by Joe Garner
(left to right) Rick Hendrick, Brian Whitesell, Robbie Loomis, and Jeff on the stage in Atlanta to accept the 2001 Winston Cup Championship trophy, November 18, 2001.
“It wasn’t until that championship that my stock and respect as a driver went to another level, because everybody realized, ‘Oh, it wasn’t just Ray,’ ” says Jeff. For him, it was the most personally gratifying of the four titles he had won. Standing on the stage that day in Atlanta to accept the trophy, “was an awesome moment,” he remembers. “In my opinion, at that moment, life could not be any better.”
But in an instant, it all came crashing down. Amid the celebration, the confetti and champagne, the team photos and interviews, Mike Helton suggested that they bring Brooke in for a few pictures. When Jeff beckoned her to the stage, she glared. Her response was sharp and steely. “It’s about time you asked me to come over,” Jeff remembers her telling him. “I thought you were just going to leave me over there. Is this celebration just about you? Is that what it’s all about?”
Her bitterness caught him off guard. “It hit me like a ton of bricks,” he recalls. One moment, he was rejoicing in the greatest accomplishment of his Winston Cup career, and the next he was being raked over the coals for his selfishness. “Did I kind of forget about her in that moment? I kind of did,” he admits. “But at the same time, I wasn’t intentionally trying to.” Still, his inattention was telling, especially for a man who, season after season, race after race, was regularly greeted in Victory Lane by a kiss from his wife and was seldom seen outside her company.
“She was pissed,” Jeff says. “And she stayed like that all the way back to the airport.” Finally, Jeff couldn’t hold his tongue. “I stopped her in her tracks,” he remembers. “I said, ‘Hey, I’m sorry you feel that way, but this moment’s not about you. This is about me and my race team and what we just accomplished. I’m proud of that, and I’m not going to let you ruin it.’ ”
It was one of the first real fights they’d had in nine years together, but it was a watershed. “We always got along pretty good, but that was mainly because I went along with pretty much everything she wanted to do,” Jeff says. “I was easygoing.” Now, it was as if a switch had been thrown, and he found himself dwelling on the slights and resentments, the petty jealousies, and all the slings and arrows he felt he’d absorbed good-naturedly over the years for the sake of marital harmony. And the one topic he kept coming back to was family.
The entire No. 24 team celebrates their fourth Cup championship in Victory Lane. Jeff is standing at the top of the stage with Rick Hendrick on his right and Brooke on his left. Atlanta Motor Speedway, November 2001.
“In all honesty, if I had to look at one single thing that was the biggest factor, I’d say that was it,” Jeff says. “The fact of the matter is that she had a problem with my parents. She had a certain picture of the way we were going to live, and my parents didn’t fit into that.” The wedge that had been driven between Jeff, Carol, and John in 1994 and ’95 had only gotten worse over the years, particularly after Jeff and Brooke moved to Florida. Over time, Jeff watched as his parents were shunted further and further to the periphery while Brooke’s mother and stepfather, who lived part-time in a home Jeff and Brooke purchased for them near Highland Beach, assumed a much larger role in the couple’s lives. It weighed on him.
“That separation from my parents, I always carried that on me, every day, every year,” Jeff says. “I didn’t like what had happened, but it had happened, and at that point a ‘sorry’ was not going to repair it. And I kept a lot of it to myself.”
“There were times when I just wanted to go over and strangle Jeff,” Carol admits. “Like, ‘What are you thinking?’ I mean, it’s okay to not have your parents running your business. I understand that. You’re married. You need to have that independence. But it was the way that he was being manipulated—and he has to live with that.”
Jeff agonized over being pulled in opposite directions, attempting to please everybody. He knew that acceding to Brooke’s wishes would hurt his family and that pushing the issue would damage his marriage. “I think my mother and me and Jeff are very sweet people,” says Jeff’s sister, Kimberly, whose first marriage, like Carol’s marriage to Billy, had ended in divorce. “And we went looking for people who were controlling, because we’re not controlling. So we found people that were controlling, but they weren’t nice and didn’t treat us well, you know?”
With his emotions still roiling, things came to a head during Christmas as he waited at the local private airport to pick up Brooke’s relatives, who were being flown in for the holidays on the couple’s jet. Jeff’s clan had been relegated to two days during Thanksgiving—Brooke said she couldn’t tolerate them for more than that—and suddenly the unfairness of it all hit him. “And I just said, ‘This is bullshit,’ ” he recalls. “What am I doing? This is crazy. I have no friends, I have no family that I have any real relationship with, and my life has become all about what happens on the racetrack and with Brooke and her family. I mean, it was nuts. That was just not the way I envisioned life to be.”
Shortly after New Year’s, Jeff met with a divorce attorney. Then he moved out. “I think I had held so much in for so long that when it hit me, I was done. We went through therapy, but it was too late. All these things added up, and when I finally accepted that the marriage was not working, it came flooding out.”
Not long after, Jeff made a trip up to Charlotte to visit Carol and John. Both of them remember having suspicions that something wasn’t quite right. He spent the night, and in the morning he asked his mother to show him the pond they were building on the property. “I’ll never forget this. It was starting to sprinkle,” Carol recalls, “and we drove down in his car, past the shop, and he parked on the grass and we started to get out. Then it started raining a little bit harder, so we got back in the car. He turned the car on, then he turned the car off. I just kept waiting for those words, ‘We’re going to have a baby.’ But he said, ‘Brooke and I aren’t living together.’ Oh my God, I was so relieved. I just said, ‘Jeff, I’m so sorry.’ I mean, I didn’t know whether he was devastated. So I said, ‘You know, maybe this is just a temporary thing, maybe you guys can work it out.’ And he said, ‘No, Mom, we’re not going to work this out. I know what I want.’ ”
He also dropped in on Rick Hendrick. “He came to talk to me, and he was sweating so bad,” Hendrick says. “And I don’t know what it is, but he’s got some bad news, something is wrong, something is big-time wrong. And I was almost relieved when he told me he was getting a divorce. I thought, ‘God, I’m lucky he’s not divorcing me.’ So I said, ‘Listen, I’m going to give you some advice. Here are the three things you don’t do: You don’t hit her, you don’t leave her, and you don’t get caught with your pants down.’ ”
In the months to come, Jeff’s romantic intrigues—which he was adamant began after he separated from Brooke—would become fodder for the tabloids. But two out of three ain’t bad. “He didn’t hit her,” Hendrick jokes.
Fresh on his own, Jeff joined Robbie Loomis, Jimmie Johnson, and Johnson’s new crew chief, Chad Knaus, on a private flight to Las Vegas that January, where they planned to test for the upcoming season, less than a month away. The Friday departure gave them four free days before their scheduled speedway session. “I had a feeling we were going to go out there and have some fun,” Johnson says, “but I didn’t know what kind of fun Jeff was planning on having.” Would he drink? Would he gamble? Would he hole up in his hotel room reading Bible verses? “I didn’t think our fun was going to match up.”
Shortly after the plane took off, Jeff got up to go to the bathroom, and Johnson quickly cracked open a bottle of rum, poured some into his half-empty Pepsi, and passed it around for the others to do likewise. “Hurry up, pour it, pour it, pour it,” he urged. They weren’t fast enough. Jeff returned to find Loomis clutching the open jug of Captain Morgan. His crew chief fixed him with a hangdog look and pointed his finge
r at Johnson like a guilty teenager. “He brought it.” But any fears that they were dealing with a stiff-necked schoolmaster dissipated once they saw Jeff’s approving reaction. When the plane landed in Sin City, the party was on.
Jeff looking confident as he wraps up his championship season.
Jeff delivering his opening monologue as host of Saturday Night Live, January 11, 2003.
9
LIVE FROM NEW YORK . . .
IF BEING ON HIS OWN WAS AN ENTIRELY new experience for Jeff—“Brooke and I were apart no more than seven days during our entire marriage,” he says—it was also a little jarring for the fans.
To them, racing’s royal couple was as inseparable as biscuits and gravy, and the smooching, hand-holding, clean-living pair had become as much a NASCAR institution as the pre-race prayer. So when Jeff arrived for the 2002 season absent his other half, the question on everyone’s lips was: Where’s Brooke? Is she sick? Is she pregnant? The rumor mill began churning, but Jeff, and everybody else who knew, stayed tight-lipped.
On Friday, March 15, just before the fifth race of the season, Brooke filed for divorce. In her petition, she asked for alimony, exclusive use of the couple’s Florida beachfront home, several automobiles, and access to their boat and jet. Boiled down, she was looking for a fifty-fifty split.
The racing world was shocked. But even more astonishing than the breakup itself was Brooke’s filing that Jeff might have been unfaithful. The truth, though it wasn’t known publicly at the time, was that nothing had occurred until after Jeff moved out of the couple’s home for good. In his mind, the marriage was over at that point, even if he wasn’t legally separated.
The idea of NASCAR’s golden boy philandering, let alone divorcing, was so at odds with his public persona that the newspapers had a field day. As for the public’s reaction, it remained to be seen whether the news might win him additional fans or earn him the cold shoulder from the moral majority.
Throughout the NASCAR garage, Jeff got a lot of support. If anybody took pleasure in his misfortune, they weren’t saying so. Jeff himself stuck to the high road. “People don’t understand that every once in a while, things are going to happen in my life just like everybody else, because I’m human,” he told reporters. “I don’t like what we’re going through, but I want it to come out with us being friends in the end.” His one request to the media was this: Don’t use this divorce as a reason for why I’m off to a slow start.
But while Jeff explained every lurch and blunder on the racetrack in terms of mechanics, track conditions, caution flags, or driver error, the situation with Brooke, and the media scrutiny, did have an effect. When Jeff countersued, claiming he should retain more than half of the couple’s estate because he risked his life to earn it, the legal battle kicked into high gear. He would race on Sundays, his head filled with anxiety about his legal strategy and stacks of depositions. The messy negotiations would drag on for sixteen months. “I was paying as much per month in lawyers’ fees as I’d made in salary my entire rookie year in 1993,” he ruefully recalls.
Ultimately, he decided that for his own peace of mind, he needed a change of scenery. He’d been shuffling between Charlotte hotels, Rick and Linda Hendrick’s house, and spare rooms in the homes of Ricky Hendrick Jr. and Jimmie Johnson, but now he chose a location where he felt he could enjoy himself with some degree of anonymity: New York City. He quickly fell in love with the place.
“New York had a lot of energy,” he recalls. “It was an exciting town. There were always things happening, and fun. And at that time, that’s what I was looking for, that’s what I needed, that’s what I didn’t have for many, many years, and I wanted to enjoy that opportunity in my life.”
Jeff soon developed a close network of well-connected friends there who were eager to show him all the city had to offer. Throughout 2002 and 2003, he soaked it up. There were dinners at the swankiest restaurants, weekends at East Hampton estates, and late nights at exclusive Manhattan clubs like Serafina and Pangea. It didn’t matter if he had to compete in a 500-mile race on Sunday; the second he climbed out of the car, he was on his way to the airport. “Those places were open on Sunday nights, so when I’d come back from a race, I would go there,” he says. It was tons of fun.
“I’d spend a few days there, then go to the next race, maybe come back to New York or go back to Charlotte, depending on what was going on. If I had a weekend off, I was going to the Hamptons with friends or I was going on my boat in the Bahamas. Wherever the fun group was, that’s where I was going.”
Jeff walking solo at the track in 2002.
Jeff and Johnson developed a fast bond, the first time in his career that he’d allowed himself to get close to another driver, teammate or not. Become too sociable and the competitive flame may flicker, he’d always thought. But in Johnson he saw a kindred spirit, and after years of living in virtual marital solitude, he yearned for friendship. It wasn’t long before the two were hanging out and carving up the Big Apple together.
He was also enjoying the freedom of playing the field and dated a number of women that season, most of them models or aspiring actresses. As a single man, he was unquestionably NASCAR’s most eligible bachelor. The running joke around the garage was that the nation’s number-one pickup line was “Hello, my name is Jeff Gordon.”
Some would say he was making up for lost time. “I would call it experiencing life as I never had before,” Jeff says. “But yeah, I made up for it. I wasn’t young and single. I was older and single, and I did it maybe even to a bigger, better level because I got to include New York and St. Bart’s and Paris.”
For once, he had no one to answer to. There was nobody else’s respect to earn, no one’s ego to care for, no dread of disappointing someone, or pressure to please anyone else. In 2001, he proved he could race, and win, on his own merits. Now he was crawling out from beneath his oppressive, carefully manufactured image—squeaky-clean “Jeff Gordon,” the championship racer, the prized product pitchman, the role model, the God-fearing churchgoer, the dutiful husband—and reconnecting with the person he felt he had always been.
“What sunk in,” he says, “is that I really didn’t care what other people thought. It’s what’s going to make me happy. I learned a lot through that experience, and one thing I learned was to be more me. I don’t want outside influences to steer me away from me being me, or away from what’s going to make me happy. Life’s too short and life’s too good. I mean, I had thought my life was amazingly perfect, and I realized it wasn’t at all. There were good moments and a lot of great things happening, certainly on the racetrack, but there’s a lot more than just that. And for many, many years, that was all that mattered to me.”
In November, Jeff and Johnson hit the road for Europe, where the two of them, along with motorcycle racer Colin Edwards, were to compete in the international Race of Champions, a team-based contest held annually on the Canary Islands, featuring racers from NASCAR, Formula 1, Indy, and a number of other formats. Busch Series driver Casey Mears, who would start his rookie Cup season the following year, also joined them. Their journey took them first to Paris, where Jeff knew friends who showed them the City of Lights—“the coolest nightclubs in the world, with hot models everywhere,” Johnson recalls—and then on to Madrid, where they sampled the sights and were given front-row seats to Cirque du Soleil. Finally, they jetted down to Gran Canaria, off the coast of Morocco, where they won the Nation’s Cup during the three-day Race of Champions (ROC) competition, making it back to the States just in time for NASCAR’s year-end banquet in New York.
Jimmie Johnson (left), Colin Edwards, and Jeff celebrate their victory at the 2002 Race of Champions—Nations Cup.
It was there, during the ceremony, that an NBC employee slipped Jeff an envelope, which he dutifully tucked into the pocket of his tux and forgot about. Later that evening, while out for dinner with friends, he remembered it. Everyone’s curiosity was piqued.
“It’s an invitation to
host Saturday Night Live,” Jeff told them.
“You’re shitting me,” said one of his friends. “You’re going to do it, right?”
“Hell no,” he responded. “I’m not an actor. I’m not worthy of doing Saturday Night Live.”
The show had been after him for a year, ever since NBC began broadcasting half the NASCAR season in 2001. In fact, they’d offered him the hosting spot then, but he shrugged it off. “There was no way I could do it,” he remembers thinking at the time. “I laughed at them. I never responded.” It’s not that acting intrinsically scared him. Over the preceding few seasons, he’d starred in episodes of Spin City and The Drew Carey Show, and had even cohosted Live! with Regis and Kelly three times in Regis Philbin’s absence (he’d go on to do it eight more times). But SNL, with the pressure to be funny for an hour-and-a-half on live TV, was far outside his comfort zone.
“Let me tell you something,” his friend said. “I don’t care what you are capable of or what you think you’re capable of. If you get an invitation to do Saturday Night Live, you’re doing Saturday Night Live.”
“So I said, ‘All right, I’ll do it,’ ” Jeff laughs. He had five and a half weeks till showtime.
When Jeff showed up at Rockefeller Center in the cold rain the week before his scheduled January 11 appearance, he was oblivious of what to expect. After some brief introductions, they plunked him down on a sofa and dropped a gargantuan stack of fifty or so scripts into his lap. Read these, he was told. “Some of them were funny,” he recalls. “Some of them were pretty out-there.” He hadn’t gotten anywhere near the end of the stack when someone fetched him and brought him into a conference room where the show’s producer, Lorne Michaels, the writers, and the cast—which at the time included Tina Fey, Jimmy Fallon, Tracy Morgan, Amy Poehler, and Seth Meyers—were gathered.