Indy 500's first lady Beth Boles: World champion jet skier, state winning lacrosse coach

INDIANAPOLIS -- Beth Boles is a fiercely passionate, kind, hilarious, fitness-obsessed sports marketing guru and high school lacrosse coach who has a tiny eagle tattooed on the inside of her wrist, an ink etching that was a promise she made to her players for winning a state title which kind of shocked her "squeaky clean" husband Doug Boles, who has no tattoos.

She is a former world champion standup jet skier who very much understands the thrill and exhilaration of racing, yet Boles can't help but go nearly insane with nerves every single time her son, IndyCar driver Conor Daly, takes the track.

She is a former Indy 500 princess who won the title of Miss Congeniality instead of queen because Boles says she was funnier than she was pretty. And she was a little girl in Noblesville who waited eagerly from May to December for Christmas morning to arrive because that meant her very own Indianapolis 500 yearbook would be under the tree.

Boles would forget all about the other gifts and pore over that book with those glorious photos from the track. She would methodically flip through the pages over and over and over again to see if she spotted anyone she knew or if, maybe, her photo had miraculously made the book.

She would take in all the facts about the drivers and the history of this iconic race. She deeply loved the Indy 500.

And so, it is not surprising that sometimes when Boles is inside Indianapolis Motor Speedway, she will turn to her husband and say, "Can you believe you are president of this place?" It still seems unreal to Boles that her love of auto racing, from the time she was a tiny girl, has become so engrained in her life.

It is surreal that Roger Penske calls her home and Mario Andretti knows her by name and that she and her husband have a trailer to sleep in at IMS for the mornings they need to be there at the crack of dawn.

And it is even more unfathomable to Boles that people call her the first lady of the Indy 500.

That title was born when Boles, formerly Beth Blackburn, married Doug Boles in 2000, a man she said was "a very cute, groovy bachelor," who went from a race team owner to director of public relations at IMS to president of the track in 2013.

With that, Beth Boles became the Indy 500's modern day matriarch.

"A lot of people call me the first lady for fun and laugh. It is cute. But just thinking back to that little girl who loved racing," said Boles, "I still sometimes can't believe it. When I met Doug, God just handed me a gift right out of the heavens."

A tomboy 500 Princess with a love of cars

Boles isn't sure the exact moment her love of racing was born. It might have been the first Indy 500 she attended in 1969. It might have been when, as a young girl, her dad took her to auto shows and auctions and she saw some of the shiniest rides. It might have been when she met A.J. Foyt as a 20-year-old college student.

It could have been one of hundreds of moments in Boles' life. It really doesn't matter. What matters is that Boles fell in love with racing, and she never turned back.

Growing up in Noblesville, Boles was a bit of a tomboy, a cheerleader who loved sports. But there weren't a lot of girls playing sports as she grew up, Boles said, adding that she went to Hamilton Southeastern when there was black and white television.

But her father, Howard Blackburn, chief radiologist at Riverview Hospital, loved trains and cars. He instilled the same love in his family, taking them on train rides and to races. He would take Boles to Auburn for the Kruse International auto auction each year and helped her learn to drive a stick in his Nash Healey.

Blackburn bought his daughter her first car, a Lincoln Continental that was red with a white hardtop roof, an AM radio and no heater. Boles loved that car, but perhaps not as much as she loved those cars at IMS.

When her dad took Boles to her first Indy in 1969, the year Mario Andretti won his only race, she was hooked and she hasn't missed a race since.

Once in college at Purdue, Boles didn't forget the track or the month of May at IMS and she desperately wanted to be a 500 princess. As a 19-year-old, she tried for the roster of 33 but didn't make it. That didn't deter her. The very next year, Boles went for it again.

"I went back for a second try. They felt sorry for me and let me go ahead and do it in 1978," Boles said. "And then I got Miss Congeniality, which I believe is because they thought I was funny. It certainly wasn't a pretty award. It was a funny award."

That was just fine with Boles who never took herself too seriously and never shied away from a challenge. During the 500 Festival, there was an event called the mechanics' lunch where each princess was assigned to a team. Boles says she can't remember what driver she initially got but one of her princess friends got A.J. Foyt.

"And she was terrified because, you know, A.J. carries a big hammer and he was a pretty bombastic type of driver," said Boles "She said, 'I don't want A.J. He scares me.' I said, 'Give him to me.'"

All these years later when Foyt, a four-time Indy 500 winner, sees Boles he calls her "queen," harkening back to that lost title all those years ago.

The day she graduated from Purdue in 1979 with a degree in retail, marketing and management, she couldn't get off the stage with her diploma fast enough to drive the 73 miles to Indy 500 qualifying. She had no idea then her love of the race would soon invade her life.

"It's just kind of cool to think back how far my passion for racing developed," said Boles. "Listen to me, Doug and I couldn't be more perfect for each other. We can talk for days about racing in the 70s and 80s."

And remember that Indy 500 yearbook she looked forward to each Christmas? Doug Boles got the same yearbook under the tree as a kid.

Aquamom was her nickname

By the time she met Doug Boles, he was a successful, buttoned-up lawyer and a founding partner of Panther Racing, one of IndyCar's most successful teams at the time, where he served as a co-owner and team chief operating officer from 1997 until early 2006.

Boles was a divorced mother of three boys, Conor, Colin and Christian, married 13 years to driver Derek Daly. She was a radio advertising saleswoman turned owner of Blackburn Sports Marketing, which does corporate hospitality, mostly at the track.

And, oh yes, she was also a world champion jet skier.

That started as a hobby when she met Roseina Brabham, wife of driver Geoff Brabham, who had little red 550 Kawasaki standup jet skis. Boles and Brabham lived on Morse Lake in Noblesville.

"And we were having a blast because our husbands were racing, and we were racing," she said. But Boles took the hobby to the next level, first winning the World Championship in the novice category and then competing for five years in the pros.

"I compare jet ski racing to motocross. It's like a racecourse on the water with buoys," said Boles, who won a world title then set the world record on the slalom course in 1990. She finished her career sixth in the World Finals and earned the nickname Aquamom as a mother racing against mostly single women in their late teens and early 20s.

Boles was so talented that she eventually was sponsored by personal watercraft company Hot Products out of California, which flew her to every race around the country -- places like New York, Washington, Florida and Texas.

None of his wife's ventures come as any surprise to Doug Boles who said the competitive spirit she has is unmatched. When asked to describe her in three words, he says "fiercely passionate, full of heart, unstoppable and my 100% teammate in all things."

More than three words, he acknowledges, but it's tough to describe Boles unless you have met her.

Born in 1957, Boles doesn't like to tell her age because she said she feels 40. "You can do the math," she says with a laugh.

Boles runs half marathons, does Rumble, a 10-round, 50-minute workout that includes sprinting, climbing, pushing, pressing, pulling, squatting, crunching, and jumping. And she still goes out every Tuesday night on Morse Reservoir for the jet ski course.

"It's just all the guys, and then Roseina Brabham and myself," she said. "So, the two of us old battle axes are out there ripping up with the boys."

Also, she's a two-time state champion as lacrosse coach

It's 2:40 p.m. and Boles is on a 3-hour-plus car drive to Evansville following a Heritage Christian school bus that is filled with her girls, her lacrosse players. She has been part of this team in some way since 2014.

As she talks about that journey, Boles becomes emotional. At first, this coaching thing was about winning -- and it still is -- but more than that she loves her players and wants to guide them in life.

"It's a ministry for me. I think it's listening to the girls, loving on them, encouraging them," she said. "Obviously, I want to win more than anybody, but I think my mission is to show love, compassion, forgiveness and grace."

Boles got the call in 2014 from Heritage Christian, where all her boys played sports and lacrosse, with a request. Would she want to coach the girls lacrosse team? She didn't know exactly what she was doing that first year but hired good people to help her out.

The next season, a new coach was brought in, but Boles stuck around, carrying water bottles and doing whatever else the team asked her to do. In 2019, when the head coach post opened again, Boles wasn't about to pass that up.

"I begged and begged to be the coach because I thought I'd put my time in," she said. Boles led the team to a state runner-up title then didn't get to play in 2020 due to COVID.

When the 2021 season came around, Boles watched as her team kept winning games, a lot of games. She's not sure what got into her when she made the tattoo promise. She didn't have any tattoos but had always thought if she got one, she wanted a tattoo that told a story.

"I told the girls, 'If we win state, coach gets a tattoo,'" said Boles. In her head she was thinking they would not actually win state. "So, it was just fun to say."

Instead, her Heritage Christian team did win state and Doug Boles remembers exactly what happened next. "Literally, within like five seconds of winning the title, the girls are all chanting, 'Tattoo, tattoo, tattoo,'" he said.

"And Doug, Mr. Clean, says, 'You're not really doing this, are you?'" Boles recalls. "I said, 'Yes, I am.'" And she did. Boles has an eagle on the inside of her wrist, the mascot of Heritage Christian.

When her team won a second title in 2022, back-to-back championships in 1A, they moved up to 2A and Boles started plotting her second tattoo. She hasn't gotten it yet, but plans to have lacrosse sticks inked next to the eagle on her wrist.

Doug Boles is in awe of all that his wife has done as a woman, athlete, coach and mother. Some may call her Indy 500's first lady, but she doesn't want to put on any airs.

"I think people that know Doug and I well enough know that that's certainly never going to go to our heads," she said. "I like to be a simple person. We like to be simple. We like to love on the fans, hang out with them and soak in everything we can at the track."

Follow IndyStar sports reporter Dana Benbow on X: @DanaBenbow. Reach her via email: [email protected].