Playboy Magazine South Africa November 2013 November 2013 | Page 38

FEATURE INSIDE EL RODEO
determine his fate. He was facing 30 years, the
maximum sentence in Venezuela.
I began to feel an immediate rush of two intense and conflicting emotions: deep concern
for a man I hardly knew but who had made an
impression on me, and the charged excitement
of inspiration. This was a story that spoke to me
powerfully but in a way I didn’t yet understand.
There was also an old-fashioned mystery that
needed solving: How had Tim become the
Osama bin Laden of Venezuela? Was Tim Tracy
a spy?

Tim grew up in the suburbs of Detroit. The
Tracy family made its fortune in auto parts following World War II, and Emmet, Tim’s father,
prided himself on the fact that he babysat Mitt
Romney while Mitt’s father, George, was on
the campaign trail. When Tim arrived in Connecticut for his freshman year at Hotchkiss, an
upper-crust boarding school, he was hyped as
one of the best eighth-grade hockey players
in the country, just as his older brother Tripp
had once been. But this was a hormonal coed
boarding school, and the pressure of playing in
front of all those chatty little girls got inside his
head. He’d get in a game and freeze, crippled
by the fear that if he fucked up none of the girls
would talk to him. He never came close to
reaching his potential. Tripp ended up playing
goalie in the NHL, while Tim wasn’t even the
best player on his high school team.
He never played at Georgetown, but after
graduating in 2001 he joined a semi-pro
beer-league team in Sun Valley, Idaho. In the
team’s final game of his first season, Tim skated
onto the ice Slap Shot–style wearing nothing
but his skates, pads, helmet and a jockstrap,
with “Thanks Fans” scrawled across his ass.
The crowd went nuts. At the bar that night, he
was a star. Everyone told him he was crazy,
and he loved it. He went home with a girl
named Barbie, the star of the figure-skating
team – more evidence that the world tended
to cooperate when he played a character and

that he was better at reading other people than
he was at reading himself. He figured he’d roll
with it. Later that year Tim moved to LA to try
to make it as an actor. If he could make a living
by hiding, maybe he’d never have to really look
at himself in the mirror.
After six years of hustling, he turned 30 and
had nothing to show for his efforts save a
couple of blink-and-you’ll-miss-him TV gigs.
No matter how hard he worked, there was
always this voice inside him saying, “This isn’t
who you are. Try something else.” One night
he was at a bar called the Green Door when
out of nowhere an extremely hot girl sat down
next to him.
“So,” she asked, “what do you do for work?”
He said it without even thinking: “I’m an active member of Delta Force.”
“Really? What’s that?”
“We go behind enemy lines and do terrorist
shit,” he replied, straight-faced. “We’re very
discreet. I don’t want to talk about it. I’m on
leave and have to ship out tomorrow for Falluja.”
The reaction on her face was unlike anything
he’d ever seen before – a combination of concern, awe, respect and desire. “Oh my God,”
she said. “Thank you so much for your service
to our country.” He knew what he was doing
was deeply wrong, but it felt good to be in the
Delta Force, even if for a moment.
She invited him back to her place. It was