Dale Earnhardt, Sr.
All expressions will be printed and delivered to the family.
Born to compete, reared to race, driven to win
By PETER ST. ONGE
On spring and fall Friday afternoons, after qualifying was done for the day
at Talladega, Idus Brendle liked to drive to the speedway from Montgomery
to pick up his friend, Dale Earnhardt.
The two would head with buddies toward a fine, little bream pond, about 15
miles up a country road. There they would take their shirts off, say little
at all, relax.
Until Earnhardt grabbed his fishing pole.
Then Idus Brendle would see the Man in Black, the competitor with an intent
on winning that took him from high school dropout to racing great and
member of the Fortune 500. Dale Earnhardt’s story, which ended in a crash
at Sunday’s Daytona 500, is the story of many of our greatest athletes.
It’s a tale of drive that threaded through his life, from racing to
business to a small boat swaying on an Alabama afternoon.
“I remember one day Dale caught a big one, a shellcracker,” Brendle says.
“He laid it out on the boat, knowing it would be the biggest one. Next
thing you know, I got one that’s bigger, and Dale sees that and starts
swinging at it with his fishing pole trying to knock it off.
“He wants the biggest shellcracker. He won’t go home until he’s got it.”
`He idolized his daddy’
Born in Kannapolis in 1951, Dale Earnhardt grew up a middle child with two
brothers and two sisters in the same white frame house his mother, Martha,
lives in now. Neighbors remember that young Dale liked to scuffle with his
best friend, and that he loved pinto beans and cars, and especially his
father, Ralph.
“He idolized his daddy,” says his uncle, Bob Coleman of Kannapolis. “He had
watched him all through life, racing and everything. He wanted to be as
good or better than his daddy.”
In a garage behind their house, young Dale watched his father build the
cars he would race four or five nights a week on tracks up and down the
Eastern Seaboard. In the late 1950s and early ’60s, Ralph Earnhardt raced
in Columbia on spring Thursday nights, but he ordered Dale to stay home
because the races were on school nights.
“I’ll never forget that I couldn’t wait to get up Friday mornings,”
Earnhardt said in a 1994 interview. “I’d run out to the shop behind our
house and walk around Daddy’s race car.
“I could tell by looking at it just about how he’d done. If there were a
lot of tire marks on the doors, he’d probably won, ’cause guys had beat and
banged on him trying to get around.”
The elder Earnhardt won often, eventually capturing two NASCAR Sportsman
Division (now Grand National) titles. In a play on his name, he came to be
known as “Ironheart” because of his courage and determination on the track.
His son would later earn a similar nickname, “Ironhead,” which spoke to
another trait.
“He was head-strong,” remembers Gary Hargett of Marshville, who worked on
cars with Earnhardt’s father and later the son. “He knew what he wanted to
do and he wanted to do it his way.”
Hargett saw early Earnhardt’s passion to win.
“He was the most competitive person I’ve ever known,” he remembers. “We had
a horseshoe stob behind the shop, and we got into a fight over a
quarter-inch. He went and got a tape measurer over it.”
Who won?
“He did. He couldn’t stand to be beat in anything, whether it was racing or
rock throwing.”
It was racing that set the boy’s heart drumming, enough so that he decided
to drop out of school after eighth grade. His parents tried to deflate the
notion, offering a car as a bribe. Earnhardt didn’t want just a car; he
wanted to race a car, so he built himself a jalopy, and before long won
with it. When he moved to a higher division, he built himself another car.
In 1973, Ralph Earnhardt died of a heart attack at age 45 while working on
a car. Two years later, Dale Earnhardt made his Winston Cup debut in the
World600 at Charlotte Motor Speedway. He started 33rd and finished 22nd,
earning $2,425 in a Dodge owned by Ed Negre.
“It has been a long time since I’ve seen a youngster so determined, so
hungry,” then-CMS general manager Humpy Wheeler said before the World600 a
year later.
In 1979, Earnhardt won the Winston Cup Rookie of the Year title while
driving for Rod Osterlund. The next year, he won the series championship,
taking five races but also receiving some sharp scolding from drivers for
his pugnacious driving style.
“He was aggressive from the start,” says retired Observer reporter Tom
Higgins, who covered NASCAR for more than 30 years. “He won the Busch Clash
down in Daytona his sophomore year, and some of the drivers were saying,
`He’s a crazy man,’ and, `He can’t keep doing this.’ Well, he did keep
doing that.”
Despite struggling in the early 1980s with Osterlund and then owner Bud
Moore’s team, Earnhardt gathered a fan following that embraced his
ruggedness on the track. In 1982, he fractured a knee in a crash at
Talladega but didn’t miss a race. In 1985, after being fined and put on
probation for a wreck at Richmond, Va., he was unapologetic. “To be good
out here, to be here a while, you’ve got to go out and try to win,” he said.
He did, winning six more series titles from 1986 through 1994, all the
while accumulating nicknames such as the Dominator, the Terminator and –
the one that stuck – the Intimidator. “He was the guy,” says driver Jeff
Burton. “He’d beat you on the road course, on the superspeedways or on
short tracks. He had muscle, brains, whatever it took. He didn’t care what
it took, he just went and did it.”
That image – the black No.3, the sunglasses, the stubborn set of the jaw –
was a moneymaker for the driver, who now had a family with wife Teresa,
whom he married in 1982. But Earnhardt made clear his driving was not about
affirming a nickname.
It was, simply, the best way to win.
At the first nighttime Winston Cup race in May 1992 in Charlotte, Earnhardt
lost on the last lap when Kyle Petty bumped him into the wall in Turn4.
Later, in the garage, Earnhardt emerged from his car demanding, “Where’s
Kyle?” He was pointed toward Petty, who took off his helmet and braced for
the confrontation.
“Great race!” Earnhardt said, and he gave Petty a hug.
Into the lead and to the top
By the early 1990s, NASCAR had begun its sprint toward worldwide
popularity, with Earnhardt again in the lead. He was one of the first
drivers to turn on-track success into off-track business opportunity. He
developed the Sports Image marketing group in the 1980s to sell his
souvenirs and later founded Dale Earnhardt Inc. with Teresa.
In 1997, DEI moved from a farmhouse in Mooresville to a 103,000-square-foot
building nearby. Now, DEI owns three Winston Cup teams, and Earnhardt was
involved in other ventures. Forbes reported his 1999 earnings as $26.5million.
“You can credit his business success to his drive and his competitiveness,”
says Grant Lynch, president of Talladega Superspeedway. “But Dale also was
smart. He was a good businessman. He was sharp and he made quality decisions.
“At Victory Lane here, we usually have to tell the driver what to do, point
him in the right direction for photographers and interviews. When Dale won,
he would run our Victory Lane. He knew everything that needed to happen.”
Such smarts helped Earnhardt push NASCAR toward the future while he
remained the strongest link to its country heritage. “He was genuine,”
Lynch says. “He didn’t put on airs. You could see that when people met him
for the first time. He immediately put people at ease.”
Friends also knew a funny Earnhardt, a practical joker who once poured a
can of sardines in Rusty Wallace’s car before a race as payback for a prank
the week before. “He’s a funny guy,” says friend Paul Schadt, morning show
host at WKKT-FM (96.9). “He would try to catch you off-guard, shake your
hand a little too hard. He had a funny side and a soft side.”
Although brusque with media and occasionally fans, Earnhardt also was known
to visit with ill race fans and quietly help out fellow teams with parts.
But he did it, friends say, on his terms.
“If you asked him about being successful, the one thing he would say was it
was all about control,” said ESPN racing broadcaster Jerry Punch. “He had
control of his life, his company, his souvenirs. And he had overwhelming
confidence that he had control of his car.”
Softening, but not weakening
In the late 1990s, the Intimidator image began to soften. Earnhardt talked
about being more calculating and less risky on the race track, and he
nurtured the career of his son Dale Jr.
“My son coming into the sport has probably made the biggest difference,” he
said in a 1999 interview. “It caused more focus on me being an elder of the
sport than of being just Dale Earnhardt. Before Dale Jr. came on the scene,
nobody really talked about me being an older guy or retiring or any of
that. All that’s changed now.”
In 1997, he was winless for the first time in Winston Cup since 1981, but
he won his first Daytona500 in 1998 and finished second in points to Bobby
Labonte last year. His last Winston Cup victory, No.76, came at Talladega
in October.
This season, he was among the favorites for the series title, and on
Sunday, the 49-year-old was among the most combative on the track. He
bumped rookie Kurt Busch, then later nudged Jeff Gordon during a pass. He
did not look like a racer cruising toward his twilight – not to his
friends, and not to Idus Brendle, who remembers how his story with Dale
Earnhardt finishes.
“So he’s whacking at my fishing pole,” Brendle says. “Finally, he got my
fish off the line, so he still had the biggest fish of the day.
`The next day at the track, he had people come up to me and ask who had the
biggest, because he knew it would get me.”
He laughs at the end of the tale.
“You just couldn’t catch a bigger fish than him,” he says. “He wouldn’t let
you beat him.”
