An Accidental Sportswriter

by Robert Lipsyte

  But as I had been thirty-seven years earlier on the exotic island of boxing, I was soon enthralled. I met Dale Earnhardt, Sr., the crusty John Wayne of wheels, learned about restrictor plates and drafting, marveled at the layers of sponsorship and the autocracy of the France family, which had created and owned the sport. From owners to mechanics, everyone was glad to see me, eager to explain their sport to a Yankee from Moneyworld. It felt like hockey, only easier: better weather, more free food and drink, more publicity people, many of them northern corporate operatives. I was surprised to find how interested I became in the economics and the technology. And in the traditional Christian family values, a NASCAR theme. Generations of fans rooted together in the stands, and generations of mechanics passed wrenches in the garages. I was particularly interested early on in the relationship between Dale and Dale, Jr., who was expected to become an even better, and more popular, driver than his dad.

  Less than a month after my Big Ride, I went to Florida for the Daytona 500, the first and most celebrated race of the season. It was scheduled for February 18, the same date I’d met Ali and the Beatles in Miami Beach in 1964. The race week buildup felt just like the buildup to a heavyweight championship fight. I was renewed. The Kid Comes Back!

  On the eve of the race, the first person I went to interview at length was Mark Martin. It would be his seventeenth 500. He had never won one. I wanted to talk about the love of speed.

  “I don’t particularly love anything about the sport except winning,” he snapped. “Racing’s not about speed for me, it’s about being better than other people.” The drum-tight skin on his pale, sharp-featured face creased with a humorless smile. “You’re the one who liked the speed. What did you feel?”

  I told him about the pleasure of becoming part of the machine when he hit 175 MPH on the straightaway, about an exhilaration so intense it had become a white light.

  “You weren’t scared?” He looked skeptical.

  “I picked your car because I trusted the way you drove, very methodical, precise. I sensed it was a chore for you, but you were going to do it right, you weren’t going to embarrass NASCAR and get me killed.”

  Martin’s smile softened then, and the pale blue eyes seemed to lose some of their locked-in focus. “That’s true. I’m compulsive about everything I do. I hate testing cars, it’s boring because you’re not racing against anybody, but once I start I do more laps than anybody else. I block out the world. Always like that. Tropical fish, ceramics, motorcycles, going from thing to thing until I found stock car racing when I was fifteen.”

  Martin, I had been happy to find out after our ride, was a NASCAR stalwart, popular with fans and other drivers, steady, a clean racer. He was known as the best driver never to have won the championship. The word around the garage was that Martin was unlucky and that he lacked the killer instinct of the three superstars to whom he had finished as championship runner-up: Dale Earnhardt (twice), Tony Stewart, and Jeff Gordon. Jeff and Tony might wreck you if you were in their way. Dale would wreck you just because he could. Martin might not even wreck you to win. Some people I talked to about Martin seemed disdainful of his innate decency. I admired him for it. He had a prickly integrity. He wouldn’t answer a question if he couldn’t be honest. The chip on his shoulder from old personal and professional defeats, from too much drinking and the early death of his father, his racing mentor, had been sanded and painted over the years as he made himself sober and competitive. But it was still there as time ran out for him. He said he knew he was old, that he was not the future of the sport. I could put myself in that category, too, I thought.

  Earnhardt at forty-nine was pretty much past a prime in which he had won seven championships. Dale—“The Intimidator”—was one of the last of the laconic, hard-charging carburetor cowboys with whom southern workingmen could identify. They flew Confederate flags with his face superimposed. They wore hats and shirts with his number 3 and grew imitations of his push-broom mustache. And they plastered their pickups and rec vehicles with pictures of his main rival, the California-born Gordon. There would be a red slash through Gordon’s pretty face and the words “Fans Against Gordon” (FAG). It was the worst they could throw at Gordon, who drove as hard as Earnhardt, who liked and mentored the younger man.

  I didn’t get Dale. I had spent a little time with him that week in Charlotte. He was gruffly charming, and I found what I considered his contradictions amusing. Here was a rural populist hero whose North Carolina office/race shop complex, the so-called Garage Mahal, contained a curated display of his hunting rifles, mounted animal heads, and pictures of his executive chef cooking up his kills. I was simply too new to the sport, maybe too New York, to appreciate his mythic place and how what seemed like contradictory excesses for a country boy were aspirational to his constituency; someone like them could make it big, could have the northern suits begging for his time.

  Dale seemed like a bully to me on and off the track and not a particularly winning father—the tough love he’d practiced with Dale, Jr., wasn’t making the kid into a great driver. Did Junior even want to race? He was twenty-six at the time and seemed happier with his video games, his pals, his guitar.

  A Times reporter had been sent down to cover the Daytona 500. I was doing a long piece on the crowd, the drivers, the scene. Introduce Times readers to the smell of NASCAR Nation, gas fumes, sizzling ribs, beer sweat. I’d spent most of the night roaming the infield, the area inside the 2.5-mile track in which thousands camped out in fancy double-wide trailers and the beds of rusty pickups. There were jolly four-generation family groups and packs of surly, stringy, tattooed rednecks. There were concession stands, a lake, tubs of iced Bud. Everybody seemed wasted by midnight, when girls were eager to lift their T-shirts at demands to “Show your tits!”

  During the race, I was still typing my long piece when the track exploded in an eighteen-car collision. One car was actually airborne. This was the Big One people were always talking about, a monster wreck. I jumped up in the press box looking for Mark Martin, whose car had been torn up in the crash. Not Mark! I was ready to run down to count the dead. How could anyone walk out of that pileup? But everyone did.

  Which certainly lulled me, a few hours later, at the very end of the race, on the final turn of the last lap, when Earnhardt slammed into the wall near where I sat.

  I can still hear the frantic voice of Earnhardt’s crew chief calling to him through my radio scanner: “You okay, Dale? Talk to us, talk to us.”

  Minutes later, a blue tarp was thrown over that famous black number 3 Goodwrench Chevrolet. I didn’t understand the symbolism of the blue tarp until I heard a terrible moan rise from the 200,000 people in the grandstand. Then people around me in the press box began to cry. Earnhardt’s body was being covered.

  The office called and asked me to write the story. For page one. There was a shivery moment—Can I still bring it on deadline?—before the adrenaline kicked in and I remembered all those nights at ringside energized by the ticking of the clock. Didn’t I used to tell new kids, “Deadlines clear the rust out of your ass”? Let’s see what you got, Lippy. It’s 1964, and Clay just won the title from Liston and the teletype operator is waiting for you to rip copy out of your little manual Olivetti, paragraph by paragraph. You’ve got more time now since you only have to press your own computer send button.

  By Robert Lipsyte

  DAYTONA BEACH, Feb. 18—Stock car racing’s greatest current star and one of its most popular and celebrated figures, Dale Earnhardt, crashed and was killed today after he made a characteristically bold lunge for the lead on the last turn of the last lap of the sport’s premier event, the Daytona 500. One of the two cars he was trying to overtake was driven by his son, Dale, Jr., who never saw his father smash into the wall.

  Popular opinion and most other writers had a different, more poignant spin. They had Dale gallantly blocking the rest of the field for the two front-runners, Dale, Jr., and his protégé and employee Michael Waltrip,
a thirty-seven-year-old journeyman who went on to win his first Cup race.

  I could have been wrong in my conclusion, which was based on a sense that Dale, Sr., would never not try to win himself. It was my first race, and I didn’t know any of the principals well. The legend is fine by me.

  More interesting was the clash of reactions to Earnhardt’s death—“Oh, God” versus “So what?”—which led me into a political take on NASCAR. This was just a few months after that chad-choked 2000 election in which George W. Bush beat Al Gore. Earnhardt’s death became a signifier of America’s cultural divide. Red states v. Blue states. Beer drinkers v. wine drinkers. Carnivores v. herbivores. The estimated 75 million Americans who lived through NASCAR, defined themselves by the drivers they followed, the products they bought, the vacations they took v. millions of Americans who thought of NASCAR as numbing Sunday afternoons of gas guzzlers mindlessly snarling around a track while rednecks got hammered. The term “NASCAR dads” replaced “soccer moms” as shorthand for the latest demographic to be wooed by politicians.

  Earnhardt’s name did not appear in the headline of my page-one story: “Stock Car Star Killed on Last Lap of Daytona 500.” The editors decided that not enough Times readers knew who he was. They were probably right, yet another indication of the red-blue divide.

  In death, Dale not only became a passing political symbol but gave NASCAR a mythological figure, its own Babe Ruth. It also gave NASCAR an increased aura of danger that lifted it above what gearheads contemptuously call “the stick-and-ball sports.” And it gave the Times more reason to refuse to let me drive a car even when I found a way to do it. It didn’t want me under a blue tarp while it supported my survivors.

  Despite my rooting, Mark had one of his worst seasons in years, finishing twelfth in the standings. But his main sponsor, Viagra, which paid something like the standard $12 million to finance the season, was racing alone on the erectile dysfunction track and winning big. Racing purists, mostly older writers, were offended by the sponsorship. Next would come hard booze sponsors and then foreign cars, they’d grumble, and it turned out they were right. Fans might have wished that the big V on Mark’s car still stood for the oil products of Valvoline, his former sponsor, but they didn’t quit on Mark. Pfizer, the pharmaceutical company that produced Viagra, set up a medical tent at racetracks offering free blood and urine exams by local doctors for diabetes and other disorders (and sexual performance advice if asked for). I sat in one day and was amazed at the number of overweight men and women with dangerously high glucose and blood pressure levels. For many, this was their only medical exam of the year. Some said they had made a choice between their medicine and their grandstand tickets. “Why live if you can’t go racin’?” was the way they put it. The doctors told me they thought the fans were making an understandable—if regrettable—“quality of life” decision.

  I ended up writing more than occasional NASCAR columns. Times editors and readers liked them, NASCAR management was pleased with the attention (it hoped for a New York–area track), and old-timey race writers went out of their way to help me—their stock rose with mainstream coverage. I was no rival for their inside-the-engine fanzine pieces.

  Sometimes I wondered if the positive reaction I was getting made me willing to overlook or at least try to justify the dark side of NASCAR, its ostentatious commercialism, its union-busting stance, totalitarian structure, reactionary politics, environmental pollution, and discriminatory exclusivity (there is no racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, or sexism in NASCAR, I’d say at Manhattan parties, because almost everyone, including Jeff Gordon, is a white Christian hetero male).

  Hey, I own a big story, I’m feeling young again. Especially after Friday, May 25, 2001, 4 P.M., when I got the chance to drive.

  In retrospect, I probably should have turned it down; there was more than a hint of gift giving, conflict of interest. Publicists from Fox (the network broadcasting the races), Lowe’s Speedway, and the Richard Petty Driving Experience—a fantasy day camp that offered a menu of rides and drives from $89 to $2,999 at twenty-four tracks—figured out a way to clear track time after the drivers’ regular practice session so I could fulfill my need for speed.

  I had no qualms about safety, liability, or ethics, only about performance; my experiences with manual transmissions, in a laundry truck as a college kid at a summer job, and in a U.S. Army jeep, had been unhappy and were at least forty years in the past. I spent the day before my drive grinding the gears of John Jeppesen’s modified Volkswagon GTI. John has since become a friend, but at the time he was the Viagra PR guy. I was not exactly a model of journalistic integrity in this. I was obsessed. The day of my drive I found a Gold’s Gym and worked out for an hour to get my blood pumping. As Mark Martin did.

  The afternoon of my drive was cool and overcast, threatening rain. The Petty guys dressed me in a fire-retardant jumpsuit and talked me through the controls of a race car. It’s surprisingly simple once you switch on the ignition and hit the starter: just keep steering left until it’s time to brake and come in. Hardly any shifting of gears. Remember to press the talk-back button on the wheel so the pit crew can hear you.

  One more thing: they wanted me to meet with Darrell Waltrip, the retired NASCAR champion who had recently made a seamless transition to the Fox broadcast booth. He was famous for talking a lot. His nickname as a driver had been “Jaws.”

  He was waiting for me in a corner of a garage he used as an office. It felt like an audience. I thought his eyes narrowed as he took in my jumpsuit. He started talking before I sat down.

  “There’s not a guy on the road who doesn’t think he can do what I did. You will never really know what I felt unless you’re racin’ with forty guys right around you. Stay high on the straightaway, between the white lines and the wall. Take the center of the turn, clip the grass coming down. The car will pull left, trust it. The car knows what to do. No violent moves, you’ll only make the car unhappy.”

  I nodded as humbly as I could. This was a great champion, a Hall of Famer. It wasn’t an interview, he was giving me advice. Why was I so anxious to get this over with and drive?

  “Do everything slowly, but think ahead, anticipate your moves, anticipate where you want to be. You must always know where you are. Always. You must always know exactly where you are.”

  I thanked him and said, “Sounds like advice for life.”

  Waltrip laughed. “When you’re out there, you’ll be closer to God.”

  My pit crew was waiting outside, Petty’s national quality assurance coordinator and two teenage tire wranglers. I clambered through the driver’s window of a blue-and-yellow Cheerios-sponsored Dodge, number 43, Richard Petty’s old number. I was strapped in. My helmet was slipped through the window and fitted on my head. They hooked up the neck brace and turned on the radio, snapped on the steering wheel, and flipped the ignition switch.

  The teenagers adjusted the snarling throttle and drilled me on the emergency release of my safety restraint and use of the fire extinguisher. No one had ever needed to do it for real in a Petty fantasy car, they said. No one had ever died or even been seriously injured. One of them said, “You’ll have such fun, just don’t be nervous.”

  In the pits, when the green panel light blinked on, my crew chief said, “You’re good to go.”

  The growl of the motor insulated me; my mind was filled with the techniques I had learned. I let the clutch up, accelerated to 1,500 RPM, shifted to second and, once I was up to 4,000 RPM, to third. Now on the track, I pulled down into fourth and followed a pace car. We were the only cars on the track.

  My gloved hands were welded to the wheel of the 3,400-pound car. I was surprised by the bumpiness of the speedway, littered with scabs of black tire rubber from the drivers’ practice sessions. I used them as markers to find my groove. I worried—although distantly, as if about someone I was watching—about rear-ending the pace car, scraping the wall, taking the turns so sharply I would flip. Over the radio, a crew
man said, “Looking good,” but I was too absorbed to remember to press the talk button on the wheel when I acknowledged as instructed, “Ten-four.”

  After eight laps, the checkered flag in the stands snapped. I slapped into neutral and rolled into Pit Road.

  They checked my tires and said I’d been averaging about 110 MPH. Now that I seemed in control, the pace car would go faster.

  I felt a surge of power. I couldn’t wait for the green light, to shift through the gears, to burst onto the track. I didn’t want to follow a pace car, I wanted to chase it, and as the car accelerated it became happier and the road was smoother and I was the brain of a gorgeous, howling 630-horsepower machine that lived only to fly on the straightaway and knife down through the middle of the turns and clip the green and rocket back up.

  Suddenly I didn’t want to chase the pace car—I wanted to pass it. But it stayed three car lengths ahead no matter how hard I mashed the gas. If I had had a coherent thought it might have been Just give me a few more horses, just a little more road, and I will spin gravel into your windshield, for I was born to run.

  I hated to see the checkered flag. I eased into neutral and coasted home. My pit crew was cheering and waving, there were a couple of photographers, even a Victory Lane beauty, the Petty marketing director. I felt an overwhelming warmth for them all. They seemed bubbly with gratitude that I was alive. Someone estimated that I had reached about 130 MPH.

  I swaggered away, brimming with adrenaline, suddenly wanting to eat, drink, smoke, make love, call everybody I had ever met. I was glad I didn’t have to give a news conference and remember to thank all the sponsors whose names were on my car.