Drivers often walk fine line with emotion, expectation

NEW YORK -- He stood on stage at the theatre in the Hard Rock Café in Times Square, accepting the latest in a week's worth of applause and congratulations for winning the Nextel Cup championship. With his spotless white firesuit and his made-for-television smile, Jimmie Johnson looked every inch a sponsor's and car owner's dream.

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Hard to believe it was the same guy who broke his wrist last offseason trying to surf on top of a golf cart, or spent his youth trying not to fall off of motorbikes and four-wheelers, or for fun used to sway from a rope swing suspended 20 feet over a dry riverbed in his native Southern California. By all accounts, the Jimmie Johnson known to his friends and family is a risk-taker to the core. But the professed daredevil -- "I've always enjoyed scaring myself," he says -- is in hibernation this time of year, replaced by the same cool, calculating driver who's won the last two Nextel Cup titles.

It's almost as if there are two Johnsons, the one who mercilessly mows down his opponents on Sunday afternoons, and the one who used to amuse himself with activities like jumping off of cliffs (not very high ones, we presume). Merging those two personas is the challenge of every public person who through accomplishment is thrust into the public eye. It's not always simple in NASCAR, where drivers must live and race to standards set by team owners, sponsors, fans and the sanctioning body. And then they're told: Just be yourself. As if it were that easy.

"I've always known who I am, what I like to do and how I like to enjoy myself. But being on the main stage like this, it's different, and you aren't trained to do this as a kid," Johnson said Wednesday during Champions Week activities. "I was trained to go fast, mind my business, act sportsmanlike. That was what was ingrained in me through my parents: Be respectful, be nice, appreciate your sponsors. That's all I've known. I've had to learn this as an adult, in front of everyone, how to have more of a personality and how to do these things. It's challenging. But it's what we've chosen to all do, and you've got to ride the good and the bad. You're going to experience both."

It's a delicate balance. Sponsors and team owners like drivers who smile and say the right things. But NASCAR is a sport that has historically been driven by competition on the track and personalities off it, populated by characters like Curtis Turner, Buddy Baker or Dale Earnhardt who seemed to leap out of the television set or off the printed page. Those types are in short supply these days, when sponsors hold sway with multi-million-dollar investments, and drivers like Johnson climbed the ladder by learning to act and speak a certain way.

Jeff Gordon went through the same thing. When he arrived in NASCAR, he was mustachioed kid out of Indiana who tried to act the way people wanted him to act. Today he's a four-time champion unafraid of letting opinions, even potentially unpopular ones, fly. Which is exactly what he did Wednesday, when the series runner-up expressed concern that drivers' personalities are being buried under an avalanche of expectation.

"One of the issues we have in our sport right now is, there's so much more personality in all these guys that you don't get to see," he said. "The reason is because we're representing the sport, our fans, sponsors, and you have to be cautions about letting yourself get too far out there. I think sometimes we get caught up in trying to be -- and I'm a perfect example of this -- trying to be what we think the fans want us to be or the sponsors want us to be. You still have to be yourself. But you also have to have limits on that, because we are under a microscope. There's a lot of criticism that comes along if you step out of line. And you just don't want to deal with the controversy. You'd rather stay under the radar, do your job, and make actions speak louder than anything else." (Continued)