In the Blink of an Eye

by Michael Waltrip

  The dude was a bit too excited. He was caught up in the moment, I guess.

  Macy didn’t think this was funny at all. She let out a giant wail: “Ahhhhhh!” The poor child was screaming like she was at the dentist. My niece, Dana, the nanny, was right behind her, quickly wiping off her beautiful little face. But I think Macy decided this Victory Lane place wasn’t nearly as cool as the rest of us thought.

  Well, at least it was the right beer, our sponsor’s beer! Who doesn’t like a good, cold duB?

  Buffy was totally loving and supportive, as always. Hugging me, congratulating me—tears still running down her face. It was like she could hardly believe it. Everybody seemed to be crying except me. And I’m a crier. I do cry. But not now. I had shed a few tears in the car, and I was done. Happiness? Joy? All that? Sure. But mainly, I was just relieved.

  Thank you, God. Thank you, Dale. Thank you, Dale Junior.

  The whole crew was gathered around. Our sponsors were too, sharing this moment with the team. I was so happy for the folks from NAPA who had taken a chance on me when Dale asked them to just a few months before. Now they and all our other sponsors—Coca-Cola, Aaron’s, Klaussner Furniture, and the others—were tasting victory with us. Most of the sponsors had already become our friends. This was their victory too.

  Everybody was there. To celebrate. To take pictures. Just to be part of this incredible moment. A couple of the NASCAR reps were making sure the Victory Lane experience went down exactly like it was supposed to. They were making sure that the team was taken care of and the media were getting the interviews they needed.

  That’s what it was like for a while after I got out of the car. A thousand things needed to happen. As the driver, you’re never going to remember everything unless someone is there to guide you. I know I wouldn’t have. How would I know what to do? I’d never been there before.

  Dick Berggren, pit reporter for Fox, quickly made his way to me. Dick had been around racing forever. I believe he was covering chariot racing when Ben-Hur was a rookie. (Hi, Dick.) He’s a former driver himself. He had a pretty good notion of what I might be feeling at a moment like that. It was his job to be one of the ones who always reminded me I’d never won a race. And he did it again.

  “Michael Waltrip,” he said in a slightly serious tone, as if he were calling my name off a school-attendance roll or summoning me up to a witness stand. “Four hundred and sixty-two green flags, finally a checker. Does this feel as good as you hoped?”

  Actually, Dick, 463! If you’re going to call me out, get the number right!

  Almost any driver will tell you he has fantasized about this moment a thousand times. You’ve just won the race. The crowd is roaring. The camera is rolling. The whole world is waiting to hear what you have to say. Make it count, baby! Make it count, Mike!

  And I know how to tell a good story. People like all the stuff I go on with! So this was gonna be good, right?

  You want to know the first words out of my mouth?

  “It’s unconscious.”

  Unconscious? Is that really what I said? I have no idea what that meant. I’m known as a talker. This was my moment! Finally, people wanted to hear what I had to say. And that’s what I said? “It’s unconscious”?

  I then gathered myself and put together a few words that actually made sense, although I did stumble through them.

  “Thank God,” I started. “Thank my dad. I love him so much. And, um, you know, I just can’t believe it. It hasn’t, ah, sunk in yet.” Well, that was deep! Keep it going, Mike. “I know I never would have won without Dale Junior. So he has to get half the credit. And I know I never would have won without the belief that Dale had in me and NAPA and all the people on my team.”

  My mind was racing. I knew my time was short. I had so much I wanted to get in.

  “I thought it kind of boosterish—or bragging—that we thought we could win this race. We hadn’t won any race yet. And we did win.”

  Berggren said my brother wanted to talk to me from the broadcast booth. Darrell was a mess. He was so happy for me and so emotional. He had just called his baby brother winning the Daytona 500. He didn’t try to hide his feelings about that either. “Way to go!” he shouted at me and viewers around the country. “Way to go, buddy! Keep it low, Mikey. Keep it low. Don’t let ’em run up on you. Come on, man. Come on, man. Block him. Block him. You got him, Mikey. You got him, man.”

  He turned to Mike Joy, exhausted, at the end. “My daddy would be so happy.”

  Quite a day for the Waltrips.

  Now in Victory Lane, Berggren handed me a headset. Darrell’s voice was loud and clear. We were talking in front of a huge television audience, millions of people watching around the world, including my proud momma back in Sherrills Ford. But when I heard him in the headset, it was like we were sitting on the back of the truck, just him and me.

  “What’s up, Brother?” I asked Darrell.

  “Man, I want to be down with you,” he said. “I want to give you a big hug. Man, way to go! I was riding with you. I was praying for you. Pulling for you.”

  By that point, it was just Darrell and me, telling a new family story, although I was doing most of the talking this time.

  “Well, as soon as I find Dale Junior, I’m gonna give him a big kiss,” I said. “He won me the race, and you can’t do this deal nowadays without friends. He was my friend. His Budweiser Chevy ran second. He had a dream. He won the Daytona 500. And he did. I’m just here to celebrate, man.”

  I looked at Berggren. It was straight stream-of-consciousness now. “Can I say one more thing? Woo-wee!” I let out the loudest whoop I had inside me. “God, I can’t believe it’s over!” No more 0-fer.

  Then it was back to Big Brother. I’ve always been a pretty big talker. Now I was kinda taking over the post-race interview. To his credit, Berggren was totally gracious, just giving me my space and my moment.

  “Now let me ask you a question, Darrell,” I went on. “How much better does one for 463 sound? Instead of 0 for 462?” I didn’t really give him a chance to answer. “You people are hung up on my record,” I said. “I don’t care. But I do know this. Me and my brother have both won the Daytona 500!”

  “That’s right, Brother,” Darrell said. “That’s right, brother. Tell ’em about it. Get up on that car.” I would. In a minute. But first I had so many people to thank. And of course, at a time like that, your mind is constantly blanking out on you. You can never think of half of them.

  “All my friends,” I said. “Golly, Scott Eggleston. There are so many people, Dick. On and on. I’m gonna have lots of time to thank people.”

  Couldn’t forget my mom, though.

  “Momma, I love you. Momma, I wish you were here. Golly, if my daddy were here, it would be complete. This is a day the Lord has made. And I’m proud, and I never gave up. You know, you can’t win if you give up. I didn’t care how many 0-fers I had. I showed up every Sunday and did my job. And today I finally won one of these things.”

  “Michael, you know how much money you won?” Darrell asked.

  “There ain’t no telling,” I said.

  “A million dollars! You won a million dollars! You are a millionaire!”

  Even at that moment, I knew that race money never quite added up like you thought it would. Good thing Darrell wasn’t my owner. He’d probably send me another check for a thousand and keep the rest.

  “The last time I won a lot of money,” I said, “I won the All-Star Race. It paid two hundred thousand. I got half of that, and I said, ‘I’m gonna build my momma and daddy a house.’ That cost a hundred grand. The government got half of mine. I went fifty thousand in the hole. I’m not making any promises today.”

  Before I got done, I had one more thing I needed to say, something that I guess was obvious, but I wanted it to be heard coming out of my mouth: how much I had benefited from the help of Dale and Dale Junior and the whole DEI racing crew.

  “I can’t believe it,” I said.
“I owe it all, or most of it, to Dale Junior. He helped me a lot. And his daddy too. I saw him back there fighting them off. I know they’re both real proud of me, their driver, but more importantly this team they threw together for a few months. They hired me to drive it and people were like, ‘Why’d he do that? He must really like him.’ Well, this is why he did that. Because I knew I could do this job. This is why he did it.”

  I hugged and kissed Buffy and Macy, saw all my family who were there in Victory Lane. I even talked to my brother on TV. But the one guy I was sure was on his way to join our celebration, the one I wanted to see the most, the one I was sure would give me a bear hug I would never forget—I hadn’t seen him yet.

  “Hey, y’all. Where’s Dale?”

  PART 4:

  DEALING WITH IT

  CHAPTER 24

  THE COVERAGE

  Mike Joy was the lead announcer in the broadcast booth, calling the race for Fox. As I was roaring toward the checkered flag, Mike turned his eyes away from me and Dale Junior for a moment and the victory that was about to be ours. That’s when millions of TV viewers got their very first indication that something had gone wrong.

  “Big trouble!” the veteran race announcer warned. “Big! Right behind them!”

  As Mike, Darrell, and Larry McReynolds described the action, I was in my own little world, rolling down the track at 190 miles an hour, ticking off the last few seconds of NASCAR’s Great American Race, on my big day. I was focused on the checkered flag in front of me.

  At home, the TV audience could hear my brother Darrell cheering me toward the checker. “To the flag!” he yelled. “Come on, Mikey! You got it! You got it! Mikeeeeey! All right! All right!” But as three glorious words moved across Mike Joy’s lips—“Michael Waltrip wins!”—the story of the 2001 Daytona 500 was going to get more complicated by the second. Nobody had any idea yet how complicated.

  The scene at the finish was still the main story. For now, it was. But some very unsettling developments were starting to intrude.

  Two cars had hit the wall between turns three and four of the final lap. That was clear from the video. These were Kenny Schrader’s and Dale Earnhardt’s cars.They bounced off the wall and spun around, then slid through the final-lap traffic into the infield.

  Quickly, Kenny could be seen climbing out of his yellow #36 M&M’s Pontiac and rushing toward Dale’s black #3 Goodwrench Chevy. From a distance, it was impossible to see inside Dale’s car as Kenny and then an ambulance crew made their way to him. But one thing was for sure: Dale wasn’t climbing out. And the guys in the broadcast booth had a race to recap. Two important story lines were beginning to collide.

  My brother Darrell, who’d finally caught his breath from yelling “Go, Mikey” so many times, was the first one to ask. “How ’bout Dale? Is he okay?”

  For Darrell to ask a question like that, he had to have suspicions. Darrell wasn’t new to scary-looking crashes. He’d seen many of them over the years. One second, he was crying tears of joy, cheering his baby brother to the checkered flag. The next, those tears still in his eyes, he was turning his attention to turn four, where Dale’s car had come to a stop. “How ’bout Dale? Is he okay?” At that moment, no one really knew the answers to those questions. But Darrell knew he didn’t like what he saw.

  What a swing of emotions my brother faced right there. Out of one eye, he could see me celebrating with my team in Victory Lane. Out of the other, he could see the emergency medical teams rushing toward Dale. Eventually, Darrell knew, I was going to find out what had happened over there. What a gut-wrenching position—on live TV.

  He and his colleagues had to gather themselves. The show had to go on. Darrell was no longer just my brother or Dale Earnhardt’s friend. He had another job to do. Now he and his colleagues were reporters with a complicated story to tell.

  “Schrader has climbed out of his car,” Mike Joy said, repeating all that anyone knew yet. “He and Dale Earnhardt crashed between turns three and four.” Then, changing gears quickly, Mike asked: “Darrell, is this better than winning it?”

  “This is great,” Darrell said. “I just hope Dale is okay. I guess he’s all right, isn’t he?”

  It was clear that nobody knew much of anything yet, least of all me. Mike Joy was doing some TV housekeeping, recapping the finish of the race.

  “Now, Earnhardt and Schrader did not complete the final lap,” he noted. “So they’re scored at 199 laps, along with Robert Presley, Brett Bodine, Kyle Petty, and on back through the rest of the field. These results are unofficial.”

  Darrell spoke again. He couldn’t keep his attention off turn four.

  “As excited as I am for Michael and proud as I am of him,” my brother said, “I’m just, I’m praying for Dale. He’s back down there, and they’re working down there. So we need to worry about him.”

  The two competing stories—one bright and cheery, the other dark and unknown—were pushed and pulled through the rest of the telecast. At times, Mike Joy was just following the script, for instance, after a break when he said: “Chevy congratulates Michael in the #15 Monte Carlo.” At other moments, the emotion was impossible to hold back. When the helicopter shot showed the ambulance pulling away from Dale’s wrecked car, Mike, Darrell, and the rest of the Fox team bounced back and forth with their competing narratives.

  “Dale Earnhardt was removed from his car, and you see the ambulance transporting him directly to Halifax Medical Center in Daytona Beach, which fortunately is but two miles from the Speedway,” Mike said. “That’s all the news we have. If we don’t get a further update on Earnhardt’s condition during our telecast, tune in to Victory Lane at 9 P.M. on Fox Sports Net tonight.”

  With the help of video replays the Fox guys tried to figure out how the wreck might have occurred. Larry McReynolds wondered whether Rusty Wallace’s car had bumped Dale or not. They worked their way through it.

  “Darrell,” Larry said, “it looked like when Rusty run up there through the middle, it maybe just took the air off Dale’s spoiler. It don’t look like anyone got into him at all.”

  Or had someone? What about Sterling Marlin?

  “Sterling may have gotten into it just a teeny bit and got him headed up the hill,” Darrell said. “It’s hard to say. Those kinds of licks are the worst kind. They’re sudden.”

  Whatever. When the video was played again, the impact of the accident looked pretty severe.

  “Schrader was riding him into the wall,” Darrell said, sounding increasingly concerned. “So you get the impact of not only one car, but two cars. It looks like right there—”

  “Looks like maybe he did get into it,” McReynolds agreed.

  “Sterling got into him, and here he goes,” Darrell continued. “Man, not only is he going into the wall, but he’s got Schrader riding in there with him.”

  “Lucky they didn’t take another six cars with them,” Mike Joy said.

  “I don’t like that,” Darrell said. “That’s not the kind of crash—” He didn’t finish that sentence, as if he didn’t want to say, “That’s not the kind of crash you survive.” The way Darrell put it was: “That’s the kind of crash that hurts you.”

  Jeanne Zelasko, a pit reporter on the Fox broadcast team, grabbed Kenny Schrader as he came out of the Infield Care Center, where he’d been checked out and quickly released. Kenny was talking with a group of reporters when Jeanne pushed in.

  “Someone runs into someone for no reason,” Kenny said. “That’s all. I mean the rules are fantastic. They’ve really got a good rules package.”

  When the pit reporter asked about Dale’s condition, Kenny didn’t offer much.

  “I don’t really know,” he said. “I’m not a doctor. I got the heck out of the way as soon as they got there.”

  “How ’bout yourself, how are you?” one of the reporters asked.

  “I’m fine, I’m fine,” he said. “Just thinking about Dale.”

  “Take us through it,” the reporter p
ressed.

  “I don’t know what happened,” Kenny said again. “All of a sudden, we was all crashing. It started behind me. But I got part of it.”

  For now, that would have to be it. No one who really knew what was going on was talking. The people who were talking didn’t know much. As I continued my Victory Lane celebration, no one was telling me anything. I was just readying myself for whatever was coming next. The broadcast was ending. Time was running out. Mike Joy and his colleagues did their Daytona 500 wrap-up.

  “While Dale’s driver Michael Waltrip celebrates,” Mike said in what turned out to be a fairly good summary of where things stood, “Dale Earnhardt rides in the back of an ambulance to the Halifax Medical Center. It is the emotions of this sport. It is the irony of Daytona.”

  With each minute that passed, it was getting more obvious to viewers: These guys on TV were juggling triumph and tragedy.

  “All right,” said Chris Myers, who had anchored the pre-race broadcast and was now closing the show. “It’s the kind of day that a motion picture could certainly cover here. Michael Waltrip becomes the sixth driver in history to have his victory, the Daytona 500—after 462 races—become his first win. He comes away with the victory.”

  I agree, Chris. The story of that February afternoon in Daytona—how I got there and how I left—had more than enough drama to fill a movie screen.

  Ken Squier had been covering the Daytona 500 as a journalist since before I ever raced there. He was the announcer when CBS first aired live flag-to-flag coverage in 1979. He had the perspective of history.

  “A couple of thoughts as we get down to the end of today,” Ken said. “William Manchester has written that true heroism is not based on a single incident, but is built on courage and commitment in the face of the unknown and potential danger over time. Heroes are those who are unwavering to their calling, said Manchester. So we’ve seen a winner today.