The Intimidator: Dale Earnhardt's Life In The Fast Lane

On this episode of Our American Stories, when one thinks of basketball, they might think of Kobe Bryant or LeBron James, and when one thinks of football they might think of Tom Brady or Jerry Rice...when one thinks of NASCAR though, only one name stands above the rest. Dale Earnhardt. Here's Jay Busbee, author of Earnhardt Nation, with the story of "The Intimidator"

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Hobibe, and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
Very rarely can one man encapsulate the image of a
particular sport to the average observer. In basketball, perhaps Kobe Bryant,
Lebron James, Magic Johnson. Notice it's not a singular name,

(00:32):
but in NASCAR, only one name comes to mind for
most people, and that's Dale Earnhart, who died on this
day in February of two thousand and one, and the
millions of us who were watching, well, we'll never forget
that day. Here to tell the story of Dale is
Jay Busbee, the lead writer at Yahoo Sports and the

(00:53):
author of Earnhart Nation. Take it Away, Jay. Daytona International
Speedway can house as many as one hundred and fifty
thousand fans, and on this day the entire track was
sold out. It was a beautiful day, a blue skies,
warm weather. It's the kind of weather that everybody else
in the country is looking at Daytona and saying, man,

(01:13):
I wish I was there. Down below on the pits,
you could see the cars lined up in a row,
one after the other, and on pit row it's absolute chaos.
There are drivers there, there are crew chiefs there, there's
family there, there's media there. But right there by the
number three, right there by Dale Earnhart's black good rich
number three is Teresa Earnhardt, sharp and business like in

(01:35):
a deep purple blazer, black slacks and sunglasses. She kisses
him once, her right hand curled around the back of
his head. Then she kisses him again. They're not long
kisses or deep, meaningful ones. There's a loving but routine
kisses a wife gives her husband as he heads off
to his job. Broadly speaking, the Daytona five hundred is

(01:56):
called NASCAR super Bowl, but that's not quite fair for
a number of reasons. First of all, the Daytona five
hundred is older than the super Bowl, and second of all,
the Daytona five hundred can house more people in the
track than the than the super Bowl kids, sometimes by
as much as a factor of three. Also, most importantly,
the Daytona five hundred starts the season rather than ending it,
and on this particular Daytona five hundred, you had the

(02:18):
start of a new century at the sort of a
new millennium, and had start of a new era in NASCAR,
and You've had both young drivers and old drivers in
the field, drivers like Dale Earnhart, drivers like Bobby and
Terry Lebani, drivers like Mark Martin who had been around
for a long time. And then you had new drivers
who were coming along like Dale Earnhardt Junior, like Matt Kenson,
and then like Jeff Gordon. Here at day I'm going

(02:40):
with a man who has won more races here at
Daytona than anybody in history, Dale Earnhart, the intimidator. We'll
pull it to Victory Lane with the checkers flag balls.
Steve Is in the Daytona five hundred had a very
special meeting for Dale Earnhart, and he always loved this
race more than any other. He chased it for for
many many years. On this day he was preparing to
run the race when NASCAR was experiencing a seismic change.

(03:04):
The significance was Fox Sports had just begun broadcasting NASCAR.
This was going to be their first race, and the
reason why this was significant was it marked NASCAR's elevation
into a higher level of American sports. For many many
years beforehand, NASCAR had been spread out over as many
as seven broadcast networks. You had to check every single

(03:25):
weekend to figure out where the race was going to be,
what channel it was going to be on. Fox comes
in and off of about ten years worth of success
broadcasting the NFL, they said, you know what, We're going
to broadcast NASCAR now. We're gonna make NASCAR huge. And
what they did was, in their characteristic Fox way, made
it into an event, made it into a spectacle, and
at the center of that spectacle was Dale Earnhard. Can

(03:47):
you win your second five hundred today? All right, We've
got a good shot at I got a good racecar,
a little wind today, a little exciting. I think it's
gonna be some exciting racing. Don't see something you probably
hadn't ever seen on Fox. He was going to be
the star for Fox going forward. They were going to
have him, had the entire season centered on him. They
were going to be bringing Dale Ernard into the Fox

(04:09):
NFL studios later that year. They had an entire plan,
and this was legitimizing NASCAR in the eyes of the world.
It had been thought of as a Southern hillbilly sport,
bunch of rednecks running around in circles, and this was
a sign that the entire Country was going to be
taking NASCAR more seriously. So it had all the all
of the trappings, all of the celebration, all of the

(04:32):
build up that you would expect with a major Fox event.
Every driver dreams of winning the Daytona five hundred. Michael
Aldrick dreams just of winning this race, the Daytona five hundred.
It's two hundred laps of racing on at two and
a half mile track, hence the five hundred in the
race's name, and for many of those two hundred laps

(04:53):
who have drivers who were kind of jockeying for position.
It's one of the two biggest tracks on the NASCAR circuit.
It's a superspeedway, which means drivers can go all out,
hammer down, mash the pedal to the floor, and never
let up all the way around the track. What that
also means is that the REX can be a lot
more devastating, can be a lot more catastrophic. It's a

(05:15):
high speed chess match, except that in this case the
chess pieces off and fly into the air, and you
have that on lap one seventy five, would Robbie Gordon
hit the back of Ward Burton's car? Ward Burton runs
into Tony Stewart, and Tony Stewart's car flips almost vertical,
with the car pointing straight up and down. Now, the
sad irony of this is that the car narrowly misses

(05:37):
Dale Earnhart's number three. If Stewart had come down on
Earnhart's car, if he clipped it, if he caused a
little bit of damage, who knows how the rest of
the day would have turned out. But in the end
what happened was to in order to clean up this wreck,
they stop the race. They prepare for the final few
laps of the race, and at this point what we
have is Dale Earnhardt himself up at the front of

(05:58):
the pack alongside Michael Trip and Dale Earnhart Junior. These
are two drivers who are the drivers for Dale Earnhart's
own team. So Ernhart had his own interests at heart,
but he also had these two drivers to look out
for as well, And so as the final lapse of
the race wound down, it became apparent that what Ernhart
was doing was setting up these two drivers to wins.

(06:20):
They were at the front of the field Michael Waltrip
and first Dale Junior and second Dale Senior in third
and what Dale Senior was doing was playing defense. He was,
as the old saying goes, driving three wide all by himself.
He was trying to hold off the entire rest of
the field to give his two drivers a chance to win. Now,

(06:40):
the final turn of the two thousand and one day
to five hundred, what happened was it got to be
too much right behind, Dale Senior gets turned into the
wall by a sterling. Marlin's car drives straight into the wall,
and what happens then is that the car Dale Senior's

(07:01):
car hits the wall at an angle, at a sharp impact,
and then rolls back down the hill. Now, seeing a
wreck at the end of the Daytona five hundred is
not all that uncommon. It happens at awful lots as
drivers are trying to jockey into position for that final
run of the checker flag. What happened in this case
was Dale Senior's car drifts back down into the infield

(07:25):
and then nothing. When we come back more of the
remarkable story of Dale Earnhardt's life here on our American Stories. Folks,
if you love the stories we tell about this great country,
and especially the stories of America's rich past, know that
all of our stories about American history are brought to
us by the great folks at Hillsdale Collar, a place

(07:46):
where students study all the things that are beautiful in
life and all the things that are good in life.
And if you can't cut to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come
to you with their free and terrific online courses. Go
to Hillsdale dot edu to learn more. And we return

(08:10):
to our American stories and our story on Dale Earnhardt
with Jay Busby, a lead writer at Yahoo Sports and
author of Earnhardt Nation. When we last left off, Jay
was talking about the end of Earnhardt's life. But to
fully understand the man, we have to start from the beginning.
Let's get back to the story. Take Sunset Road off

(08:33):
Interstate seventy seven, just north as Charlotte Cruise. Pass the
local McDonald's, Arby's, and other classic symbols of Americana. Turn
on Statesville Road and drive past the exhibit halls of
the Metrolina Trade Show Expo, home of Dusty Rose of
discount DVDs and decades old beanie babies. Park in the
open field near the rusty fence that encloses something large beyond.

(08:55):
From this distance, he can't quite tell what. There's a
bouquet of plastic hours jammed into the chain link fence,
a jarring splash of brilliant purple amid rust and ruin.
The flowers mark the entry to the long defunct Metro
Line of Speedway, a place every bit as legendary years
old Ebbotsfield in Brooklyn. The chains that held the fence
together lie on the ground, their locks beside them. If

(09:17):
you like, you can walk right in. A short, root
cracked paved road leads up to the top of the
grand stands. The sign that used to arc over this walkway,
Welcome to Metro Line of Speedway. The I as stylized
number one is long gone, as are the red and
white painted ticket booth at the base of the hill
and the press box atop the grand stand. All this

(09:38):
left now are those grand stands, giant steps of painted
concrete looking out on emptiness. Graffiti covered walls circumscribed the
tracks half mile oval, weeds and time have claimed it all.
Look a little closer, though, use little imagination. Once two
dozen cars wheeled through these turns, spitting red Carolina clay
of the exhaust and oil scented the sound of their

(10:01):
engines so loud it was just one unified bone, rumbling hume.
And these stands families cheered on sons and brothers and fathers,
and on rare occasions, daughters, who threw themselves hard into
the turns, and often hard into the walls, where something
they labored over for days, months, even years could be
reduced to scrap in moments. Imagine the desperation of crews

(10:24):
trying to coax life out of a dead engine. Imagine
the exultation of drivers using wits, cunning, brains, and balls
to triumph over a field of sons just every bit
as crafty as they were. The races often ran on
Saturday night, Yes, but what happened here was as holy
and sanctified as anything you'd experienced the next morning. This
desolate track is the place where family bonds were forged, broken,

(10:47):
and then forged even stronger. This once proud arena is
the place where the most famous story in racing first
hit red line speed. A few miles up the road
stands Connapolis, North Carolina, a small town about thirty miles
away from Charlotte. This is a company town built to
house the workers who worked at the Cannon Mills. People
who lived there worked in the mill morning, noon, and night.

(11:10):
Every day except Sunday, the mill would run, and every
day except Sunday, the workers would leave their houses, work
at the mill for their shift, and return home. It
was a very programmed and defined existence, and this is
exactly where the legend of Dale Earnhart was born. Connapolis
was the home of Ralph Earnhart, who was born in
nineteen twenty eight and dropped out of school in sixth

(11:32):
grade to work in the Cannon Mills. He was expected
to live his entire life the way that so many
of his neighbors did. Grow up, go to school for
a time, work in the mills, raise a family, and
keep on working until he retired. But Ralph Earnhart was
built of something different than most mill workers. Ralph Earnhardt

(11:53):
had a need and a desire to rate. He had
a talent for it, and he nurtured it, and he
raced as much as he possibly could while doing millwork.
At the same time, he found the mill work to
be unnecessarily confining, and he found the freedom of racing
to be what brought him happiness. So in nineteen fifty three,

(12:16):
after having spent years working full time and then racing
in his off hours, he decided, I'm going to give
racing full time a trial. He told his wife Martha this,
She was horrified. They had a bunch of children there.
They had five children, including young Dale, who was born
in nineteen fifty one. And yet what Ralph did was

(12:39):
managed to turn himself into a single person enterprise responsible
for every single part of the racing machine, from driving
the car and races, to getting the car to and
from races, to repairing it during the week when he
wasn't racing, and he managed to pull it off. He
managed to run an entire racing operation for many, many years,

(12:59):
and as he did, he built himself into one of
the most significant figures in early NASCAR history. When Ralph
Earnhart was racing, it was a very different landscape than
what we see today or even what Daylernhardt saw. In
his day, there was a lot of racing on dirt,
there was a lot of racing on concrete, but there

(13:19):
wasn't a whole lot of organization to either of them.
A lot of drivers learned their racing style through bootlegging.
You learn to drive a car pretty quickly and pretty
well when you're running from the law. And they learned
how to handle a car, they learned how to set
up a car, they learned how to wheel a car
in a way that even today's drivers would have trouble matching.
When Ralph Earnhardt made the decision to go full time

(13:41):
into racing, he made the promise to his wife Martha
that the children would not starve, that they wouldn't go hungry,
that they wouldn't lose their house, And having that always
burning behind him made him that much more responsible and
that much more driven to do everything possible to win.
The way that NASCAR works now, even the last place

(14:02):
finisher gets a paycheck. But at the time when Ralph
Ernhart was racing in all these little unsanctioned events all
over North Carolina and all over the South, if you've
finished much further below second, you didn't get anything, and
at worse, you could get your car wreckt and you
could come out in the hole by several hundred or
even thousand dollars if things didn't work out that way.

(14:22):
That was a way for you to it certainly focused
your interest and your desire and your willpower in terms
of racing if you knew that you were racing for
your family's groceries that week. One of the innovations that
Ralph Earnhardt brought to racing was something called tire stagger.
And what this is a way for a driver to

(14:45):
have his tires last longer and provide better grip. You've
got to have strong tires. You've got to have tires
that will hold you onto the track. And Ralph Ernhart
figured out a little bit of geometry in the sense
that if you think of a car going in at
right line, then the tires are going to wear equally.
But if you think of a car going around a turn,
going around a left hand turn, then the left side

(15:08):
tires are going to be traveling a shorter distance than
the right side tires. This means the right side tires
are going to blow out quicker because there's more mileage
being put on them over the course of a race.
Ralph Ernhardt figured this out and started putting larger tires
on the outside. Therefore there was more tread to be
worn off as they were driving around. He was able

(15:29):
using this to outlast his competitors to stay tight on
a track when many of them couldn't, and he was
able to use this technique to prolong the life of
his tires, to prolong the life of his cars, and
basically keep himself off a wall. He figured this out
with a sixth grade education. Obviously, it's been refined to
a much, much greater degree at this point, but Ralph

(15:49):
was one of the first people to figure this out
and use this in a race to start winning races
and bringing home that money. Dale Larnhardt was born in
nineteen fifty one, and he grew up in kind of
a perfect encapsulation of a certain kind of Americana. He
played cowboys and Indians in the yard. As a kid,

(16:12):
he played with cap guns. He would race go carts,
and he would play it in the afternoons, and his
mom would call him home for supper. So it was
the sort of idyllic upbringing that really laid the foundation
for him. But along with that he had the kind
of classic American silent, reserved father who would not often
give a lot of praise, both because that was Ralph

(16:35):
Arnhart's personality and because he didn't see the need in it.
He focused more on what was right in front of
him and what was in front of him was trying
to win a race. Dale Earnhardt grew up idolizing his father.
Dale adored Ralph, Dale worshiped Ralph, and he spent hours
and hours out in the garage paying attention to what

(16:55):
his father was doing, trying to learn from his father,
trying to understand what it was that his father was
doing under the hoods of all these cars. Dale Earnhard
decided to race for the same reason that his father had.
He was good at it and it kept him out
of the mill. And we've been listening to Jay Busby
tell one heck of a story about Dale Earnhardt and

(17:19):
his father, and we learned that his father had worked
at the local mill in Kannapolis, North Carolina, where Manuel
went to school for a time, and then just went
to the mill and worked till they retired. And there's
nothing wrong in that. There's honor and dignity and all work.
But his father wanted something more and discovered a passion
for racing. And the son would learn all about this

(17:39):
passion and joy and freedom watching his father do it
every day in the garage and at the track. When
we come back more of this remarkable story, a father's
son's story, among many other things here on our American Story.

(18:08):
And we returned to our American Stories and our story
on Dale Earnhardt with Jay Busby, a lead writer at
Yahoo Sports an author of Earnhardt Nation. Go to Amazon
or the usual suspects and pick this book up. You
won't put it down. When we last left off, Jay
was talking about Dale Earnhardt's dad, Ralph, who decided to

(18:30):
quit his mill job in the nineteen fifties to go
full time into racing, and my goodness, his wife, while
she was not pleased and could not have been pleased
with that decision, young Dale would follow in his dad's footsteps.
Let's return to the story. Dale Earnhardt grew up idolizing

(18:56):
his father, who grew up wanting to be like Ralph,
so much so that he too decided to quit school.
He actually lasted three more grades longer than Rolt did.
Dale quit in ninth whereas Ralph had quit in sixth.
It frustrated his parents to no end that Dale quit school,
but they couldn't really say anything because Ralph had done
the same thing and had been successful. Dale Earnhard decided

(19:19):
to race for the same reason that his father had,
he was good at it, and it kept him out
of the mill. He understood that if he kept on
going in the life that he was in, that he
was going to be headed to a life of millwork,
and he didn't want that. He had he believed that
he had the talent, he had the genetics, and he
had the willpower to get into a car and to
start winning races and bringing home money like his father did.

(19:43):
And his very first car was an old beat up
nineteen fifty six Ford Victoria that was owned by his neighbors.
And the irony of this is that the first car
that Dale Earnhardt drove was pink. The big bad Intimidator
with his future black number three car, drove a pink
car for the first time, largely because of a painting accident.
They thought that they were going to be painting it

(20:04):
a sleek purple color and once the paint dried, had
turned into the pink of an uncooked steak. So his
very first car was pink, but he drove it well
enough to get some financial backing to keep driving forward
and to convinced himself that he did belong in a
race car and not necessarily working at a mill for
the rest of his life. The legend was that Ralph

(20:29):
Earnhard died in his garage working on his car, but
the truth is a little more mundane, but just as sad.
He died at his kitchen table working on a carburetor
in September nineteen seventy three. He was just forty five
years old. But he had lived a hard, hard life
as a smoker, He'd inhaled a whole lot of exhaust.
He had lived with the stress of racing every single

(20:52):
weekend to provide for his family, and had caught up
to him sadly. And he died a young man, and
it devastated Dale. Dale didn't know what to do. He
locked up his father's garage. He didn't even touch anything
within at all, the cars and the trophies he sold,
his father's dogs, all of it was incredibly damaging and

(21:12):
devastating to young Dale, and it took him many many
years to get not even to get over it, but
to be able to reconcile himself to his father's memory
and start building his own life. Dale was living basically
the life of a high school dropout. He was working
at an autoparts store. He was racing, but he was
also making choices that he probably wouldn't have made later

(21:35):
in life if he were an older man. He got
married very young, he had a child very young, and
he got divorced for the first time very young. He
spent most of his twenties without even seeing his first child.
He got married again a second time, and then had
two young kids when he was still in his twenties.
Two more kids, I should say. And this is the

(21:57):
point in daler in Art's life where life could have
gone on two very different ways. He could have ended
up back in the mills. He could have ended up
being just basically a guy who raced a couple times
on the weekends and then gave up that silliness and
went on and got himself a real job. But he
decided to stick with the racing, and it cost him
a lot. It cost him his second marriage, and it

(22:20):
cost him his two children, who went to live with
their mother because he was not able to care for
them in the way that he needed to to be
a proper father. He was racing all the time, he
was enjoying life all the time. It was partying all
the time, and it just was not a good fit
by the late nineteen seventies, Dale Earnhardt was a mess.

(22:40):
Quite frankly, he was a single guy living in a
small apartment with a friend of his. He would wake
up every morning at six thirty of the sound of
Leonard Skinners give Me Back my Bullets. That was his
motivational song. He was a guy who had the hounds
at his tail. He was twice divorced, he had three kids,
and he had no real options other than racing his

(23:02):
way out of poverty and racing his way out of
a nine to five clock punching life. And it wasn't
until his ex father in law, of all people, a
gentleman named Robert g helped him find his way and
figure out how he could make the talent that he
had as a driver payoff. The problem was that Ernhart

(23:22):
was so aggressive he tended to wreck everybody's equipment. He
was really good, but he figured that the fastest way
to the finish line wasn't around his competitors, it was
through them, and more often than not, while he would
win a lot of races, he would also wreck a
lot of cars along the way. He was a very
very expensive driver to invest in, and that made it difficult.

(23:45):
Dale Earnhart would drive at dirt tracks without a whole
lot of regard for common sense or for anyone driving
around him, or for his own safety. And one edit
a dirt track, it could have been any dirt track.
The exact name is lost to his street. He was
running in fourth place, and the top three finishes paid.
He knew that finishing third place would be enough to

(24:06):
put food on his family's table, and so he needed
to get there. And so in order to get there,
he went drove right on through a driver who went
by the nickname of stick Elliott. This is a guy
who had a bit of notoriety. He had allegedly taken
Elvis Presley for a drive around Charlotte Motor Speedway, had
made the King throw up, so he had a little
bit of cachet. And here's young Dale Earnhart just knocking

(24:27):
him out of the way to go and get third
place in this race. So after the race, a whole
bunch of stick Elliot's men were looking for Earnhart wheels
out of the track in a hurry. The next week,
stick Elliott himself comes up to Earnhart. Earnhart's thinking, oh boy,
this is gonna be This is gonna end badly. Elliott
walks up, sticks out his hand and says, you know, son,

(24:49):
you might just make a driver. Yet, the implication being,
of course, that while Ernhard didn't yet had the skill
to be a driver, he had the guts and he
had the spine to be a driver, and that was
gonna be enough to get him going a little bit
faster and a little bit further down the road. And
so it took a number of people. It was Robert
g It was a gentleman named Suitcase, Jake Elder who

(25:10):
was a crew chief. It was an owner by the
name of rod Osterland. All of these men and many
others saw some promise in Dale and they said, you've
got this rock talent. We just need to figure a
way to get you to harness it and point it
in the right direction. So what they did, over the
course of the late seventies was take this lump of

(25:31):
angry and intimidating clay and mold it into a driver
who was able to go and run at a reasonable
pace until he needed to run wide open. He was
able to drive in away that could get him to
the front of the pack without wrecking the pack as
he did so, and once Earnhardt figured out how to
actually drive, then he started to take off. Dale made

(25:56):
an application to race in NASCAR in nineteen seventy five,
and looking at it now, it's basically like a country
music song. He had three children, Carrie, Kelly and Dale Junior.
May misspelled two of his kid's names. And then, beside
what happened in first race, he wrote finished tenth, and
beside ambition other than racing, he wrote none. That was it.

(26:17):
That was Dale Earnhardt right there. And what a story
you're hearing, the fact that the intimidator's first car was pink.
Oh that's good enough for me as a takeaway in
a watercooler moment. But my goodness, what he went through,
the struggles, the divorces, choosing in the end his career
over anything, anything, ambition other than racing. None, None, And

(26:42):
so often there's a price to pay for these things.
And the price he paid was my goodness, living as
a single guy, alienated, angry until a few men parked
into his life and helped mentor him and get his
act together to become the talent he'd become. The story
of Dale Earnhardt continued here on our American story, and

(27:37):
we returned to our American stories and the final portion
of our story on Dale Earnhardt with Jay Busby. When
we last left off, Dale had finally gotten the right
people behind him to become a star. Let's continue with
the story here again is Jay. The fact that NASCAR

(27:59):
driver have such long careers means that drivers from different
eras often overlap at the end of one career in
the beginning of the next, and the nineteen seventy nine
Day two to five hundred was just one of those
sorts of crucial races. It was significant for the sport
because it was the first one that was being broadcast
beginning to end, and it was significant and good timing

(28:20):
that a huge snowstorm blanketed most of the East Coast,
leaving America with nothing much to do but sit inside
and watch these hillbillies run around a track at high
speeds down in Florida, and what they got was an
amazing race. Richard Petty wins the race, but the most
important part of it was that a couple of other drivers,

(28:41):
Bobby and Donnie Allison, got involved in a last lap
wreck with Kyle Yarborough. All of these legends colliding and
sliding into the infield, and Kyle Yarborough comes over to
Bobby's car, starts getting in his face, starts punching him.
Bobby gets out of his car, he starts swinging. Donnie
pulls down, he gets involved in the mess, and so
America is watching these three lunatic race drivers beat on

(29:05):
each other. It's a remarkable, remarkable moment in American sports.
And what nobody noticed that during this entire time was
that this rookie by the name of Dale Earnhart manages
to make his way up and finish eight. This is
almost unprecedented for a rookie to do this well. This
was the season that Dale Earnhardt started to become Dale Earnhardt.

(29:26):
He would go on to win Rookie of the Year
that year, and he was racing with the number three.
He got the Wrangler sponsorship, and then in nineteen eighty
it all comes together when he wins the championship in
his second year as a driver. He wins his first
of what would eventually be seven championships, and he does
it with an aggressive style that upset much of the

(29:46):
rest of the garage. There's always a certain code among
drivers that you don't go out of your way to
wreck another driver. You don't go out of your way
to cause harm or cause difficulty, i should say, for
another driver, because it would be very easy to win
a race if all you were trying to do was
wreck every other driver on the track. And yet here
was Earnhardt with aggression and pent up frustration and rage

(30:10):
and desire to win, trading paint with everybody on the track,
not giving an inch, constantly knocking fenders, constantly ending up
in walls. And the other drivers at the time didn't
care for this kind of aggression because it was just
too much for the level that they wanted to be
racing it. Because of this kind of chaotic driving, Earnhardt

(30:31):
earn the intimidator, and you can see why, particularly once
he switched over to his black car in the nineteen eighties.
The last thing you wanted to see was Earnhardt coming
up in your rearview mirror. That was incredibly intimidating. And
it's a perfect nickname. You don't even have to go
and trade paint with anybody. You don't even have to
knock into anybody if you're intimidating them. You're managing to

(30:53):
put them on their heels just by your sheer presence.
And that's what Ernhard did. He didn't have a whole
lot of fights. He didn't get into a whole lot
of actual physical, face to face, fist flying brawls. He
was intimidating enough on his own that almost everybody would
back down in front of him, and it worked. Dale

(31:15):
was the kind of guy that you wanted to be.
You wanted to be able, whether you were male, female, young,
old adult kid, you wanted to be like Dale Earnhart.
And not just because he drove fast, but because he
was able to speak his mind, and because he was
able to be intimidating in a way that most people aren't.

(31:36):
He had a charisma and he had a willpower about
him that quite simply most people don't. He was the
kind of voice of the people who wanted to be
able to tell their boss to take this job and
shove it he wanted to. He was the voice of
people who wanted to follow their passions. He would take
advantage of whatever his opponent's weakness was. If Bill Elliott
was known as too nice of a guy, Earnhart would

(31:59):
push him so that so that Elliot would get mad.
General Waltrip was well known for talking, Earnhardt would push
him into saying something ridiculous and then would come back
with a devastating one liner. So whatever his opponent's strength was,
Earnhart would turn it into a weakness. He wasn't under
anybody's control. He was able to do what he wanted

(32:20):
without recrimination, and he was able to do it his
own way, and that's an incredibly attractive quality for people
looking for someone to be. And then he enjoyed the
benefits of fame, which to him meant having fun with it.
For instance, he would be on hunting or fishing trips
and he'd walk into a bait shop in the middle
of nowhere, Alabama, and the clerk would look at him

(32:42):
and say, you know who you look just like, and
Ernhart would just smile. He left to help tracks all
over the NASCAR circuits sell tickets, and sometimes he would
get on the phone with actual customers, kind of berating
them to come out and spend some more money on
some higher priced seats. Sometimes he'd even go out and
stand on street corners outside the track and he'd hold
up a sign, say and buy tickets. To the next race,

(33:03):
and people that were driving by, Shirley said that couldn't
possibly be who it looks like. Goold it? And then
around the house. And by house I mean the enormous
estate that Dale earn Are owned in rural North Carolina.
He loved to do yardwork and drive his tractor right
up next to the people who were hanging outside his
gates waiting for a glimpse of him. He'd liked to
see how long it would take for them to notice

(33:24):
who was driving the tractor. For Earnhardt, fame was a byproduct,
an enjoyable byproduct, but a byproduct all the same of
what truly drove him, the need to win and the
need to triumph. Once he did that, the fame of
the money took care of themselves. This is undoubtedly one
of the toughest a bouncements that I've ever personally had
to make. But after the accident and turned forward at

(33:46):
the end of the day ten of five hundred, we've
lost Dale Earnhard. How could NASCAR's most popular star have
died on the day of its marquee event. How could
this possibly have happened? It just didn't make sense in
any way, and It's one of the grim ironies of
Earnhardt's death that his passing led to safety improvements all

(34:09):
across NASCAR that almost certainly have saved the lives of
many many drivers since then. Beyond that, what Earnhardt's death
did was bring attention to NASCAR in a way that
it hadn't had ever in its history. People were watching NASCAR,
and ironically enough, paying more attention to it than they
were when he was alive. There were several years in

(34:32):
the two thousands when it was second only the NFL.
He commanded respect in a way that no other driver did.
He was intimidating, yes, but he also won races. He
made a whole lot of people, a whole lot of money,
and he spoke the language of the common fan. But
maybe most significantly for NASCAR, he was the voice of

(34:52):
drivers in the garage. He would stand up to sponsors,
stand up to NASCAR officials, stand up to track officials
whenever they needed it, because drivers historically had very little
power and very little representation. If you're showing up to drive,
you're going to be at the mercy of the tracks.
Earnhart flipped that around. Money drives NASCAR. Money wants the

(35:13):
drivers to fit in certain very non offensive boxes, turning
them into brand friendly robots. Earnhardt never put up with that.
He was happy to sponsor products. He even went so
far one time as to ask a doctor to stitch
at w into his knee when he was getting stitches
for Wrangler jeans. The doctor wisely refused, but Ernhart would

(35:33):
not diminish himself to sponsor products in a way that
NASCAR drivers today, to some extent, have to diminish themselves,
have to sand off the rough edges of their personality.
Earnhart leaned into that if you wanted to sponsor your product,
you got the whole deal. Ernhart was the last of
the truly larger than life NASCAR drivers. He was someone
who had the charisma and the energy that most people,

(35:54):
not just most drivers, but most people simply don't have.
Today's drivers are more technically skilled than Earnhart, but they
don't have that combination of talent, personality, and attitude that
Earnhardt had. We always compare the later generations unfavorably with
those who came before them in sports. If you were
a Michael Jordan fan growing up, nothing that Lebron James
ever does will match up to Jordan's achievements. But what

(36:17):
Earnhardt did was singular. He established himself as an iconic
driver while he was at the height of his powers
and still driving. He cast a shadow that went in
both directions, both before him and after him or the
other drivers who won seven titles. He might like Richard
Petty's personality a little bit more. He might believe that
Jimmy Johnson possessed his finer technical skills, but neither one

(36:39):
of them where the total package, like Ernhard was Dale.
Earnhardt is a true American original. He embodies so many
elements of who we like to believe we are as
a nation and who we want to believe we can
be ourselves. He was a winner, a champion. He was
a master of speed and a master of the automobile.
These are two essential American obsessions. He created entire world himself.

(37:01):
He was raised in poor surroundings and literally raced his
way into a palace that is the American dream. Right there.
You cannot get more honestly American than what dayl Or
Heart did. He gave the South a voice in a
way that few others did. He had an accent that
he didn't try to clean up. He loved where he
came from, and he encouraged others to do the same.
And finally, he was always his own man. He was

(37:23):
an icon for people who wanted to follow their dream,
their mused, their north star. He did everything his way,
not society's way, and that made him a legend. There's
never been another one like him, and there never will be.
A terrific job on the production. Editing and storytelling by
Monty Montgomery in a special thanks to Jay Busby. What

(37:44):
a story he told. By the way, get his book
Earnhardt Nation. It's available at Amazon. And all the usual
suspects and all of those things are so true. What
he did. He gave a voice to the drivers. He
enjoyed the fame, but he was a winner. He was
a champion, a self made man. Didn't clean up that

(38:05):
Southern accent. The story of Dale Earnhardt, the story of
the American Dream, and so much more here on our
American Stories.