by Monte Dutton
Stock car racing has seldom seen a hero less affected by success than Gant, who still lives in his hometown, Taylorsville, North Carolina. Gant used to run a steakhouse there, and he is also a cattleman and an accomplished woodworker. When Gant retired, other drivers asked him if he was still going to be around at the track.
“Heavens, no,” he replied. “You ever seen the traffic around these places? I built myself a piece of furniture for my television set. I can roll the set right out on my deck and watch the race right out there in the fresh air if I see fit.”
“Seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars is a lot of money, but it … wouldn’t have been worth what I had to do to get it.”
—DALE EARNHARDT JR.
explaining why he resisted the temptation to spin out Ryan Newman in the 2002 all-star race, the Winston
“I bumped him; that’s part of it. I think we needed a yellow so we could put on a good show there at the end.”
—KURT BUSCH
after not resisting the temptation to spin Robby Gordon out in the same race
“Lowe’s Motor Speedway is one of those tracks where the sun usually sets in the west.”
—Motor Racing Network’s
BARNEY HALL
“Maybe if Jeff Gordon had been a little braver, he might’ve won.”
—KEVIN HARVICK
after being told that Gordon, who finished second at Chicagoland Speedway in 2002, had called his driving through the grass “a stupid move”
Kurt Busch, the 2004 Nextel Cup champion, is fond of big words, of which there are some that he actually knows the meaning. Busch is kind of like the kid who went off to college for a year and came home thinking he knew everything. In fact, he did attend the University of Arizona for a year.
The owner of Busch’s number 97 Ford, Jack Roush, also likes stringing syllables together, but Roush’s use of the language is far more authoritative than that of his young driver. The truth is that Roush is probably a bad influence, linguistically, on Busch. Busch, if prompted, would probably say Roush was a bad influence “vocabularically.”
After a qualifying run, Busch once said he had “circumferenced the track.” After Ryan Newman’s first pole of 2005, Busch called Newman’s Dodge “ludicrous fast.”
During Daytona Speedweeks in 2003, he said rival team DEI (Dale Earnhardt Incorporated) had “a threshold on the front of the competition.” He added that “the DEI cars have some sort of wrath that nobody else has.” He said of own his team, “It’s real solidifying to know that the group is solid.”
Hard to argue with that.
Referring to his spectacular sophomore season (in NASCAR, not college) which included three victories in the final five 2003 races, Busch said, “It’s been somewhat of a tailspin and somewhat more of a comfort level to know what I’m capable of and to know where the team is at right now.”
“Sorry teams don’t usually win the Brickyard, or anywhere else, if you think about it.”
—MARK MARTIN
“I’ve got some really good words for him. Unfortunately, I can’t say them on TV. I wish I had something I could’ve shot at him.”
—WARD BURTON
angry at Dale Earnhardt Jr. after a crash at Bristol in August 2002
“The Chevrolet has had more nose jobs than Michael Jackson.”
—STERLING MARLIN
complaining about a NASCAR rules change
No one ever outran Ernie Irvan, who retired in 1999, in a race of verbal blunders. The best example occurred in a telephone press conference in 1997, shortly after Irvan had been told by Robert Yates that he would no longer drive Yates’s number 28 Ford after that season.
With an army of journalists listening in, Irvan said, “You know what they say: When the going gets tough, the tough get happening.”
When asked if Yates had given him a reason for his dismissal, Irvan said, “Well, you know, I went to Robert, and he didn’t really give me a reason. He just hee-hawed around the subject.”
Then a reporter asked Irvan if he was concerned at being “a lame duck.”
“Somebody asked me that the other day, and I didn’t really know what the guy meant,” Irvan replied. “I never played baseball when I was a kid.”
In the span of about ninety seconds, Irvan had dozens of reporters laughing uncontrollably, heads facedown in their computer keyboards, punching the table with their fists.
“We had the wrong gear, wrong springs, wrong shocks, and wrong car. We had the right beer, but other than that, we got stomped.”
—STERLING MARLIN
sponsored by Coors Light, at Dover in September 2004
“When I was twenty-two or twenty-three, I was trying to act like I was forty-five or fifty. I’m not saying that didn’t help me get a long way in this sport, but, now that I’m thirty-one, going on thirty-two, I want to get back some of those years.”
—JEFF GORDON
before the 2003 Daytona 500
“Fast and smooth. You don’t have to be aggressive as long as you’re fast and smooth.”
—RYAN NEWMAN
Jeff Gordon was not always the self-assured, polished spokesman he is today. When he was in his early twenties, he had become a superstar on the track but remained uncertain off it. He often relied on the protective influence of crew chief Ray Evernham and drove journalists mad with responses that seemed rehearsed and predictable.
In 1995, when Gordon was closing in on his first championship, he conducted a press conference at Atlanta Motor Speedway, which then hosted the final race of the season. Journalists were informed in advance that Gordon would not answer any question concerning the championship and would only respond to questions specifically referring to the specific race. This stipulation, of course, defeated the purpose of holding a press conference.
It took a resourceful writer to smoke Gordon out.
Jim McLaurin, then covering NASCAR for The State newspaper in Columbia, South Carolina, was up to the task.
“Jeff,” he said, “I know you won’t answer any questions about the championship. What I want to know is why you won’t answer any questions about the championship.”
Most everyone in the room erupted in laughter. Gordon couldn’t keep a straight face. And he did talk about the championship he would wrap up two days later.
“He drives off the end of his hood. He can’t see past his ears.”
—TERRY LABONTE
referring to Kurt Busch after an Indianapolis crash in 2003
“If we ever had fan interference in this sport, it’d be a lot worse than a dropped ball.”
—KEN SCHRADER
noting the controversial incident in the 2003 Cubs—Marlins baseball playoff series
“We all knew what the deal was when we got into it. It’s not like we started a five-day-a -week, nine-to-five job and all of the sudden somebody said, ‘Hey, we need you working more hours, traveling all over the country, and being gone just about every weekend.’ This didn’t surprise anyone. When we signed up we knew how many weeks, how many races, had a pretty good idea of where they were going to be, and knew what we had to do. Nobody fooled us into it”
—KYLE PETTY
Before the start of the 2005 season, I asked Carl Edwards if anyone had ever told him he was so wholesome and enthusiastic it made them sick.
This youthful believer in truth, justice, and the American way replied, “Oh, yeah. I get that all the time.”
Twenty-five years, Edwards’s age at the time, might be a relatively mature length of age for some, but not for race drivers, who strap themselves into outrageously fast vehicles and live out their frenetic dreams. Missouri gave the world Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, and Edwards—from Columbia, Missouri, not Mark Twain’s Hannibal—is descended from that fictional heritage.
It’s not hard to imagine Edwards, sitting in some high school classroom, daydreaming about winning the Daytona 500. He’s all “yes, sir” and “no, sir,” reciting his sponsors even to an aud
ience of world-weary journalists who wouldn’t mention Scotts fertilizer (one of Edwards’s sponsors) if they were standing up to their knees in a weed-infested garden.
Come to think of it, it wouldn’t be hard to imagine Edwards daydreaming even now—that is, except for the fact that he’s living out his dreams with the world as his witness.
Jeff Gordon has his own brand of wine. Carl Edwards deserves his own line of comic books. He couldn’t get a movie deal because his story is too hokey. In a way, it’s a shame that Edwards isn’t an actor because, now that Mickey Rooney’s day is past, he alone could play Andy Hardy. If Jack Roush could build Edwards a Ford out of Lincoln Logs, he’d try to race it. Edwards is one of the last people alive who could say, “Gee whiz, that’s swell,” and keep a straight face.
The occasion of Edwards’s first Nextel Cup victory, the Golden Corral 500 at Atlanta Motor Speedway on March 20, 2005, was just as hokey, uplifting, and, well, swell as everything else about him.
“I was trying to get by Jimmie [Johnson], which is just about impossible,” said Edwards after doing so on the final lap. “It just worked out at the end. I can’t believe it worked out.”
The thing is, when Edwards says something, despite the fact that it’s sickeningly wholesome, it’s impossible not to believe him because, well, he delivers the goods, whether it’s executing a backflip off the roof of his car or an otherworldly pass of the most productive NASCAR driver of recent vintage.
Anyone other than Edwards would be laughed out of the room. Somehow, in an age when all the various and sundry icons—Mark McGwire, Martha Stewart, Rush Limbaugh, Bill Clinton, maybe even Jeff Gordon—are being brought to their knees, Edwards lifts us up with his wide-eyed charm and makes us believe in the aforementioned truth, justice, and the American way again.
And that backflip! Edwards almost slipped up at Atlanta, completed as it was just a day after the one he wowed a smaller crowd with after his first Busch Series victory.
“The first time I saw him do it, I thought it was luck,” said Jack Roush, the owner of Edwards’s number 99 Ford. “I went over and said, ‘We’re going to be doing this a long time, and if you keep doing that, and rely on luck to do it, it’s not going to work.’
“[Edwards] said, ‘Don’t worry. When I was in college, I had a girlfriend who would help me with it, and I was in a padded room, and I fell a lot, but now I won’t fall down. I can do it.’ It’s not bragging if you can do it, and he’s been doing it really well.”
That observation could be made both of Edwards’s backflips and his driving, but, of course, he doesn’t brag about either. He even credits Tyler Walker, then a sprint car driver but now in the Busch Series, with giving him the idea for the celebratory backflips.
Heck, Edwards even thanked the media: “I just want to thank you guys because you’ve written some really nice things about me … and I know it won’t always be good. There’ll be times when you have to write bad things about me, and I’ll be grateful for that, too.”
That alone ought to be enough to make NASCAR officials dock him twenty-five, or even fifty, points. Thank a sponsor, okay, but thank the media? Them’s fightin’ words.
“Not to discredit them in anyway, but NASCAR has become this black hole sucking up sponsorship, fans, TV viewers, and all the things that make racing work. It’s like a giant vacuum cleaner. So how everybody gets along with reduced crowds, reduced money, and reduced ratings to me is the real issue. Look at what many others perceive as the crisis in open-wheel racing; a lot of that has to do with NASCAR just taking over the audience.”
—DAVE DESPAIN
host of Speed Channel’s Wind Tunnel
“I couldn’t tell what was coming out of that little ‘yap-yap’ mouth of his.”
—RICKY RUDD
referring to Kevin Harvick, after a post-race altercation at Richmond in 2003
“I was about to get fired and Bill was getting old.”
—JEREMY MAYFIELD
asked why his and teammate Bill Elliott’s performances improved late in the 2003 season
I’ve never understood why there seems to be some innate compulsion to ask journalists to predict things: races, games, champions, political outcomes, etc. No one should expect us to play Nostradamus. What I’m trained to do is write about what’s already happened. I don’t have dreams of the future. I don’t keep tea leaves handy. Normally, supernatural visions do not hover above my bed when I awaken in the middle of the night. Nature is usually what beckons when I awaken at such times. When someone—sadly, it’s often another journalist—asks me to predict the winner of the Nextel Cup championship, I do it but I don’t attach any particular importance to it.
I have, however, thought about it, and what I’ve concluded is that picking the champion under the current system is patently ridiculous. It’s like deciding which numbers to select on a lottery ticket. Once the race-offs begin, it’s kind of a crapshoot. It seems to me, though, that a more valid assessment would be to pick which ten drivers will have a chance to win that pulse-quickening, spine-tingling, maddeningly unfair “Chase.”
Getting in the top ten after twenty-six races is what counts. Then it’s a matter of getting hot, keeping the fenders uncrumpled, and hoping a rod doesn’t fly through the cylinder wall. In 2004, Jimmie Johnson won four of the final ten races, but that wasn’t enough to win the championship because Kurt Busch finished in the top ten in nine of them. Busch’s persistence and tenacity were admirable, but it didn’t hurt that, when the right front tire flew off his Taurus in the season’s final race, it conveniently did so at the mouth of pit road and the tire itself continued rolling down the frontstraight, thus bringing out a caution flag, while Busch was guiding the car three-wheeled into his pit stall.
Making all the right moves isn’t enough. It takes a little Stardust.
“It’s like you’re sitting in a parking lot, a lot of times in the middle of a parking lot … This parking lot just happens to be going really, really fast.”
—KEN SCHRADER
on racing at Talladega Superspeedway
“It was too crazy for me, and I’m ’bout the craziest one out there.”
—DALE EARNHARDT JR.
after a Talladega race in 2003
“If the Romans had any sense, they would’ve built Bristol instead of the Colosseum.”
—O. BRUTON SMITH
chairman, Speedway Motorsports Inc.
American sport has no more ambitious a leader than NASCAR chairman Brian Z. France, but the youthful leader of this still-burgeoning sport is not without his eccentricities. When he is speaking in front of an audience, France’s hand gestures can be metaphorically linked to a fifteen-car Talladega pileup.
France, the grandson of NASCAR’s founder, makes frequent use of the old Bill Clinton thumbs-up gesture, but he has cultivated his own variations. Comparing the ex-president’s mannerisms to France’s is like comparing a triple-pump reverse dipsy-doo to a standard slam dunk. France is fond of firing the left thumb off to the side, making it appear as if he is referring to someone or something that invariably isn’t there. Sometimes he fires one hand jauntily while karate-chopping with the other. The words are fraught with euphemisms, but the hands are charismatic.
When France steps up to a microphone, he sounds almost like he’s starring in an infomercial. NASCAR exists, he says, “to showcase the opportunities for the best drivers in the world to do their thing.” Those very same drivers invariably “step up to the plate” and “the more there is on the line,” the better they perform.
Occasionally he misspeaks. In 2004, he noted that “it reeks [did he mean ‘wreaks’?] of the whole industry to be able to absorb that many changes.” Perhaps this was because “with momentum comes anticipation.”
Shortly after he said this, a bus that had been provided for the convenience of journalists covering France’s momentous remarks returned from NASCAR’s Research and Development Center to a nearby hotel. As the bus neared the
hotel, one of the writers pointed to the roof of another hotel, where a windblown stick figure was gyrating just about as wildly as Brian France. Apparently it was atop the hotel because of a business conference being held there.
“The answer, my friend, is Brian in the wind,” the writer said.
“When you’re looking at me, you’re looking at NASCAR history.”
—RICHARD PETTY
who won two hundred Cup races, nearly twice as many as anyone else
“You know how you get in shape to drive a race car? You drive a race car.”
—DICK TRICKLE
Road racer Boris Said learned some lessons in his first Daytona 500.
“I love this kind of racing,” he said, “[but] these guys sure change their personalities in race mode. They’re like Doberman pinschers with a hand grenade in their mouths.”
Joe Gibbs is a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame who may well wind up in the NASCAR equivalent one day as well. He’s won NFL championships as a coach and NASCAR titles as an owner.
“The Coach” considers the most notable difference between pro football and stock car racing to be the immediacy of the fans:
“This sport is so unusual in that aspect,” he says of NASCAR. “I think that’s what I love the most about it. In football, the players have very little contact with the fans. You take a bus to the stadium, you warm up, you play the game, you get back on the bus, and then you’re gone. Where else can you have contact with your favorite athlete on the day of the event? It’s not unusual for these guys [in NASCAR] to sign autographs and interact with the fan on the day of the race.”