Speed, Guts, and Glory

by Joe Garner

  The win was the biggest and richest of Earnhardt's career, but he seemed less interested in celebrating than putting the doubters in their place.

  With about 65 laps remaining, the Intimidator began to move, and by the time leader Rusty Wallace was held up by a pit-road jam on Lap 130, Earnhardt had the momentum to blast by him on the backstretch. After a hard-charging Jeff Burton got too chummy with the number 3 car and spun, bringing out the race's only caution, it was clean air for Earnhardt, who stubbornly held off Wallace and Dale Jarrett for the final 28 laps to take the checkered by just 0.37 seconds. Gordon, plagued by handling problems, finished sixth.

  The win was the biggest and richest of Earnhardt's career, but he seemed less interested in celebrating than putting the doubters in their place.

  When a reporter asked how it felt to creep out of Gordon's shadow with a huge victory, Earnhardt removed his ever-present shades and glowered. “Do you think I needed to reestablish myself? Do you think people have just completely forgot about me? Just because a Jeff Gordon gets ahead of us in points doesn't mean we're through. We're not dead yet.”

  With those words, and a few well-aimed barbs at Gordon, Earnhardt began a tenacious climb back into contention. He'd make it closer than anyone expected, finishing in the top three in seven of the last ten races and falling just 34 points shy of a record-setting eighth title.

  Defiant in defeat, Earnhardt continued to haze the youngster he'd derisively dubbed Wonder Boy. Months after the season, he still crowed about being “the only man to have ever won the Brickyard 400.”

  From Rookie of the Year to Cup Champion

  The young Dale Earnhardt was a Hank Williams song come to life, a raucous good ol' boy who scraped and scrapped, raised plenty of hell, and wasn't afraid to bust his knuckles to get what he wanted—on or off the track.

  He may have been born into NASCAR royalty, but there was no silver platter. By the time he was twenty-five, the high school dropout had burned through two marriages, fathered three kids, and careened around enough minor-league dirt tracks to make a carousel dizzy. Bouncing from one thankless job to another—mechanic, mill worker, welder—and buried $11,000 deep in debt, he never gave up his dream of one day competing in the Cup Series.

  And then the call came. In 1979 he was offered his first full-season ride by owner Rod Osterlund, and the twenty-eight-year-old from Kannapolis, North Carolina, stunned everyone by posting seventeen Top 10 finishes in twenty-seven starts, coming in seventh in points and garnering NASCAR Rookie of the Year honors.

  Dale Earnhardt holds aloft a dummy front page proclaiming him the 1980 NASCAR Grand National Champion at the Los Angeles Times 500, November 15, 1980.

  But the taste of triumph only whetted his appetite. “That ain't s——t,” he reportedly told friends after the 1979 season. “Next year I'm gonna be Winston Cup points champion.” It was a bold boast, considering no sophomore had come close to winning a title in NASCAR's thirty-one-year history. Earnhardt didn't care.

  He greeted 1980 with a non-points victory and immediately raised the hackles of racing's elite with his brazenness. “There might be a trick or two that Richard Petty and Bobby Allison haven't shown me yet,” he boasted, “but I know I'm as good as they are.”

  “Earnhardt has more damn nerve than a sore tooth,” veteran Buddy Baker complained of the young swaggerer. He wasn't alone. But the kid had the chops to back it up. He started the year by reeling off six straight Top 5 finishes, including two wins—one after starting light-years away, in thirty-first position—and never looked back.

  The old warriors Petty and Yarborough snapped at the upstart's heels from the season's get-go. But Earnhardt, who took the points lead with a fourth-place finish at the Daytona 500 and never relinquished it, was able to pad his margin with two hard-charging late-season victories at Martinsville and Charlotte. When the year's final checkered fell at California's Ontario Speedway on November 15, 1980, NASCAR crowned its brand-new champion.

  Earnhardt's astonishing five victories and twenty-four Top 10 finishes (including nineteen in the top five) dispelled any notion that he was just a flash in the pan. And his old-school, paint-swapping style, fighting tooth and nail for every pass, in every corner and down every straightaway, quickly won admirers in the grandstands, and enemies on the track.

  By the time the leather-faced, mustachioed newcomer waltzed into NASCAR's year-end winner's banquet in his cowboy boots, a star had been born, and a legion of hardscrabble, blue-collar fans had found themselves a new honky-tonk hero.

  The Man in Black/The Man of Steel

  “Earnhardt has always had the ability to intimidate,” Humpy Wheeler, president of Lowe's Speedway, once remarked. “People just don't like to see that black car on their bumper.”

  And God help the thickheaded fool who refused to open up when that car came knocking—there'd be hell to pay, in Bondo and sheet metal. “I would hate to have me behind me,” confessed Earnhardt, who'd put his stamp on more fenders than GM.

  But sooner or later, many imagined, the chickens would come home to roost. And then they'd see what the man was made of.

  That moment came on July 28, 1996. And it nearly ended the forty-five-year-old Earnhardt's life. Leading the DieHard 500 at Talladega, the Intimidator roared into Turn 1 of Lap 117 with Sterling Marlin riding his right rear and Ernie Irvan inches from his bumper. The frustrated Irvan tagged the number 4 car, which then hit Earnhardt, sending him into the wall.

  At 190 mph, the impact crushed Earnhardt's sternum like an eggshell, and his car flipped down the frontstretch like a 3,400-pound Ping-Pong ball. Derrike Cope nailed it, snapping Earnhardt's collarbone and bruising his pelvis. The mangled hulk slid on its side into traffic. Robert Pressley plowed into the roof, crushing it to within six inches of the gearshift. The car lurched and flipped upright, facing traffic. Kenny Schrader cracked it head-on.

  Earnhardt, crawling from the wreck, fell to his knees. The pain was excruciating, but he refused a stretcher, gave the thumbs-up to the crowd, and somehow managed to walk to a waiting ambulance.

  When news came down that Earnhardt would race in the Brickyard 400 six days later, few could believe it. But there he was, behind the wheel of the number 3 car, taped together like a rag doll and running at 170 mph before the pain became so unbearable that he handed the reins to alternate Mike Skinner. It was the toughest decision of his life. “It was hard to get out of there,” he told the press, wincing, his eyes welling up with tears. “This is my life right here.”

  It wouldn't happen again. Against the advice of his doctors, his team owner, his friends, his family, and NASCAR president Bill France Jr., the mule-stubborn Ironhead, still in agony, raced again one week later at Watkins Glen, breaking the track qualifying record and rolling to a sixth-place finish on the eleven-turn road course. Everyone gulped at his fortitude.

  “[Earnhardt] is the man,” Jeff Gordon's crew chief, Ray Evernham, said after that race. “Until you can do what he does, you're second. That's it. The rest of us, as far as I'm concerned, are wannabes.”

  Still healing from his horrendous injuries, he proved he was the hardest of the hardcore by running every one of the remaining eleven races that season in constant pain, finishing in the top ten four times and fourth in overall points.

  “I guess it's just my ego,” Earnhardt said of his courageous run. “That's the bottom line.”

  Dale Earnhardt leads the field into the third turn at Talladega during a 1984 event.

  A First for the Number 3

  When Dale Earnhardt, fresh off his first Cup championship, suddenly found himself adrift without a ride in 1981, it was his hunting buddy and fellow driver Richard Childress who threw out the life preserver. Childress, who had run 285 races over a dozen years without a win, had read the writing on the wall. If he wanted success in NASCAR, he'd have to climb out of the driver's seat and pitch the keys to someone else.

  “It was the toughest thing I ever had to do,” Childress said. �
�But I knew Dale was one of the best raw talents that had come along in a long time, so I got out.”

  Their initial partnership lasted only a single season. They attracted no sponsors. They posted no wins. At year's end, Childress glumly suggested over a six-pack that Earnhardt find himself a better team. Resignedly, the thirty-year-old champ departed for greener pastures with owner Bud Moore. But Childress's magnanimity had made an indelible impression.

  “Nobody might have ever given me another shot,” Earnhardt remembered years later. “I might have been back on the short tracks and back working in a textile mill somewhere. He saved my butt. And I never forgot that.”

  So when Childress managed to land a lucrative contract with Wrangler Jeans for the 1984 season, the loyal Earnhardt repaid the favor and hopped behind the wheel.

  The team clicked instantly. After eighteen races, they led the points standings and had fifteen top ten finishes. But by late summer they were still searching for that first victory.

  It came at Talladega on July 29, 1984. In a heady battle marked by sixty-eight lead changes, ten blown engines, and a slew of spectacular crashes, Earnhardt managed to survive and steer himself into striking position on the final go-round. With fifteen cars in the lead lap and Terry Labonte out front, Earnhardt made his move on the backstretch, barreling into the point and holding off Labonte and Buddy Baker through the final two turns. As he shot across the finish line for his first ever win in the number 3 car, he waved jubilantly to the crowd.

  At year's end, Childress glumly suggested over a six-pack that Earnhardt find himself a better team. Resignedly, the 30-year-old champ departed for greener pastures with owner Bud Moore.

  The Earnhardt-Childress team would falter in the last third of the season, winning just once more, in Atlanta, and dropping to fourth in the final standings. But the seed had been planted, and over the next sixteen years that victory at Talladega would blossom into one of the greatest success stories in NASCAR history.

  Years later, Childress, musing on the sixty-seven victories and six Cup championships he and Earnhardt had claimed during their illustrious ride, could still recall the night in 1981 when they'd met at the Downtowner Inn in Alabama to ink the new partnership. “I'd say it worked out,” he joked. “Wouldn't you?”

  Chapter Nine

  ONE-WIN WONDERS

  After taking the lead with less than 30 laps left in the 200-lap contest, Wendell Scott put some distance between himself and the front pack, which included Ned Jarrett, Richard Petty, and Buck Baker.

  Wendell Scott: The First African American Driver to Win at NASCAR's Top Level

  In most ways Wendell Scott was just like dozens of other underfunded independent racers on NASCAR's Grand National circuit in the 1960s. He survived on salvaged parts, reconstructed engines, guts, and ingenuity while endlessly scraping the bottom of the barrel for a few nickels to keep his dream alive.

  But two things set him apart. First, he was better than most other drivers. Second, Wendell Scott was black.

  And in a sport with roots sunk deep in the white working-class culture of the South, the wrong skin color could still be a serious detriment. While Jesse Owens and Jackie Robinson may have broken the athletic color barrier a generation earlier, NASCAR fans weren't about to tear down the Stars 'n' Bars and raise the banner of racial brotherhood.

  “Back in those days,” one NASCAR official said, “people could be very ugly when it came to race.”

  That ugliness reared its head at nearly every track Scott and his wife and six kids visited. There were racial taunts and flying garbage. There was on-track subterfuge and sabotage in the garage. There were even death threats from the Klan.

  “If I'd have went through what Wendell Scott went through, I'd have never made it,” said driver Junior Johnson. “And if I had to race the stuff he had, I wouldn't have lasted ten races. His determination was a thousand times more than what mine was.”

  That determination kept Scott running in NASCAR's Grand National (now Cup Series) Division for more than a dozen years, during which he competed in 495 races and logged 147 top ten finishes. For nine straight seasons he finished twentieth or better in points, including a four-season streak (1966–69) in the top ten, when he regularly edged out NASCAR legends like Ned Jarrett, Buddy Baker, Bobby Allison, and Cale Yarborough.

  A former bootlegger from Danville, Virginia, Scott got his start as the result of a jailhouse bargain. While detained on charges of whiskey-running, he was approached by a local race promoter with a devious offer of posting bail if Scott would run at his track that evening.

  Wendell Scott working on his car.

  It didn't take a lot of arm-twisting. The champion bootlegger quickly became a champion dirt-track racer, and over the next decade he dominated the Dixie circuit, winning more than 120 races and claiming NASCAR's 1959 Virginia State Sportsman title. In 1961 Scott made the jump to NASCAR's top-level Grand National Division.

  Surviving in the Grand Nationals was a constant struggle for Scott, both economically and socially, but he made it work despite the indignities and isolation he suffered.

  “He overcame many hurdles,” said Scott's son Franklin, who spent his teenage years traveling with the family to races and working with his brothers on his father's pit crew. “But he never let it faze him to the point where it made him hostile.”

  That was true most of the time. But Scott wasn't above flexing some muscle if his antagonists pushed it too far. If that meant threatening to punch Bobby Allison in the nose for spinning him or leveling a pistol at a bullying Jack Smith in the middle of a race, so be it. A man has a right to protect his livelihood, especially when he's walking a constant tightrope between penury and the poorhouse and has seven hungry mouths to feed.

  “He probably did more with less than any driver I've ever seen,” said racer Ned Jarrett. “But he just never really got the [financial] break he needed to show the talents that he had…

  On December 1, 1963, Scott would roll his meal ticket onto the half-mile dirt track at Jacksonville Speedway Park. In less than two hours, he would be involved in one of the most controversial decisions in NASCAR history.

  After taking the lead with less than 30 laps left in the 200-lap contest, Scott put some distance between himself and the front pack, which included Ned Jarrett, Richard Petty, and Buck Baker, who was running second. Over the next few laps that margin would grow as Scott put the hammer down. By the time he entered the final turn, he had lapped the field twice, but there was no checkered flag waiting for him at the finish line.

  Scott completed another lap. Still no checkered. He tried a third time, but before he could get around, Buck Baker, running more than a full mile behind him, crossed the start-finish line, and was declared the winner to raucous cheers—and much to the track officials' satisfaction, according to Scott. The sport's guardians, it seemed, just weren't ready for the spectacle of a black man celebrating in Victory Lane. It was highway robbery, plain and simple.

  “Everybody in the place knew I had won that race,” a resentful Scott recalled years later. “But the promoters and NASCAR officials didn't want me out there kissing any beauty queens or accepting any awards.”

  Officials later informed Scott that the blunder was the result of an unfortunate scoring error and awarded him his only Grand National victory hours after the last fans had left. A month later, in Savannah, in a feeble attempt to make amends, NASCAR gave Scott his “trophy”—little more than a varnished wooden post bearing a crudely carved inscription. Baker kept the gleaming original.

  But the slight didn't stop Scott from doing what he did best. The 1964 season would turn out to be the winningest of his career—he would cop eight top five showings and twenty-five top tens while running 56 races, and would finish twelfth in overall points.

  Scott would continue racing until 1973, when a bad wreck at Talladega left him nearly crippled and in chronic pain.

  “He probably did more with less than any driver I've ev
er seen,” said racer Ned Jarrett. “But he just never really got the [financial] break he needed to show the talents that he had. …He could have knocked our pants off.”

  Scott died in 1990 from spinal cancer at the age of sixty-nine. In 1999 he was inducted into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame. He remains the only African American to ever win a race at NASCAR's highest level.

  Wendell Scott with Bill France, 1965.

  Richard Brickhouse's Day in the Talladega Sun

  The sad story of Richard Brickhouse began and ended on a single fall day in 1969. Momentarily raised up as a champion, he'd be dropped like a hot potato, the unfortunate victim of a political battle between forces much greater than himself.

  When he came to NASCAR in late 1968 Brickhouse was green, straight off the farm, a dirt racer who'd never touched a paved track. But the talented twenty-seven-year-old managed to turn a few heads with top ten performances at Darlington and Rockingham, running a cast-off 1967 Plymouth purchased from Richard Petty.

  Keeping that car going at the Winston Cup level, however, proved difficult. Without sponsorship, Brickhouse found himself pouring his soybean savings into a quickly sinking ship. And then came Talladega.

  Brickhouse shines at Talladega.

  The brand-new 2.66-mile Alabama track—the latest jewel in NASCAR boss Big Bill France's crown—was to host the first ever Talladega 500 on September 14, 1969. But there were problems. The track was unbelievably fast, and at 200 mph-plus, the asphalt quickly turned drivers' tires to spaghetti during qualifying.

  That was all most racers needed to see. Petty's recently organized Professional Drivers Association (PDA) boycotted the race, and its members, including more than thirty top competitors, packed up their equipment and went home. France was fuming. With less than twenty-four hours before start time, he hit the phones, wheedling, cajoling, and threatening NASCAR's remaining drivers into their cars.