It was Ralph Seagraves who broke the news. The founder of R.J. Reynolds' successful sports marketing division had retired years earlier, but he was still a fixture at the company's Winston-Salem headquarters, and still just as connected as ever. One day, in he walked to Jeff Byrd's office carrying a message from Bruton Smith: The race track magnate had just bought Bristol Motor Speedway, Seagraves said, and he wanted Byrd to move to eastern Tennessee and run it.

Byrd balked at the idea. He was Winston-Salem born and bred, as was his wife, Claudia. He had gone to college locally at Wake Forest, and had two kids in high school. He also had more than 20 years behind him at RJR, many of those working on the partnership between NASCAR and Winston alongside charismatic marketing genius T. Wayne Robertson. He had a great benefits package and retirement to think about. He turned the job down. When Smith called personally, Byrd turned down the job again.

And again.

And again.

And again.

Every day for two weeks, Smith called, to the point where Byrd stopped answering his phone. Then one Friday evening, Byrd let his guard down and picked up the receiver. It was Smith, no surprise, but this time with some hard salary numbers that were difficult to dismiss. Byrd told Smith he'd think about it. Robertson, the man whose opinion he trusted most, told his lieutenant he had to take the job. So Byrd went home, gathered his family around the kitchen table, and told them all they were leaving the only home they had ever known and moving to Bristol.

"It was horrible. I didn't know what I was doing," Byrd told me in June, granting a rare interview to talk about his days at RJR for a story on the impact the company had on NASCAR. "I came up here, got an apartment. Claudia stayed at home with the kids until they got out of school. I came up here and ran my first race weekend in March [of 1996]. I've been up here ever since. It's the best move I ever made."

And it was unquestionably one of the best things to ever happen to Bristol, a town and a track both in mourning at the passing of Byrd, who died Sunday at 60 after suffering from what he termed a "very rare form of brain cancer" in a letter to fans posted earlier this year in a Speedway Motorsports Inc. online forum. Gregarious, tireless, and immediately likeable, Byrd was the point man in perhaps the most ambitious expansion project in NASCAR history, the growth of a little race track that had 67,000 seats when he got there and has 160,000 today. He oversaw a sellout streak that reached 55 races before the recession ended it this year. Along the way he became as much a part of Bristol as the concrete racing surface, fiercely protective of his speedway and what made it the most beloved arena in the sport.

"He was extremely territorial about Bristol and what to do with it," remembered Humpy Wheeler, former president of SMI, Bristol's parent company. "When we were getting ready to [resurface] the track [in 2007], he guarded that race track fiercely, because he knew that track itself, and the shape and the banking, was a tremendous part of the success of Bristol. What Jeff knew was there had been a day when Bristol wasn't such a hot place, when somebody would win the race by five or six laps, when there weren't many good cars in the race, when it was in the afternoon in the summertime and it was just hot as the hinges of you-know-what in August. He knew what the turnaround had been -- it was lights, it was more cars running the full circuit, and he wanted to make sure that kept going."

But Byrd also knew people, and how to relate to them, and how to foster an atmosphere where no one was above doing anything. He learned that working at RJR, where it wouldn't be uncommon for top executives such as himself or Robertson to do things like clean race track bathrooms, hand out free caps, or paint the Winston name across the start-finish line at a speedway -- anything to enhance the brand's image in the minds of potential customers. He would later take those lessons on to Bristol, where his primary goal was always to try and enhance the visitor experience and keep them coming back. Bristol's season ticket renewal rate has always been among the highest in the sport. (Continued)