Family tradition

You hit me, and I'm going to hit you back. Twice.

It's NASCAR's version of the Golden Rule. Drivers may police themselves in today's era of "have at it, boys," but that very same sense of frontier justice has been around since the sport's beginning. Rough up someone on the race track, and somewhere, somehow and at some point in time, there's going to be retribution. Count on it, as surely as tomorrow's sunrise.

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When Kyle Busch and Brad Keselowski ran into each other in the Nationwide Series race at Bristol, regardless of who might or might not have been at fault, they were simply carrying on the family tradition. Long before Busch and Keselowski -- or Cale Yarborough and Donnie and Bobby Allison, for that matter -- there were one-time combatants like Ned Jarrett and Richard Petty.

Yep. Gentleman Ned and the King once had at it.

During a Grand National event on July 14, 1963, at the third-mile New Asheville Speedway in North Carolina, Jarrett was leading with 40 laps to go when he had to pit with a cut tire. After quickly making up the lap he lost, Jarrett immediately proceeded to take off after the new leader, Petty.

Jarrett had long been simmering over an incident in which he felt unjustly roughed up by Petty. The gauntlet thrown down by Petty? Jarrett was about to smack Petty with it.

"This was a payback at Asheville," Jarrett said without hesitation. "[Petty] had, I thought, done me wrong at Bowman Gray Stadium in Winston-Salem, and put me out of the race. I thought it could've been helped, and I carried that for over a year. I might have made a threat at that time that maybe I'd get him back, but then it just died down. Everybody, even my crew, thought it was all over."

This wasn't a case where Jarrett lost control of his car. It certainly wasn't an aero push on the tiny paved bullring that caused his car to bump Petty, who was more than a year away from winning his first NASCAR championship. Premeditated? You betcha. Jarrett knew exactly what he was doing. With Petty clearly in his sights, Jarrett took a healthy whack at the soon-to-be famous blue No. 43 Plymouth.

It worked.

Jarrett charged back into the lead with 20 laps to go, and he held it the rest of the way. Petty went on to finish second, the only other car to complete all 300 laps of the showdown held that afternoon in the heart of North Carolina's Blue Ridge Mountains.

"I didn't look for a whole lot of room to get by him," admitted Jarrett, who made the opening to get by Petty rather than waiting for it. "We were battling for the lead when I got taken out at Bowman Gray Stadium and that's the way I wanted it to be when I paid it back."

All these years later, the memory of that day resonates with both men. It doesn't appear to matter to either that the race took place nearly 50 years ago, on an itsy-bitsy track long since gone from the Cup schedule. If it seems remarkable that Petty can remember not only the event itself, but a relatively obscure mechanical problem that caused him to slow his pace, consider this.

It was a race. That's what's important.

"Let me give you a little history on the deal, OK?" Petty began. "On that deal, we was leading the race and running pretty good. The right-rear hub, the bearing started going out of it. So it started tightening up, so we got to slowing down. There was still some laps to go. We knew we weren't going to win the race. We knew Ned was going to ... but when he caught me, instead of just passing me, he run into me. It kinda peed us off."

Kinda? No. Petty was a whole lot peed off, but he just didn't know why. Until now.

"I knew it was a little bit on purpose, but I didn't know it was that much on purpose," Petty said with a laugh. "I'm just now hearing that for the first time, as far as it being payback. I just thought when he caught up with me, he said, 'OK, I've gotta get him out of the way.' That's what he done. I didn't know it had festered with him a little bit longer than that."

Rather than slamming into Petty on the fastest of superspeedways as Carl Edwards did with Keselowski earlier this season at Atlanta, consider this. David Pearson won the pole for that afternoon's Asheville event with a speed of 67.235 mph. Jarrett's average speed for the race was all of 63.384 mph. Jarrett made his point without running any real risk of injuring the future seven-time NASCAR champion.

"I would never have done it on a large track where there is high speed involved," Jarrett said. "So I caught him, knocked him out of the way and went on and won the race."

Petty was livid after the Asheville event and Jarrett knew it. He stayed in his car as Petty approached, which was probably the smart thing to do. A series of extraordinary pictures snapped by legendary motorsports photographer Don Hunter clearly show Petty trying to pop Jarrett with a few shots of his own, his fists clenched in an outright rage of fury.

"I've seen the pictures on the Internet," Petty said. "He was still in the car. He pulled up to the winner's circle, and I was the first one to meet him. I was a little upset that he had plenty of time to pass me. He had the whole race track and he spun me out, so that made me kind of ill. It didn't last long."

In that moment, Petty was all kinds of bent out of shape.

"I don't blame him for being mad," Jarrett continued. "I don't blame him at all, but he and Maurice [Petty, Richard's brother] came after me. There was no question about that. I purposely didn't get out of the car. I thought I was safer in there, so I stayed in [the car]. We never had another problem after that."

First class

The NASCAR Hall of Fame's first class -- Dale Earnhardt, Bill France, Bill France Jr., Junior Johnson and Richard Petty -- was enshrined on May 23.

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If the incident seems out of character for both Jarrett and Petty, it probably was. Petty is a laid-back country boy who made good. He signed every autograph, kissed every baby and posed for every picture. Reputations in the sports world don't get any better than Petty's, yet there he was, trying to drag Jarrett out of his car so he could beat the living daylights out of him.

Jarrett already had captured the 1961 Grand National championship and he would follow that up with another title in 1965, a year before retiring. Known as "Gentleman Ned," Jarrett is to this day known for his calm, almost stately persona.

Throughout his career, Jarrett did his best to maintain that demeanor on the race track. But when somebody crossed that line, all bets were off.

"Jim Paschal was quoted several times as saying, 'Yeah, he's Gentleman Ned. He's a nice guy, but you get him on the backstretch of some of these tracks that are not too well lit and you'll see how much of a gentleman he is,'" Jarrett remembered. "It was an understanding among drivers, really, that you had to rub and you had to hit people to be able to pass them.

"But you tried to do it as discreetly as possible, and you also tried to do it so that it didn't take them out of the race. I always was very conscious of that. Still, it was fun to get in there and rub fenders and bump somebody out of the way a little bit to make a pass. I expected it from them. I was using the Golden Rule. It was just something that was part of the game back then."

The kind of raw emotion that Jarrett and Petty exhibited during that long-ago race are the same that caused Busch to pile-drive Keselowski at Bristol.

"We basically policed ourselves," Petty said. "Somebody would straighten me up. I'd straighten them out. Then, all of a sudden, we get on nationwide TV. We get all these sponsors. We get all the people watching us. Then, NASCAR says, 'We can't have this. We've gotta clean our sport up. We can't have fights and arguments and stuff like what you used to have.

"It's lost its history. It's lost its base. These guys are out there running for three or four hours against each other at 160 mph, 180 mph. They are gonna get mad at each other. It's not a gentleman's sport where they say, 'Excuse me ... I didn't mean to hit you.' When you're driving a race car, it's a very emotional deal. You're doing everything you can to beat somebody, and then when they start beating on you, [there's raw emotion]."