Jarrett took driving success into the broadcast booth

Ned Jarrett won 50 races and several NASCAR championships as a driver but most of today's fans know him more for his sterling work as a television commentator. The Newton, N.C., native grew up on a farm and worked at a sawmill before beginning his racing career as a teenager at Hickory Speedway. A two-time Sportsman champ, Jarrett then moved to NASCAR's premier series and won the first of his two Cup championships in 1961, then repeated the feat four years later. He retired from driving duties a few weeks after turning 34, but turned to broadcasting in an effort to stay active in the sport. One of his most famous calls came in the 1993 Daytona 500, when son Dale held off heavily-favored Dale Earnhardt at the checkered flag.

Q: How did you get started in racing?

Hall of Fame bio

Jarrett had it all -- hard-charging capabilities combined with the consistency essential to stock-car success. The combination produced two Cup Series championships. His 50 career victories are tied for 10th all-time with Junior Johnson. He also won 28 races during the 1964 and '65 seasons.

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Jarrett: When they started building Hickory Speedway, back in the early '50s, it was a big thing in the community. My dad had taken me to a few dirt-track races. There was a country store near where I grew up on a farm and worked at a sawmill, so on a rainy day during construction of that speedway, the workers would be sitting around the store talking and I told them all I'd go up there and show them how to drive. I decided I was going to do that, so I managed to work it out for the first race ever run at Hickory Speedway. I was in it. It started out as something that was just a little weekend fun, not thinking that it would ever turn into a career.

Q: What was your first car?

Jarrett: It was a 1939 Ford coupe. That was a popular car in those days in the Modified and Sportsman divisions of NASCAR. I was running in the Sportsman division. The difference, basically, was that Modified cars could do anything to the engine to make them produce more horsepower and make them run faster, whereas the Sportsman cars were restricted to one carburetor.

Q: You made your Grand National debut driving for Mellie Bernard. Who was he?

Jarrett: Mellie Bernard was an automobile dealer in a little town of Valdese, N.C. I drove a car for him at Darlington in 1955. He took a brand-new Pontiac right off the showroom and raced with it. It didn't run very long, but he brought it back, had the engine overhauled and put it back on the market. That was common in those days.

Q: Was that about the time you started driving full-time?

Jarrett: During that time, I concentrated pretty heavily in the Sportsman division and tried to win the national championship in 1956, 1957 and 1958. In 1956, I finished second to Ralph Earnhardt, Dale's father. In 1957, I did win the championship in the Sportsman series and did it again in 1958. All along then, I'd run a Grand National race every now and then, when the opportunity presented itself. But there were not many opportunities at that point. I didn't really get serious about Grand National racing until the latter part of 1959.

Q: How did the first full-time Cup ride come about?

Jarrett: I was searching around for a car to drive. I thought after winning those two national championships in the Sportsman series that people would come knocking on my door. But it didn't work out that way. I was searching around and found a 1957 Chevrolet -- a guy by the name of R.C. McDaniels from Kannapolis, N.C., owned it. It was a fast car but it wasn't very durable, and I drove it I don't know how many races in 1959 but it wasn't doing my career any good, getting in races and falling out. One night in late July 1959, I went to Greenville, S.C., to a race and drove that car. We ran good but dropped out of the race. My brother had a friend with him who came down from Newton, N.C. And on the way back, I told him my career was going downhill and I needed to do something different.

He told me there was a 1957 Ford that was being maintained by a former mechanic who helped me win the Sportsman championship. Junior Johnson had been driving that car and they were building him a new Dodge to run in the Southern 500 and were willing to sell the Ford. They wanted $2,000 for it. There was a race down in Myrtle Beach, S.C., on Saturday night, a 100-mile race that paid $950 to win, and another race at Charlotte at the fairground tracks on Sunday afternoon, which also paid $950.

That was back when the banks stayed open on Saturdays, and that team had their bank account at the same bank that I did business with. So my plan was to wait until the bank closed at noon, go down there and write them a check, go to Myrtle Beach and win that race, then go to Charlotte and win that race. That would be $1,900, and I'd find a way to scrape together the other $100 before the bank opens on Monday to cover that check. So it worked out that I was able to do that, and that launched my career in the Grand National Series.

I really didn't have any sponsorship money to do it on my own, so that was a tough grind but we had it work. You could say the rest is history. We ran that car until it aged out at the end of the year, according to the rules that NASCAR had back then. We ran that car in five races and won three of them, finished second in one and third in one. I knew it was a good car, a winning car because Junior had done well in it.

In 1960, we decided to go full-time. There was a car leader in Marion, N.C., who said he could get some help from Ford if you'll put our name on the side of the car. I said, 'That sounds good to me.' That was about 60 miles from where I lived. We ordered a 1960 Ford Starliner. Back in those days, you used a car off the showroom floor to build a Cup race car with or get a wrecked one if you didn't have a new one to start with. Supposedly the car was going to be given to me. He made it sound like he was going to hold the check until he got the paperwork from Ford, and give me a check to deposit the same day as he deposited mine.

Well, the bank called me a few days later. The car cost $2,500 -- that was the price for a Ford Starliner in those days. The bank said, 'We've got a $2,500 check that you don't have the funds to cover.' I said, 'I know I don't have the funds to cover it.' Anyway, I had to scramble and borrow money to cover that check. The man just led me down a primrose path. But I was already into it. We had already taken the car apart and were ready to start building it as a race car, so it was too late to return it.

October unveiling

A Voting Panel will meet in Charlotte, N.C., to select the five for enshrinement with the inaugural Hall of Fame class to be announced October 14.

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The Hall of Fame will bring NASCAR's history to life and preserves that history in the appropriate environments. The facility will allow fans to have the opportunity to relive the sport's greatest moments.

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I borrowed the money and went on to win five races in 1960 and finished fifth in the points. We were third going into the last race at Atlanta but blew an engine and dropped down to fifth.

Q: Why the switch back to Chevrolet in 1961?

Jarrett: Well, NASCAR was involved in it. Bill France was friends with a couple of the Holloways, the owners of the car. Rex White had won the championship in 1960 in a Chevrolet. They mentioned to Rex they'd like to have another young driver to run for the championship. They had other cars that would run selected events. They asked if he knew of another young driver interested and he suggested me. So Bill France put the Holloways in touch with me.

We only won one race that year but we were consistent and won the championship. The Holloways got out of it at the end of the year, and I went on my own again. Chevrolet helped me a little bit in 1962, enough to where I could run the business. I wasn't paying back even the interest on the money I had borrowed to run in 1960. In the fall of 1962, Ford came to Darlington on Labor Day weekend and announced to the world that they were coming back into racing, above the table and said, "We've going to have four teams that we're going to sponsor." And I was chosen as one of the four teams.

That was a godsend, as far as I was concerned, because I was broke. I didn't have money to live on, really. So then I got the Ford deal and met a guy by the name of Charles Robinson, who had a concrete business in Fairfax, Va. He told me, 'If you ever need any help, like a partner or anything, you let me know.' I didn't have the money to build the Ford cars during the winter, so I called him up. He said he'd front me the money to do it, and so we made a deal and got the Ford deal and won eight races that year.

In the fall of that year, I got a call from John Holman of Holman-Moody, saying there might be a deal in Camden, S.C., that might be the deal of your lifetime. Bondy Long was one of the DuPont heirs. He had a team that wasn't functioning very well. He had made the rounds in Detroit to try and find some help. They were willing to spend the money to do what they needed to do, but needed factory support. They put me together with that situation, so I moved to Camden, not only to be the driver but to manage the team. I might have been the first driver to be paid a salary from a team, plus my regular 40 percent for driving.

We won 15 races that year, I had a great year, and at the end of that year, I was able to finally pay back the money I had borrowed in 1960. In 1965, we won the championship and that was the first year I had clear books.

Q: Is there a single moment that stands out in your career?

Jarrett: The 1965 Southern 500. That was one of my goals, to win that race and to win a championship. I never saw myself as someone who would be in the sport for a long period of time, not that I didn't like it, but there wasn't a lot of security. My kids were growing up and I wasn't able to spend the kind of time with them that I wanted to spend with them. I was missing a lot in their lives. I just didn't see myself as being a long-term driver, like Richard Petty and some of those other guys.

Plus, I knew that people have a tendency to remember you for the last thing you did. And I didn't want them to remember me as being a has-been. The goal that I sent was to win the Southern 500, and of course, the record still stands for the largest margin of victory. But I wasn't satisfied after the championship in 1961 because I only won one race that year. So I vowed to myself that if I could win the championship again, that I would win more races and be the kind of a champion that the sport needed and the kind of a champion that I wanted to be.

In 1966, Ford pulled out of racing for a while, and I realized how little security there was in the sport, so I started looking around at other things and decided to retire at the end of the year.

Q: What's the biggest change you've seen in the sport?

Jarrett: Certainly the notoriety of the sport is much greater than it was, and that's good. Certainly there have been tremendous changes, as far as the safety of the sport. First of all, in the vehicles and then in other parts of the race tracks and just about everything that goes with it. And thank God for that. The evolution of the sport into more superspeedways and bigger markets, and then radio and television coming into the sport and taking it to the next level has been a major change, too.

Q: Which five nominees would you select for the inaugural Hall of Fame class?

Jarrett: I do have a vote, and I just got a package that I looked over once, and I'll look over several more times before Oct. 15. I think Bill France has to go in, Richard Petty, Dale Earnhardt. From there, I'm going to have to do a lot of thinking and ciphering out. And I'll be honest, I won't leave myself out of that possibility. And the reason -- and I don't want to sound boastful or egotistical or anything like that -- it will depend on how the voters are looking at it. Are they looking at just what happened on the race track? If that's the case, then Bill France doesn't get in. But I don't think it'll be done that way. Instead, I think it's more about contributions to the sport in various ways.

I probably had more contributions to the sport in my broadcasting career than I did as a driver. I had reasonable success in driving, certainly something I'm proud of, and probably someday, that in itself would be enough to warrant being in the Hall of Fame. But when you consider I was in radio and then television, that became a bigger challenge to me than driving the race car. It made the transformation easier from driver to broadcaster, rather than walking away from the sport.

My timing was perfect, it just happened that way, to be able to get in on the ground floor in broadcasting and to hopefully be able to make some contributions in some way. Those are the reasons why I might put myself in that fourth or fifth position. But certainly when you look at the records of David Pearson and Cale Yarborough and Darrell Waltrip, those guys had tremendous careers. It just depends on how people look at it.

Q: What do you feel will be your legacy?

Jarrett: I feel it will be more in the broadcasting, although 50 wins and a couple of championships is nothing to sneeze at. But most people know me from the broadcasting than driving race cars. And the one thing that stands the most is the 1993 Daytona 500. Everywhere we go, Dale and I or any member of our family, that particular situation is brought up more than all things put together: the call of the 1993 Daytona 500. The way that it worked out, the way that CBS captured that particular moment in sports, a human interest story. I had no idea it was going to play out that way, at that moment. But as time has gone by, I realize that was special and how important it became to the history of the sport.

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