February 19, 2024 • 38 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, when one thinks of basketball, one might think of Kobe Bryant or LeBron James, and when one thinks of football one 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
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib, 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 Earnhardt, who died on this
day in February of two thousand and one. And the
millions of us who are watching, well, we'll never forget
that day. Here to tell a story of Dale is
Jay Busby, a lead writer at Yahoo Sports and the
(00:53):
author of Earnhardt Nation.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
Take it Away, Jay.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
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 sky's warm weather. It's the kind of weather that
everybody else in the country is looking at Daytona and saying, man,
I wish I was there. Down below on the pits,
you could see the cars lined up in a row,
(01:18):
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.
Speaker 4 (01:26):
But right there by the number.
Speaker 3 (01:28):
Three, right there by Dale Earnhardt's black good rich number
three is Teresa Earnhardt, sharp in businesslike, in 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.
Speaker 4 (01:49):
Off to his job.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
Broadly speaking, the Daytona five hundred is called NASCAR super Bowl.
That's not quite fair for a number of reasons. First
of all, the dayton of 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
super Bowl can, sometimes by as much as a factor
of three. Also, most importantly, the daytone of five hundred
starts the season rather than ending it. And on this
(02:16):
particular daytone of five hundred, you had the start of
a new century, at the start of a new millennium,
and you had to 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 labonni drivers like Mark Martin who had been around
for a long time.
Speaker 4 (02:33):
And then you had new drivers who were coming along like.
Speaker 3 (02:35):
Dale Earnhardt Junior, like Matt Kenson, and then like Jeff Gordon.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
Here at day I'm going with a man who has
gone more races here at Daytona than anybody in history.
Dale Earnhart, the intimidator, will pull.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
It to victory Lane with a checkered flag, balls Steve
is in favor. The dayton one of five hundred had
a very special meeting for Dale Earnhardt, and he always
loved this race more than any other, chased it for
many many years. On this day he was preparing to
run the race when NASCAR was experiencing a seismic change.
The significance was Fox Sports had just begun broadcasting NASCAR.
(03:09):
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.
Speaker 4 (03:16):
Of American sports.
Speaker 3 (03:18):
For many many years beforehand, NASCAR had been spread out
over as many as seven broadcast networks. You had to
check every single weekend to figure out where the race
was going to be.
Speaker 4 (03:27):
What channel it was going to be on.
Speaker 3 (03:28):
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 going to 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 Earnhardt.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
Can you win your second five hundred today?
Speaker 5 (03:48):
We got a good shot at I got a good
race car, little wind day, a little exciting. I think
it's going to be some siding racing.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
Don't see something you probably hadn't never seen on Fox.
Speaker 3 (03:58):
He was going to be the star for Fox going forward.
They were going to have him, have the entire season
centered on him. They were going to be bringing Dale
Earnard into the Fox 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, a bunch of rednecks running
(04:21):
around in circles, and this was a sign that the
entire country was going to be taking NASCAR more seriously.
So it had all of the trappings, all of the celebration,
all of the build up that you would expect with
a major Fox event.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
Every driver dreams of winning that a ton of five hundred.
Speaker 5 (04:39):
Michael Waldrick dreams just of winning this.
Speaker 4 (04:42):
Rate any rate.
Speaker 3 (04:44):
The Daytona five hundred is two hundred laps of racing
on a two and a half mile track, hence the
five hundred in the race's name, and for many of
those two hundred laps you have drivers who were kind
of jocking for position. It's one of the two biggest
tracks on the NASCAR circuit. It's a super speedway, which
means drivers can go all out, hammered down, mash the
(05:05):
pedal to the floor, and never let up all the.
Speaker 4 (05:07):
Way around the track to go.
Speaker 3 (05:10):
What that also means is that the res can be
a lot more devastating. It can be a lot more catastrophic.
It's a high speed chess match, except that in this
case the chess pieces off and fly unto the air,
and you have that on lap one seventy five when
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,
(05:33):
the sad irony of this is that the car narrowly
misses Dale Earnhardt's number three. If Stewart had come down
on Earnhardt'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, 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
(05:54):
have is Dale Earnhardt himself up at the front of
the pack alongside Michael Trip and Dale Earnhardt Junior.
Speaker 4 (06:02):
These are two.
Speaker 3 (06:02):
Drivers who are the drivers for Dale Earnhardt's own team.
So Earnhardt 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 Arnhart was doing was setting
up these two drivers to win.
Speaker 4 (06:20):
They were at the front of the field.
Speaker 3 (06:22):
Michael Waltrip and first Dale Junior and second Dale Senior
and 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, in the final turn of
the two thousand and one day Dona five hundred, what
(06:45):
happened was it got to be too much.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
Behind them, come out.
Speaker 3 (06:52):
Dale Senior gets turned into the wall by a sterling
Marlins car drives straight into the wall and what happens
then is that the car Dale Seniors 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 an awful lot of is as
(07:14):
drivers are trying to jockey in a position for that
final run at the checker flag. What happened in this
case was Dale Senior's car drifts back down into the
infield and then nothing.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
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 College, 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.
Speaker 3 (08:32):
Take Sunset Road off 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 Metro Lina Trade Show Expo,
home of dusty rows of discount DVDs, decades.
Speaker 4 (08:49):
Old Beanie Babies.
Speaker 3 (08:51):
Park in the open field near the rusty fence that
encloses something large beyond. From this distance, he can't quite
tell what. There's a bouquet of plastic flights 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 here as old Ebbittsfield and Brooklyn. The
(09:13):
chains that held the fence together lie on the ground,
their locks beside them. If 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 Metrolna Speedway.
The eye, a stylized number one, is long gone, as
are the red and white painted ticket booth at the
(09:35):
base of the hill and the press box atop the
grand stand. All that left now are those grandstands, giant
steps of painted concrete looking out on emptiness. Graffiti covered
walls circumscribed, the tracks half mild oval. Weeds and time
have claimed it all. Look a little closer, though, use
little imagination. Once two dozen cars wheeled through these turns,
(09:56):
spitting red Carolina clay of the exhaust and oil scented,
the sound of their engines so loud it was just
one unified bone rumbling hum In 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,
(10:19):
even years could be reduced to scrap in moments. Imagine
the desperation of crews 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 of
just every bit as crafty as they were. The races
often ran on Saturday night, Yes, but what happened here
(10:39):
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, and then forged even stronger. This
once proud arena is the place where the most famous
story in racing first hit red line speed.
Speaker 4 (10:55):
A few miles up the.
Speaker 3 (10:56):
Road stands Connapolis, North Carolina, a small towny miles away
from Charlotte.
Speaker 4 (11:02):
This is a.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
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. 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 Earnhardt
(11:24):
was born. Cannapolis was the home of Ralph Earnhardt, who
was born in nineteen twenty eight and dropped out of
school in sixth grade to work in the Cannon Mills.
He was expected to live his entire life the way
that so many of his neighbors did.
Speaker 4 (11:39):
Grow up, go to school.
Speaker 3 (11:41):
For a time, work in the mills, raise a family,
and keep on working until he retired. But Ralph Earnhardt
was built to something different than most mill workers, and
Ralph Earnhardt had a need and a desire to race.
He had a talent for it, and he nurtured it,
and he raced as much as he possibly could while
(12:01):
doing mill work. At the same time, he found the
millwork to be unnecessarily confining, and he found the freedom
of racing to be what brought him happiness. So in
nineteen fifty three, after having spent years working full time
and then racing in his off hours, he decided, I'm
(12:22):
going to give racing full time a try. 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 managed to turn himself into a single
person enterprise responsible for every single part of the racing machine,
(12:46):
from driving the car in 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, and as he he did, he built himself
into one of the most significant figures in early NASCAR history.
(13:08):
When Ralph Earnhardt was racing, it was a very different
landscape than what we see today or even what Dail
Earnhardt saw on his day. There was a lot of
racing on dirt, there was a lot of racing on concrete,
but there wasn't a whole lot of organization to.
Speaker 4 (13:21):
Either of them.
Speaker 3 (13:22):
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 would have
trouble matching. When Ralph Earnhardt made the decision to go
full time into racing, he made the promise to his
(13:43):
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 finisher gets a paycheck. But at the
(14:04):
time when Ralph Earnhardt was racing in all these little
unsanctioned events all over North Carolina and all over the South,
if you finished much further below second, you didn't get anything,
and worse, you could get your car wrecked, and you
could come out in the hole by several hundred or
even thousand dollars if things didn't work out that way.
That was a way for you to it certainly focused
(14:27):
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
have his tires last longer and provide better grip. You've
(14:49):
got to have strong tires, You've got to have tires
that will hold you onto the track. And Ralph Fernhardt
figured out a little bit of geometry in the sense
that if you think of a car going in a
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
tires are going to be traveling a shorter distance than
(15:11):
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
using this to outlast his competitors to stay tight on
(15:32):
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
was one of the first people to figure this out
and use this in a race to start winning races
(15:54):
and bringing home that money. Dale Earnhart 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,
he played with cap guns. He would race go carts,
(16:15):
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):
Ernhart's personality.
Speaker 4 (16:36):
And because he didn't see the need in it.
Speaker 3 (16:38):
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
his father was doing, trying to learn from his father,
(16:58):
trying to understand what it was that his father was
doing under the hoods of all these cars. Dal Leernhard
decided to race for the same reason that his father had.
He was good at it and it kept him out
of the mill.
Speaker 1 (17:13):
And we've been listening to Jay Busby tell one heck
of a story about Dale Earnhardt and his father, and
we learned that his father had worked at the local
mill in Connapolis, North Carolina, where men well 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
(17:34):
his father wanted something more and discovered a passion for racing.
And the son would learn all about this 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 son's story,
among many other things here on our American Story. And
(18:08):
we returned to our American stories and our story on
Dale Earnhardt with Jay Busby, a lead writer at Yahoo
Sports and author of Earnhardt Nation. Go to Amazon are
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 quit
(18:30):
his meal 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.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
Let's return to the story.
Speaker 3 (18:54):
Dale Earnhardt grew up idolizing his father and 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 Ralph 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
(19:14):
say anything because Ralph had done the same thing and
had been successful. 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. 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 mill work, and he didn't
want that. Had he believed that he had the talent,
he had the genetics, and he had the willpower to
(19:36):
get into a car and to start winning races and
bringing home money like.
Speaker 4 (19:40):
His father did.
Speaker 3 (19:41):
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 Earnhard 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.
(20:03):
They thought that they were going to be painting it
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 convince himself that he did belong in a
race car and not necessarily working at a mill for
(20:23):
the rest of his life. The legend was that Ralph
Earnhardt 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
(20:45):
as a smoker, he'd inhaled.
Speaker 4 (20:47):
A whole lot of exhaust.
Speaker 3 (20:49):
He had lived with the stress of racing every single
weekend to provide for his family, and it caught up
to him sadly, and he died a young man, and
it devastated Dale didn't know what to do. He locked
up his father's garage. He didn't even touch anything within it.
All the cars and the trophies he sold, his father's dogs,
all of it was incredibly damaging and devastating to young Dale,
(21:14):
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 auto parts store.
He was racing, but he was also making choices that
he probably wouldn't have made later in life if he
(21:36):
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.
Speaker 4 (21:53):
Two more kids, I should say.
Speaker 3 (21:56):
And this is the point in Dale Renart'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
(22:16):
cost him a lot. It cost him his second marriage,
and it 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, he was partying
all the time, and it just was not a good fit.
By the late nineteen seventies, Dale.
Speaker 4 (22:38):
Earnhardt was a mess.
Speaker 3 (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 point 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
(23:02):
racing his way out of poverty and racing his way
out of a nine to five clock punching life.
Speaker 4 (23:08):
And it wasn't until his.
Speaker 3 (23:09):
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 Earnhardt 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
(23:33):
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. Dale Earnhardt
would drive at dirt tracks without a whole lot of
regard for common sense, or for anyone driving around him,
(23:53):
or for his own safety, and one edded a dirt track.
It could have been any dirt track. The exact name
has lost to him. He was running in fourth place,
and the top three finishes paid. He knew that finishing
third place would be enough to 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
(24:15):
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. It had made the King
throw up, so he had a little bit of cachet.
And here's young Dale Earnhardt just knocking 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 Earnhardt. Earnhardt wheels out of the
(24:37):
track in a hurry. The next week, stick Elliott himself
comes up to Earnhardt Earnhardt'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, you
might just make a driver. Yet, the implication being, of course,
that while Earnhardt didn't yet have the skill to be
a driver, he had the guts and he had the
(24:57):
spine to be a driver, and that was going to
be enough to get him going a little bit faster
and a little bit further down the road.
Speaker 4 (25:04):
And so it took a number of people.
Speaker 3 (25:06):
It was Robert g It was a gentleman named Suitcase,
Jake Elder who 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 raw 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
(25:30):
lump of 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 a way that could
get him to the front of the of the pack
without wrecking the pack as he did so, and once
Earnhardt figured out how to actually drive, then he started
(25:53):
to take off. Dale made 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, and misspelled two of his kids' names.
And then beside what happened in first race, he wrote
finished tenth, and beside ambition other than racing, he wrote none.
Speaker 4 (26:17):
That was it. That was Dale Earnhardt right there.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
And what a story you're hearing. The fact that the
intimidator's first car was pink. Well, that's good enough for
me as a takeaway in a water cooler 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.
Speaker 2 (26:40):
None, None, And.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
So often there's a price to pay for these things,
and the price he paid was my goodness.
Speaker 2 (26:47):
Living as a single guy, alienated, angry.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
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 we returned to our American
(27:39):
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.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
Let's continue with the story here again is Jay.
Speaker 3 (27:58):
The fact that NASCAR driver had 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 Daytona 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
(28:19):
good timing 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.
Speaker 4 (28:32):
And what they got was an amazing race.
Speaker 3 (28:35):
Richard Petty wins the race, but the most important part
of it was that a couple of other drivers, Bobby
and Donnie Allison, got involved in a last lap wreck
with kale Yarborough. All of these legends colliding and sliding
into the infield, and kale Yarborough comes over to Bobby's car,
starts getting in his face, starts punching him. Bobby gets
(28:56):
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.
Speaker 4 (29:04):
Drivers beat on each other.
Speaker 3 (29:06):
It's a remarkable, remarkable moment in American sports. And what
nobody noticed during this entire time was that this rookie
by the name of Dale Earnhardt manages to make his
way up and finish eighth. This is almost unprecedented for
a rookie to do this well. This was the season
that Dale Earnhardt started to become Dale Earnhardt.
Speaker 4 (29:26):
He would go on to.
Speaker 3 (29:28):
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.
Speaker 4 (29:38):
Year as a driver.
Speaker 3 (29:39):
He wins his first of ale would eventually be seven championships,
and he does it with an aggressive style that upset
much of the 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.
Speaker 4 (29:53):
You don't go out of your way to.
Speaker 3 (29:54):
Cause harm or cause difficulty, i should say, for another driver, because.
Speaker 4 (29:59):
It would be very easy to win a race.
Speaker 3 (30:00):
If all you are trying to do was wreck every
other driver on the track.
Speaker 4 (30:04):
And yet here was Earnhardt with.
Speaker 3 (30:05):
Aggression and pent up frustration and rage 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
(30:25):
level that they wanted to be racing at. Because of
this kind of chaotic driving, Earnhart earned the name the Intimidator,
and you can see why, particularly once he switched over to.
Speaker 4 (30:36):
His black car in the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 3 (30:38):
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
put them on their heels just by your sheer presence.
And that's what Earnhardt did. He didn't have a whole
(30:58):
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
was the kind of guy that you wanted to be.
(31:18):
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.
He had a charisma and he had a willpower about
(31:39):
him that, quite simply, most people don't. He was the
kind of voice of 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 push
(31:59):
him so that so that Elliott 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.
Speaker 4 (32:41):
Would look at him and say, you know who you
look just like, and Earnhart would just smile.
Speaker 3 (32:46):
He left to help tracks all over the NASCAR circuit
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 price 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, and people that
were driving by Shirley said that couldn't possibly be who
(33:07):
it looks like, could it? And then around the house,
And by house, I mean the enormous estate that.
Speaker 4 (33:13):
Dale Earnhardt owned in rural North Carolina.
Speaker 3 (33:15):
He loved to do yard work 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 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
(33:36):
fame and the money took care of themselves.
Speaker 5 (33:39):
This is undoubtedly one of the toughest the bouncements that
I've ever personally had to make. But after the accident
and turned for at the end of the day, total
five hundred, we've lost Dale Earnhardt.
Speaker 3 (33:53):
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 across NASCAR that almost
certainly have saved the lives of many many drivers since then.
(34:15):
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 the two thousands when it
was second only the NFL. He commanded respect in a
(34:39):
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 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
(35:01):
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. Earnhardt flipped that around
money drives NASCAR. Money wants the 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
(35:21):
sponsor products. He even went so far one Thomas to
ask a doctor to stitch at w into his knee
when he was getting stitches for Wrangler Jeanes. The doctor
wisely refused, but Earnhardt would 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. Earnhardt leaned into that if you
(35:43):
wanted to sponsor your product, you got the whole deal.
Earnhardt was the last of the truly larger than life
NASCAR drivers. He was someone who had the charisma and
the energy that most people, not just most drivers, but
most people simply don't have. Today's drivers are more technically
skilled than Earnhardt, but they don't have that combination of talent, personality, and.
Speaker 4 (36:03):
Attitude that Earnhardt had.
Speaker 3 (36:05):
We always compare the later generations unfavorably with those who
came before them. In sports, If you are a Michael
Jordan fan growing up. Nothing that Lebron James ever does
will match up to Jordan's achievements. But what 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
(36:28):
before him and after him. Of the other drivers who
won seven titles, he might like Richard Petty's personality a
little bit more. You might believe that Jimmy Johnson possesses
finer technical skills, but neither one of them were the total.
Speaker 4 (36:40):
Package like Earnhardt was. Dale Earnhardt is a true American original.
Speaker 3 (36:45):
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. He was raised in poor
surroundings and literally raced his way into a palace that
(37:05):
is the American dream right there. You cannot get more
honestly American than what Dale Erhart did.
Speaker 4 (37:12):
He gave the South.
Speaker 3 (37:13):
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 an icon for people who wanted
to follow their dream, their muse, 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,
(37:35):
and there never will be.
Speaker 2 (37:38):
A terrific job on the production.
Speaker 1 (37:40):
Editing and storytelling by Monty Montgomery in a special thanks
to Jay Busby.
Speaker 2 (37:44):
What a story he told.
Speaker 1 (37:46):
By the way, get his book earn Hart 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 goodness, he was a winner. He was a champion,
a self made man. Didn't clean up that southern accent.
(38:07):
The story of Dale Earnhardt, the story of the American Dream,
and so much more here on our American Stories
This is Lee Habib, 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 Earnhardt, who died on this
day in February of two thousand and one. And the
millions of us who are watching, well, we'll never forget
that day. Here to tell a story of Dale is
Jay Busby, a lead writer at Yahoo Sports and the
(00:53):
author of Earnhardt Nation.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
Take it Away, Jay.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
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 sky's warm weather. It's the kind of weather that
everybody else in the country is looking at Daytona and saying, man,
I wish I was there. Down below on the pits,
you could see the cars lined up in a row,
(01:18):
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.
Speaker 4 (01:26):
But right there by the number.
Speaker 3 (01:28):
Three, right there by Dale Earnhardt's black good rich number
three is Teresa Earnhardt, sharp in businesslike, in 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.
Speaker 4 (01:49):
Off to his job.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
Broadly speaking, the Daytona five hundred is called NASCAR super Bowl.
That's not quite fair for a number of reasons. First
of all, the dayton of 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
super Bowl can, sometimes by as much as a factor
of three. Also, most importantly, the daytone of five hundred
starts the season rather than ending it. And on this
(02:16):
particular daytone of five hundred, you had the start of
a new century, at the start of a new millennium,
and you had to 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 labonni drivers like Mark Martin who had been around
for a long time.
Speaker 4 (02:33):
And then you had new drivers who were coming along like.
Speaker 3 (02:35):
Dale Earnhardt Junior, like Matt Kenson, and then like Jeff Gordon.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
Here at day I'm going with a man who has
gone more races here at Daytona than anybody in history.
Dale Earnhart, the intimidator, will pull.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
It to victory Lane with a checkered flag, balls Steve
is in favor. The dayton one of five hundred had
a very special meeting for Dale Earnhardt, and he always
loved this race more than any other, chased it for
many many years. On this day he was preparing to
run the race when NASCAR was experiencing a seismic change.
The significance was Fox Sports had just begun broadcasting NASCAR.
(03:09):
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.
Speaker 4 (03:16):
Of American sports.
Speaker 3 (03:18):
For many many years beforehand, NASCAR had been spread out
over as many as seven broadcast networks. You had to
check every single weekend to figure out where the race
was going to be.
Speaker 4 (03:27):
What channel it was going to be on.
Speaker 3 (03:28):
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 going to 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 Earnhardt.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
Can you win your second five hundred today?
Speaker 5 (03:48):
We got a good shot at I got a good
race car, little wind day, a little exciting. I think
it's going to be some siding racing.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
Don't see something you probably hadn't never seen on Fox.
Speaker 3 (03:58):
He was going to be the star for Fox going forward.
They were going to have him, have the entire season
centered on him. They were going to be bringing Dale
Earnard into the Fox 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, a bunch of rednecks running
(04:21):
around in circles, and this was a sign that the
entire country was going to be taking NASCAR more seriously.
So it had all of the trappings, all of the celebration,
all of the build up that you would expect with
a major Fox event.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
Every driver dreams of winning that a ton of five hundred.
Speaker 5 (04:39):
Michael Waldrick dreams just of winning this.
Speaker 4 (04:42):
Rate any rate.
Speaker 3 (04:44):
The Daytona five hundred is two hundred laps of racing
on a two and a half mile track, hence the
five hundred in the race's name, and for many of
those two hundred laps you have drivers who were kind
of jocking for position. It's one of the two biggest
tracks on the NASCAR circuit. It's a super speedway, which
means drivers can go all out, hammered down, mash the
(05:05):
pedal to the floor, and never let up all the.
Speaker 4 (05:07):
Way around the track to go.
Speaker 3 (05:10):
What that also means is that the res can be
a lot more devastating. It can be a lot more catastrophic.
It's a high speed chess match, except that in this
case the chess pieces off and fly unto the air,
and you have that on lap one seventy five when
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,
(05:33):
the sad irony of this is that the car narrowly
misses Dale Earnhardt's number three. If Stewart had come down
on Earnhardt'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, 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
(05:54):
have is Dale Earnhardt himself up at the front of
the pack alongside Michael Trip and Dale Earnhardt Junior.
Speaker 4 (06:02):
These are two.
Speaker 3 (06:02):
Drivers who are the drivers for Dale Earnhardt's own team.
So Earnhardt 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 Arnhart was doing was setting
up these two drivers to win.
Speaker 4 (06:20):
They were at the front of the field.
Speaker 3 (06:22):
Michael Waltrip and first Dale Junior and second Dale Senior
and 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, in the final turn of
the two thousand and one day Dona five hundred, what
(06:45):
happened was it got to be too much.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
Behind them, come out.
Speaker 3 (06:52):
Dale Senior gets turned into the wall by a sterling
Marlins car drives straight into the wall and what happens
then is that the car Dale Seniors 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 an awful lot of is as
(07:14):
drivers are trying to jockey in a position for that
final run at the checker flag. What happened in this
case was Dale Senior's car drifts back down into the
infield and then nothing.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
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 College, 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.
Speaker 3 (08:32):
Take Sunset Road off 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 Metro Lina Trade Show Expo,
home of dusty rows of discount DVDs, decades.
Speaker 4 (08:49):
Old Beanie Babies.
Speaker 3 (08:51):
Park in the open field near the rusty fence that
encloses something large beyond. From this distance, he can't quite
tell what. There's a bouquet of plastic flights 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 here as old Ebbittsfield and Brooklyn. The
(09:13):
chains that held the fence together lie on the ground,
their locks beside them. If 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 Metrolna Speedway.
The eye, a stylized number one, is long gone, as
are the red and white painted ticket booth at the
(09:35):
base of the hill and the press box atop the
grand stand. All that left now are those grandstands, giant
steps of painted concrete looking out on emptiness. Graffiti covered
walls circumscribed, the tracks half mild oval. Weeds and time
have claimed it all. Look a little closer, though, use
little imagination. Once two dozen cars wheeled through these turns,
(09:56):
spitting red Carolina clay of the exhaust and oil scented,
the sound of their engines so loud it was just
one unified bone rumbling hum In 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,
(10:19):
even years could be reduced to scrap in moments. Imagine
the desperation of crews 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 of
just every bit as crafty as they were. The races
often ran on Saturday night, Yes, but what happened here
(10:39):
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, and then forged even stronger. This
once proud arena is the place where the most famous
story in racing first hit red line speed.
Speaker 4 (10:55):
A few miles up the.
Speaker 3 (10:56):
Road stands Connapolis, North Carolina, a small towny miles away
from Charlotte.
Speaker 4 (11:02):
This is a.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
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. 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 Earnhardt
(11:24):
was born. Cannapolis was the home of Ralph Earnhardt, who
was born in nineteen twenty eight and dropped out of
school in sixth grade to work in the Cannon Mills.
He was expected to live his entire life the way
that so many of his neighbors did.
Speaker 4 (11:39):
Grow up, go to school.
Speaker 3 (11:41):
For a time, work in the mills, raise a family,
and keep on working until he retired. But Ralph Earnhardt
was built to something different than most mill workers, and
Ralph Earnhardt had a need and a desire to race.
He had a talent for it, and he nurtured it,
and he raced as much as he possibly could while
(12:01):
doing mill work. At the same time, he found the
millwork to be unnecessarily confining, and he found the freedom
of racing to be what brought him happiness. So in
nineteen fifty three, after having spent years working full time
and then racing in his off hours, he decided, I'm
(12:22):
going to give racing full time a try. 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 managed to turn himself into a single
person enterprise responsible for every single part of the racing machine,
(12:46):
from driving the car in 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, and as he he did, he built himself
into one of the most significant figures in early NASCAR history.
(13:08):
When Ralph Earnhardt was racing, it was a very different
landscape than what we see today or even what Dail
Earnhardt saw on his day. There was a lot of
racing on dirt, there was a lot of racing on concrete,
but there wasn't a whole lot of organization to.
Speaker 4 (13:21):
Either of them.
Speaker 3 (13:22):
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 would have
trouble matching. When Ralph Earnhardt made the decision to go
full time into racing, he made the promise to his
(13:43):
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 finisher gets a paycheck. But at the
(14:04):
time when Ralph Earnhardt was racing in all these little
unsanctioned events all over North Carolina and all over the South,
if you finished much further below second, you didn't get anything,
and worse, you could get your car wrecked, and you
could come out in the hole by several hundred or
even thousand dollars if things didn't work out that way.
That was a way for you to it certainly focused
(14:27):
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
have his tires last longer and provide better grip. You've
(14:49):
got to have strong tires, You've got to have tires
that will hold you onto the track. And Ralph Fernhardt
figured out a little bit of geometry in the sense
that if you think of a car going in a
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
tires are going to be traveling a shorter distance than
(15:11):
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
using this to outlast his competitors to stay tight on
(15:32):
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
was one of the first people to figure this out
and use this in a race to start winning races
(15:54):
and bringing home that money. Dale Earnhart 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,
he played with cap guns. He would race go carts,
(16:15):
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):
Ernhart's personality.
Speaker 4 (16:36):
And because he didn't see the need in it.
Speaker 3 (16:38):
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
his father was doing, trying to learn from his father,
(16:58):
trying to understand what it was that his father was
doing under the hoods of all these cars. Dal Leernhard
decided to race for the same reason that his father had.
He was good at it and it kept him out
of the mill.
Speaker 1 (17:13):
And we've been listening to Jay Busby tell one heck
of a story about Dale Earnhardt and his father, and
we learned that his father had worked at the local
mill in Connapolis, North Carolina, where men well 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
(17:34):
his father wanted something more and discovered a passion for racing.
And the son would learn all about this 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 son's story,
among many other things here on our American Story. And
(18:08):
we returned to our American stories and our story on
Dale Earnhardt with Jay Busby, a lead writer at Yahoo
Sports and author of Earnhardt Nation. Go to Amazon are
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 quit
(18:30):
his meal 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.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
Let's return to the story.
Speaker 3 (18:54):
Dale Earnhardt grew up idolizing his father and 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 Ralph 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
(19:14):
say anything because Ralph had done the same thing and
had been successful. 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. 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 mill work, and he didn't
want that. Had he believed that he had the talent,
he had the genetics, and he had the willpower to
(19:36):
get into a car and to start winning races and
bringing home money like.
Speaker 4 (19:40):
His father did.
Speaker 3 (19:41):
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 Earnhard 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.
(20:03):
They thought that they were going to be painting it
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 convince himself that he did belong in a
race car and not necessarily working at a mill for
(20:23):
the rest of his life. The legend was that Ralph
Earnhardt 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
(20:45):
as a smoker, he'd inhaled.
Speaker 4 (20:47):
A whole lot of exhaust.
Speaker 3 (20:49):
He had lived with the stress of racing every single
weekend to provide for his family, and it caught up
to him sadly, and he died a young man, and
it devastated Dale didn't know what to do. He locked
up his father's garage. He didn't even touch anything within it.
All the cars and the trophies he sold, his father's dogs,
all of it was incredibly damaging and devastating to young Dale,
(21:14):
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 auto parts store.
He was racing, but he was also making choices that
he probably wouldn't have made later in life if he
(21:36):
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.
Speaker 4 (21:53):
Two more kids, I should say.
Speaker 3 (21:56):
And this is the point in Dale Renart'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
(22:16):
cost him a lot. It cost him his second marriage,
and it 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, he was partying
all the time, and it just was not a good fit.
By the late nineteen seventies, Dale.
Speaker 4 (22:38):
Earnhardt was a mess.
Speaker 3 (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 point 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
(23:02):
racing his way out of poverty and racing his way
out of a nine to five clock punching life.
Speaker 4 (23:08):
And it wasn't until his.
Speaker 3 (23:09):
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 Earnhardt 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
(23:33):
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. Dale Earnhardt
would drive at dirt tracks without a whole lot of
regard for common sense, or for anyone driving around him,
(23:53):
or for his own safety, and one edded a dirt track.
It could have been any dirt track. The exact name
has lost to him. He was running in fourth place,
and the top three finishes paid. He knew that finishing
third place would be enough to 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
(24:15):
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. It had made the King
throw up, so he had a little bit of cachet.
And here's young Dale Earnhardt just knocking 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 Earnhardt. Earnhardt wheels out of the
(24:37):
track in a hurry. The next week, stick Elliott himself
comes up to Earnhardt Earnhardt'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, you
might just make a driver. Yet, the implication being, of course,
that while Earnhardt didn't yet have the skill to be
a driver, he had the guts and he had the
(24:57):
spine to be a driver, and that was going to
be enough to get him going a little bit faster
and a little bit further down the road.
Speaker 4 (25:04):
And so it took a number of people.
Speaker 3 (25:06):
It was Robert g It was a gentleman named Suitcase,
Jake Elder who 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 raw 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
(25:30):
lump of 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 a way that could
get him to the front of the of the pack
without wrecking the pack as he did so, and once
Earnhardt figured out how to actually drive, then he started
(25:53):
to take off. Dale made 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, and misspelled two of his kids' names.
And then beside what happened in first race, he wrote
finished tenth, and beside ambition other than racing, he wrote none.
Speaker 4 (26:17):
That was it. That was Dale Earnhardt right there.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
And what a story you're hearing. The fact that the
intimidator's first car was pink. Well, that's good enough for
me as a takeaway in a water cooler 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.
Speaker 2 (26:40):
None, None, And.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
So often there's a price to pay for these things,
and the price he paid was my goodness.
Speaker 2 (26:47):
Living as a single guy, alienated, angry.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
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 we returned to our American
(27:39):
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.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
Let's continue with the story here again is Jay.
Speaker 3 (27:58):
The fact that NASCAR driver had 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 Daytona 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
(28:19):
good timing 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.
Speaker 4 (28:32):
And what they got was an amazing race.
Speaker 3 (28:35):
Richard Petty wins the race, but the most important part
of it was that a couple of other drivers, Bobby
and Donnie Allison, got involved in a last lap wreck
with kale Yarborough. All of these legends colliding and sliding
into the infield, and kale Yarborough comes over to Bobby's car,
starts getting in his face, starts punching him. Bobby gets
(28:56):
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.
Speaker 4 (29:04):
Drivers beat on each other.
Speaker 3 (29:06):
It's a remarkable, remarkable moment in American sports. And what
nobody noticed during this entire time was that this rookie
by the name of Dale Earnhardt manages to make his
way up and finish eighth. This is almost unprecedented for
a rookie to do this well. This was the season
that Dale Earnhardt started to become Dale Earnhardt.
Speaker 4 (29:26):
He would go on to.
Speaker 3 (29:28):
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.
Speaker 4 (29:38):
Year as a driver.
Speaker 3 (29:39):
He wins his first of ale would eventually be seven championships,
and he does it with an aggressive style that upset
much of the 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.
Speaker 4 (29:53):
You don't go out of your way to.
Speaker 3 (29:54):
Cause harm or cause difficulty, i should say, for another driver, because.
Speaker 4 (29:59):
It would be very easy to win a race.
Speaker 3 (30:00):
If all you are trying to do was wreck every
other driver on the track.
Speaker 4 (30:04):
And yet here was Earnhardt with.
Speaker 3 (30:05):
Aggression and pent up frustration and rage 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
(30:25):
level that they wanted to be racing at. Because of
this kind of chaotic driving, Earnhart earned the name the Intimidator,
and you can see why, particularly once he switched over to.
Speaker 4 (30:36):
His black car in the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 3 (30:38):
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
put them on their heels just by your sheer presence.
And that's what Earnhardt did. He didn't have a whole
(30:58):
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
was the kind of guy that you wanted to be.
(31:18):
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.
He had a charisma and he had a willpower about
(31:39):
him that, quite simply, most people don't. He was the
kind of voice of 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 push
(31:59):
him so that so that Elliott 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.
Speaker 4 (32:41):
Would look at him and say, you know who you
look just like, and Earnhart would just smile.
Speaker 3 (32:46):
He left to help tracks all over the NASCAR circuit
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 price 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, and people that
were driving by Shirley said that couldn't possibly be who
(33:07):
it looks like, could it? And then around the house,
And by house, I mean the enormous estate that.
Speaker 4 (33:13):
Dale Earnhardt owned in rural North Carolina.
Speaker 3 (33:15):
He loved to do yard work 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 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
(33:36):
fame and the money took care of themselves.
Speaker 5 (33:39):
This is undoubtedly one of the toughest the bouncements that
I've ever personally had to make. But after the accident
and turned for at the end of the day, total
five hundred, we've lost Dale Earnhardt.
Speaker 3 (33:53):
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 across NASCAR that almost
certainly have saved the lives of many many drivers since then.
(34:15):
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 the two thousands when it
was second only the NFL. He commanded respect in a
(34:39):
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 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
(35:01):
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. Earnhardt flipped that around
money drives NASCAR. Money wants the 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
(35:21):
sponsor products. He even went so far one Thomas to
ask a doctor to stitch at w into his knee
when he was getting stitches for Wrangler Jeanes. The doctor
wisely refused, but Earnhardt would 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. Earnhardt leaned into that if you
(35:43):
wanted to sponsor your product, you got the whole deal.
Earnhardt was the last of the truly larger than life
NASCAR drivers. He was someone who had the charisma and
the energy that most people, not just most drivers, but
most people simply don't have. Today's drivers are more technically
skilled than Earnhardt, but they don't have that combination of talent, personality, and.
Speaker 4 (36:03):
Attitude that Earnhardt had.
Speaker 3 (36:05):
We always compare the later generations unfavorably with those who
came before them. In sports, If you are a Michael
Jordan fan growing up. Nothing that Lebron James ever does
will match up to Jordan's achievements. But what 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
(36:28):
before him and after him. Of the other drivers who
won seven titles, he might like Richard Petty's personality a
little bit more. You might believe that Jimmy Johnson possesses
finer technical skills, but neither one of them were the total.
Speaker 4 (36:40):
Package like Earnhardt was. Dale Earnhardt is a true American original.
Speaker 3 (36:45):
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. He was raised in poor
surroundings and literally raced his way into a palace that
(37:05):
is the American dream right there. You cannot get more
honestly American than what Dale Erhart did.
Speaker 4 (37:12):
He gave the South.
Speaker 3 (37:13):
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 an icon for people who wanted
to follow their dream, their muse, 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,
(37:35):
and there never will be.
Speaker 2 (37:38):
A terrific job on the production.
Speaker 1 (37:40):
Editing and storytelling by Monty Montgomery in a special thanks
to Jay Busby.
Speaker 2 (37:44):
What a story he told.
Speaker 1 (37:46):
By the way, get his book earn Hart 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 goodness, he was a winner. He was a champion,
a self made man. Didn't clean up that southern accent.
(38:07):
The story of Dale Earnhardt, the story of the American Dream,
and so much more here on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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