Yarborough about much more than a moment in '79

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- He had a wife, a baby daughter, and a job that paid him $1.25 an hour. Cale Yarborough was a floor sweeper at Holman-Moody back then, just another hopeful a long way from greatness. Money was always tight. Once at the grocery store, he and Betty Jo filled the shopping cart with provisions they hoped they could afford -- until the future three-time NASCAR champion spotted a display offering cans of black-eyed peas for 10 cents apiece.

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"I grabbed Betty Jo by the hand and I said, 'You come with me.' We went back around to all the counters and put everything back that we had in the cart, and went back and bought every can of those black-eyed peas that they had," Yarborough remembered. "I'm going to tell you, we had black-eyed peas for breakfast, we had black-eyed peas for lunch, and we had black-eyed peas for supper. There were some lean, hard times in there."

By then, he was used to them. The most unlikely of racing legends, Yarborough grew up the son of a tobacco farmer, and had to milk a cow each morning before leaving for school. His sport wasn't racing, but football, which he excelled at in his rural South Carolina community. But his father loved to watch the cars go fast, and young Cale was brought to the dirt tracks at a young age, hanging on the fence to see the action. At 15 he built a car and brought it to a quarter-mile dirt track in nearby Sumter. One of the most successful and colorful careers in racing history had begun.

These days, despite all he's accomplished, Yarborough is immediately associated with one event -- the fight that followed the 1979 Daytona 500, an event where he and Donnie Allison had crashed battling for the lead in the waning laps, a race that brought NASCAR into living rooms to stay. In all honesty, he deserves better than being forever linked to one event he did not win, no matter how riveting the fisticuffs that followed. Three consecutive Cup championships, four Daytona 500 victories, even a top-10 in the Indianapolis 500 -- Yarborough's spectacular driving career speaks for itself. But he's a quiet man, and he lives a quiet life selling cars in South Carolina, and it is much, much too easy for his achievements to be overshadowed by time.

Admittedly, there's a bit of a bias here. South Carolina in the late 1970s and '80s was a racing wasteland -- David Pearson's career was ending, Spartanburg had been supplanted by Charlotte as the capital of the sport, Darlington Raceway was languishing in disrepair. One of the states that had helped build the sport had somehow lost hold of it. And then came Yarborough, a hard-charger who always seemed to be coasted in dirt and grease, winning races with all the subtlety of a hammer hitting a nail. He won championships, he won Daytona 500s, and he gave those of us watching back in the Palmetto State someone to cheer for and a reason to care.

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And these days, he seems to get lost. Perhaps it's because he's not the most loquacious of drivers, or because he missed out on the era when past champions move into the television booth, or because the team he owned was sold off in 1999. The best thing about Jimmie Johnson's quest for three consecutive Cup titles may be that some attention gets reflected over to Yarborough, as of now the only NASCAR driver ever to achieve such a feat. Still today he has a reputation for being feisty and ornery, probably because of his involvement in the 1979 Daytona fight. And while he is more private than many other great drivers of his era, he's often self-effacing and charming, even if he doesn't say a whole lot.

That was the case this week, when Daytona International Speedway assembled all the living Daytona 500 winners, and Yarborough reflected on the hardships he dealt with before his career took flight. If it wasn't living off black-eyed peas, it was trying to make a go of it in the poultry business, or struggling with the decision to give up semi-pro football and dedicate himself to racing full time. "I just decided one day I had to either go one way or the other, lay all that other stuff down and go racing, and that's what I decided to do," he said. "But it was tough. There were a lot of lean years, I'll tell you."

He'd race Thursday nights on the track in Columbia, S.C., and Friday and Saturday nights somewhere else. He didn't go on dates on the weekend, he went racing. He went to the track even when he didn't have a ride, just in case one became available. He'd drive anything, anywhere, anytime. Betty Jo, his strikingly pretty wife of 47 years, stood by him through all of it. "Had to climb the ladder the hard way," said the man whose 83 Cup victories rank fifth all-time.

But eventually, inevitably, somebody brings up 1979 and the fight. He starts to answer the question, and then stops. "That's history," he said. "Why are you asking me? You've seen it a thousand times."

As has everyone. Those grainy images of men scuffling in the infield 29 years ago have become NASCAR's version of the Zapruder film. The career of Cale Yarborough, easily one of the 10 best drivers to ever settle behind the wheel of a NASCAR race vehicle, is so much grander than that one violent instant. Maybe one day people will see that, and Yarborough will be better remembered for all the races he won instead of one he lost.

The opinions expressed are solely of the writer.