Joe Gibbs gave up coaching football and went racing. He has never looked back by William Nack In the trophy case that covers one wall of the lobby in his racing team's new 35,000-square-foot headquarters outside Charlotte, Joe Gibbs displays the imposing evidence of his two most fervently lived and cherished dreams. While one carried him on July 27 into the National Football League Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, the other is no less than a fantasy in progress. "Think about it," Gibbs says, "I am getting to live two dreams. Most guys don't get to live one." Indeed, among the artifacts in the case are the football announcing the Washington Redskins' 42-10 victory over the Denver Broncos in the 1988 Super Bowl (the second of three world championships that Gibbs won as coach of the Skins) and the trophy proclaiming him the 1983 NFL Coach of the Year. Nearby, gleaming in the lights, are the trophies he has won in the five years he has owned a NASCAR Winston Cup team: two from the 1995 races in Michigan; two more taken in Charlotte in 1994 and 1995; and, right in the middle, the grandest stock car racing bauble of all, the one he carried off for winning the Super Bowl of the Winston Cup series, the Daytona 500, in 1993. Nothing more vividly symbolizes the reach and vitality of the man's life as a competitor than that trophy case, and no one is more surprised than Gibbs at what he has done and what he is doing now. "I never thought I'd be in the position I am today," Gibbs says. "I never thought I'd be back in car racing. It's a fantasy life I'm living. I'm the most spoiled guy in the world." After all the years of prowling sidelines in those familiar headphones, consulting playbooks and railing at quarterbacks, he suddenly chose another kind of life—that of a NASCAR team owner. And in 4 1/2 years, his Joe Gibbs Racing team has become a familiar presence on the stock car circuit. In its five seasons of racing, the team has won more than $5 million in prize money, and Gibbs finds himself a serious player in a sport that he has had a lifelong love affair with. From running the Redskins to pacing the pits, only the headgear has endured. photograph by George Tiedemann Gibbs was born in Mocksville, N.C., in the very cradle of stock car racing, but he grew up with only a vague awareness of the legends of Junior Johnson and Lee Petty. It wasn't until his family moved to Southern California, when he was nine, that racing automobiles became a passion. All through high school, in towns like Norwalk and Whittier, the teenage Gibbs cruised in one of his hot rods—the 1927 Model T Ford with a Cadillac engine, or the '32 Ford Victoria with an Olds under the hood, or the '37 Chevy with a Corvette engine. "Those are three of the rods I had as a high school kid," recalls the 56-year-old Gibbs. "You ever see the movie Grease? That was me. The 1950s. We worked on all sorts of street rods. Went to drive-ins. We raced on the streets. I got into drag racing. I loved cars and I loved working on them. I couldn't have had more fun growing up." Even as a student at San Diego State, where he played under head coach Don Coryell, Gibbs built and raced dragsters during summer breaks. In fact, he was considering a career as a professional drag racer when Coryell offered him a job as an assistant coach. Over the next three decades—through his nine years as a college coach and 21 years in the pros, culminating in that extraordinary 12-year run with the Skins, during which he won 140 football games and lost only 65—he indulged his passion for all kinds of racing and began to follow the stock car circuit on television and, when time allowed, at the track with sons J. D. and Coy, now 27 and 23 respectively. "I always had a hunger to go into it," Gibbs says. "A dream of getting back into racing." It took him only 28 years. On the eve of the 1991 season, the one that ended with the Redskins whipping the Bills 37-24 in the Super Bowl, he announced the founding of the Joe Gibbs Racing team, with Dale Jarrett as his driver and Jimmy Makar as crew chief. A mere 18 months later, after a rookie year in which they did not win a race, there was Jarrett roaring to a two-length victory over Dale Earnhardt in the 1993 Daytona 500. The sight of his green-and-black Chevy flashing under the checkered flag was as unforgettable to Gibbs as the waning moments of his first Super Bowl victory in 1983. Of that day at Daytona, he remembers seeing J.D. and Coy rolling with joy like two puppies on the track's infield grass. "That's the first time I ever won anything with my wife standing next to me," Gibbs says. "She was crying all the way to the winner's circle. We were all crying and yelling and screaming." Joe Gibbs won three Super Bowls while coaching the Redskins. photograph by Richard Mackson The very next month, to the dismay of Redskins owner Jack Kent Cooke and the consternation of Washington fans, Gibbs quit the team and his $1.6 million annual salary and plunged full time into the world of stock car racing. He has since built the sprawling garage complex near Charlotte, where a staff of 50 assembles his cars. He has also turned the enterprise into a family affair. Both J.D. and Coy work for him when they aren't racing late-model stock cars of their own. Gibbs was a ferocious workaholic during his football days. But now he's no longer at the center of every storm; he's not the coach any more. He is a presence at races: headset on, pacing the pit, listening to the dialogue between Makar and driver Bobby Labonte, who replaced Jarrett in 1995, clocking lap times and pit stops with a stopwatch. But he does not butt in. "Jimmy Makar is the coach," Gibbs says. "And Bobby is the quarterback. My role is totally different now. I get the sponsors, keep them happy and pay the bills. That's a different kind of pressure, a different kind of fun. I feel like an owner in the NFL feels. I used to wonder what Mr. Cooke gets out of being an owner. I never understood that. Now I do. It is very competitive. Winning a racing championship is as hard as winning a Super Bowl. You've got 40 or so drivers. One is going to win each week. And one of those guys is going to win a championship at the end of the year. Same thing in football. Thirty teams. The best in their field. Both sports are very competitive, very intense. This is a hard sport. Soooo hard. But I love that part of it." Gone are the months on end when he slept three nights a week on a cot in his office at the Redskins' training complex in Northern Virginia. Gone too are the days when he was a kind of football recluse who would withdraw into his office at the training facility to plot strategy with his staff. And gone are the days when he lived a life so organized and regimented that he could tell you, months ahead of time, where he would be at certain hours each day of the week. "That's how structured my life was," Gibbs says. "When I got out of football and into racing, the reality hit me. I thought, Good gosh, I can actually go home at lunch if I want to or go for a run. Or if [Gibbs's wife] Pat and I decide we want to go to the lake for two days, we go to the lake. There's a flexibility I'd never known as a coach, and it was a shocker to me." Except for a brief flirtation with the Carolina Panthers, who wanted Gibbs to coach the fledgling NFL franchise, he has not looked back. During a recent tour of his garage, Gibbs was almost ebullient as he made his way in and out of the noisy machine shops. "I am immersed in this," he says. "I'm excited every day about going to work. I love building a business, too. I mean, that's scary and exciting. And I'm at peace with myself about what I'm doing and where I am now." The man is doing precisely what he has long wanted to do, and he is where he has long sought to be: "After I'd won three Super Bowls, I was kind of sitting there saying, 'What are we gonna do now? Do it again?' There comes a point where you say, 'I've done that.' Now I want to win a NASCAR championship someday. That's the challenge. "I'm really happy. I really am."