A parent's love lasts forever

By Jim Huber, Turner Sports Interactive
July 17, 2001
11:49 AM EDT (1549 GMT)

COMMENTARY

They told me there would be tears, and often. They told me the mother wasn’t up to talking at all but that the father would sit down with me. They warned me it wouldn’t be easy.

Jim Huber

But I had no idea how deep and how gripping the grief remains in Kenny Irwin’s family.

His mother, Reva, is a raven-haired beauty, but you could see the troubled emotions bubbling just beneath the surface. She smiled and shook her head graciously and then took her leave before the torrents began again.

His father, Kenny Sr., is wracked with pain, his eyes hollow, his cheekbones gaunt, a box of tissues always at his elbow.

"I don’t enjoy doing these," he admitted to me as the lights went up and the microphones were adjusted, "but I have to. I have to do them because I’m just afraid everyone is gonna forget Kenny. And I can’t let that happen."

It has been a year now since the accident on Friday morning at Loudon, N.H., site of this weekend’s New England 300. A year in which three too many young men died a-racin’.

Adam Petty at Loudon, too, and Tony Roper in a Texas truck with Kenny Irwin Jr. squeezed amidst them.

And in the wake of the great Earnhardt tragedy, perhaps Kenny Irwin Sr. was right, perhaps there is that danger of forgetting the others.

With that firmly in mind, always feeling like I’d rather be anywhere other than across from this hurting man, as intrusive as a burgler, I sat down to talk memories with him.

There in the upstairs study of the house Kenny Jr. had purchased just two months before his death. There on a peaceful cove of Lake Norman, just north of Charlotte. There on furniture purchased after his death, for there hadn’t been a stick in place when his end came. In fact, the house wasn’t completely finished yet.

His father talked of the 5-year-old who took to speed and never, ever, let go of it. At 16, he told his parents that, while his two older sisters had gone to college, they could likely forget any further education for him … that racing would be his university. And they backed him with every fibre of their being.

There were moments as we talked when, as if something had suddenly taken the wind right out of him, the father gasped and hung his head.

"Forgive me," he said quietly through the sobs.

"There is no forgiveness necessary," I said inadequately and allowed him his space. I had asked him the greatest thrill and it had taken him to another place.

He struggled to get himself back.

"That day," he said, slowly, dragging the words from his soul, "that day when they put the No. 28 jacket on my son. That was a thrill I’ll never, ever, experience again."

We talked of the pressures, of the problems of racing, of what they, as parents, had given their son.

"I’m a businessman," the father told me, "and I gave him the guidance of that side. I taught him about sponsors and business and how to handle that. His mother is the gentle woman and she gave him the love and the kindness, nailed his feet firmly to the earth and made sure he was balanced. We each gave him what we had to offer."

Together, though they rarely talk about their son to each other, still, for fear of implosion, they are starting a Kenny Irwin Jr. Foundation to benefit down-and-out children.

They want to purchase some land and build a camp and bring kids there a couple times a year, for that’s what their son would have wanted.

They discovered, in the days following his death, a quiet, hidden, generosity toward people they never knew.

One family wrote and said Kenny had been sending checks to them to help take care of a very sick daughter. Others echoed that. It all was done in the shadows of his life, where no one would see. Not that it mattered if they did, but he just as soon would rather have been private.

His father stood on the small deck leading out into the warm water and looked at me. Looked past me, really. A smile struggled and then faded just as quickly.

"He was a good boy. Please don’t let them forget him."

They told me there would be tears. I just never expected them to be mine, as well.

NOTE: Jim Huber’s chat with Kenny Irwin Sr. will be shown on the TNT pre-race show Sunday from Loudon at 1 p.m. ET. Jim Huber's column appears regularly on NASCAR.com. The opinions listed here are solely those of the writer.