First you notice his eyes. They are piercing, steel blue. They bore in on you as he talks. It’s as though he’s searching you for signs. For a glimmer of understanding. Or an opening.
The show, Motorsports Unlimited, is seen in some 110 communities in Illinois and Wisconsin. Mark Schaefer of WBBM TV called it the most watched cable show in Chicago a few months back. Untold thousands of people in the area have clicked past the show. Who knows how many of them have sat bolt upright in their chairs and clicked back?
Schutz shakes her head and laughs. “Yeah, like everybody wants to see Bill,” she says sarcastically.
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Viewers may not be tuning in to see him, but in truth the show is all Bill. He is the man who supplies the girls with their costumes. He controls their appearance from the tops of their feather headdresses to the points on their stiletto heels. There are outfits for eight girls in a closet in Wildt’s house, Schutz says. They include dangling rhinestone earrings, red bow ties, red spandex tank suits, boys’ size small yellow T-shirts emblazoned with the Motorsports logo, and the aforementioned feathers and heels.
The problem is this: no one’s paying enough attention to motor sports.
Wildt admits it’s tough for most of us to get excited about the plight of auto racing. “It is very difficult to be sensitive to something you don’t feel. I wish I had been smarter in the 60s. I was a young man during the marches in Selma, Alabama, the civil rights movement and all of that. I remember pondering as I watched it on television, ‘What’s all this about? Everything seems OK to me.’ That’s how consciousnesses are raised. Someone has to jump up and shout and make you sensitive to the issues,” he says.
“Now I ask you, what six-year-old is going to say [again, he apologizes] ‘I think I’ll spend my life fuckin’ around with cars and be a financial bust-out’? We don’t offer much of a future for the technically inclined. We have to be manufacturers of significant products.”
