Wilber Book ‘How Far?’ Tied To Racing But Blends Baseball, Hockey

By Susan Wade

Photos courtesy of Bob Wilber

Bob Wilber made a conscious decision not to fall into the trap.

So many drag-racing public-relations representatives peppered their press releases for the Las Vegas races, for example, with predictable “holding four aces,” “hitting the jackpot,” “rolling the dice,” “having good luck” gambling slang. But not Bob Wilber. He wanted not to fall into that rut.

He would challenge himself to write something that would hook reporters, make them want to write an article. He would float new ideas. His Seattle advance report once alluded to the stands of fir trees that ring Pacific Raceways, calling the oxygen-producing environment “a health spa for race cars.”

“That’s just being in the trenches and learning and wanting to be different and wanting to be creative and pushing myself,” Wilber said. “I’d never repeat myself if I could help it.” And the urge to improve and have his work stand out, the former pro baseball player said, “was constant – it was practicing every day.” He said he would “do it all the time and think, ‘I can do better.’” And by doing that, he fostered friendships with media members across the country, and that benefited his Funny Car drivers, Del Worsham and Tim Wilkerson.

“I still have some of that stuff from 1996 and 1997,” Wilber said. “The difference between how I wrote then and how I wrote by 2005 is two different people.”

That’s an ironic choice of words, because in 2022, his newly released second book, “How Far?” tells the fictional story of two athletes, and Wilber has the characters share their own experiences in first person.

He said this book – as well as his autobiographical first one, “Bats, Balls & Burnouts” (also from Outskirts Press) – “doesn’t exist without 22 years as a PR guy. It just doesn’t – because that’s where I developed as a writer.”

His main characters in “How Far?” are baseball player Brooks Bennett and hockey player Eric Olson.

Wilber only had to look into his own past to tap into Bennett’s world. After all, he’s the son of the late Del Wilber, a major-leaguer with the St. Louis Cardinals, Boston Red Sox, and Philadelphia Phillies. (Bob Wilber’s mother Taffy’s maiden name was Bennett, so Wilber had some fun dropping clues about his life throughout the book.)

Just the same, he did have to do more than a fair bit of research, and that, too, had drag-racing connections. His friend Jeff Morton, the NHRA’s director of advertising and sponsorship sales, provided him with mounds of information about Southern California high-school and college baseball. And when Wilber decided which middle school to have Bennett attend, it turned out the school – Cerro Villa – was the same school Worsham’s daughters, Kate and Maddy, had attended. The Brooks Bennett character also had a background in surfing, a world Wilber knew nothing about. But the Worsham connection came through. Worsham, of Orange, Calif., had been an active surfer, and he tutored Wilber about the lingo and etiquette among surfers.

When it came to penning the details of Olson’s journey in “How Far?” Wilber had to do much more research.

“I didn’t know any of this inside hockey stuff, and I needed a lot of help. And I got a lot of help from a lot of really important people and people very willing to walk me through this, particularly in Roseau, Minn.,” the downstate resident who lives in the St. Paul suburb of Woodbury with wife Barbara said. He started by calling the school at Roseau (it has just one for all grades), and Superintendent Larry Guggisberg arranged interviews for him with anyone and everyone who could paint vivid pictures of the culture there and what the rich history of the Roseau Rams high-school hockey team meant to the town. He became acquainted with Newell and Carol Broten, parents of Neal, Aaron, and Paul, all of whom played in the NHL. Neal Broten was a member of the U.S. Olympic hockey team that won the 1980 Gold Medal at Lake Placid, the “Miracle On Ice” team.

It was Paul Broten who provided a particularly captivating peek at his childhood in Roseau (which happens to be on the border of the Canadian prairie province of Manitoba). Wilber asked Broten to “walk me through what it was like to walk to school at 25 below zero.” Broten told him, “We knew how to walk to school backwards.”

Wilber said, “They knew the number of steps between their house and the four blocks to school. And on the way home, if it was really well below zero, he had at least three pit stops he could make in just four blocks. There was a diner, a full-on restaurant, and a bowling alley. His mom would know that he had stopped at the bowling alley, where someone would always give him a free cup of hot chocolate, because he came in the house smelling like smoke.”

Those are the kinds of details and study Wilber put into this work of historical fiction from the beginning of this project, once he had settled on his storyline.

The chapters alternate between Bennett’s viewpoint and Olson’s perspective. That might sound like a confusing or difficult self-imposed assignment, but Wilber said it wasn’t at all. The two actually sprang to life in his imagination and almost were palpable to him. And he respected the “voices” of these characters as he progressed with their stories – to the point even of changing the direction he had intended to go with the narratives.

“It wasn’t long before I heard their voices in my head. I know that sounds hokey. I would sit down on a weekday and think, ‘OK . . . Now this is Chapter Whatever and this is Brooks Bennett. And his voice would just come into my head,” Wilber said. “I’d think, ‘I’m going to have him do this, this, and this,’ and after the first ‘this,’ it was like ‘No, no, no.’ It was as if Brooks said, ‘I wouldn’t do that. This is not me. I would do this.’ And I would shift gears. So I threw my outlines away by Chapter 10. It didn’t take that long for me to know this was going to be organic and it was going to flow where it was going to flow and there was going to be emotional stuff in it.

“I had a clue there was going to be some big drama. And I remember talking to Barbara about that, right up front when I started the book: ‘There’s got to be drama. This is not just a sports book. There’s got to be personal relationships. There’s got to be tragedy. There’s got to be love. There’s got to be break-ups. There’s got to be all of this stuff. But it all has to be true to these guys’ personalities and voices,” he said.

“So that was the challenge: just follow that muse and know what your guys are like and what they would do – and just be true to that. It actually became quite easy. It was a joy to write, once I got 10 chapters in,” Wilber said.

And months beyond the completion of the 560-page novel, Wilber thinks of these characters, Brooks Bennett and Eric Olson, as he would an old friend from his college days at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville or from his minor-league baseball career or his time spent working in professional soccer.

“I still miss ’em,” Wilber said of Bennett and Olson. “I tell people they still live in my head, rent-free. They’ll always be in there.” Bob Wilber makes friends everywhere he goes with his fun-loving and outgoing personality, and they’re lasting relationships . . . even if in some cases he invented them.

This massive tome, like the 544-page “Bats, Balls & Burnouts,” had Wilber wondering how he could have accomplished what he has as an author in pre-computer days: “Imagine back in the day when they hand-wrote manuscripts. How could you write a 400-page book by hand? How petrified would you be that that manuscript is the only one? Back then, you had a two-inch-thick manuscript you sent off to the publisher. That would just scare the hell out of me.”

It’s scary enough to think too long about how difficult it is to succeed in the publishing world, because, he said, publishers “won’t consider it [an unsolicited manuscript] if they don’t know who you are. It’s tough. My nephew has had two best-sellers. His entrée into writing was that he was a widely acclaimed reporter for The Washington Post and the L.A. Times. People knew he could write. He had an agent, and the agent got him a publishing deal. I asked how he did it. And he said, ‘I was lucky. I got known as a reporter, a journalist. He said, ‘You don’t have a prayer. There’s just no way. They will not even read your stuff unless you have an agent. And you won’t get an agent until the agent thinks you’ve already been successful, because the agents don’t want to fail, either. The business is crazy.’ My nephew’s book, which is about Ronald Reagan and was on the New York Times Bestseller List for about four months [“Rawhide Down, by Del Quentin Wilber] sold 14,000 copies. That’s what it sold. My first book sold 3500 copies. And I thought that was terrible. But no, that’s amazing. In this day and age, if you sold 3500 copies, that’s unbelievable.”

What’s even more remarkable is that Wilber’s work before composing “How Far?” was non-fiction (although he said even for his own life story, “Bats, Balls & Burnouts,” he had to spend time researching facts). So this was a self-dare, this process of exercising mental muscles.

“I call them ‘writing muscles,’” Wilber said. “One of the reasons I chose historical fiction was that’s a whole new set of writing muscles: ‘I’ve never used those before. So let’s get them in shape and hone them and see if I can be world-class at this, even though I’ve never tried it. Never even tried it.’ So, that was a giant challenge. And I got those muscles in shape, and I would say right now they’re in perfect condition.”

He said, “I have a stock answer for people who say, ‘How’d you know you could do this?’: I didn’t. I didn’t know. I just thought I would try it, and if it didn’t work, it didn’t work. And if it worked, it’s going to be really cool. Barbara said, ‘How can you write this?’ I said, ‘I don’t know – I just think I can.’”

And he was correct. So will he write a third book? He shrugged. He doesn’t know, even though he has lots of opportunities and a swirl of plots that dart around in his mind. Any projects going forward will be intriguing for him, certainly: “I want to do something out of my comfort zone, attack something completely different. I’m not sure I’ll ever get completely out of the sports realm, because that’s what’s in my head.”

But all he can say for sure is “How Far?” was a book he was destined to write.

“In between the books, I had a couple of other ideas before this one came up. And the only way I can explain it is that neither one of them had any traction in my head. It seemed like a good idea, seemed like a good outline, seemed like a good plot, seemed like a good book to write. And I’d sit down and nothing would happen. And it was like, ‘Oh, my God, it’s like I’m forcing words onto the page here.’ It just wasn’t what I was meant to write,” he said. He pivoted, telling himself, “So let’s figure out what I’m supposed to be doing here. And that’s when I came up with this concept.”

Happily, sales of “How Far?” can affect the sales of his 2017 work.

“My first book is now four years old, and it still sells,” Wilber said. “A copy here and a copy there, but it’s not dead, because people discover it. And when this book came out, the first book sold a bunch, because people were learning about this book and realizing, ‘Hey, he’s got another one.’ So it goes on forever. So if we had a big article or a TV shot in June, it would sell just as well as it does now. And that’s fine.

“What matters in the long run is how many people did you impact. To me, it’s never been about the money. I don’t want to lose money, but it’s about the passion and making people happy and being proud of what I’ve done. And Barbara, being a finance person, doesn’t get that very well, either. She’s like, ‘If you’re not in this to make money, why are you doing it?’ I love it. That’s why I’m doing it. And I’m retired now. That’s why I’m doing it,” Wilber, an energetic 65, said. “She’s getting close to retirement and panicked that she’s not going to know what to do. And I said, ‘The world is your oyster. You can write a book. Don’t worry about that. Believe me – retirement’s pretty good.’ And I keep myself very, very busy.”