Rick was different. He was quieter and more thoughtful, though rail-thin like his father and Lance. Asked to describe him, most everyone used the word “nice.” He listened more than he talked, often with a cigarette in hand. His eventual death was attributed to lung cancer.
The Washington Post in ’83 recorded Rick’s very business-like view of how he finally reached the Iditarod winner’s circle, a goal he’d been working toward for eight years:
“I haven’t slept for three to four days; you have to push hard if you want to get here first. I just went out and ran my own race. I didn’t care what anybody else did.”
The latter wasn’t quite wholly true. He overslept at the checkpoint in the tiny village of Shageluk 25 miles shy of the Yukon River and though he managed to still lead the race into Anvik, an equally small community and the first checkpoint on Alaska’s biggest and most famous river, disaster was lurking ahead
Victory snatched from defeat
Going up the river, Rick took a wrong turn on a trail put in for a local village race along with most of the other race leaders, including the late and legendary Susan Butcher whose future accomplishments would spawn the phrase “Alaska where men are men and women win the Iditarod.”
The group veered miles and miles into the vast emptiness of the one-time Inland Empire east of the Yukon before one musher consulted a compass and realized they’d been traveling due east for a long time when they should have been headed north.
All were forced to turn around, and by the time the race reached the village of Kaltag, where the Iditarod jumps overland and heads for the coast, Canada’s Larry “Cowboy” Smith was in the lead. And Butcher, who many had picked as the favorite to win that year, was suffering something of a breakdown.
She announced the off-route excursion into the wilds along the Yukon had “fried” her dog’s heads and doomed her chances of victory. She was then still behind the strongest looking bunch of dogs in the race, but she parked them for a long rest and the race moved on.
Rick Mackey, on the other hand, had a different reaction to getting lost. The excursion transformed him from a sleep-deprived musher who looked like the walking dead in Shageluk to a man on fire in Kaltag, where he announced he was going to win the damn Iditarod in order to be done with trying to win the Iditarod.
It was a bold pronouncement, but by the time the race reached the village of Koyuk on the north side of Norton Bay, 175 miles down the trail from Kaltag, the only other mushers still left at the front – Smith and the late Herbie Nayokpuk, “The Shishmaref Cannonball,” were conceding defeat.
They sat with Mackey around a plywood table in the Tin Hall of the First Scout Battalion of the 299th Infantry Alaska Army National Guard and told Rick, to use the Cannonball’s words, “you’re the only one that can beat Swenson,” the defending Iditarod champ and an already four-time Iditarod winner.
I can remember the day like it was yesterday, given that the three of them were acting as if they were reading a script from a Jack London novel.
Knowing they couldn’t win, there was nobody Cowboy and Herbie wanted to win the Iditarod more than nice guy Rick Mackey.
Nice-guy benefits
“Don’t kill ’em,” coached Smith, a stoic man ordinarily of few words, “but keep them moving along and make sure you don’t take no extra rest over there. Keep walkin’ ahead of him. See how close he gets and then go. They only time he got excited and had to win, he couldn’t do it.”
“Swenson ain’t gonna get here for three (hours). He’s gotta be payin’ a little bit. He’s gotta be burning down a little, too.”
Rick, as was his way, listened politely. Nayokpuk told Rick the race was his to lose, and as Rick left Koyuk he himself observed that in his then-11 dog team “there’s still nine dogs in there that look like their guaranteed to go to Nome.
“I got five good ones. I still got enough. They can take anything, maybe even Swenson.”
And they did.
By the time Rick reached the penultimate checkpoint at the Safety Roadhouse 20 miles outside of Nome, he had a healthy lead and won the race by nearly two hours over a charging Eep Anderson. Smith hung on for third with Nayokpuk close behind.
Swenson pulled the plug and coasted in fifth. Butcher ended up ninth.
It would be more than a decade before Rick came close to victory again. He was the runner-up in a 1994 race dominated by Martin Buser, a Swiss transplant, who made his name in Alaska.
That race also marked the beginning of the end for Rick’s competitive career. He ran the two fastest races of his life in the years that followed – clocking 9 days, 15 hours in 1995 and 52 minutes and an even better 9 days, 13 hours, 35 minutes in 2000 – but never finished better than sixth.
He took a couple of years off from Iditarod in the early 2000s, came back to the race in 2004, finished 43rd and retired. Thus ended a long and successful career.
In 22 Iditarods dating back to 1975, he 13 times finished in the top-10 and twice won the Leonhard Seppala Humanitarian Award for outstanding dog care, a prize awarded by a vote of the veterinarians who man the nearly two dozen checkpoints along the 1,000-mile trail from Willow to Nome.
And he retired as one of only five mushers to have won both the Iditarod and the Quest.
Rick and wife Patti for decades ran a sled dog kennel – Mackey’s Happy Dog Kennel – and trained dogs first in Trapper Creek, a remote community about 75 miles northwest of Anchorage, and later in Nenana, a roadside community along the George Parks Highway about 60 miles southwest of Fairbanks.
Rick was known as a top trainer or “coach,” as Patti termed it, but she said his greatest achievement was his two children.
“He loved dogs. He loved racing. But at the end of the day, nothing else mattered more than his children and me,” Patti told the AP. “He was just very nice.”
“Very nice” would pretty much sum him in total. While Lance was raising hell and getting in more than a little trouble over the years, Rick was quietly and happily enjoying family life in Nenana.
His daughter Brenda and partner Will Rhodes are now carrying on Rick’s legacy. With the help of daughter Isabel, they operate Mackey’s Alaska Distance Dogs, a kennel-based in the community of Two Rivers just outside of Fairbanks.
Craig, I remember the panic from Rick when they woke him up in Shageluk: “What DAY is it?”, he bellowed as he freaked out, thinking the race had passed him by as he slept. And I remember taking that photo you used above. Those guys were so sleep-deprived it was like they didn’t see me, although I was just inches from Rick, and a foot or two from Herbie and Cowboy…
Yeah, I remember, too. The good old days of journalism were Tony the Tiger grreeeaaaaattttttt.
And P.S.: That was one damn good photo.
Èven though the subject of loss was sad, I enjoyed your storytelling in this. I, too, have sat in quietly at some post race interviews. Most notably for me, John Baker’s. Listening to the low, slow, rhythmic cadence as he described his dogs had me almost in a dreamy trance, head back, eyes shut, imagining. Nothing quite like hearing the tales when someone has just stepped off a long, sleepless trail.
Loved the London line.
Condolences and respect to Rick’s family.
In the end, kindness is the world.
Rick Mackey lives in the Hearts of those who were fortunate to know Him and those who followed the Iditarod Races.
Great article……..in 1983 the Iditarod was still a major event for Alaska…….RIP Rick Mackey
Thank you Craig. Pretty much says it all.
Nice tribute Craig. Those were the golden years of the Iditarod. Rick was the epitome of the era, quietly doing it at the highest level.