by Joe Garner
Jeff reviewing his script in the green room before Saturday Night Live, 2003
Jeff, shaking in his boots, took the one free seat, next to Michaels, who welcomed him and thanked him for hosting that week. “This is where we go through all the scripts,” Michaels began. “All right, let’s go.” Jeff started off with the first, which, unfortunately, required him to howl like a wolf. ‘Do I just say it, or do I act it,’ he wondered. “Nobody’s giving me any direction,” he says, “and I’m scared shitless.” He gathered himself. “So I do the whole howl, I do it very, ‘Aaaaooooooh!’ ” The next “line” was a cast member’s howl. “And they’re like just over-the-top selling it,” Jeff says. “And I realized I’ve got to step up my game.” His howling grew louder each time. “It was awkward,” he admits. “I was out of my element.” Michaels made it easy on him and cut the sketch.
By the time they’d worked their way through the immense stack, Jeff was more unsure than ever. “I was overwhelmed,” he recalls. “I was seriously concerned at this point.” One of the cast members assured him that he was doing fine and they’d have plenty of time to work through everything in rehearsals. “Still,” he says, “that was one of the most frightening experiences of my life, because I had no direction, no idea what to expect.”
Chris Parnell (left) and Jeff Gordon (right) in the “The Terry Funck Hour” skit on Saturday Night Live, 2003.
As the week progressed, he lightened up and eventually began to enjoy himself. During rehearsals, Carol remembers him calling her. “They were on a break or something, and he was like a little kid in a candy store,” she says. “So he’s got me on the phone, and one of the guys comes in and says the F-word, and Jeff goes, ‘This is my mom I’ve got on the phone!’ And the guy goes, ‘Oh God, tell your mom I’m sorry.’ It was just funny. I could tell how much he loved doing that. He was having such a good time and was so happy . . . even though he was going through all the stuff with Brooke.”
On the night of the live show, he was on the verge of a coronary as he waited to be introduced by Don Pardo. And then he stepped on stage—a cooler, edgier Jeff than most NASCAR devotees were used to, sporting a dark, open-necked shirt, a black leather jacket, and spiked-up hair.
His opening monologue ran with that idea of image. A couple cast members planted in the audience played “typical” rowdy NASCAR fans—replete with No. 24 paraphernalia, pork rinds, and beer koozies—who interrupted Jeff by shouting clichéd racing phrases in mock-Southern accents. “Drop the hammer, Jeff!” “Yeah, open ’er up, dog!” At first, he brushes them off. But they lay it on so thick he finally stops and says, “You can’t possibly go to a NASCAR event and act like that . . . because a real NASCAR fan would’ve killed you by now.”
The moment was telling. On one hand, it was a defense of NASCAR’s image. On the other hand, it was a nod to the fact that the sport had outgrown its regional roots, and that even then, the stereotype of the old-time stock-car fan was an overblown myth. It also showed just how far away Jeff, the sport’s best-known personality, stood from that long-held image. It was a subtle PR coup for everyone, and it was hilarious.
Jeff Gordon (left) and Tracy Morgan (right) on Saturday Night Live, 2003.
For the rest of the show, Jeff played a variety of characters, as both a straight man and a ham, and nailed them all. “It was a huge adrenaline rush, such a blast,” Jeff says of the SNL experience. “You realize you can’t fail. It’s one of those situations where it could be a terrible skit, and you could go in there and mess it up and make it look funny. It’s so much fun that it’s hard to mess it up.”
The same could have been said of Jeff’s life at the time. He couldn’t fail. The issues with the divorce had done nothing to lessen his popularity, his profitability, or his attractiveness to sponsors. The appearance on SNL—which added him to a short list of athlete-hosts that included Joe Montana, Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky, and Walter Payton—only boosted his public profile.
Since his rookie season, his face had emblazoned millions of cereal boxes, Pepsi cans, and a number of other consumer products, not to mention the millions of hats, T-shirts, posters, die-cast cars, bobbleheads, and other licensed goods. He’d been in TV commercials, sitcoms, and talk shows. He’d even been name-checked in a chart-topping hip-hop song and christened one of People magazine’s “Sexiest Men Alive.” Throw in the increasingly frequent mentions in gossip pages, and at times he seemed to be everywhere. When people thought of racing, they thought of Jeff Gordon. But the SNL show sealed his status as a crossover superstar and his place in American popular culture.
“I got goose bumps the night he did Saturday Night Live,” Rick Hendrick recalls. “I mean, you get good drivers, guys that have a lot of talent, but they couldn’t do Saturday Night Live. They couldn’t do Regis and Kelly. But Jeff Gordon is a guy who took this sport to another level . . . elevated us to another level in the fans’ eyes, and brought in new fans that weren’t from the Southeast.”
“Jeff ushered in an era of sophistication,” NASCAR vice chairman Mike Helton says. “He brought with him a persona that crossed into more areas than we may have been in previously, and he led the charge [with his] cross-generational, cross-genre personality.”
Jeff’s profile and the sport had exploded together. As NASCAR expanded from its Southern base, building new tracks in big media markets like Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, Las Vegas, and Dallas, event attendance skyrocketed by nearly sixty-five percent. By the new millennium, the Winston Cup races each weekend had more TV viewers than any sport except NFL football. Sales of NASCAR and driver-related products rose from roughly $80 million a year in 1990 to nearly $1 billion by the decade’s end. By the early 2000s, NASCAR had become a $2-billion-a-year business.
How much of that was a result of Jeff’s success and popularity is difficult to say. But one thing is clear: You don’t sell a product unless you’ve got personalities. The fresh look and attitude that Jeff brought to the sport, along with his skills in a race car, attracted new fans—older fans, to be sure, but also younger fans, female fans, and fans from parts of the country NASCAR hadn’t touched before. That shift brought with it new advertisers and sponsors who saw an opportunity in the burgeoning sport.
“It didn’t take long,” Helton remembers, “for NASCAR, Winston, Chevrolet, and others to identify Jeff as one they had great respect for as far as being the face of our products.” And the market push that Jeff had given not only NASCAR, but his sponsors, was immense. By 1999, Lou Savelli, head of DuPont automotive finishes, was attributing a phenomenal twenty percent, or $100 million, of his division’s fifty percent growth in the 1990s to their association with Jeff and Hendrick Motorsports. With returns like that, it’s no wonder Fortune 500 companies were falling over each other to get a piece of a NASCAR race team.
Jeff standing beside the trophy after winning the Atlanta 500, October 28, 2003.
But if there was a “Jeff Gordon Effect” on the business and marketing side of NASCAR, there was an equally discernible Gordon effect on the racing side. Since his sensational successes in the mid and late 1990s, everyone was searching for the “next Jeff Gordon,” that new youthful super-talent who could anchor a race team, drive the wheels off a car, please the sponsors, and bring home a boatload of money.
“Jeff was what I’d call our first Pop Warner race driver,” Humpy Wheeler says, referring to the early-youth football league. “He set the stage for young people racing. Before Jeff Gordon, it didn’t exist where you had a multitude of drivers seven, eight, nine, ten years old racing. It just didn’t happen. Jeff Gordon started it all.”
It wasn’t only his youth, though. It was where he had come from and the cars he raced. NASCAR broadened its horizons after folks saw what Jeff—one of the first to have raced open-wheel cars on short tracks before joining the Busch Series—could do on a stock-car oval. Scouts fanned out to sprint, midget, modified, and Silver Crown tracks across the country. Within a few years, the various NASCA
R series were teeming with former open-wheelers and off-road racers, hailing from Nevada, California, Wisconsin, and Indiana. And some of them, like Tony Stewart, the 2002 Winston Cup champion, were already starting to blow the doors off the place.
“Nobody from open-wheel ever got a chance in this sport,” says Hendrick. “Jeff opened the door, and everybody followed. . . . More than anybody else, he revolutionized the sport. If it wasn’t for Jeff Gordon, all the other guys that have come along from outside the sport would’ve never gotten a shot. And so they owe him a ton.”
The entry of all those new drivers ushered in a sea of change that altered the geographical face of the sport. But as far as the next Jeff Gordon, some, at the time, argued he had already been found—by Jeff Gordon. Jimmie Johnson was among that new crop of young guns who had followed in Jeff’s footsteps and were starting to come into their own. And that’s who Jeff would be up against in the years to come.
Jeff on Apple Jacks and Frosted Mini-Wheats cereal boxes; A Jeff Gordon bobble-head; No. 24 car leading at Martinsville, April 13, 2003; Jeff on a four pack of Pepsi.
A champagne soaked celebration after Jeff’s fourth win at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, August 8, 2004..
10
A “NEW” JEFF GORDON
JEFF’S 2003 SEASON STARTED MUCH like 2002, an up-and-down series of races highlighted by a couple runner-up finishes and his fourth career win at Martinsville, where he also won the pole. But no team was running away with it, and by mid-June, the No. 24 found themselves sitting third in the standings.
And then, on June 12, Jeff’s sixteen-month divorce nightmare came to an end. In an effort to avoid an ugly, drawn-out battle in court, Jeff, who was by then NASCAR’s all-time leading race-earnings winner, settled with Brooke for the publicly reported amount of $15.35 million, one of the most expensive divorces in sports at the time. In an effort to ward off further publicity, the parties elected not to file the settlement with the court, but today Jeff scoffs at that number. “That was just a fraction,” he says. “The real number was actually way more than double that, and I had five years to pay it. That’s insane. The lawyers on her side said, ‘Listen, he has the ability to recoup.’ And I’m sitting there going, ‘I’ll never recoup that much!’ But luckily, my best-earning years were after that. To this day, I dislike the system—I dislike the lawyers involved, hers and mine. But I’m not bitter,” Jeff chuckles.
As his bank balance began plummeting, so did his performance on the track. In the six races between late July and late August, he had one top-five finish, but otherwise finished no better than 28th. Worse still, he wrecked four times and nearly put himself out of title contention.
Robbie Loomis chalked up a good measure of the team’s temporary implosion to his own difficulties in navigating the crew chief–driver relationship with what he termed the “new Jeff Gordon,” the Jeff who continued jet-setting between the track, the Caribbean, and New York. The Jeff who was getting friendlier with some of his fellow racers and who at one point took a golf-cart tour through the Watkins Glen infield and came upon a motorhome dripping with anti–Jeff Gordon slogans, and promptly hopped out, signed some autographs, and posed for pictures with the vehicle’s gobsmacked owner. It was that Jeff, Loomis says, that he didn’t recognize.
“Up until the end of 2001, the guys on the team and myself had always had more of what I would call a ‘working relationship’ with Jeff,” he says. “But I think when he was getting divorced, he was experiencing a whole new side of life out there. And I think for me, I was seeing a whole different Jeff than the guy I knew. He was getting real close to a lot of guys on the team, and I was getting closer to him from a friend standpoint. That was a big change for all of us. . . . looking back on it, I probably could have been more influential in helping keep the focus on the racecar.”
It also worried Loomis that as Jeff became more sociable with some of his competitors, the veneer of power and invincibility he’d possessed for so long—something he felt gave the No. 24 a distinct psychological advantage—seemed to chip ever so slightly. “Before, there was a little edge or mystique when Jeff had beat [a competitor], because they really didn’t know him; they didn’t think he was human,” Loomis says. “Then, all of sudden, they’re out with him on a Wednesday night and they look at him and go, ‘This guy’s just like us, there ain’t nothing special about him.’ But at that time in his life, he was really enjoying becoming Jeff Gordon the person rather than just Jeff Gordon the winner.”
From a statistical standpoint, that air of complete dominance began eroding before Jeff ever shared a couple rounds with his rivals. In the years between his 1995 and 1998 championship seasons with Evernham, he’d averaged nearly ten wins a year. In his four seasons with Loomis, even with the 2001 title, that mark had dropped to just under four. While he may have been slowly coming down from Everest, Jeff was still a threat and led all other Cup racers over that four-year span in wins, top-five, and top-ten finishes.
As Jeff began to emerge from his cloistered existence in the hauler, the mansion, and his marriage, people did see a new side, one that those closest to him had always known—the one they described as down-to-earth, humble, generous, friendly, a normal dude, good people. Things were changing. And perhaps one of the most obvious changes was that “God” seemed to have fallen out of Jeff’s post-race vocabulary. Once considered one of NASCAR’s most stalwart Christians, who would race with psalms taped to the dashboard and give the Lord top billing before his sponsors after every win, Jeff appeared to have distanced himself from NASCAR’s worshipping community.
“They used to see me in Victory Lane thanking God first for everything,” Jeff says. “And I wasn’t trying to be fake or phony with it. That’s where I was in my life at that time. And I’m glad I had those experiences with Christianity; I’m proud of that experience. It taught me a lot about life, about religion. But what I learned from it also is that, ultimately, shouting it out to the world is not really me. That’s not who I am.”
Jeff’s outlook on life began to shift in 2002.
The fact that he had been led to the Christian life primarily through Brooke made it harder for him to hew to the faith following their breakup, especially when the community of folks they had been close to turned against him. “When I went through that divorce, the people I had confided in, the ones that had influenced me to pray and follow Jesus, were not very supportive,” he recalls. “They didn’t believe in divorce. And because they didn’t believe in it, they didn’t believe in what I was doing, and they didn’t support me. And that turned me off, I’ll be honest.”
He still believed in God, and he still prayed. But he felt more comfortable with a broader spirituality, one that incorporated elements of different belief systems rather than a single one. It was an evolving approach he no longer felt compelled to wear on his sleeve.
In the wake of their disappointing summer, the team managed to put the pieces back together and salvage some sense of competitiveness. “When things were breaking on his divorce, he carried that team on his shoulders,” Hendrick says. “He never flinched. He just marched right on. He can shoulder a lot, and people don’t really know that about Jeff Gordon. Even with all the tabloids on him and he wasn’t running as good, he just marched right on, and we fixed it.”
From that fall onward, they showed what they were really made of. In the season’s final nine races, Jeff finished in the top-five seven times, including back-to-back wins at Martinsville and Atlanta, the eighteenth time he’d followed one win with another. At the end of the season, the No. 24 settled for fourth in the standings, but for Jeff, it felt like that last series of races was the beginning of something great.
The 2004 season brought with it a truckload of changes, not the least being a new Cup series sponsor, Nextel, and a revamped championship format called “The Chase,” which was designed to boost fan excitement by means of a playoff-style competition. Rather than tally the points after the entire thirty-six-
race season and crown a king, NASCAR would now select the top ten drivers after the first twenty-six races, reset their points, and have them compete against one another in a ten-race showdown for the trophy. Everyone outside that ten-team group would still race alongside them for prize money and bonuses but would not be eligible for the title.
Among the other changes was the return of John Bickford. Nine years after Jeff and his stepfather severed their business relationship and Bob Brannan took over the helm of Jeff Gordon, Inc., Jeff decided it was time for a change and approached John with an offer to run the company. It wasn’t an easy sell. While Jeff, John, and Carol had reconnected since the divorce, feelings were still a little raw over how things had played out in 1995.
Jeff hoists the trophy over his head after winning the Dodge Save Mart 305 at Sonoma Raceway, June 27, 2004.
“I knew John loved the cars and being a part of a race team, but I had no idea how much the business side of it meant to him, so I didn’t realize how much it was going to impact him, but it did,” Jeff says. “He thought I saw him as somebody who just liked to carry wrenches, and, in a way, that’s true.”
Since then, however, John had built a hugely successful career as a business consultant and executive with Action Performance, a company that manufactured and distributed licensed die-cast cars and assorted memorabilia for NASCAR and other racing leagues. There wasn’t a soul in the race game who didn’t see John as one of the more astute business minds in the sport. And Jeff had ultimately seen that, too.