Boatloads of nosy and sometimes taunting fans are on the verge
of forcing Jeff Gordon and Rusty Wallace out of their dream
houses on Lake Norman, north of Charlotte. "I'm thinking about
selling," Wallace says of the waterfront mansion he built 18
months ago, about a half mile down the shore from Gordon's
four-bedroom place. "It's terrible when you've got to sit in
your house with the blinds drawn. People with binoculars will
sit in boats at my seawall, and they'll stare and stare.
Boatloads of them will yell, 'Hey, Rusty! H-e-e-y
Rusty!'—rooting for you," he says. "Then another boatload will
yell, 'Hey, Rusty! F--- you!' Then they go down to Gordon's
house. They're driving Jeff ape. That's the reason he's moving
to Boca Raton [Fla.].
"I love fans, and I never hide from them at racetracks," adds
Wallace, who is fifth in points on the Winston Cup circuit.
"I'll go right into the middle of a crowd and b.s. with them.
But when I'm at my house, I want some time with my family.
[Wallace and his wife, Patti, have three children: Greg, 18,
Katie, 13, and Stephen, 10.] I don't like people on the lake
bugging me and shouting profanity. On Memorial Day, I counted 70
boats in front of my house. One guy jumped onto my seawall, ran
up to the front of my house, put his hands and face up to my
windows and walked all around my house, looking in."
When fans run up to Gordon's window, they're usually armed with
video cameras. "Once I heard a noise," says Jeff's wife, Brooke,
"and looked and saw someone videotaping our cat through the
window." The Gordons are seeking refuge in Highland Beach, Fla.,
just north of Boca Raton, because the populace is used to having
celebrities around.
Over the years NASCAR drivers have gravitated to the Charlotte
area—home to most Winston Cup teams—as a matter of
convenience. "But a lot more drivers have airplanes now," says
Gordon. He and Wallace own Learjets, which make commuting from
Florida to North Carolina for meetings with crew chiefs and
engineers easy.
Both Gordon and Wallace concede that they were warned about
living on the open water by another longtime Lake Norman
resident, fellow driver Dale Earnhardt. Indeed, Earnhardt—who
has since moved to a secluded estate with a hidden cove—joked
that he might as well make money off Gordon's and Wallace's
folly by buying a boat and ferrying fans on tours of their houses.
Tell us what you think. Sound off on the CNN/SI Message Boards.
Issue date: July 13, 1998
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