DESTINY'S CHILD: Part 1 of 2; Sam Hornish Jr. wins an Indy thriller.(News)(Biography)

Byline: CURT CAVIN

The Indianapolis 500 is as much about history as it is speed. This year's race was the 90th for open-wheel cars at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and to understand what it meant to winner Sam Hornish Jr., a look back is in order.

Sam Hornish, father of the two-time Indy Racing League champion, grew up modestly in the small northwestern Ohio town of Defiance. He was introduced to the 500 before he understood what a privilege it was to ride 150 miles to the Speedway in a Studebaker truck.

By Hornish's recollection, his first Speedway race was in 1950, although he concedes it might have been a year or two later. He was just a young boy at the time, six or seven years old, but he remembers sitting in that truck in what the locals call the North Forty, the 40-plus acres just outside the Speedway's third turn used primarily for camping and parking.

Back in Defiance, Hornish was often called "Duke,'' so he became attracted to Duke Nalon, a driver whose 10-race career included a third-place finish in 1948. Hornish didn't know it at the time, but his heart, through the roar of the engines and the allure of the action, was leading him to a lifetime of Brickyard love.

Hornish kept attending 500s through the years and started to follow what became known as Indy car racing. In 1979, with his second wife, Jo Ellen, seven months pregnant with their only son, he attended yet another Indy race. A rising star, Rick Mears, won Indy for the first time. Another star was about to be born. Literally.

Sam Hornish Jr.'s journey to the Speedway began on July 2, 1979. He can't remember much about his earliest years following the race, but he knows it was so much of a family ritual that his father always managed to shake hands with Roger Penske, who fielded Mears.