AT THE ALTAR - A man in Cocoa Beach, Fl. plowed a giant, 353-foot No. 3 in his pasture. He said he just wanted to do it. To honor Dale…
A thirty-five-year-old tow truck operator in Kenosha, Wisconsin. finished work, picked up his son and his father and started driving. Twenty hours later, they were in Mooresville in front of the offices of Dale Earnhardt Incorporated. Just wanted to be there. He said he had left money with friends back in Kenosha to rent a billboard to say goodbye to Dale…
A traveler from Los Angeles reported on the internet that he was near Daytona Beach, taking pictures of a Titan rocket launch from the Space Center a week after the accident. The contrails from the rocket, moved by the wind, formed a giant No. 3 in the sky. He posted a picture…
The proprietor of Tropical Tattoos in Daytona Beach, Fl. said he did a number of Dale Earnhardt tattoos on a number of bodies. He said he did two on the Monday after the accident…
Crowds gathered. People cried.
Everywhere you looked, if you looked hard enough, there seemed to be a tribute. Something….
THE CRASH
The intelligent head argued with the intelligent eyes. That was the thing. The eyes saw the severity of the crash. The eyes had seen other crashes in other places, the same speed, the same angle, the same unmerciful thud against a concrete wall. The eyes knew something terrible had happened. The intelligent head knew Dale Earnhardt was involved. He would be all right.
Eyes vs. head. What was a television color commentator supposed to say?
"How about Dale?" Darrell Waltrip asked into his Fox Sports microphone late on that Sunday afternoon of February 18, 2001. "I hope he's OK."
"Of course he's OK," the head screamed in response. "That's Dale. He walks away. Dale Earnhardt. He always walks away."
"I just hope Dale's OK," Waltrip said again into his microphone. "I guess he's all right, isn't he?"
The emotions that crowded inside the broadcast booth at the Daytona International Speedway were too much, too much, way too much to handle. Jesus, Good Lord, they were. Look out the window at one spot on the track and there was the surprise winner of the Daytona 500, Michael Waltrip, Darrell Waltrip's thirty-seven-year-old baby brother, off on a victory lap in his yellow NAPA No. 15 car, happier than happy after capturing the biggest stock car race in all Creation, first win in his life in his 463rd race…look at another spot on the track and there was Dale.
Was he all right?
The monitors in the control truck blinked out all the color-camera choices. Happy winner. Happy. Live. Crash on tape. The black No. 3 car is going all right, going all right, wait a minute, nudged, going left, going right - slow it down - that's the No. 36 car, the yellow car, Kenny Schrader, coming in from the side, the M&M's car, hits the No. 3 car and they go into the wall together and, wow, everything flies everywhere. Crash live. The car is back on the grass, rolled down the embankment from the wall. What are they doing? Why isn't Dale crawling out of there? The rescue workers have arrived. Maybe he broke a leg. Maybe the side was caved in. Boy, is he going to be pissed at somebody. Won't he? Where is Dale?
Way too much.
The voices from the truck came through Darrell Waltrip's ear piece and joined the voice in his head. Dale will be fine. Dale has been in about a billion of these crashes, much worse than this one. If he comes out of that car soon enough, we may even get a word with him. Won't that be a hoot? The eyes of Waltrip, a fifty-four-year-old man who had driven for thirty years, won 84 races and three Winston Cup championships, knew better. They had seen just about all of the good things and all of the bad that can happen on a race track. This was bad.
"This is bad," he told the voices in the truck.
The other color man in the booth, Larry McReynolds, was pretty much speechless. He didn't know what to say. This was his debut as a color commentator after a lifetime of work as a race car mechanic. For two years in his career, he had been Dale Earnhardt's crew chief. He trained his binoculars on the activity around the mangled No. 3 car down the track, the car he once had treated with the same love and care he gave his children, and found himself paralyzed by the inner debate.
"Schrader is looking in the car…backing off in a hurry…that's not good…oh, could be anything…maybe Dale's unconscious…
"The emergency crew is reaching inside, working on him…that could be something bad. No, that could be anything…
"The emergency crew is cutting off the roof…that's not good…then, again, it's standard procedure. If Dale broke something…
"They're putting him on a stretcher, taking him to the ambulance…OK, that's standard procedure…
"They're covering up the car…
"The ambulance is not going very fast…
Shit.
The idea that the greatest driver in NASCAR history could crash and die on the final turn of the final lap of the biggest race on the NASCAR schedule simply did not compute. Especially if that driver was Dale Earnhardt.
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They were all new, the members of this Fox crew, at what is billed as "The Great American Race." They had been put together, collected, in the past year for the debut of NASCAR on the network. Fox had paid an unprecedented $1.6 billion to televise just half of the NASCAR season every year for the next eight years. The Daytona 500, the annual stock car Super Bowl, was the most important part of the package.
Everyone was nervous. No, not nervous, really, but excited. More than two hundred people were involved in the telecast.
"The idea was that we were moving into a new era of motorsports coverage," Fox producer Neil Goldberg says. "We were doing some things in production that never had been done. Our team was close to the size of a team that would cover a Super Bowl."
A sequence of robotic cameras had been installed around the 2.5 mile track, so that for the first time an entire race could be covered from a low, street-corner angle. The biggest problem in televising race cars in the past was capturing the speed, the concept of how fast these cars really were traveling. This would help. Microphones, placed strategically, could be left open to capture the accompanying roar.
A moving scroll, The Fox Box, had been invented for the top inch of the screen to keep viewers abreast of the always-changing standings. A computer tracking device, Fox Trax, could superimpose arrows onto the screen pointing to any number of moving cars. All this was laid upon the existing angles and features of traditional coverage, the shots from the blimp, the interviews from pit road, the sight of nervous wives chewing their well-done nails while their husbands flew around the track at close to 200 miles per hour.
The coverage, the attention, was a testament to how much this one-time regional sport featuring good ol' boys banging their look-alike Fords and Chevrolets and Pontiacs and Hudson Hornets into one another had grown. NASCAR was national. NASCAR was modern. NASCAR was now. Giant concrete speedways had popped like so many carbunkles across the map of America, megastadiums that sat more than 100,000 people on a Sunday afternoon, hordes of true believers in racing and speed.
While the ratings numbers for the traditional four big professional sports - football, baseball, basketball and hockey - were in a sodden decline, NASCAR ratings were a skyrocket. NASCAR was NASDAQ, at least the NASDAQ of a couple years earlier. The merchandise flew off the shelves. The most famous corporate names in the country - Proctor and Gamble and Coke and Pepsi and Budweiser, the King of Beers - fought each other to place their ads on the cars. The drivers, drawn now from across the country, had become spokesmen and stars, the last large band of American white boys left on the athletic scene after football and basketball had gone black and baseball had gone Hispanic and hockey was filled with European names that would get you a lot of points in a good game of Scrabble.
NASCAR! They look like you! They talk like you! This unspoken thought could not be denied. An increasing portion of the white, mainstream public was settling down behind the steering wheels of these colorful, highly tuned racing machines and driving away on a vicarious 500-mile Sunday afternoon. The newly-inaugurated President, George W. Bush, was known to be a NASCAR man. Yes, he was.
"I'll tell you how much this has grown," Goldberg, the producer, says. "I started working in auto racing, television, in 1982 for ESPN. In the mid-eighties, we'd go to Bristol, this little half-mile track in the mountains of Tennesse and there'd be maybe 20,000 people in the stands. We go there now, there are seats for 160,000 people and they're all filled. It's just been amazing to see."
Goldberg, forty-two years old, originally from Sudbury, Massachusetts, had fallen in love with the sport. The races were terrific, he thought, but the people were even better. Even as the scene had grown larger, the businessmen in suits running more and more aspects of the operation, the people at the base level were different from the people in all other sports. There was a purity to them. They were a collection of success stories, all of them, no-nonsesne dreamers who sacrificed and fought to wind up in the spotlight. There was a humility mixed with ambition that could not be denied.
"These are people…you don't go to school to play auto racing," Goldberg says. "Every other sport, you can play it at your school. You want to play football? You play it at the school. Basketball? Same thing. If you want to be in auto racing, you have to go somewhere after school. Or you have to leave school. You hang around garages, racetracks, making yourself useful, looking for your break. You go down to one of the NASCAR teams and try to get a job. No other sport demands so much determination."
The only moments when Goldberg had questioned his love for the game had been when the game had turned sour, when a car had flown out of control, when a driver had slumped against the wheel, when the ambulance had arrived and the news was not good. They were infrequent, these moments, but they happened often enough. Goldberg would wonder about his job. Was he encouraging some deadly pastime? Was he spreading good words about an inherently bad enterprise? What was he doing? The people of racing always brought him back.
"The people are wonderful," he says. "They are so infectious with their enthusiasm. It's hard to walk away. Even now, as different as this sport has become with all this money, these people are you and me. You sit down with them for an hour and you have the feeling you've made a friend. Can you do that if you sit in the locker room of the Los Angeles Lakers? You can do that here. The people are so great."
The idea, lying underneath all the technological bells and whistles, was to show how great these people really were. And the greatest of them all was Dale Earnhardt.
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"He was in a unique position," Goldberg says. "He was the bridge, the connector between the old days of auto racing and the new NASCAR. He was the old-school race driver who ushered in the modern era, the hard-nosed driver moved into the present."
Forty-nine years old, winner of seven Winston Cup championships to tie King Richard Petty for the all-time record, he was the success story to top all of the other success stories, a multimillionaire who had come from nowhere and nothing to rule his sport. He had a smile that could light up an orphanage. He had a stare that could melt a spark plug. He was a man's man, a hunter and fisherman, a family man who asked for no favors and gave no ground.
In twenty-one years on the Winston Cup circuit, he had dented more fenders, caused more controversy than any dozen drivers you could find. The only group that sometimes seemed as large as his fans was his enemies. The four tractor-trailers selling his souvenirs at the race track every week usually sold more merchandise than the trailers of all the other drivers combined.
The joke was that schoolchildren in his home state of North Carolina learned to count by saying "1-2-Dale Earnhardt -4-5-6-7-8-9-10." That was how famous he was. His black No. 3 car was his armor and tool on the racetrack, an extension of his hard-bitten personality. He took no prisoners, never had, never would. He was a constant Clint Eastwood, taking care of the bad guys and picking up that fistful of dollars at the end. He was old and still good and still hip, a phenomenon right there in American culture.
He was the star. He was the star of NASCAR stars, his success and life almost a mirror of the great growth of the sport. He was - that most overused and misused of all phrases, but absolutely true here - an American icon.
"You're driving home and the traffic's stopped up and you're just sitting there," H.A. Humpy Wheeler, president of Lowe's Motor Speedway in Charlotte, says. "You do that five days a week and you're sick of it. You live your life by rules. You wear a tie. You work for a guy you don't like
"For once, you'd like to break the rules. You'd like to get in a race car and just go wherever you wanted, get past all of those other people, doing what you want to do. Well, maybe you can't do that, but you can go to the racetrack on the weekend and watch somebody else do it. You can watch Dale Earnhardt. He breaks the rules."
Subtlety never had been part of his modus operandi. He conceded nothing. Are you looking at me? That's right. You. He had old-time values, working under an old-time code. Nothing scared him. Nothing stopped him. There was an engaging kick-ass toughness about him that had been there from the beginning and simply would not leave.
Fox had plans for Dale Earnhardt.
"Oh, we had things all set up, Dale and me," Darrell Waltrip says. "I had this sound effect - the sound they played when the shark appeared in Jaws -- that I was going to use every time he came up from behind on someone. We had a bunch of stuff. We'd already talked about it."
The presence of Waltrip in the booth opened up all kinds of roads with Earnhardt. Retired only at the end of the 2000 season, the well-spoken Waltrip served as nemesis and rival during Earnhardt's early years, fighting him to the wire for championships. Called to replace the injured Steve Park in 1998 in the Pennzoil car fielded by Dale Earnhardt Incorporated (DEI), Earnhardt's race team, Waltrip became ally and friend. A lot of experiences, a lot of time, had been shared. Waltrip called Earnhardt "my frenemy -- 90 percent friend and 10 percent enemy.'
"I think the time I spent driving for him in 1998 really changed things between us," Waltrip says. "Any hard feelings disappeared. I was helping him out and he was helping me out. We were able to let our guard down and just talk. It wasn't all about 'you wrecked me' or 'I wrecked you.' We could talk about anything."
The plans already were working. The Fox crew televised just about every race or qualifying session during Speed Week at Daytona, shaking the bugs out, learning how everybody worked together, getting ready for the big race on Sunday. Earnhardt was a main attraction.
"He knew how it all worked," Goldberg says. "You'd do a live shot and he'd come in from the side, unexpected, and grab the announcer. He'd grab a sharpie and walk up to the camera and sign his autograph right on the camera lens. He worked great with Darrell. You could see the rapport. He came up to Matt Yokum, our reporter, after qualifying and grabbed Matt's headset and said, 'Let me talk to Waltrip." And they talked. Just these two guys who knew so much about racing. I think about it now, they talked every day during our telecasts. Darrell even argued with him about wearing the open-faced helmet, about his choice of safety equipment."
The plot possibilities with Earnhardt for the big day were endless. Waltrip's brother, Michael, now was the third driver for the DEI team, his first chance at handling a truly competitive car. Park, the driver Darrell once replaced, was back in the Pennzoil car as the No. 2 driver for DEI. The top driver was Earnhardt's son, Dale Junior, twenty-six years old and already successful, already a threat.
Earnhardt, himself, revitalized after disc surgery a year and a half earlier, second in the Winston Cup standings in 2000, was in the familiar No. 3 Monte Carlo of Richard Childress Racing. This was a driverowner partnership that had lasted through seventeen successful seasons. Why change it now? Earnhardt felt as confident as he ever had. Earnhardt felt as confident as he ever had. The storied Daytona track, the scene of his greatest win in 1998 after going a bizarre 0-for-19 in the 500 for the bulk of his career, surely was a character. Larry McReynolds was the crew chief for that race. He would have stories about Earnhardt. Waltrip, the competitor, friend, frenemy would have stories.
Throw in the return of Dodge to Daytona, two Dodges sitting in the front row at the start. Throw in baby-faced Jeff Gordon, the clinician, the successful driving opposite of Earnhardt. Throw in pit stops and blown engines, restrictor plates and air foils to keep everyone close, defending champion Bobby Labonte and the rest of the field, 175,000 fans and the sight of Florida sun for the good folks back North in the scraggly days of Winter.
How good could all this be?
"We were eleven seconds from having the greatest telecast in the history of the Daytona 500," Neil Goldberg says. "That's how close we came."
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The black car and the three cars that the driver of the black car owned were in the middle of the action for the entire day. Earnhardt was the leader on the 27th of the 200 laps, holding the lead for 11 before being passed by Childress teammate Mike Skinner. Earnhardt was the leader on laps 83 and 84, then dropped back again. This was the restrictor-plate mayhem, speeds legislated into uniformity, that Earnhardt always said he hated but always handled very well, racing in packs, two wide, three wide, different grooves on the banked track. Earnhardt was always involved.
Early in the race, fender to fender, he bumped with rookie Kurt Busch. He appeared to turn and - wait a minute, the Fox cameras caught it - he stuck his left hand out the driver's side window and raised the middle finger to Kurt Busch. In the middle of the race! The finger! Flying!
"I remember thinking that he was going to be talking to Kurt Busch after this race," Goldberg says. "He wasn't going to be angry. I didn't think so. He was going to be like a father, giving advice to a son."
On the 174th lap, the perils of restrictor-plate racing arrived. Robby Gordon hit Ward Burton and Ward Burton hit Tony Stewart and Tony Stewart went flying. This was a spectacular crash that eventually involved nineteen cars, almost half the starting field. Stewart's car spun and flipped twice, badda-boom, badda-boom, crashing into teammate Bobby Labonte on the way. The pictures of the orange Home Depot car going through the air were perfect television. Looked bad, wasn't bad. This was almost a Hollywood-stunt-driver kind of crash.
"If you didn't know anything about auto racing, you would have thought that was the bad crash," Goldberg says. "If you knew auto racing, though, you knew that the speed was dissipating as Stewart was going over and over. Flipping was good. That energy was being used up. The bad crashes are the ones where the car at great speed hits an object that doesn't move. That's when there's no chance for the energy to go anywhere."
Earnhardt, riding low and ahead of Stewart, missed the entire jackpot. When the race was restarted on lap 180, he was second behind Dale Jr., first on lap 183, then fell behind Michael Waltrip on lap 184. With five laps to go, he was third behind Waltrip and Dale Jr. What could be better?
"I wonder sometimes what the NASCAR of the future will be like," Humpy Wheeler says. "It'll clearly be different. One of the things I wonder about…did you ever see the Tour de France, the bicycle race? They run that in teams, the rest of the team helping one driver to victory. Maybe that's where we're going. There never have been the number of teams there are today. Maybe that's what we'll see in NASCAR."
Maybe this was the start. In a Twin 125 qualifying race during the week, Earnhardt was leading when a bunch of cars stormed past him on the final turn, using the draft from his car to speed up and slip free. That seemed to be the way the cars worked for this new season. Wouldn't drivers try to do the same thing in this race?
There seemed to be little doubt that Earnhardt thought that would be happening again as he approached the final turn. He advised both Waltrip and Dale Jr. to ride on the low part of the racetrack. He put himself into a blocking mode, slowing just enough to stop the hard chargers in the pack behind him from making a final run at the front. The move was nothing less than a basketball pick, freeing his teammates - employees, really, one of them his son - to roll to the basket.
The problem with a basketball pick is that sometimes the defender, trying to catch his man, bumps into the man throwing the pick. The bump here was at 185 miles per hour. It came from Sterling Marlin from behind and sent Earnhardt's car to the left, toward the apron for a moment. Then the car turned hard right and went on a straight line until it crashed into the wall at the same time it was hit by Schrader's car on the door of the passenger's side.
What exactly happened? What? There would be controversy and questions in the future:
Did Earnhardt overcorrect the steering in the second after the impact?
Did he have no control, none?
Had he put himself in peril by slowing down the way he did instead of following the hard-charging, no-surrender course he had used during his entire career?
Would he have been better served with the full helmet that all of the other drivers use instead of the half-helmet he insisted on wearing?
Should he have been using HANS, a head and neck support system that recently had been developed?
Did his seat belt break?
There would be press conferences and the potential for lawsuits. Claims and counterclaims. The rescue workers who arrived at the car would become momentarily famous, telling their stories on television. Sterling Marlin would receive death threats and shut off his Web site. Doctors would be questioned. Experts would be hired. An entire country would be shaken.
None of that was known in the broadcast booth. There was only the sight of what had happened.
"TV does not do that [crash] justice," Waltrip said into his microphone, after watching the replay at the same time as viewers. "That is incredible impact. Those are the kind of accidents that are absolutely frightening."
The head still battled the eyes. Maybe…You never know…Maybe. Goldberg, in the truck, couldn't get the thought out of his mind that somewhere Earnhardt was going to pop out of a door, pop out of the ambulance, pop out as a smiling jack-in-the-box. Waltrip thought that maybe he should say more, that this was what he was being paid to do, give his analysis, but what if you said the fateful words and they were wrong? Half the television stations in the country had killed off driver Ernie Irvan after a crash at Michigan and Ernie Irvan was walking and talking and probably eating dinner right now. Caution had to be the guide.
The telecast was scheduled to end at five o'clock and David Hill, head of Fox Sports, was in the studio and said the schedule would be followed. What more could be said if nobody knew the answer for certain to the awful question? An answer might take a long time to arrive. The broadcast ended with Dale Earnhardt still alive at five and - later reports said - Dale Earnhardt was pronounced dead at 5:16 at Halifax Medical Center. The rescue workers and doctor at the track later said that they were sure he was dead while he was still in the car.
He had suffered a basal skull fracture, eight broken ribs on his left side, a broken left ankle, a fractured breastbone and collarbone and hip abrasions. The basal skull fracture, the newest fear of race car drivers, had killed him. The whole thing, even listing the injuries, one after another, seemed almost beyond belief.
There are moments - more and more of them, really, in modern life -- where the real becomes so outrageous that it outstrips the fictional. If I saw that in the movies or on television, I wouldn't believe it! Some nitwit named McVeigh fills a Ryder truck with fertilizer and blows up a government building in Oklahama City, killing 168 people. A six-year-old kid named Elian with puppy-dog brown eyes is pulled out of the waters off Florida, his mother drowned in an escape attempt from Cuba, and it becomes an international incident. A football player named O.J., maybe the most recognizable football player of all, is accused of killing his wife and leads an entire city's police force on a motorized chase through the freeways of Los Angeles. These are plots a hundred screenwriters in a hundred lonely rooms couldn't imagine, too weird for the conventional mind to accept, too flat-out unbelievable.
The death of Dale Earnhardt was one of these moments. Dozens of analogies would be made. What if Michael Jordan dropped dead, going to the foul line with a second left in the seventh and final game of the NBA finals? What if Tiger Woods were hit by lightening, standing over the final birdie putt on the 18th green, 72nd hole of the Masters at Augusta? What if? What if the President of the United States said "I do" to finish out his Inauguration and keeled forward? What if any of these unbelievable things happened? Would they have been more shocking than this one?
This was the ultimate public death of an ultimate public figure. The Nielsen rating was 10.1, the highest number in the history of Daytona 500 coverage.
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Waltrip was supposed to go to Victory Lane to see his brother. He had a friend, a Daytona policeman, who was going to escort him through the crowd. The policeman's wife worked at Halifax Medical Center. She called her husband and told him that Waltrip should come to the hospital. Waltrip went, talked with Earnhardt's wife, Teresa, and members of the family, then returned to the condo he had rented to be with his own wife, Stevie. She had been close with Earnhardt, had taped a Bible verse on the steering column of his car before the race, a tradition. Waltrip and his wife talked for a while and then went back to the track. His brother, Michael, was still there, not really knowing what to do. Darrell says that four months later, his brother still does not know what to do. It is a shame.
Larry McReynolds left after the race to catch a plane. The airport is across the street from the speedway, so he walked, still keeping up the internal debate between his head and his eyes. By the time his cell phone rang, while he ate dinner in the airport cafeteria, Neil Goldberg on the line, he was ready for the grim news. The eyes had won.
Goldberg stayed at work in the truck. The decision was made that the death of Dale Earnhardt would not be announced on the air until it was officially announced to the media. This happened at 7 P.M. when NASCAR president Mike Helton stood in the front of the press room and said, "This is understandably the hardest announcement I've ever had to make. We've lost Dale Earnhardt." Goldberg stayed at the controls as Fox Sportsnet ran a special report. A number of people were crying.
"Covering the Winston Cup, you really get to know the people," Goldberg says. "You're with them every week. It isn't like other sports where you can go in and cover two teams and maybe never see them again for an entire season. You're with the forty-three teams of NASCAR for the whole year. Friendships are made. You get close to people you like."
At nine o' clock, a studio show called Victory Lane premiered on Fox Sportsnet from a set in Charlotte, N.C. The host was sportscaster John Roberts and his color commentator was Derrick Cope, a driver. The same pressures, Fox executives hovering in the background, new contract, new approach, had been present all day. The same sadness crept into the room when the news was official about what had happened in Daytona.
Derrick Cope had won the Daytona 500 in 1990, beating Earnhardt on the last lap when Earnhardt's tire fell apart. They were linked forever by that moment. His wife was a friend of Earnhardt's wife.
"It was a struggle to get a show together, but everyone was very professional," John Roberts says. "We put together a tribute. We went to the files, not knowing what we were going to find, but there was some wonderful videotape."
Yes there was.
For sure.
Wonderful videotape.
Copyright 2001 by Leigh Montville