, he lost.

After wrestling with reluctant politicians to stage a grand prix along city streets, Sanchez at last secured the necessary permits for February 1983. In the heart of Florida's dry season. Dry, except for one February weekend - the wrong one.

Sanchez lost almost $1.3 million. But to the drivers' everlasting appreciation, he paid the entire $250,000
purse for racing just 50 of the scheduled 310 miles. And despite a daunting mass of debt, he planned the second grand prix. And he prayed.

But his wife, Lourdes, apparently prayed more effectively. Just before Grand Prix II, a storm again engulfed Miami. Worse than the year before, water rushing over the course like a mountain stream. Another rainout would mean financial disaster for the family and an exhausted Ralph Sanchez fell asleep in his downtown hotel room as his wife cried and
torrents swept over the streets.

"I will never forget that afternoon," Lourdes Sanchez said. "I prayed, 'Oh God, if this is not the way for us, let me know. And if it is, give me some sign. Show us this is the right way.' "

The rain stopped. The heavens - or at least, the clouds - parted. The race ran on dry streets. And to this day, Lourdes Sanchez believes God smiled on her husband.

She has been married to this man for 26 years now and they have raised a 20-year-old daughter, Patricia, who plans to work for Miami Motorsports and a 17-year-old son, Rafael, who has Downs syndrome. And though Ralph and Lourdes Sanchez could move in the fast, exclusive circles of Miami's glitterati, they socialize little, preferring quiet evenings at home. Her husband is a private, nervous man with no truly close friends
except her, Lourdes Sanchez confided. Over lunch, he swallows pills to control his ulcers. And if he is outgoing and charming before the TV cameras, he remains inside the shy orphan from Sancti Spiritus, still an outsider with something to prove.

"There's a lot of kid in him," his wife said. "When you're a very mature person, you're very rational and you put obstacles in your own way. But being a little kid, he doesn't see the obstacles. He only sees the light."

The Homestead Motorsports Complex was constructed despite some very real obstacles, including a prolonged permitting process. The $65 million track is owned by the city of Homestead, with Sanchez holding a 37-year lease to operate the facility. But everyone knows it's The Track Ralph Built, hailed locally as something of a miracle rising from the ashes of Hurricane Andrew. Two weeks after the storm flattened
Homestead on August 24,1992, Sanchez and the city manager worked out details on a napkin and shook hands on the deal.

Top drivers such as Fittipaldi and Bobby Rahal have raved about the track, which will host IndyCar's 1996 opener. But typically, Sanchez envisions attracting the entire race world, from Skip Barber Racing School to Formula One.

He confidently tells reporters he expects a Winston Cup race at Homestead in "the very near future." And he talks optimistically about drawing the F-1 world championship to his complex, which offers oval and road courses. Never mind that NASCAR and Formula One are also looking at other tracks for possible expansion. Sometimes Ralph Sanchez seems the most overly hopeful, impractical of men.

With just 48 hours before qualifying laps for the first big race, the new track looks more like Homestead three months after Andrew than three years after. Construction plans were dramatically accelerated when Sanchez secured the NASCAR race for
November - No problem, he told officials. Except that everything had to be finished months ahead of schedule.

And so the complex is a work site this day, with broken concrete scattered over compacted clumps of ground, funnel clouds of dust spiraling over barren concession areas, backhoes and bulldozers scrambling around a hive of hard hats. And you think no
way will they make it.

But two days later, the ground is soft and green with sod and plants have sprouted and dozens of concession tents sit neatly behind white-slat fences serving 25,000 race fans who turned out - for qualifying, mind you. And the racing goes off without a hitch and
team owners and drivers and fans are slapping Sanchez on the back.

And as you drive away, a glorious South Florida sunset glows golden with farm dust behind a dramatic arc of storm clouds that skirt the track, carrying the November rain somewhere else. And you wonder if maybe God is really smiling on Ralph Sanchez after all.
----------------------------------------------