DALE EARNHARDT: 1951-2001: The Last Lap

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It didn't start out as such a holy thing. Early on, stock-car-racing events ranged from illegal to highly illegal, emerging from races between law officers and moonshine runners. It wasn't until a racer named Bill France started the National championship circuit in 1946--which incorporated as the National Association of Stock Car Auto Racing in 1948--that jalopy races began to look like something resembling a league, an organization, a sport.

It was roughshod and regional, but France negotiated the bumpy road efficiently, and then in the late 1950s, Detroit moved south and everything changed. Much of America thinks stock-car racing broke through about five years ago, when the Kid--Jeff Gordon, he of the Tom Cruise looks and the middle-class Indiana upbringing--started winning everything in sight and turning up on the Today show to hobnob with Katie and Matt. But consider this: by 1965, NASCAR was already the second most popular sport, by attendance, in the country. And it hadn't started its Northern offensive.

That would be mounted gradually. To an itinerary of Spartanburg, S.C.; Birmingham and Talladega, Ala.; and Hickory and Asheville, N.C.; NASCAR added, over time, Long Pond, Pa.; Sonoma, Calif.; Joliet, Ill.; Brooklyn, Mich.; Dover, Del.; and Loudon, N.H. The fans were attracted, in this mature iteration of NASCAR, by the thunder of the cars, which have been able to reach 190 m.p.h. for 40 years now, and also by a host of stars every bit as human and accessible as some of the early characters, if better scrubbed. Richard Petty won 200 races. David Pearson beat Petty head to head 33 times to 30. Bobby Allison won 84 times in 25 years. Cale Yarborough won 83 times and was an entertaining throwback, a broad-bellied, bullheaded racer, maybe the biggest s.o.b. on the track this side of...

Dale Earnhardt.

It was Petty and Earnhardt, each of whom won the season-long Winston Cup title a record seven times, who had the largest legions of fans. King Richard's subjects loved his laconic aw-shucks manner and the way it contrasted with his ferocity behind the wheel. Ironhead's followers reveled in their hero's orneriness. Jeff Lancaster, owner of Lancaster's BBQ, a restaurant and car-racing shrine in Mooresville, N.C., explained it last week, the walls around him covered with souvenirs of racing giants: "He was the John Wayne of NASCAR. He was a kick-ass, take-names kinda guy. A guy's guy. Somebody that made things happen."

He was his father's son. Born in Kannapolis, N.C., in 1951, he didn't take naturally to school--he would drop out in the ninth grade--but loved being around cars. Ralph Earnhardt, known as Ironheart, was a short-track racing god and taught his son to wrangle a stock car. Dale married at 17, and he and his first wife had a son, Kerry. By the time he began his pro racing career at age 24 in 1975, Earnhardt had a young family to support and, more than most other drivers, was all business and no fooling. When strapped for cash, he would borrow from fellow racers, banking that he would win enough in Sunday's race for payback on Monday. That's pressure, and it made Earnhardt bear down.