Jeff Gordon: His Dream, Drive & Destiny

by Joe Garner

  If the race wasn’t going my way, there’d come a time where I’d have to start accepting what had happened, and believe me, it’s easier to accept a top five than it is a fifteenth or twentieth. If we were the dominant car leading the race and we finished third, then I was upset, because we should have won the race. If we ran tenth all day and we finished fifth, then I was happy. That’s like a victory, because we got more out of the car. It’s always about getting the most out of the car. If I made a mistake, I was mad at myself. If I felt like someone else contributed to that mistake, even though we were a team, I wasn’t going to beat them up for their mistake. I’m pretty good at letting things go.

  Jeff in his final Victory Lane celebration, Martinsville 2015. “There aren’t many things that can compare to that feeling,” says Jeff.

  But if it was a mistake that cost us a championship, it stuck with me for a while. Like Texas in 2014. We had it won so many times, and then the caution kept coming out. We’d have to rerack and do another restart. I just didn’t do as good as I possibly could. In the clutch, I didn’t get it done and allowed Brad Keselowski to take advantage and give me a cheap shot. Yeah, I was mad at him, but I was just as mad at myself. I feel like it was my job to prevent that from happening. At that time, I knew 2015 was going to be my final year, so I knew how crucial it was, and that probably contributed to what happened between us later on pit road. I held on to that one for a couple weeks.

  A VICTORY IS A HUGE ADRENALINE RUSH; it’s extremely exciting. You’re just really proud of yourself and your team. I can remember back in the mid-nineties winning quite a few races and I just couldn’t wait to get home. In recent years if I won a race, I was like, “Man, give me another hat to put on. Let’s take another picture!” You couldn’t get me out of Victory Lane. I’d take my sweet time because I’d want to take it all in. It’s such a great moment. There aren’t many things that can compare to that feeling, and you want to be around the people who contributed to it and the people you care about. The most gratifying aspect of being in that race car is seeing all the effort that went into it and getting the reward at the end of the day.

  I was truly ready to do something different. My body was telling me. My mind was telling me. My family was telling me. Since I made the decision, it really added pressure in the final season. But it was also a huge relief.

  I KNOW HOW FORTUNATE I WAS to get to do something that I loved, was good at, got paid a lot of money to do, and was successful doing it. I got the chance to drive great cars, be a part of great teams, and have the most amazing experiences I couldn’t even have imagined. “Dream” is in the subtitle of this book for a reason. Since I was five-years-old, my dream was to become a racecar driver, and it came true. To this day, when I think about all the things that have happened for me as a result of realizing my dream, I still pinch myself sometimes to know it’s all real. But it is. It all happened. As I look back over the journey of my life, I think it’s one of the coolest stories ever.

  Amazon

  Jeff at seven years old posing in his uniform purchased from Simpson Race Products, Torrance, California. Jeff’s stepfather, John Bickford, had to special order the uniform directly from owner Bill Simpson because the company didn’t routinely make a uniform that small.

  1

  THE KID FROM CALIFORNIA

  AMERICAN STOCK CAR RACING HAD a long, proud provenance as the sport of the Southeast. It sprung from the illicit tradition of moonshining, the birthright of the sons of the Piedmont plateau and Appalachian hills, who carried loads of mountain dew to market in souped-up sedans, outfoxing and outdriving federal agents. These were the good ole boys, and this was their sport. If you told those folks in 1970 that in a mere twenty years or so a boy from California’s Bay Area would become the public face of their pastime, they probably would have spit tobacco juice in your eye. But the boy was Jeff Gordon. And the place he was from? Well, hardly anybody outside the state had heard of it.

  Twenty-five miles northeast of San Francisco, Vallejo was a blue-collar burg, a military town whose naval yards built the nation’s first West Coast warships. The USS Ward, which fired the first shots in defense of Pearl Harbor, had been assembled there in a record-setting seventeen days. The war brought prosperity to the town, tripling its population.

  When the war ended, most of the newcomers returned to their hometowns, but many stayed on, adding a rich mix of German, Irish, Polish, Italian, Mexican, and black, to the ethnic pot. The postwar town grew into something of a Main Street USA, albeit one where sailors’ saloons and tattoo parlors dotted that street. It was into this Vallejo that Jeff’s parents, Billy Gordon and Carol Houston, were born—delivered by the same doctor, in fact, who would also deliver Jeff’s sister Kimberly. It was a world of mom-and-pop stores and roller rinks and soda fountains.

  It was at the local Foster’s Freeze that Billy Gordon first laid eyes on Carol and was smitten. “I was in eleventh grade, she was in tenth,” he recalls. “She was with a guy I knew, and I thought, man, if this guy can be with her, I’ve got a great shot.” It was an unlikely pairing. Carol was a reserved and respectful girl, the daughter of a delivery truck driver and a seamstress who stitched clothes for local department stores. She was what most people would call “well raised,” and even as a girl, she understood the importance of family and the value of hard work.

  On the other hand, Billy was a balled-up fist, ready to spring in whatever direction adventure blew. His mother and his father begged him to buckle down in school, go to college, and get a well-paying job. “My older brother, Howard, didn’t care about school. Cars, girls, guns—that was his thing, that whole young, go-get-’em thing,” Billy says. “I wanted to be like him.” And he did a respectable job drag racing, drinking, and fighting.

  In 1966, a year after Carol’s graduation, an unplanned pregnancy beckoned them to the altar. “I didn’t want to be married. I was twenty. She was nineteen. I was in full bloom. I had money, I had a car. I was having fun.” Billy lived it up, racing, carousing, and cozying up to other women.

  Coming from a close-knit clan, Carol hoped for a family with household unity. “Everything we did when I was young, we did as a family,” she says. “That’s how I grew up. That’s what I wanted.” After some cajoling from Carol, Billy promised to settle down and do better, taking an apprenticeship at the naval yard, which his father helped him land. But you can’t bottle a whirlwind. They split up and then made up; split up and got back together. “We were really living separate lives together,” he recalls. The couple made a decision many troubled couples make. They chose to have another child.

  Jeff’s mother Carol in 1965.

  On August 4, 1971, Jeffery Michael Gordon made his grand entrance. Two days later, Bobby Allison edged out Richard Petty to take NASCAR’s Myers Brothers 250 in Winston-Salem, earning $1,000. At the time, no one knew this little bundle would grow up to make his Cup debut in Petty’s final race and go on to become the winningest driver in NASCAR’s modern era.

  But before Jeff had seen his first Christmas, Billy had taken up with another lady in the neighborhood, a recently separated but still married woman whom he confessed to have fallen “crazy in love with.” Carol knew she should leave, but leaving wasn’t something that just happened. There were logistics, there were kids, there were house payments—but every one of those considerations fell away when she received a phone call from Billy’s flame. “She said that the police had just been at her house,” Carol remembers. She told Carol to hide the drugs. “There were a lot of things going on that I wasn’t comfortable with, but that one pushed me over the edge. That’s when I knew I needed to leave.”

  A newspaper clipping announcing Jeff’s birth, August 4, 1971, with his first name misspelled in the article.

  Four-month-old Jeff and his four-year-old sister Kimberly with their father, Billy Gordon.

  “I didn’t have anywhere to go,” she recalls. “I couldn’t afford the house, I didn’t have a job.” A girlfr
iend down the street offered to let them bunk with her until they got back on their feet. So Carol, four-year-old Kimberly, and three-month-old Jeff moved in.

  As for Billy, he wasn’t caught. He married his new sweetheart and eventually moved to Fort Ross, a secluded area about eighty miles north. “Carol is a fantastic woman, and she put up with way more than any person should. Jeffery says I have an excuse for everything, and he’s right. Me and my daughter Kimberly were tight, but I made the decision to be with this new woman mostly based on the fact that it was better to go before Jeffery knew me. . . . I’m thankful every day that he even talks to me or has anything to do with me. And Jeffery doesn’t know this, but when all this was going on, I used to go out in the backyard and cry and pray. I prayed that Carol would end up with a guy that would be great for her, and I prayed that she would find a man that would be a great stepfather to my kids. I prayed for that. And so my prayers came true.”

  When you ask people about John Bickford, the same words keep popping up: determined, competitive, detail oriented, independent, savvy, visionary. No problem couldn’t be solved, no hurdle couldn’t be overcome with the right amount of fortitude, observation, and common sense. It’s a philosophy that led him to cobble together a working go-kart out of random two-by-fours and a lawn mower engine at the age of nine, and to go on to build the first quadriplegic-operated vehicle by the age of twenty-four. “I didn’t have a mentor,” he says. “I feel like I’m an intelligent person, I’m a good observer, and I don’t quit easily.”

  Four-year-old Jeff playing at Blue Rock Springs Park, Vallejo, California.

  John Bickford at Capitol Quarter Midgets, Rio Linda, California, 1978.

  Racing had always been his passion. John graduated in the class of 1965 from Napa High School, about fifteen miles from Vallejo, and was married within a year. The problem, as far as his wife was concerned, was that he couldn’t seem to keep his hands off cars. He and a group of friends pooled their resources to purchase and fix up a broken-down sedan to run at Vallejo Speedway. Later, he traded a decrepit military jeep for another hardtop and recruited his friend’s brother to drive it, while he served as engineer, builder, head wrench, crew chief, and everything else under the mechanical sun. “I was absolutely the worst teenage husband that was ever created,” he remembers. Although he and his wife, Rosie, had a son in 1967, they divorced two years later.

  By that time, John had found a niche for himself at a Vallejo medical supply company called Robin-Aids. He’d started at the bottom, scraping caked food off veterans’ wheelchairs, but it wasn’t long before the higher-ups discovered his mechanical ingenuity. “They just kept bringing me problems and I’d solve them, and then they’d bring me another problem.” Soon he was busy designing and building vehicles for disabled people.

  With all that work, John spent a fair amount of time in the company’s billing department. And when a good-looking clerk named Carol Gordon was hired in January 1972, he started logging perhaps a little extra time. “We had a lot of interaction,” John says. “I was always talking to her, getting her life story. She’s single, got two kids.” He helped her out at the laundromat, holding six-month-old Jeff and talking to Kimberly while Carol washed diapers, even though he was due to be married again in a few months. John’s second union lasted just four months before it was annulled. “I don’t even know why I got married, really,” John says. “But it was over like it didn’t even exist, and so I asked Carol, ‘Well, you want to go to the races?’ ”

  It was Labor Day weekend, the sun was bright, and John and Carol and the kids were together, surrounded by loud, fast cars. Never mind that Jeff, who had just turned one, slept his way through most of the event. It was a perfect snapshot of their future. John and Carol were already living together in a modest three-bedroom house in Vallejo when they wed in May 1973. “It was kind of like night and day,” says Kimberly. “My mom and John are day, and my father, Billy, is nighttime. John is just so good with my mom, and he always treated her like an equal partner. And John loved us and treated us like his own.”

  Jeff, at three years old, in the family’s backyard.

  As early as anyone can remember, Jeff had a well of energy that seemed to run to the center of the earth. He was like a creature unleashed, and Vallejo offered plenty of opportunity to rollick.

  In the mid-1970s, the town had its share of vacant lots. On their way to and from school, Jeff and his kindergarten cronies would romp through those rubble-filled landscapes like soldiers at war, chucking dirt grenades and spear fighting with stalks of wild fennel. There were days he’d spend hours blasting video-game aliens on the family’s new Atari or play with Star Wars figures and army men in his room.

  He was just a typical kid blessed with an extra dose of energy. But he did have one chink in his boyhood armor: he was extremely wary of grown-ups. “There was definitely a period of time, up until my teenage years, when I was shy,” Jeff admits. “I had no problem with other kids and friends—I was a chatterbox when it came to that. But if I didn’t know them very well, I didn’t say much.”

  Jeff (at far right) with brothers Donny and Tommy van Inwagen, 1979.

  “He didn’t talk to anybody,” John says. “Most people thought he had a speech impediment because he wouldn’t say anything.” Carol remembers it being like a steel door slamming shut each time a human over five feet tall opened their mouth.

  “I had a neighbor I used to like hanging out with, and we’d play G.I. Joe together,” Jeff recalls. “I’d tell my parents, ‘I’m going over to Steven’s.’ ” “If Steve didn’t happen to be outside,” Carol remembers, “Jeff would simply open the neighbors’ front door without knocking and walk to Steven’s bedroom. Sometimes he might not even find Steven, but no matter. He would just play in the bedroom. And then when he was done, he’d walk back out. He never spoke to the parents.”

  As reticent as he was with adults, he could be bold and brash with kids his age. “As far as playing with other kids in my neighborhood, yeah, I was pretty competitive with it,” he remembers. Whether it was a neighborhood game of hide-and-seek or four square on the school playground, Jeff had a need to win that could at times seem pathological. He would play until he won. To this day, his friends recall that he could not stand to lose, or even to be second. He still reminds some of them how he used to dominate them in something as simple as a video game. “You could say that he was cocky, all right,” says his boyhood buddy Rod Sherry. “He was a cocky, little kid and he was confident, and I’m sure that came from his natural ability—he was coordinated and he was smart.”

  That natural ability and drive were traits John was determined to nurture in his unique Bickfordian way. “From the time he was little,” John remembers, “he wanted to be better. You inherit a lot of stuff, but you have to want to succeed.” One day, Billy dropped off a secondhand bicycle for Jeff, and he was eager to learn to ride it. As John recalls, the bike was well worn, with small-diameter wheels and hard rubber tires. He wasn’t even sure it was street worthy. But instead of upsetting Jeff by pitching it outright, John set before his four-year-old stepson a challenge. “Bottom line,” John told him, “no training wheels. When I come back from the shop, you’re either riding it without training wheels, or I’m putting it in the car and it’s going to the dump. So you choose.”

  Jeff racing at the BMX bike track in Vallejo, California, in the summer of 1976—the year he placed fourth in the state championship. Jeff still has the helmet.

  (left to right) Patrick Gerard, Jeff, and Tim Clauson proudly displaying their quarter-midget award plaques.

  Most kids that age would have collapsed in a pool of tears. Jeff didn’t complain. With a little help from Carol, he figured out how to mount the bike from the curb. “He was so short, and his legs wouldn’t touch the ground,” she recalls. “The next thing I knew, he came in and he said he could do it.” Within a day, he’d managed to face-plant on the curb and bust his lip, but he was undeterred and quickly devel
oped a new obsession. “We lived on a hill, and it didn’t take long before I was going up the hill and down it,” Jeff says. “That was really my first introduction to speed, going down that hill, pushing the limits of how fast I could go.” Weeks later, he asked to be taken to the BMX racing track in the neighborhood.

  “He didn’t even know what racing was,” John remembers. “He just wanted to do it.” The first order of business was to get Jeff a new bike. John went out and purchased a top-of-the-line frame, which he customized in his machine shop to accommodate Jeff’s tiny body—modifications that by his own admission might have strayed just a hair’s breadth from the BMX rule book. He and Carol gave it to Jeff as a birthday present.

  “And then we started practicing,” John recalls. “I’d take him every day. We’d go to the BMX track, just by ourselves, and we’d practice and we’d practice and we’d practice and we’d practice.” Jeff learned the best way to start, how to take the first corner, how to pedal through turns. When it finally came time for a sanctioned race, Jeff, who had just turned five and was competing against bigger, stronger kids, placed third. He brought his trophy home, his first ever, and placed it in the front window of the house.

  “I may have won a couple races, but I was usually finishing second or third,” Jeff says. “I was too slow, and I was too little. But it was an influence that’s still there today—just tapping into that competitiveness, going and competing against others.” He may not have overshadowed the field, but he made it to the 1976 state championships. “When you’re a miniature five-year-old and you’re competing against some long-legged seven-year-old, that’s pretty tough, but he was fast and focused,” John remembers. “He rode the hell out of the bike.”