By Dick Mittman
indyracingleague.com

Rick Galles and the St. Louis Rams, his choice to win the Super Bowl XXXIV on Sunday, have a lot in common.

A year ago the Rams were a team at the bottom of the NFL heap not knowing where it was headed. Today, with a new coach, quarterback and running back the Rams will take on the Tennessee Titans in football's premier game.

On Saturday, Galles will be ready to take on the titans of the Indy Racing League in the season opener, the Delphi Indy 200 at Walt Disney World Speedway in Orlando, Fla., with new co-owners, a new driver and a new major sponsor hoping to produce his own Super Bowl season on the oval tracks of America.

It's quite a comeback for veteran car owner Galles, from Albuquerque, N.M. Last January, Galles made a last-minute decision to enter a car in the Disney race. He had no major sponsor, but retained his team and brought driver Davey Hamilton to Orlando only so Hamilton could maintain his perfect record of starting every Indy Racing League event. The expenses came out of Galles' pocket, which he no longer wanted to incur.

On Thursday, Galles participated in a press conference at his motorhome inside the track announcing Tickets.com will sponsor the team for the next three years. It was the final piece of the puzzle for Galles in his search to regain the glory of early the 1990s when a series championship and Indy 500 victory came his way.

Sitting at the podium with Galles were his new driver, two-time Indy 500 winner Al Unser Jr., one of his new partners, Tommy Constantine (the other is Roger Elliot) and Andy Donkin, senior vice president for marketing for Tickets.com under owner W. Thomas Gimple.

Galles needed only a single word to describe how he had reached this point over the past 12 months.

"Perseverance!" he said.

Galles' perseverance was tested to the ultimate. At the Phoenix Open Test in February 1999, he introduced a sponsor, who promptly backed out. This forced Galles, a former Kansas football player, to skip the Arizona race in March, but he was back at it at Indy when he took over a team newly formed by Greg Barnhart for Hamilton at Phoenix. The revived Galles team made an excellent turnaround to place fourth in the final entrant point standings.

Now he's shooting for the top spot again.

"Basically, I don't give up," Galles said. "Basically, I think that is the trademark of my family. We don't give up on things. We love racing.

"Obviously, in the past we didn't do it for the money. We just made a commitment that unless we could do it first class we weren't going to do it. Tickets.com and Tommy and Roger have given us the opportunity to do it first class."

Constantine owns several businesses, including a real estate and an aviation company. He founded Motorsports Marketing in 1992 and competes in the U.S. F2000 series as a driver. Elliott is former vice president of business operations for Forsythe Racing and later was director of business development for British American Racing in England.

Tickets.com is based in Costa Mesa, Calif. It went public last November and offers sporting-event and entertainment tickets for sale over the Internet.

Galles, 53, called racing a narcotic. But he was prepared to say no to racing early last year.

"I was ready to go to the ranch, raise come cattle and do some cutting horse stuff," he said. "And lo and behold, here is Al Unser Jr. sitting next to me, which I never thought would happen again."

Unser started with Galles in 1983 and returned to the fold to win the 1990 CART championship and the 1992 Indy 500 before moving on to the Roger Penske team in 1994.

Galles said he was watching a CART race last summer when announcer Paul Page commented that the rumor was Unser and Galles were talking about reuniting.

"I hadn't heard the rumor so I called Al and asked him if we had met," Galles said with tongue in cheek. "Next thing I know, we're talking about how we could get back together. We plotted out a way.

"And thanks to my partners and Tickets.com, really a dream's come true. So I think it's just not giving up. And hopefully we'll be successful. We've got a lot of work to do. Everybody knows how tough the competition is."