Dale Earnhardt's NASCAR: A Throwback

Doing the Dale Earnhardt story a week ago was revelatory, if not, to one who follows sports, altogether astonishing. There were two reactions in America to the news of Earnhardt's death. Within the massive NASCAR family, there was the abject shock of losing their sport's reigning king, its Mark McGwire, its Jack Nicklaus. More than a few times you heard that Elvis had left the building.

And then, beyond the borders of NASCAR, there was sympathy for an athlete cut down in competition, but there was also curiosity. Who was this guy? Why is this such a huge story?

Surely the phenomenal success of NASCAR is no longer a secret north of the Mason-Dixon line. For years now, races have been sellouts in New York and New Hampshire, and poster boy Jeff Gordon has been dropping by Rock Center for "Today Show" schmoozings with Katie and Matt. But because of what the sport once represented, NASCAR is still, to many, a thing best kept in the garage, doors down so the neighbors won't see. Tell these people that, in this week's Billboard 200, the Dixie Chicks' latest CD is still a million units up on the Beatles, 8 to 7, and they choose not to believe you.

Before returning to this point — NASCAR as a vast cultural force that barely touches those outside its walls — I should explain, for those ignorant of NASCAR, just how it differs from other forms of car racing, because this has everything to do with the outpouring of grief over Earnhardt. When we talk about the "sport" of NASCAR we're talking about a particular church with its own righteously faithful congregation. NASCAR racers drive stock cars: simultaneously — paradoxically — primitive and ultrasophisticated versions of the Fords, Chevies, Pontiacs and Dodges in America's driveways. These cars have engine blocks of 1960s vintage; neither you nor I have driven a car with a carburetor for 15 years, but the car No. 3 that Dale Earnhardt drove two weeks ago at Daytona had one. Certainly Earnhardt's Monte Carlo was a modified machine: Its engine had been juiced to 700 horsepower; its sheet-metal skin was lighter than a road-ready car's; its tungsten rollbars were designed to render the cab a fast-moving cage. Still, a NASCAR car looks like any old car wearing a sweater of decals, and in NASCAR racing there is little psychic distance between the superstar and the fan in the stands. The European Grand Prix circuit, with its dukes and duchesses and scarf-wearing playboy drivers, is as foreign to NASCAR as Bordeaux to Bud. Even American Indy-car racing, with its open-wheel roadsters that look like go-carts on steroids, has no great hold on the heartstrings of its audience. But NASCAR in America, to return to the metaphor, is religion, replete with charismatic figures, creeds and commandments about how life should be lived.

It didn't start out as such a holy thing. Early on, stock-car racing events ranged from illegal to highly illegal. In the South, in the hill towns of Pennsylvania and out in California's wide open spaces, a race often meant kids speeding wherever they might in souped-up cars. It's fair to say that the hottest stock races in the Carolinas during Prohibition were between bootleggers making deliveries in jury-rigged junks and tax agents sucking their dust. Postwar, dirt tracks were laid out in cornfields and competitions took on a semblance of order, but 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 started looking like something resembling a league, an organization, a sport.

Young NASCAR had a nucleus of 15 to 20 drivers, and they were of a type: southern, rugged, poor or near-poor, fearless. Some were wilder or nastier than others away from the oval, but you couldn't survive in NASCAR without driving wild and nasty on the track. As Dale Earnhardt, who would have been at home amidst the early lions of NASCAR, once put it: bumpers are meant for bumping, and on any given Sunday the leaders would routinely be forced onto the infield or into a rickety wooden wall by aggressive challengers. NASCAR's was a tougher, dicier form of racing than, say, Indy's, and traditions were accruing to NASCAR that, in its respectable middle age, would be as hard to scrape away as barnacles.

The sport was gaining a big fanship in the South, but wasn't playing nationwide. For one thing, its cast of good-old-boy characters just didn't look like sports heroes to northerners. Driver Smokey Yunick once said of Herb Thomas, who won 43 times in 175 races in the 1940s and '50s, that "until he experienced serious sheet time" — Thomas's career ended in 1956 after he fractured his skull in a race — "he was on his way to becoming the greatest ever." Yunick added a little sadly, "He was a hillbilly with a terrible set of teeth so nobody knew how good he was."

Problems weren't just cosmetic. NASCAR was rife with, let's say, cheating, with illicitly customized cars nearly as common as legit ones. At the big weekend-long meetings, a NASCAR crowd could get, let's say, rowdy; in Darlington, N.C., the local sheriff took to setting up his jail right in the middle of the infield. And some would-be stars had, let's say, problems. The storied Junior Johnson, who some consider the greatest driver ever, was a bootlegger's boy who mastered his technique while running moonshine whiskey through the hills of Wilkes County, N.C., at 4 in the morning. (Some of his famous cars — "The Black Ghost," "The Midnight Traveler" — were never used at the track.) Junior got nabbed in 1955 and missed a season and a half of racing while paying his debt to society. Not long before, baseball star Ted Williams had missed a couple of seasons, too, because he had proved an able fighter ace in World War II and was asked to serve again in Korea. Who's Daddy going to tell his own Junior to look up to?

So NASCAR had issues. But France negotiated the rough road efficiently and then, in the late 1950s, Detroit moved south and everything changed. The car companies had learned that NASCAR's extremely loyal audience was buying whatever their heroes were driving. Ford, Dodge and others started to pay the Junior Johnsons and Lee Pettys and Fireball Roberts of the world big money to drive particular models — and, meantime, to stay out of jail, cut the crap on the track and, oh yeah, get your teeth fixed. NASCAR started to smell better, look richer and become more popular.

Way more popular. 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 taught Matt Lauer how to climb in though a window. 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, if not quietly. To an itinerary of Birmingham, Spartanburg, Talladega, Hickory and Asheville NASCAR added, over time, Long Pond, Pa.; Sonoma, Calif.; Joliet, Ill.; Brooklyn, Mich.; Dover, Del.; and Loudon, N.H. Tens of thousands of fans flocked to these tracks, and they weren't trekking up from Atlanta like Deadheads chasing the next show. They were coming out of the woods and hills and cities and suburbs. NASCAR Nation, it turned out, was everywhere.

They were attracted, in this mature iteration of NASCAR, by the thunder of the cars, which have been able to reach 180 mph for 40 years now, and also by a host of stars every bit as human and accessible as the early characters, if better scrubbed. Richard Petty, Lee's boy, 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 sonuvabitch on the track this side of....

Dale Earnhardt.

I think, finally, the reason that Earnhardt was so appealing to NASCAR fans — and so appealing beyond NASCAR, to people for whom NASCAR is an intriguing oddity — was this throwback quality. He was a cowboy. He was a dirt-track racer. He was Ironheart's kid, and who wouldn't love such a one.

In researching last week's TIME cover story, I went to lunch with a friend more knowledgeable in the ways of NASCAR than... well, than just about anybody. I asked Stephen Madden, who has written on racing for Sports Illustrated and other publications, for a favorite Intimidator story. He paused but briefly. "In 1996 at the superspeedway in Talladega, Earnhardt had a near thing when [Sterling] Marlin bumped him when the two were fighting for the lead in the DieHard 500. I was at the Atlanta Olympics, but Talledega was on, so I drove over. I remember it like yesterday. It was a hot, humid day — thunderstorms came in and they delayed the start of the race. Then they finally get under way, and it's terrific stuff, a great race. It was on Turn 1, and after the nudge by Marlin, Car No. 3 just launches, ass-over-teakettle, a total highlight crash — not just SportsCenter highlights, but network. Earnhardt broke his sternum and fractured his clavicle. For some guys, that's the end of the summer.

"Next week is the Brickyard 400 in Indianapolis, and everyone is telling Dale to park it. He says, 'No f---ing way,' and gets into the car, basically driving one-armed. He qualifies pretty well. And then he lets someone else take the ride — he qualifies the car, then gives it to his teammate for the glory. A total Ironhead move.

"The week after that, at Watkins Glen [N.Y.], still mending, he sets a course record. In NASCAR they look at that and say, 'That's a real man. That's why we sing about him around the campfire.'"

And ever will.