It was a painful year for Dale Earnhardt, who had to endure injury and, worse, losingby Bruce Newman
For a stock car racer, looking straight ahead is not necessarily more revealing—and is almost always less fun—than looking back over the shoulder. The acquired wisdom of Satchel Paige notwithstanding, most NASCAR drivers would sooner give up their left lug nut than their rearview mirror. For 17 years, however, there has been one important caveat against looking backward. No driver has enjoyed peeking in his mirror and seeing Dale Earnhardt in it—his black Chevy looming ominously like a thundercloud, his reflective sunglasses never quite hiding the agate eyes that every driver could feel on the back of the neck.
That would not usually be the last thing they felt from Earnhardt either, for he had a bully's sense of how to scare other drivers, often bumping them from behind in a not-so-subtle suggestion that now might be a good time to get the hell out of the way. Soon, of course, the battering ram became unnecessary; cars moved aside quickly when he merely hove into rear view.
In 1996, however, Earnhardt seemed less a threatening presence in the mirrors of other drivers than a mild annoyance simply trapped there, like Alice caught on the wrong side of the looking glass. When he blew a rear tire and crashed in the MBNA 500 at Dover in September, Earnhardt equaled the most dismal streak of his career, ending his 10th straight race out of the top five. It didn't take a particularly acute sense of irony to note that his troubles had begun on July 28 at Talladega when another driver, Sterling Marlin, bumped him from behind.
Earnhardt had often used that move when he was trying to make a name for himself on the dirt-track circuit two decades ago. In those days, he would borrow money to buy racing tires on Thursday in the hope that he would make enough in winnings on Friday and Saturday nights to repay the original loan on Monday. "We didn't have enough money to buy groceries," Earnhardt has said, attempting to account for the desperation that fueled his wild side.
Despite the Talladega crash, the Intimidator remained unintimidated.
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He did what he did not just for the money but for the thrill of winning and because anybody he could push from behind was probably just asking for it anyway. That, in any case, was the way Earnhardt saw it during one of those mid-'70s battles with veteran dirt-track driver Stick Elliott. "Going into the last lap," Earnhardt says, "I got right up on old Stick's bumper and caught hold of him just right and spun him around just as pretty as you'll ever see. After the race, I was getting out of my car when somebody came running and told me one of Stick's mechanics was coming with a pistol. I ran out of the racetrack, jumped over the wall and took off."
NASCAR is much beloved as full-contact sport, but even for Earnhardt, nudging bumpers at 150 miles per hour can have severe consequences. In July at Talladega, Earnhardt was speeding down the long straightaway, the fastest part of the 2.66-mile tri-oval, when Ernie Irvan bumped Marlin, who then clipped Earnhardt. Earnhardt's black Chevrolet was battered around the track like a 3,400-pound piñata.
Irvan later insisted that Marlin had run into his right side while trying to beat Earnhardt at Earnhardt's own game—intimidation. "Earnhardt was probably one of the worst ones about running up beside somebody and getting almost against them," Irvan said. "Sterling just learned from that."
Earnhardt suggested, tartly, that it was Irvan who had a couple of things to learn: 1) how to drive and 2) how to apologize. "The wreck should have never happened," Earnhardt said. "The wreck should have never happened. That's just all I got to say about the wreck." Actually, that wasn't quite all he had to say about it. Absolving Marlin of any responsibility, he seemed to object to the lack of artfulness in Irvan's move and to the absence of any expression of regret afterward.
Among those wishing Earnhardt well were Taylor and Teresa.
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"He made a mistake, but he didn't call or come by until today," Earnhardt said in August. "He just had no comment. To deny the mistake is wrong on his part. In 1993, when I wrecked Rusty [Wallace at Talladega], I knew it was my fault, and I went out there and helped him get out of the car and apologized to him and his team."
On the way to his third Winston Cup title, in 1987, Earnhardt created so much havoc on the racetrack, enraging so many of his fellow drivers, that even the imperturbable Richard Petty said, "There'll come a Sunday when there won't be enough wreckers to pick up the pieces of his car." That day came July 28 at Talladega: Earnhardt's car went headlong into the wall, then pinwheeled down the track. Only the roll bar saved him from being squashed like a bug, and even at that his collarbone was fractured when the car's roof crumpled to within six inches of the gearshift knob. The last impact occurred when his car landed on its wheels, spun again and Ken Schrader's Chevrolet pounded into his front end. "Ken said, 'I seen you, and I aimed for you,'" Earnhardt said a few days later, laughing.
It was to be a long time before anybody saw Earnhardt laughing much again. Later that week, at the Brickyard 400 in Indianapolis, he was in tears when excruciating pain forced him to get out of his car and let backup driver Mike Skinner take over after just six laps. "It's one of the biggest races of the year, and he was defending champion of it," said co-crew chief David Smith. "He was physically hurt, but it hurt him more emotionally."
At Watkins Glen two weeks after the accident, Earnhardt proved again why his nickname in the garages was Ironhead long before it was the Intimidator. Hunched over in pain, his left hand stuffed into the pocket of his black jeans to keep his arm immobilized, Earnhardt had to be lowered into his car for the Friday qualifying run; he wore a flak jacket to protect his ribs and was swaddled in a special harness so he could be lifted out quickly if his car caught fire. But the only fire in his Chevy that day was the one Earnhardt kept banked in the shattered hearth of his rib cage. Tossed around the cockpit like a rag doll as he hurled himself through the undulant, 11-turn road course, Earnhardt won the pole position, beating the track record by .3 of a second.
Fans wish Earnhardt well.
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It was one of the purest displays of panache on a racing circuit since drivers wore ascots, but Earnhardt paid a price for it. "Watkins Glen was terrible when it came to the pain," he said later, "but it was a good sort of feeling, actually, because the car was running good and I was on top of my game."
But it was as if the racing gods were conspiring against Earnhardt; in mid-August he reinjured his shoulder while repairing a bent frame on his son Kerry's late-model stock car. Kerry, 26, had been in a six-car wreck at the Nashville Speedway the night before; two of the other cars involved were driven by Dale's daughter Kelley, 24, and his son Dale Jr., 22. Dale and wife Teresa's child, seven-year-old Taylor, is the one Earnhardt offspring not yet behind the wheel. When Dale got hurt working on Kerry's car, it recalled a sadder incident in 1973, when Dale's father, Ralph—a virtuoso of the short-track circuit—died of a heart attack while working on Dale's car. Ralph's nickname was Ironheart, and now they called his son Ironhead, a nickname he seemed less likely to belie. At both Bristol, on Aug. 24, and at Darlington, on Sept. 1, Dale refused to stop after crashing. Says Smith, "I asked him why he didn't get out of the car after he crashed at Bristol, and he said, 'I guess it's just my ego.' That's the bottom line."
What drives Earnhardt? Maybe it's his iron head, maybe his passionate love of winning, or maybe it's his desire to win his eighth Winston Cup driving championship; that would give him one more than Petty, who now shares the record with him. Whatever the reason, Earnhardt's own team members had begun to find him difficult to put up with. "You think you guys have it bad. You ought to sit in on the meetings with him," one said. Car owner Richard Childress and several others in the Earnhardt camp wanted him to ease up, but no one could make him. No one, it seemed, could tell Dale Earnhardt what to do. "Not even his mama," said Smith.
No one could make Dale Earnhardt ease up? That should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone who has ever seen him lurking in the rearview mirror.
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