February 17, 2026 • 38 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, in NASCAR, some names fade. But Dale Earnhardt does not. Dale Earnhardt Sr. built his reputation one race at a time, driving the black No. 3 and collecting championships like stamps. More than two decades later, Dale Earnhardt remains central to NASCAR’s story. Jay Busbee, author of Earnhardt Nation, shares the tale of how a poor boy from Kannapolis, North Carolina, became “The Intimidator”—auto racing’s greatest legend and an American icon.
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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 the story of Dale is
Jay Busby, a lead writer at Yahoo Sports and the
(00:53):
author of Earnhardt Nation. Take it Away, Jay.
Speaker 2 (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 Pitt Row it's absolute chaos.
There are drivers there, there are crew chiefs there, there's
family there, there's media there.
Speaker 3 (01:26):
But right there by the number three, right.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
There by Dale Earnhardt's black good Rich number three is
Teresa Earnhardt, sharp in businesslike and 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
(01:48):
husband as he heads off to his job.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
Broadly speaking, the.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
Daytona five hundred is called NASCAR super Bowl. That's not
quite fair for a number of reasons. Of all, the
dayti in a five hundred is older than the super Bowl,
and second of all, the dayton of five hundred can
house more people in the track than the super Bowl kids,
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 particular daytone of
(02:17):
five hundred, you had the start of a new century
at the sort of a new millennium, and you had
to get the 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 3 (02:33):
And then you had new drivers who.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Were coming along like Dale Earnhardt Junior, like Matt Kenson,
and then like Jeff Gordon.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
Here at David I'm going with a man who has
won more races here at Daytona than anybody in history.
Dale Earnhart, the intimidator.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
Will pull it to victory Lane with a checkered flag balls.
Steve Is in daytone in five hundred had a very
special meeting for Dale Earnhardt, and he always loved this
race more than any other. He 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. This
(03:09):
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 weekend to
figure out where the race was going to be, what
channel it was going.
Speaker 3 (03:28):
To be on.
Speaker 2 (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. Caen, you win your second five hundred today.
Speaker 4 (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. Don't see something
you probably hadn't never seen on Fox.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
He was going to be 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
(04:20):
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 4 (04:36):
Every driver dreams of winning the Daytona five hundred. Michael
Waldrick dreams just of winning this race any right now.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
The Daytona five hundred, it 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.
Speaker 3 (05:04):
The pedal to the floor, and never let up all
the way around the track, come on to go.
Speaker 2 (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.
Speaker 3 (05:19):
And fly unto the air.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
And you had 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.
Speaker 3 (05:32):
Now, the sad.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
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 have is
(05:55):
Dale Earnhardt himself up at the front of the pack
alongside Michael wall Trip and Dale Earnhardt Junior. These are
two 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,
(06:16):
it became.
Speaker 3 (06:16):
Apparent that what Earnhardt was doing.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
Was setting up these two drivers to win. They were
at the front of the field Michael Waltrip and first
Dale Junior and second Dale Senior in third, and what Dale.
Speaker 3 (06:27):
Senior was doing was playing defense.
Speaker 2 (06:31):
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
happened was it got to be too.
Speaker 4 (06:47):
Much trouble behind the.
Speaker 2 (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.
Speaker 3 (07:08):
Now, seeing a.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
Wreck at the end of the Daytona five hundred is
not all that uncommon.
Speaker 3 (07:12):
It happens an awful.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
Lot of is as 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 2 (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 and decades.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
Old beanie babies.
Speaker 2 (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 flower 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 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.
Speaker 3 (09:17):
If you like, you can walk right in.
Speaker 2 (09:20):
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 Metrolina Speedway. The eye,
a 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 grandstand. All
that left now are those grandstands, giant steps of painted
(09:41):
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, spitting red Carolina clay
of the exhaust and oil scented a the sound of
their engines so loud it was just one unified bone,
(10:04):
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 or something they labored over for days, months, even years,
could be reduced to scrap in moments. Imagine the desperation
of crews trying to coax life out of a dead engine.
(10:26):
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 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, Standskannapolis,
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.
Speaker 3 (11:07):
People who lived there worked.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (11:16):
Shift, and return home.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
It was a very programmed and defined existence, and this
is exactly where the legend of Dale Earnhart 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 3 (11:39):
Grow up, go to school for.
Speaker 2 (11:41):
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 his as much as he possibly could while
(12:01):
doing mill work. 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, after having spent years working full
time and then racing in his off hours, he decided,
(12:22):
I'm going to give racing full time a trial. If
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
(12:45):
of the racing machine, 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 did,
he built himself into one of the most significant figures
in early NASCAR history. When Ralph Earnhardt was racing, it
(13:10):
was a very different landscape than what we see today
or even what day 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.
Speaker 3 (13:21):
To either of them.
Speaker 2 (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.
Speaker 3 (14:22):
Out that way. That was a way for you to.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
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 is a way
for a driver to have his tires last longer and
(14:47):
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 Heernhardt 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 gonna
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
(15:10):
shorter distance than the right side tires. This means the
right side tires are gonna 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
(15:32):
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.
Speaker 3 (15:42):
He figured this out with a sixth grade education.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
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 and bringing home that money.
Dale Earnhardt was born in nineteen fifty one, and he
grew up in kind of a perfect encapsulation of a
(16:07):
certain kind of Americana. He played cowboys and Indians in
the yard. As a kid, he played with cap guns,
He would race go karts, and he would play 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.
Speaker 3 (16:24):
But along with that, he.
Speaker 2 (16:26):
Had the kind of classic American silent, reserved father who
would not often give a lot of praise, both because
that was Ralph Arnhardt'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.
Speaker 3 (16:42):
To win a race.
Speaker 2 (16:44):
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, trying to understand what
it was that his father was doing under the hoods
of all these cars. Dale Leernhard decided to race for
(17:05):
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 Stories. And
(18:08):
we returned to our American Stories and our story on
Dale Earnhardt with Jay Musby, a lead writer at Yahoo
Sports and 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 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.
Let's return to the story.
Speaker 2 (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 Earnhardt 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. He 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 his father did. 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
(19:57):
future black number three car, drove a pink car for
the first time, largely because of.
Speaker 3 (20:01):
A painting accident. They thought that they were going to.
Speaker 2 (20:04):
Be painting it a sleek purple color and once the
paint dried, had turned into the.
Speaker 3 (20:08):
Pink of an uncooked steak.
Speaker 2 (20:10):
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 the rest of his life. The legend was
that Ralph Earnhardt died in his garage working on his car,
(20:32):
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 weekend to provide for his family, and it
(20:55):
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 it. All the cars and the trophies he sold,
his father's dogs, all of it was incredibly damaging and
devastating to young Dale, and it took him many many
(21:16):
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 were an older man. He
(21:36):
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
(21:57):
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 cost
him a lot. It cost him his second marriage, and
(22:19):
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 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 point thirty to 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 3 (23:08):
And it wasn't until his.
Speaker 2 (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
(23:32):
more often than not, while he would win a lot
of races, he would also wreck a lot of cars.
Speaker 3 (23:37):
Along the way.
Speaker 2 (23:38):
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, or for his
own safety, and one edded a dirt track. It could
have been any dirt track. The exact name has lost
(23:59):
to his way. 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 Stick Elliott.
This is a guy who had a bit of notoriety.
He had allegedly taken Elvis Presley for a drive around
(24:21):
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.
Speaker 3 (24:30):
In this race. So after the race, a whole bunch
of Stick Elliott's.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
Men were looking for Earnhart. Earnhardt wheels out of the
track in a hurry. The next week stick. Elliott himself
comes up to Earnhardt. Earnhardt's thinking, oh boy, this is
going to be this is going to 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
(24:55):
to be a driver, he had the guts and he
had the 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.
And so it took a number of people. It was
Robert g It was a gentleman named Suitcase, Jake Elder
who was a crew chief. He was an owner by
the name of rod Osterland. All of these men and
many others saw some promise in Dale and they said,
(25:19):
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 lump
of angry and intimidating clay and mold it into a
driver who was able to go and run at at
a reasonable pace until he needed to run wide open,
(25:40):
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
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,
(26:05):
Kelly and Dale Junior. He 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 3 (26:16):
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. None, None, And so often there's a
(26:43):
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 we returned to our American
(27:39):
stories and the final portion of our story on Dale
Earnhardt with Jay Musby. 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.
Speaker 2 (27:58):
The fact that NASCAR drivers 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 Daytota 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 3 (28:32):
And what they got was.
Speaker 2 (28:33):
An amazing race. 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
(28:55):
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.
Speaker 3 (29:04):
Drivers beat on each other.
Speaker 2 (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. He would
(29:27):
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 ale
would eventually be seven championships, and he does it with
an aggressive style that upset much of the rest of
(29:47):
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 win a race if all
you are trying to do was wreck every other driver
on the track.
Speaker 3 (30:04):
And yet here was Earnhardt.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
With 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
(30:25):
for the level that they wanted to be racing at.
Speaker 3 (30:28):
Because of this kind.
Speaker 2 (30:29):
Of chaotic driving, Earnhart earned the name 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.
(30:49):
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 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,
(31:10):
and it worked. Dale 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
(31:30):
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 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
(31:50):
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 him so that Earth
and so.
Speaker 3 (32:00):
That Elliott would get mad.
Speaker 2 (32:01):
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
without recrimination, and he was able to do it his
(32:23):
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
and say, you know who you look just like, and
(32:44):
Earnhart would just smile. 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 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,
And people that were driving by Shirley said that couldn't
(33:06):
possibly be who it looks like, could it? And then
around the house. And by house, I mean the enormous
estate that Dale Earnhart owned in rural North Carolina. 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.
Speaker 3 (33:24):
Who was driving the tractor.
Speaker 2 (33:26):
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 and the money took care
of themselves.
Speaker 4 (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 forward, at the end of the day, total
five hundred, we've lost Dale Earnhardt.
Speaker 2 (33:53):
How could NASCAR's most popular star have died on the
day of its marquee event. How could this possibly have happened?
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.
Speaker 3 (34:22):
Ever in its history.
Speaker 2 (34:23):
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 way
that no other driver did. He was intimidating, yes, but
he also won races. He made a whole lot of people,
(34:45):
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
drivers historically had very little power and very little representation.
(35:06):
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.
Earnhart 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
(35:27):
knee when he was getting stitches for Wrangler jeans that
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 wanted it to sponsor your product, you
got the whole deal. Earnhart was the last of the
(35:49):
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 Earnhardt, 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
(36:09):
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
before him and after him. Of the other drivers who
(36:30):
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 package like Earnhardt was.
Speaker 3 (36:42):
Dale Earnhardt is a true American original.
Speaker 2 (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 his entire world himself. He was raised in
poor surroundings and literally raced his way into a palace
(37:05):
that is the American dream.
Speaker 3 (37:06):
Right there.
Speaker 2 (37:07):
You cannot get more honestly American than what.
Speaker 3 (37:10):
Dale or Heart did.
Speaker 2 (37:12):
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 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
(37:35):
one like him, and there never will be.
Speaker 1 (37:38):
A terrific job on the production. Editing and storytelling by
Monty Montgomery in a special thanks to Jay Busby. What
a story he told. 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.
(37:58):
He enjoyed the fame, but my goodness, he was a winner.
He was a champion, a self made man. Didn't clean
up that Southern accent. 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 the story of Dale is
Jay Busby, a lead writer at Yahoo Sports and the
(00:53):
author of Earnhardt Nation. Take it Away, Jay.
Speaker 2 (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 Pitt Row it's absolute chaos.
There are drivers there, there are crew chiefs there, there's
family there, there's media there.
Speaker 3 (01:26):
But right there by the number three, right.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
There by Dale Earnhardt's black good Rich number three is
Teresa Earnhardt, sharp in businesslike and 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
(01:48):
husband as he heads off to his job.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
Broadly speaking, the.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
Daytona five hundred is called NASCAR super Bowl. That's not
quite fair for a number of reasons. Of all, the
dayti in a five hundred is older than the super Bowl,
and second of all, the dayton of five hundred can
house more people in the track than the super Bowl kids,
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 particular daytone of
(02:17):
five hundred, you had the start of a new century
at the sort of a new millennium, and you had
to get the 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 3 (02:33):
And then you had new drivers who.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Were coming along like Dale Earnhardt Junior, like Matt Kenson,
and then like Jeff Gordon.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
Here at David I'm going with a man who has
won more races here at Daytona than anybody in history.
Dale Earnhart, the intimidator.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
Will pull it to victory Lane with a checkered flag balls.
Steve Is in daytone in five hundred had a very
special meeting for Dale Earnhardt, and he always loved this
race more than any other. He 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. This
(03:09):
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 weekend to
figure out where the race was going to be, what
channel it was going.
Speaker 3 (03:28):
To be on.
Speaker 2 (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. Caen, you win your second five hundred today.
Speaker 4 (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. Don't see something
you probably hadn't never seen on Fox.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
He was going to be 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
(04:20):
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 4 (04:36):
Every driver dreams of winning the Daytona five hundred. Michael
Waldrick dreams just of winning this race any right now.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
The Daytona five hundred, it 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.
Speaker 3 (05:04):
The pedal to the floor, and never let up all
the way around the track, come on to go.
Speaker 2 (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.
Speaker 3 (05:19):
And fly unto the air.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
And you had 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.
Speaker 3 (05:32):
Now, the sad.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
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 have is
(05:55):
Dale Earnhardt himself up at the front of the pack
alongside Michael wall Trip and Dale Earnhardt Junior. These are
two 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,
(06:16):
it became.
Speaker 3 (06:16):
Apparent that what Earnhardt was doing.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
Was setting up these two drivers to win. They were
at the front of the field Michael Waltrip and first
Dale Junior and second Dale Senior in third, and what Dale.
Speaker 3 (06:27):
Senior was doing was playing defense.
Speaker 2 (06:31):
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
happened was it got to be too.
Speaker 4 (06:47):
Much trouble behind the.
Speaker 2 (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.
Speaker 3 (07:08):
Now, seeing a.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
Wreck at the end of the Daytona five hundred is
not all that uncommon.
Speaker 3 (07:12):
It happens an awful.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
Lot of is as 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 2 (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 and decades.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
Old beanie babies.
Speaker 2 (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 flower 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 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.
Speaker 3 (09:17):
If you like, you can walk right in.
Speaker 2 (09:20):
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 Metrolina Speedway. The eye,
a 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 grandstand. All
that left now are those grandstands, giant steps of painted
(09:41):
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, spitting red Carolina clay
of the exhaust and oil scented a the sound of
their engines so loud it was just one unified bone,
(10:04):
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 or something they labored over for days, months, even years,
could be reduced to scrap in moments. Imagine the desperation
of crews trying to coax life out of a dead engine.
(10:26):
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 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, Standskannapolis,
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.
Speaker 3 (11:07):
People who lived there worked.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (11:16):
Shift, and return home.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
It was a very programmed and defined existence, and this
is exactly where the legend of Dale Earnhart 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 3 (11:39):
Grow up, go to school for.
Speaker 2 (11:41):
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 his as much as he possibly could while
(12:01):
doing mill work. 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, after having spent years working full
time and then racing in his off hours, he decided,
(12:22):
I'm going to give racing full time a trial. If
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
(12:45):
of the racing machine, 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 did,
he built himself into one of the most significant figures
in early NASCAR history. When Ralph Earnhardt was racing, it
(13:10):
was a very different landscape than what we see today
or even what day 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.
Speaker 3 (13:21):
To either of them.
Speaker 2 (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.
Speaker 3 (14:22):
Out that way. That was a way for you to.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
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 is a way
for a driver to have his tires last longer and
(14:47):
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 Heernhardt 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 gonna
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
(15:10):
shorter distance than the right side tires. This means the
right side tires are gonna 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
(15:32):
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.
Speaker 3 (15:42):
He figured this out with a sixth grade education.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
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 and bringing home that money.
Dale Earnhardt was born in nineteen fifty one, and he
grew up in kind of a perfect encapsulation of a
(16:07):
certain kind of Americana. He played cowboys and Indians in
the yard. As a kid, he played with cap guns,
He would race go karts, and he would play 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.
Speaker 3 (16:24):
But along with that, he.
Speaker 2 (16:26):
Had the kind of classic American silent, reserved father who
would not often give a lot of praise, both because
that was Ralph Arnhardt'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.
Speaker 3 (16:42):
To win a race.
Speaker 2 (16:44):
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, trying to understand what
it was that his father was doing under the hoods
of all these cars. Dale Leernhard decided to race for
(17:05):
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 Stories. And
(18:08):
we returned to our American Stories and our story on
Dale Earnhardt with Jay Musby, a lead writer at Yahoo
Sports and 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 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.
Let's return to the story.
Speaker 2 (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 Earnhardt 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. He 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 his father did. 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
(19:57):
future black number three car, drove a pink car for
the first time, largely because of.
Speaker 3 (20:01):
A painting accident. They thought that they were going to.
Speaker 2 (20:04):
Be painting it a sleek purple color and once the
paint dried, had turned into the.
Speaker 3 (20:08):
Pink of an uncooked steak.
Speaker 2 (20:10):
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 the rest of his life. The legend was
that Ralph Earnhardt died in his garage working on his car,
(20:32):
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 weekend to provide for his family, and it
(20:55):
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 it. All the cars and the trophies he sold,
his father's dogs, all of it was incredibly damaging and
devastating to young Dale, and it took him many many
(21:16):
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 were an older man. He
(21:36):
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
(21:57):
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 cost
him a lot. It cost him his second marriage, and
(22:19):
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 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 point thirty to 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 3 (23:08):
And it wasn't until his.
Speaker 2 (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
(23:32):
more often than not, while he would win a lot
of races, he would also wreck a lot of cars.
Speaker 3 (23:37):
Along the way.
Speaker 2 (23:38):
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, or for his
own safety, and one edded a dirt track. It could
have been any dirt track. The exact name has lost
(23:59):
to his way. 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 Stick Elliott.
This is a guy who had a bit of notoriety.
He had allegedly taken Elvis Presley for a drive around
(24:21):
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.
Speaker 3 (24:30):
In this race. So after the race, a whole bunch
of Stick Elliott's.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
Men were looking for Earnhart. Earnhardt wheels out of the
track in a hurry. The next week stick. Elliott himself
comes up to Earnhardt. Earnhardt's thinking, oh boy, this is
going to be this is going to 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
(24:55):
to be a driver, he had the guts and he
had the 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.
And so it took a number of people. It was
Robert g It was a gentleman named Suitcase, Jake Elder
who was a crew chief. He was an owner by
the name of rod Osterland. All of these men and
many others saw some promise in Dale and they said,
(25:19):
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 lump
of angry and intimidating clay and mold it into a
driver who was able to go and run at at
a reasonable pace until he needed to run wide open,
(25:40):
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
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,
(26:05):
Kelly and Dale Junior. He 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 3 (26:16):
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. None, None, And so often there's a
(26:43):
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 we returned to our American
(27:39):
stories and the final portion of our story on Dale
Earnhardt with Jay Musby. 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.
Speaker 2 (27:58):
The fact that NASCAR drivers 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 Daytota 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 3 (28:32):
And what they got was.
Speaker 2 (28:33):
An amazing race. 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
(28:55):
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.
Speaker 3 (29:04):
Drivers beat on each other.
Speaker 2 (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. He would
(29:27):
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 ale
would eventually be seven championships, and he does it with
an aggressive style that upset much of the rest of
(29:47):
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 win a race if all
you are trying to do was wreck every other driver
on the track.
Speaker 3 (30:04):
And yet here was Earnhardt.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
With 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
(30:25):
for the level that they wanted to be racing at.
Speaker 3 (30:28):
Because of this kind.
Speaker 2 (30:29):
Of chaotic driving, Earnhart earned the name 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.
(30:49):
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 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,
(31:10):
and it worked. Dale 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
(31:30):
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 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
(31:50):
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 him so that Earth
and so.
Speaker 3 (32:00):
That Elliott would get mad.
Speaker 2 (32:01):
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
without recrimination, and he was able to do it his
(32:23):
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
and say, you know who you look just like, and
(32:44):
Earnhart would just smile. 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 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,
And people that were driving by Shirley said that couldn't
(33:06):
possibly be who it looks like, could it? And then
around the house. And by house, I mean the enormous
estate that Dale Earnhart owned in rural North Carolina. 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.
Speaker 3 (33:24):
Who was driving the tractor.
Speaker 2 (33:26):
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 and the money took care
of themselves.
Speaker 4 (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 forward, at the end of the day, total
five hundred, we've lost Dale Earnhardt.
Speaker 2 (33:53):
How could NASCAR's most popular star have died on the
day of its marquee event. How could this possibly have happened?
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.
Speaker 3 (34:22):
Ever in its history.
Speaker 2 (34:23):
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 way
that no other driver did. He was intimidating, yes, but
he also won races. He made a whole lot of people,
(34:45):
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
drivers historically had very little power and very little representation.
(35:06):
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.
Earnhart 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
(35:27):
knee when he was getting stitches for Wrangler jeans that
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 wanted it to sponsor your product, you
got the whole deal. Earnhart was the last of the
(35:49):
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 Earnhardt, 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
(36:09):
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
before him and after him. Of the other drivers who
(36:30):
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 package like Earnhardt was.
Speaker 3 (36:42):
Dale Earnhardt is a true American original.
Speaker 2 (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 his entire world himself. He was raised in
poor surroundings and literally raced his way into a palace
(37:05):
that is the American dream.
Speaker 3 (37:06):
Right there.
Speaker 2 (37:07):
You cannot get more honestly American than what.
Speaker 3 (37:10):
Dale or Heart did.
Speaker 2 (37:12):
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 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
(37:35):
one like him, and there never will be.
Speaker 1 (37:38):
A terrific job on the production. Editing and storytelling by
Monty Montgomery in a special thanks to Jay Busby. What
a story he told. 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.
(37:58):
He enjoyed the fame, but my goodness, he was a winner.
He was a champion, a self made man. Didn't clean
up that Southern accent. 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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