The beginning of the end came on Feb. 5, 2003, in the form of a news release that rocked the NASCAR world. R.J. Reynolds, the tobacco company based in Winston-Salem, N.C., had backed the sport's premier division for 32 years. In the history of major American sports, there had never been a more symbiotic relationship between league and sponsor, entities in this case so intertwined that it was sometimes difficult to tell where one ended and the other began. RJR's red and white colors were as ubiquitous in the garage area as tires and fuel. Winston was NASCAR and NASCAR was Winston, and an arrangement of any other type was simply unthinkable.

Until that news release, sent out strategically late in the afternoon, as the sport was convening on Daytona Beach for Speedweeks. Business dynamics had changed, it read. Even though RJR had recently signed a five-year extension to continue as title sponsor of NASCAR's premier series, it was asking the series to explore the idea of bringing a new partner on board.

Simply put, it wanted out. Later, as the shock subsided and the larger picture came into focus, it became easy to see why. RJR was caught in a vise, pinned by the dual forces of changing attitudes toward cigarettes and almost constant litigation, and hemorrhaging cash as a result. It had lost $44 million in the past three months of the previous year alone. Operating budgets had been slashed, payroll had been cut, stock value had dropped. Public smoking bans were gaining traction, and lawsuits were mounting in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. Forecasts called for continued losses and substantially lower revenue in the future.

There had been signs, of course, that it would come to this. Five years earlier, tobacco industry executives -- including RJR chairman Steven Goldstone -- had been summoned before Congress, where they defended their marketing and advertising practices. That same year, a settlement agreement between tobacco companies and attorneys general of 46 states forced RJR to consolidate its motorsports sponsorships, which to that point had been spread across a variety of disciplines. It could pick only one, and chose, of course, to stick with NASCAR. Somehow, it seemed, the Winston Cup name would always survive.

Except that it didn't. Over time the losses mounted, and even a partnership that a Boston University study determined was worth $305 million in television advertising value -- not bad for a product that by law couldn't be advertised on TV -- was deemed too expensive to retain. Within a year, all that red and white of Winston had been replaced by the black and gold of Nextel, later to be merged with Sprint. RJR, a cornerstone of NASCAR's national growth, an entity that helped the year-end point fund blossom from $100,000 in 1971 to $17 million in 2003, was suddenly and stunningly gone, another relic of the sport's history.

And yet, no institution that entrenched for that long leaves without traces, little breadcrumbs that comprise a trail back to memories of better times. In the case of RJR, those traces exist in the form of people churned out by a sports-marketing powerhouse that even to this day stands without peer in NASCAR. Yes, RJR is gone, has been for seven years now, to the point where it's difficult to remember a time when lighting up inside a media center was acceptable. But RJR's legacy is alive and well in the people it produced, in the track presidents and team executives and marketers who still populate the sport, dozens of graduates of an RJR sports marketing arm that taught the business from the ground up.

"It was a superbly, superbly, run department," recalled Humpy Wheeler, former president of Charlotte Motor Speedway and current owner of the consulting firm The Wheeler Co. "There's no question in my mind that of all the companies that use sports marketing, RJR had the most clever program that I saw."

It worked because no one was too big, no one was too small, and everybody learned everything. One day, you might be meeting with a corporate CEO; the next, you might be cleaning a bathroom at Rockingham. It was all about enhancing NASCAR, and by extension enhancing the Winston brand name, and employees took to the task with almost a religious fervor. No wonder the program produced so many people who are still successful in NASCAR even today, among them a line of current and former track presidents that includes Grant Lynch and Rick Humphrey of Talladega, Jeff Byrd of Bristol, Chris Powell of Las Vegas, Chris Browning of Darlington, and Curtis Gray of Homestead-Miami.

"They knew how to teach you how to sit down with chairmen of the board of major companies and to take care of folks hospitality-wise in a very nice way. But they also taught you the guys in the stands are the ones buying our products, so when you're at the races, don't forget to touch them in special ways, too," Lynch said. "I think of all the hats we gave away, all the jackets we gave away, that's back when race tracks were not doing as well as they are today. I think of all the red and white paint we shipped all over the country. That was us. We bought paint and built media centers and supplied scoreboards. R.J. Reynolds probably bought more red and white paint every year than any other company in America."

That paint did more than identify a company or a brand name -- it defined a culture, a way of doing business that since RJR's departure has seeped into almost every corner of the sport. There are RJR alums at race tracks, at NASCAR and Michael Waltrip Racing, at Sprint and Nationwide, at racing-associated marketing firms and public-relations companies and support businesses too numerous to count. They are all products of the same institution, a company that based its management style on the belief that no job or no person was too big or too small, and together they form a living, breathing legacy to a bygone sponsor that in many ways carried NASCAR on its back.

"I don't think there will ever be anything like it in organized sports," said Byrd, who worked there for 23 years. "I don't think there was before it, and I don't think there will be again."

Not only did T. Wayne Robertson have relationships with CEO's of major corporations, but drivers as well, who would seek his advice.

Ralph and T. Wayne

It was a different time, before public health concerns fueled the backlash against smoking, before the economic downturns that would cripple motorsports sponsorship, before rampant political correctness made anyone terrified of doing anything that seemed the least bit out of line. To work for RJR in its heyday as a NASCAR sponsor meant to live large, to be surrounded by larger-than-life characters, to drink deep into the night and wake up in the early morning ready to report for work. They always flew first class. They always picked up the bar tab. They were always the life of the party. When employees needed travel money, they didn't ask for it in dollars, they asked for it in inches -- as in, how thick the stack of cash needed to be.

There were two ringleaders of this circus, the first a Jack Daniel's-loving power broker who always carried a roll of $100 bills in his pocket, the second an almost evangelical presence who moved his people to action by force of will. Together, Ralph Seagraves and T. Wayne Robertson, the first two presidents of RJR's sports marketing arm, held sway over an almost unlimited budget and an operation that would become deeply rooted in golf, tennis, rodeo, and nearly every form of auto racing. NASCAR, though, was the crown jewel. Legend has it that after televised cigarette ads were outlawed in 1970, it was Seagraves who suggested that RJR back not just a car, but the entire series.

Ralph Seagraves, right, with 'Last American Hero' stars Valerie Perrine and Jeff Bridges.

"Ralph just knew what that man in the grandstand wanted," Wheeler said of Seagraves, who died in 1998. "He might not have known what the man in the Masters golf gallery wanted, but he knew what that race fan wanted. And he made sure that the guys who went to work for him would roll their sleeves up and get down there and learn who those people were and what they wanted. That's what's so sadly lacking today in a lot of cases."

Seagraves' gift was that he could relate to people regardless of status, a trait he handed down to top lieutenant Robertson and spread throughout the RJR staff. He was connected enough that he delivered cigarettes to the White House, down-home enough that he concluded meetings with Wheeler with a ceremonial sip from a Mason jar. He held his managers to very high standards, yet didn't micromanage them. He set another example, too -- former staffers well remember Seagraves' fondness for Jack Daniel's, and how late in the evening he would stay up consuming his favorite beverage, and how he never seemed to have a hangover the next day.

"He was one of those guys who played hard and worked hard," said Byrd, whom Seagraves hired. "If you went to bed at 4 a.m., you'd better be at breakfast at 6:30, 7 o'clock, getting after it, hanging those banners, putting the cigarettes out at the race track. He was a true character in every sense of the word."

An evening out with Ralph Seagraves could be an adventure. Byrd remembers one night at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York when RJR executives were on hand to see NASCAR operations director Les Richter, a star linebacker for the University of California and later the Los Angeles Rams, be inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame. Several former U.S. presidents were also in attendance, a fact that created substantial alarm within the RJR crowd when they looked down from their balcony table and suddenly spotted Seagraves crawling on the floor near the dais.

"It wouldn't be the first or the last time we had to go retrieve Ralph after he'd had too much Jack Daniel's," Byrd remembered. "We get there about the same time the Secret Service gets there. We're explaining, and about that time we look up, and there's Richard Nixon. He said, 'Baldy, what are you doing down there?' In a most politically incorrect time, Ralph used to deliver cigarettes to the White House. He and Nixon were big buddies. We all ended up in Nixon's suite in the Waldorf, drinking with him. That's the kind of stuff that went on."

And yet, despite the occasional late-night shenanigans, Seagraves instilled within his employees a sense of ownership, which was obvious in the personal investment RJR staffers placed in the NASCAR partnership. The bigger NASCAR became, he preached, the bigger the Winston brand became. They spent money a lot of sponsors might not have spent, and it paid off. Even though Marlboro eroded Winston's national brand share, eventually forcing it below 15 percent, among race fans that number remained well above 30 percent.

Seagraves retired in 1985, turning the reins over to Robertson, who used his business-to-business skills to take his former boss' platform of personal relationships to another level. Former RJR employees who worked for Robertson -- who disliked his given first name, Thurmond, so much that leaking it was believed to be an offense worthy of being fired -- speak of him in almost reverent terms, to this day beguiled by his ability to close deals, solve problems, and motivate people.

"He was like Billy Graham. People just followed him," said Ty Norris, vice president at Michael Waltrip Racing and a former RJR employee. "He had a magnetic personality. He was always walking down the hallways singing and in a good mood. He loved life. He built a culture, and the culture was that R.J. Reynolds people were always going to be the coolest people in the room. And that's didn't always mean personality; sometimes it meant you paid. R.J. Reynolds people always picked up the bar tab. It was in our culture so much so that personally, I started picking up bar tabs with friends. It gets in your culture. He did that not because he was trying to buy love, but almost like T. Wayne wanted to share the wealth."

Sure enough, whenever Robertson would leave his hotel for dinner on the Friday of a race weekend, crewmen would linger in the parking lot, knowing the man with the expense account would buy them a steak. According to former Talladega president and current International Speedway Corp. executive Rick Humphrey, Robertson had a way of communicating that left his employees wanting to know more. "I kid you not," he said, "you hung on every word he said." Drivers would ask his opinion when they thought about changing teams. It was Robertson who came up with the idea for the former Winston Cup Preview, the gathering of fans and drivers that drew thousands to Winston-Salem every January.

Chris Powell, the Las Vegas track president, said not a day goes by that he doesn't think about how Robertson might have handled a certain issue. "Wayne was just so adroit at dealing not only with CEOs and CFOs, but he could walk right out the door and relate very well to a crew member who might have a problem with his car owner," he said. "Wayne was there for people like that, too, in order to help them. And then five minutes later, he'd talk to the CEO of R.J. Reynolds about a marketing plan. And then five minutes later he'd talk to a race fan. Wayne was one of those people who not only said we have to keep the fans in mind first, he also did it."

Whatever the challenge, Robertson met it. Byrd remembers 1986, when the asset management firm of Kohlberg, Kravis and Roberts bought the company then called RJR/Nabisco with the intention of selling it for profit. KKR had recently pulled the plug on a five-year, $26 million CART/Formula One sponsorship package involving food products company Beatrice, at the time another of the firm's holdings. Then KKR sent its army of Ivy League attorneys to Winston-Salem. They wanted all of RJR's active contracts on the table, and everyone feared the worst. Byrd asked Robertson if he wanted help. "I'm handling this one by myself," was the reply.

Employees fretted while the long meetings went on. Finally, Robertson and the KKR attorneys emerged, and summoned the RJR sports-marketing staff. "It was like the Bataan death march as we trudged up to the conference room," Byrd remembered. "We knew what was going to happen. As good as Wayne was, he wasn't going to beat these son of a guns. They were buying us out of contracts."

Except they weren't. Robertson had weaved some kind of magic, and convinced KKR not only to keep the contracts, but to expand upon them. The Ivy Leaguers had been swayed by a former show-car driver with a two-year degree in fire science from Rowan Community College. That's how convincing Robertson could be. "He had a feel, a gift for understanding the way people received information," Powell said. "He had a feel for the way people reacted. He struck many chords in that regard."

Nothing, it seemed, was beyond his sphere of influence. Robertson would even use RJR's considerable stores of experience and authority to try and bring other sponsors to NASCAR, arguing that they could enjoy the same kind of growth his company had. It was all about building the sport to build the brand, carrying on the mission Seagraves had begun. He wasn't above trying to convince on-the-fence sponsors to stay, which is why he was in southern Louisiana in January of 1998, trying to keep Tabasco in NASCAR. Robertson was in a party of duck hunters motoring through Vermilion Bay in the rainy pre-dawn when his boat was struck by another vessel carrying an oil-rig crew. At age 47, he was gone.

"It was a microcosm," Byrd said. "Wayne got killed trying to help the sport."

Chris Powell learned working at Winston and was able to work his way up to track president at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

Paths to presidency

Even before Robertson's passing, it was evident that the ethos of R.J. Reynolds was bigger than one man. RJR ordered thousands of buckets of red paint and had them shipped to every NASCAR facility, so the walls could be branded with the Winston name. If bathrooms needed cleaning, they cleaned them. If a track needed a media center, they built one, complete with Winston over the doorway. Byrd and Robertson once convinced management at Atlanta to let them paint the Winston logo across the start-finish line, and the RJR executives rolled up their sleeves and did it themselves. NASCAR had one media relations person, but RJR's sports marketing arm had a complete media relations department, one that essentially handled PR not just for the sponsor, but for the entire series.

"There are so many instances where Winston became a whole part of the NASCAR culture," Powell said, "as much a part of it as the NASCAR bar logo."

They wrote and printed the media guides, distributed press releases, organized the year-end banquet, put up billboards, designed promotional posters, paid race tracks to advertise their events. They were able to do all those things because they had manpower, they had an unparalleled ability to build personal relationships, and they had an astronomical budget. Money was rarely an object. "We had our own airplane, went first class everywhere," Byrd recalled. "We were kind of like Switzerland in that we were everybody's buddy."

That largesse extended to the other sports RJR had relationships with as well. "It had huge budgets," remembered Norris, who through his association with Winston developed a relationship with Dale Earnhardt, whom he eventually went to work for. "There was one year, we had a budget on the golf side, they had $2.5 million left over at the end of the year. They said, you'd better spend it, or you're going to lose it. They started calling golf courses and saying, what do you need? Do you need a facility upgrade? You need a scoreboard? You need a new clubhouse? You need new putting greens? Here are a couple of hundred thousand dollars."

The people, though, were what made RJR work. They didn't get paid for weekend work, but they went anyway, amassing dozens of comp days that would go unused. "You had a bunch of guys who would kill for Winston," said Byrd, who spent 43 of 52 weekends on the road the year his daughter was born. "I'm telling you, it wasn't a job, it was a lifestyle for all of us." In time the sports-marketing arm developed a reputation for producing tireless, dedicated employees who could do almost anything and do it well. So it seemed only a matter of time before Grant Lynch received a phone call from NASCAR executive Jim Hunter, asking him to stop by his office in Daytona Beach.

Lynch walked in and saw not only Hunter, but also Lesa France Kennedy, daughter of NASCAR chairman Bill France Jr. and head of race track arm ISC. Mike Helton was leaving Talladega Superspeedway to become NASCAR's vice president for competition, and ISC needed a new president for the facility. They wanted Lynch, who remembers feeling a little uncomfortable -- he didn't want to talk about a new job opportunity without first discussing it with Robertson, his boss at RJR. "Dad called T. Wayne this morning," France Kennedy told him, "and he thinks you really need to take a good look at it."

And so there he was in February 1993, shadowing Helton for the first race that season at Talladega before taking the reins on his own for the July event. That summer, Davey Allison was killed in a helicopter crash in the Talladega infield. Neil Bonnett crashed and tore up the catchfence. Jimmy Horton sailed out of the race track and into a campground. "It was baptism under fire," Lynch remembered. Even so, the race track life hooked him. "I loved it then, and I love it today."

Lynch was the first RJR employee to move into a track presidency, arriving at Talladega just as the NASCAR boom was beginning. He added seats aggressively, and was able to fill them. "I don't think it hurt that I got here at the right time, just as the sport was exploding," Lynch said. Even so, track owners took notice of where Lynch had come from. And one of the first things Bruton Smith did after buying Bristol Motor Speedway was call Byrd and ask him to run the place. Except, he didn't say it like that. In typical Smith style, he got right to the point: "When are you coming to work for me?" he asked the RJR executive.

Byrd didn't want to leave. He had gone to work for RJR straight from the Winston-Salem daily newspaper, and risen to the No. 2 position behind Robertson in the company's sports-marketing division. He had attended Wake Forest, had kids in high school, and was a Winston man to the core. He told Smith no. Once. Twice. Three times. Every day for two weeks. He stopped answering his phone, he grew so tired of turning Smith down. Finally Smith, to that point sketchy on details, drew up concrete salary numbers. Finally Robertson told Byrd he needed to go. Finally Byrd gathered his family around the kitchen table and told them they were moving to East Tennessee.

"It was horrible. I didn't know what I was doing," Byrd said. "I came up here, got an apartment. Claudia stayed at home with the kids until they got out of school. I came up here March 1 [of 1996] and ran my first race first weekend in March. I've been up here ever since. It's the best move I've ever made."

And so the progression began. That culture of knowing how to market a product, of being able to treat a race fan or a corporate CEO as the most important person in the room, translated to the race track side. At RJR they had already been exposed to almost every facet of the business, from painting walls to securing sponsorship. "The guys who were running that program at Winston, they had exposure with the drivers, with the sanctioning body, with the France family and so forth," Humphrey said. "They had the exposure to show their skills. And obviously, along the way, the folks who owned the race tracks saw some good qualities in all those guys."

As much as they loved working at RJR -- and make no mistake about it, they all did -- the ceiling was only so high, and upward mobility within the sports marketing department was somewhat limited. So like members of a large fraternity, they began to look out for one another, to recommend each other for jobs. Lynch eventually hired Humphrey as his public relations director, with Humphrey assuming the role of Talladega president when Lynch was assigned to other tasks by parent company ISC. When Smith bought Las Vegas Motor Speedway, Byrd recommended his former RJR colleague Powell.

"I think it gets back to relationships," said Powell, who went to Las Vegas as executive vice president in 1998, and became president three years ago. "Obviously, Grant has done a wonderful job at Talladega, Jeff has done a wonderful job at Bristol. Those guys have become important within their own organizations, and their influence has helped people who came along after them -- in this case a guy like me, or a guy like Rick Humphrey. I was recommended by Jeff, no question about it. But it gets back to relationships. I think Jeff had a large role in dealing with Bruton in my getting this job."

Lingering above it all was the specter of what might become of the cigarette industry. The crackdown was beginning. In 1998 the leaders of the major U.S. tobacco companies were summoned before Congress. That same year, California enacted its statewide smoking ban, which included bars and restaurants. Around that same time, the Department of Justice used the Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act of 1965 to remove tobacco billboards from sports stadiums. Cigarette logos likely to appear during live racing telecasts were exempted, and the Winston Cup had been spared -- but for how much longer?

At Homestead in 2003, the NASCAR drivers says goodbye to the only title sponsor the series had known.

Writing on the wall

As it turned out, it didn't take government intervention to separate NASCAR and big tobacco. Economic forces took care of that on their own, and the result was a shocking end to a hugely successful 33-year partnership. Within RJR, though, there was little surprise. There had been concerns about the changing attitudes toward cigarettes even in Robertson's day, even when the private jets were flying and the money was flowing like water, even as the Winston brand helped a once-provincial stock-car series go nationwide.

"The writing was on the wall for people who were there at a more senior level and understood what the issues really were," Norris said. "Wayne tended to shield us from the negative."

Norris didn't leave RJR because of tobacco concerns -- he left because Felix Sabates offered to double his salary if he went to work for Sabates' race team, a proposal the former RJR media relations manager simply couldn't refuse. But a few years later, he turned down more money to return to RJR, opting instead to become vice president at Dale Earnhardt Inc. The cigarette industry was feeling the pressure from lawsuits, the anti-tobacco movement was gaining strength, and suddenly members of RJR's unparalleled sports-marketing division were beginning to wonder about their own job security, wondering what other options might be available to them.

"I don't think any of us left because we weren't happy where we were," Lynch said. "It was just, you could read the tea leaves and say, hey, this may be a better place over the next 25 years than here."

"You just kind of always had that uneasy feeling that something was going to take place, whether it was something that was going to force them out of the sport, or as sponsors sometimes do, they would realize, OK, maybe we need to go a different direction with what we're doing here," added Humphrey, now managing director of business operations for ISC. "Because Winston had been involved for so long and had touched so many people within the sport, it certainly was a sad say to see it go away. But again, you always had that uneasy feeling that something was going to take place."

Powell said the decline of the cigarette industry had a direct effect on him taking the job at Las Vegas, and it also made race track owners aware that RJR had employees who might be willing to move. "I was concerned at the time," he said. "The Clinton Administration had made the marketing of tobacco a real target. I was concerned about what was coming in the next few years. That played a role with me, certainly, in my decision, and I think it probably played a role the decisions of the executives at Speedway Motorsports or International Speedway Corp. in pursuing people from R.J. Reynolds."

The inevitable became reality seven years ago this week, when Nextel -- later to be merged with Sprint -- announced a takeover of the title sponsorship to NASCAR's premier series in a splashy news conference in New York. Although several RJR employees found positions with the new sponsor, it was a sad moment for many who had been involved with Winston, a brand so intertwined with NASCAR the two almost shared a common identity. There remains today something of a brotherhood among all those former RJR staffers, who keep in touch via e-mail chains and maintain a keen interest in the well-being of their old colleagues.

These days, tobacco sponsorship in sports is virtually a thing of the past. Yet many of those former RJR employees are still out there, still working in NASCAR, still using the methods taught to them by Seagraves and Robertson. Byrd tried to make a list, stopped at almost two dozen, and still kept coming up with names, people like Chad Willis, Karen Davis, Jimmy Holder, Denny Darnell, Rob Goodman, Roger Bear, Rich Habegger, Jeff Kirk, Mickey Nutting, Cliff Pennell, and on and on and on. They didn't all work together at the same time. But they shared a common experience none of them will ever forget. They were at RJR when it felt like the center of the racing world.

"I've never in my life been around a group of 40-something people who cared more for each other," Norris said. "And it was a special group. It wads a group of people who, their families did everything together. We did everything together. We didn't know any better than to be teammates. It was such a great atmosphere, because T. Wayne was as plugged in and as powerful as anyone in the sport. Jeff Byrd was plugged in and powerful. When my relationship started with Dale, T. Wayne would call me every day and ask, what's happening? What have you heard? It was awesome. I was hoping it would never end."