He's been to more Victory Lanes than Richard Petty, David Pearson, Dale Earnhardt and Jeff Gordon combined.

Officially, Bill "The Hat Man" Brodrick was in charge of public relations for Unocal's racing division. He's remembered, however, as the burly guy with a lion's mane of coiffed hair and beard to match who was in charge of Victory Lane.

His celebrations were orchestrated with the finely tuned precision of a symphony conductor. Brodrick was almost always the first person to a winner's car once it got to racing's version of the Promised Land, and as a result, he was almost always on television for at least a few seconds.

If you watched races during the '70s, '80s and early '90s, you might not have known Brodrick's name, but you most definitely knew his face. Countless letters to various motorsports publications and television shows began with the same question: 'Who's that guy in Victory Lane?' Almost before the query was finished, the answer was obvious. That guy in Victory Lane was Bill Brodrick.

Brodrick's first race with Unocal was the 1969 Daytona 500. The winner's circle was a mess, to put it mildly.

"Victory Lane was, in those days, total chaos," Brodrick said. "The photographers couldn't get anything. The TV guys were always fighting [with] the photographers and couldn't do interviews. There was no order. There was really no order at all. We all hurt from it ... all the sponsors, the press."

Soon, Brodrick gave the proceedings a sense of order.

"It just developed over a period of a short time," Brodrick said. "I was bigger than anybody else. I had more voice than anybody else, and had more people working for me than anybody else. I came from the media, so I knew a lot of people. I said, 'Wait a minute. Let's put a little order in it. Let's see what we can do to make everybody happy.'

"It was just one of those things that developed. It wasn't planned. It just happened. Everybody liked the results. It didn't change overnight, it took a little bit of time. It just slowly developed. Nobody else wanted to do it, and my contemporaries in the business were all getting what they wanted. NASCAR didn't want anything to do with Victory Lane at that time. They left it up to the racetrack promoter. When the race was over, NASCAR wanted out."

It's hard, obviously, for Brodrick to pick out one defining moment from his career in Victory Lane. Brodrick was there when Richard Petty won his 200th race. He was there when Ernie Irvan won at New Hampshire, nearly two years after he'd nearly lost his life in a racing accident. He was there when countless drivers won their first race. (Continued)