After loss of wife, Foyt finds Indy 500 refuge: ‘It’s more pain than anything on my body’

INDIANAPOLIS – When it comes to overcoming physical pain, there are few individuals tougher than 88-year-old A.J. Foyt.

He’s suffered a broken back in a NASCAR crash at Riverside, California in 1965, a fracture left knee and left foot and dislocated right leg from a massive crash at Road America in Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin on Sept. 23, 1990, and nearly had his right arm severed off from the Armco barrier at Michigan International Speedway in the 1981 Michigan 500. He was also badly burned at The Milwaukee Mile.

That’s just on the racetrack.

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Off the track, he survived over 200 stings from killer bees on his ranch in Del Rio, Texas in 2005 and again in 2018, and he survived an overturned bulldozer that left him upside down in a pond.

He’s had triple-bypass surgery and stem cell replacement in Mexico. He also had a pacemaker installed to regulate his heart earlier this year.

Each time, Foyt has endured and returned to living his life, AJ.’.s way.

The reason Foyt is so tough is because he was raised in Houston, Texas without air conditioning. For anyone who has ever been to that city with the heat and humidity, they know how difficult that can be.

None of that pain, however, comes close to the pain that Foyt has carried with him since April 5.

That’s the night the love of his life, his wife Lucy, unexpectedly died at the age of 84.

“The pain I had about my wife is more pain I have had from anything on the rest of my body,” Foyt told NBC Sports. “You got to sleep, and you don’t feel the physical pain.

“Now, I go to sleep, and I think about my wife.”

Foyt is the epitome of toughness. But he is also a man who just lost his wife, who was a real Texas