Jeff Gordon: His Dream, Drive & Destiny

by Joe Garner

As early as Jeff’s rookie season, it was clear the kid had an unusual gift for driving, but more importantly, he wasn’t going to be cowed by Dale’s on-track antics. “Dale Earnhardt would not have respect for anybody who was a pushover,” Evernham says. “Drivers know who can drive and who can’t, and I think Dale was like, ‘Holy shit, this kid’s the real deal.’ ”

  During 1994 and 1995, they raced each other sixty-two times. Each had nine victories. Each won a championship. Over the course of their careers, they would line up together in 258 points races, with Jeff taking fifty-two of them and Earnhardt twenty-three. Every time they raced, they knew it was going to be a war.

  Jeff and Dale Earnhardt share a laugh, 1995.

  “When it came to basic competition,” Evernham recalls, “they’d wreck each other for a dollar. It was all about winning with them two. They’d even wreck cars on us in practice just screwing around with one another. If they were leaving the parking lot at the same time, stand back, because it was going to be a race. Whether it was getting to the airport, getting home, practice, getting to the best seat in the drivers’ meeting, it didn’t matter.”

  Throughout the mid-1990s, that rivalry grew, especially after Jeff wrested the Cup title. Frosted Mini-Wheats even featured the two competitors on a cereal box above a legend that read, “The Kid and the Champ.” The more Earnhardt talked it up, the more people wanted to see the two of them go at it week after week. And once the press and the fans got a hold of it, it turned into something far bigger and more symbolic than Jeff and Dale on the racetrack: it became old versus young, working class versus middle class, plainspoken versus media polished, southerner versus outsider.

  In many ways, it came to encapsulate the cultural clash of “old” NASCAR, the longtime regional Southeastern pastime, and the “new” NASCAR, the major national sport with wide appeal. “Jeff came in and was decidedly everything Dale wasn’t,” says PR and marketing man Bill Armour. “And Rick Hendrick knew he had the guy who was going to break the mold of the traditional mid-South, good-ole-boy driver. [Jeff] was going to transcend into the mainstream, as far as having the personality to break through to the American consumer. He would transcend the stereotype.”

  And while Earnhardt was by then a millionaire several times over, what he exuded was also what he was—a rural, hardscrabble son of the South who had done his time as a mechanic, mill worker, and welder before finding a Cup ride. “Earnhardt played that farmer deal. Every time you saw a picture of him, he was in the chicken coop, on the farm with cows,” Hendrick remembers. “I knew there were pictures of him with his fishing boat down in the Bahamas on the weekends he wasn’t racing. . . . But to his fan base, he played that good-ole-boy, roll-with-it guy.”

  Jeff and Dale Earnhardt share a moment at the 1996 Daytona 500.

  Earnhardt, perhaps more than anybody, understood that that kind of black-and-white battle is what made the money tills ring. It was good for him, good for Jeff, and good for the sport. Just as the Larry Bird–Magic Johnson rivalry helped resuscitate an ailing NBA in the 1980s, the Gordon–Earnhardt duel bolstered NASCAR’s appeal among fans and sponsors.

  “It was very much Ali–Frazier—both of them knew that their rivalry would put asses in the stands and sell plenty of T-shirts,” Evernham says. “And when you’ve got sold-out events with 150,000 people and your TV ratings are up, the price of real estate on the side of that car goes up.”

  “I think that’s why not just the fans but NASCAR loved Dale so much,” Jeff says. “Because he got it. There aren’t many that get it the way he did, and he used it to the advantage of himself and the sport.” But his dedication to the fans and the sport sometimes meant he played up his “black hat” role a little too much for Jeff’s liking.

  “There were times,” Jeff says, “when he either felt like he was in control of a race or like he couldn’t win a race, so he would play it up. Like, ‘My only chance of winning is to hit this person or make his life very difficult.’ And he’d say, ‘Oh, yeah, the fans love that.’ He’d say that all the time, ‘Oh, the fans eat that up.’ And I’m like, ‘Well listen, it cost me the race, so I didn’t eat it up.’ And he’d say, ‘Ah, you’ll get over it. It’s good for the sport.’ ”

  Earnhardt had very loyal and very vocal fans—and a lot of them. Add to them the supporters of forty or so other racers and things could be difficult for Jeff, and his team. When Jeff had started out in the Cup Series, when he got his first few victories, everybody loved it. When he won at the Brickyard, the crowd went berserk. Even through the first part of 1995, there were far more cheers than heckles. But that started to turn, quickly, as his success continued. It was something Rick Hendrick assured him was simply part of racing.

  “When a young kid steps in and first starts winning or starts running good, all the fans applaud him,” Hendrick says. “But then he starts beating their guy, and some turn against him. And then, when he starts winning a whole lot, you get the boo-birds.”

  But the rivalry between Jeff and Earnhardt took that natural progression to an outrageous and vitriolic level. “It got to where they would announce two people at the racetrack,” Carol recalls, “and everybody there would know who those two people were because one would have the biggest applause and one the biggest boos. There were probably rivalries before, but the one between Dale Sr. and Jeff was unique.”

  “People would throw beer at us, and it was pretty nasty for a while,” Evernham recalls. “We’d work and do something really cool, win a race with two laps to go with a great pit stop or something, and then you’d just get booed. I didn’t like it. I think it bothered me more than it bothered Jeff. At least on the surface, he kind of used to let it roll off. He just seemed like, ‘Look, that’s part of it. At least they’re cheering, too.’ But it was brutal.”

  With their rivalry surrounding the races, most fans would have been horrified to learn that not only would Jeff occasionally pick Earnhardt’s brain about licensing and marketing issues and how to handle the race game, but the two were in business together. Even Humpy Wheeler, the head of Charlotte Motor Speedway, nearly lost his lunch when he found out the pair had purchased a piece of property together in Charlotte.

  “They were business partners and they were competitors,” says Dale Earnhardt Jr., who remembers his father introducing him to Jeff in 1993 and saying Jeff was going to be one of the greats. “And the fact that Dad would go into business with Jeff, and that he worked with Jeff on that side of the sport, the souvenirs and what have you, I felt that was probably a bigger compliment than ‘This kid is awesome’ or ‘He’s one hell of a racer.’ I think for Dad to feel that comfortable about him as a person to go into business with him, that was saying something.”

  None of that, however, diminished what went on at the track. And while there were plenty of boos to be heard, Jeff had built up a large fan base of his own. Since winning the Brickyard in 1994 and shooting for the championship in 1995, everything had grown, and at times, it seemed everybody wanted a piece of him.

  During the week, there were endorsements to negotiate, photo shoots, commercials, merchandising issues, board meetings, media interviews, and sponsor appearances—all of that outside the actual competition, which required testing, practicing, qualifying, talking with the team, and debriefing with the crew chief. But Sundays at the track presented the biggest challenge.

  In NASCAR, unlike other sports, sponsors cover the drivers’ salaries in return for a prominent display on the car and a driver’s commitment to sling their product in public and put smiles on the faces of consumers and their VIP customers. A lot of that hobnobbing happens on Sunday, and in many cases, it lasts until the moment a racer straps into his car and puts his helmet on. Over the years, Jeff warmed to the reality that the tidal wave of supporters was part of what made the NASCAR world go round. He would even be recognized for his indulgence of fans on race day, but there was a short period in 1995 when the young champion needed a few words of helpful advice.

/>   “He did have a crushing amount of fans,” Hendrick recalls. “And at one point, he had surrounded himself with an entourage—usually at the track—to protect himself, and it looked like he wasn’t the Jeff Gordon I knew and loved. They were trying to convince him, ‘You’ve got to build a wall around yourself.’ And that’s not Jeff Gordon. Jeff Gordon is more comfortable walking among the people. He doesn’t want to act like a superstar.”

  Jeff surrounded by eager fans.

  His business manager, Bob Brannan, remembers shooing well-wishers away and trying to insulate Jeff from the demands on his time and attention. “People would go directly to him, sometimes at inappropriate times,” he says. “He’s getting ready, he’s sitting in the car, and somebody wants to ask him a question. And there was a point when Jeff, particularly before a race, would want to spend time in the transporter with his team, get changed into his uniform, all that. And people wanted to pop in: ‘So-and-so is here and wants to say hi to Jeff.’ And that got to be a distraction. So Jeff said, ‘I just don’t really want to be interrupted from this time forward, and I really don’t care who it is.’ ”

  Jeff and Ray Evernham celebrate in Victory Lane at Watkins Glen, New York, August 10, 1997.

  Jeff and Evernham speaking on campus at Princeton Unversity, 1996.

  Rick Hendrick felt Jeff was becoming too inaccessible. “And for anybody who had the success he had and the following he had, it was easy to do, but keeping him grounded was important. I talked to him about it, and I told him about his look when he walked by sponsors, and how you don’t have time for this and you don’t have time for that—and part of that was his manager. We had to rein it in a little bit. But as soon as you say something to Jeff, he gets it.”

  “I accepted the fact that the fans, the sponsors, the media, all those things are part of how this process happens,” Jeff says. “And if you accept it, you can be more comfortable and open and have more enjoyment in life at the racetrack. It makes life easier.”

  Naturally, after his 1995 title performance, expectations were huge for 1996. Jeff didn’t disappoint, winning a Cup-topping ten races, to go along with twenty-one top-five finishes. He and Evernham, after taking the competition to school on the track, were even invited to Princeton University to guest lecture on race engineering and communication.

  But 1996 was more memorable for what he did not achieve—namely, a second championship. The trophy, which had been close enough to taste, was yanked away by his Hendrick teammate, Terry Labonte, who despite tallying just a pair of wins, had been slightly more consistent. Labonte narrowly slid past Jeff in points in the last few weeks of the season to edge him out.

  “Yeah, it was disappointing,” Jeff says. “I mean, I liked Terry, and I loved competing against him. But we were disappointed that we didn’t get it done. Those near misses drive you. You’re like, ‘Okay, I know what it’s like to win. Now I know what it’s like to lose, and I don’t want to lose.’ In my experience, some of the greatest lessons were learned from the losses, more than the wins. And I thought that was a great lesson, a great year to go wrong. We came back with a vengeance the next couple years because of that loss.”

  But at the time, it didn’t just bother him that he’d lost by a hair’s breadth—it galled him. “He’s just one of those guys; he is really competitive,” Evernham says. “I remember we had a basketball machine and a pinball machine in the No. 24 shop, and Jeff had the high score on those. If anybody beat him, he would stand at those machines until he got the high score back. I saw him stand at that basketball machine for two hours one day until he got the high score.”

  On the team plane, he’d play poker and acey-deucey with the crew until he’d amass giant stacks of their per-diem cash and Evernham had to make him return it so they wouldn’t starve. And nearly twenty years later, he would pass Evernham in a friendly go-kart race and feel the need to put him into the wall. “I said, ‘You’re Jeff Gordon,’ ” Evernham recalls. “ ‘Do you really get that much enjoyment out of beating me?’ He’s laughing, and he said, ‘Yeah, I really do, I really do.’ You don’t want to gamble or race with Jeff Gordon because chances are, you’re not going to win. He’s just that competitive.”

  So by February 1997, it was no surprise that he was nearly jumping out of his skin to get back on the racetrack at Daytona and rectify the 1996 bust. It had taken him some time to master the art of restrictor-plate racing, that special understanding of how to “draft,” or exploit the cars’ aerodynamics to his advantage during the bunched-up, pack-style runs at Daytona. “We had cars fast enough to win the first time we went there,” Evernham says. “He just had to learn the drafting part of it.” By 1997, with wins at Talladega and in Daytona’s shorter Pepsi 400 under his belt, Jeff felt he had every tool he needed to finally crack NASCAR’s signature race.

  And if he required any extra incentive, his ailing boss, Rick Hendrick, who had recently been diagnosed with life-threatening leukemia, had responded to Jeff’s offer of help by telling him to “just go out and try to win that race and try to win a championship.”

  During the first half of the 500, Jeff slowly worked his way up from deep in the pack, and by the race’s later portion, he had settled into a battle up front with Bill Elliott, Dale Earnhardt, Dale Jarrett, Mark Martin, and Ernie Irvan.

  With twelve laps to go, Jeff and Earnhardt were running side-by-side behind the leader, Elliott, coming out of Turn 2. Jeff made a quick passing move to the inside. Earnhardt’s No. 3 suddenly hit the wall on the back straightaway and skittered off. Contact with Dale Jarrett’s No. 88 sent Earnhardt flipping up into the air and barrel-rolling over Irvan’s No. 28, sending Irvan’s hood reeling off into the grandstands. The battered No. 3 then slid across the track and onto the infield grass.

  “It was an intense battle,” Jeff says. “I got aggressive on his bumper, and he washed up the racetrack. As I got underneath him, he went wide, hit the wall, and he bounced off the wall into me. Jarrett made contact with him and turned him upside down. I actually never touched him until after he hit the wall and bounced into me.”

  ESPN’s Dave Despain claims Dale took a slightly different view of things. “Probably the next week, I happened to be alone with Earnhardt, and so I said, “What happened at Daytona?” And he got this glint in his eye, and he got that lopsided smile on his face, and said in a hushed tone, even though there was nobody around, ‘The [expletive] wrecked me and never touched me.’ And it was with admiration. It was wonderful, because Earnhardt knew more about wrecking people than anybody in the business, and the old dog had learned a new trick from the young kid.”

  Jeff and Dale Earnhardt battle side-by-side at the 1997 Daytona 500.

  Earnhardt may have been giving the incident more than its due, but whatever the perception, the move pushed Jeff into second, and over the next few laps, his teammates Terry Labonte and Ricky Craven crept up behind him. With six laps left, he dove low into Turn 1 to pass Elliott as Labonte and Craven moved by on the outside to take over the second and third spots. A wreck near the back of the pack, a lap and a half later, brought out the caution flag and ended the race. It was a sweep for Hendrick Motorsports, and Jeff, at just twenty-five years old, was the youngest driver, at the time, to ever win the Daytona 500.

  (left to right) Terry Labonte, Jeff, and Ricky Craven, along with Hendrick Motorsports teammates, dedicate the 1997 Daytona 500 race to Rick Hendrick.

  In Victory Lane, having made good on his promise to Hendrick, he spoke to his boss by cell phone. “Did I tell you we were going to do it or what? I told you, man . . . We love you, and this one’s for you.” He then thanked God for throwing out the timely caution and embraced his wife.

  Jeff may have been the biggest name in racing at the time, but he was just a guppy in a giant pond of celebrity, still shy enough to be starstruck. Just weeks after the Daytona win, Hendrick reached out to Tom Cruise and producer Jerry Bruckheimer, whom he had become friendly with during the filming of the 1990 racing mo
vie Days of Thunder in Charlotte, and landed Jeff and Brooke an invite to Vanity Fair magazine’s exclusive post–Academy Awards party in Los Angeles.

  “It was the A-list of who’s who in Hollywood,” Jeff remembers. “We were like, ‘How the heck did we get here?’ I’m sitting there, and nobody really knows who I am, and everywhere I looked I’m seeing every major actor, director, and entertainer in Hollywood—I mean, they’re just standing right next to us. It was amazing.”

  He and Brooke tried to cozy up to Cruise, who had been nominated for a best actor Oscar for Jerry Maguire, but the megastar had a line of VIPs a mile long just waiting to shake his hand. They joined the queue. “Mr. Cruise is not taking any more visitors at this time,” his security detail eventually told them. “No problem,” Jeff said. “Can you just pass along a message that Jeff Gordon and Rick Hendrick say hi?” Then he and Brooke turned to go. They hadn’t gotten more than a few steps before he heard someone shout his name. It was Cruise, waving them back.

  “He sits us down in this booth and says, ‘Oh my god, this is awesome. It’s such a pleasure to meet you.’ He introduces us to Nicole [Kidman],” Jeff recalls. They were flabbergasted. He and Cruise talked about racing, about Hendrick Motorsports, about the track at Darlington, where he’d raced the previous day. “He couldn’t have been nicer.”

  But the kicker for Jeff was when they passed twenty-two-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio on the way out. “He had these purple sunglasses on, two glasses of champagne. I said, ‘Leonardo, I know you’re probably not a NASCAR fan, but I’m a NASCAR driver and I love your work, and congrats on everything.’

  “I’ll never forget, he looks at me and goes, ‘Ah, man, I don’t follow NASCAR, but if you’re in here, you must be somebody.’ ”

  After the initial Daytona victory, No. 24 only got hotter. Heading into the 23rd race, they’d already amassed eight wins and seventeen top-fives, but the Southern 500 at Darlington topped them all. According to Evernham, it was “the best race we ever executed as a team.”