Junior considers Gordon gesture a tribute to father (cont'd)

Before making his way around the track for a victory lap, Gordon was handed a black flag bearing the No. 3 made famous by Earnhardt prior to his death following a tragic accident in the 2001 Daytona 500. Gordon then waved the flag out his driver's side window as he made the lap, which apparently -- somehow -- infuriated some Earnhardt fans who took offense.

"I don't understand people saying it was disrespectful. What's the angle there?" Earnhardt said. "Basically when you win a race, it's all about you at that moment. You won; you're happy; you're excited; you're the best of the best.

Give Gordon his due

If you judged Jeff Gordon's career by fan reaction, it seems like the guy can't do anything right. Anything, that is, except win. Gordon won at Phoenix, paraded around the track with a flag to salute Dale Earnhardt ... and people booed, or reacted in other childish ways. Not a lot of them, writes TNT's Bill Weber, just the ignorant ones.

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"And he decided to split that down the middle and give my dad some respect. ... I knew if they had any amount of class, which I knew they did, they would do something or say something. ...Jeff has been in the sport a long time and knows that acknowledgment and respect are a big deal."

Earnhardt was one of the first to greet Gordon and congratulate him in Victory Lane, an obvious stamp of approval for the flag-waving gesture.

"When I first saw Jeff doing that on the big screen, I just wanted to make sure that he knew that it was OK with me on this side of the fence," Earnhardt said. "It was really cool, and I appreciated it. My dad was a big deal in this sport ... and for him to continue to get recognized on down the road is a real big deal to me and pretty important to me."

At the same time, Earnhardt said he felt bad that some fans appeared to misinterpret what Gordon was trying to do.

"Jeff can't win for losing. Well, he did win a race. But with the fans, he has a hard time getting his point across -- which is unfortunate, because he was trying to make a good gesture. That was all that was," Earnhardt said. "I don't see how anybody in the world could find anything wrong with what he did. That's a shame if anyone did. I want to give him all the credit he deserves for it."

Humpy Wheeler, track president of Lowe's Motor Speedway, said that what many fans for years interpreted as a Earnhardt-Gordon "rivalry" never really existed in the true sense of that word.

"Well, I thought it would end up being one of the greatest rivalries we ever had -- and for gosh sakes, the guys ended up going into business together," Wheeler said. "As a promoter, I didn't like that. I wanted to see a rivalry -- because you had the new kid on the block [in Gordon] and the veteran, tough guy. They were opposites and I just thought a great rivalry would develop. And it didn't.

"We probably lost some of the drama of that because they seemed to get along too well."

Earnhardt added: "They had a lot of respect for each other. I think Daddy probably had more respect for Jeff as a driver and a person than I had seen him show for a lot of people he had driven against for years."

The younger Earnhardt did grin and concede that his father especially would have enjoyed one aspect of Gordon's flag-waving tribute in Phoenix. The Gordon race team snapped a 25-race winless streak with the victory, and obviously had been planning long in advance to honor Earnhardt, so ...

"So if you think about it, that flag rode around in that [Gordon team] truck for several months," Earnhardt said. "My dad would have really gotten a kick out of that."