EARNHARDT NATION is the story of one of NASCAR’s most famous families, from dirt-track racer Ralph to American legend Dale to NASCAR icon Dale Junior. The book is the first to trace the entire history of the Earnhardt family, from Ralph’s first days working under a hood to Dale Junior’s 2015 Sprint Cup campaign, and everything in between. EARNHARDT NATION is available at bookstores everywhere, or online at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and all other booksellers. Author Jay Busbee is on Twitter at @jaybusbee and on Facebook at facebook.com/jaybusbee.
In this excerpt, we get a look at the lighter side of Dale Earnhardt, the prankster side:
Woe to the reporter who entered Dale Earnhardt’s domain on anything less than high alert. He was an inveterate prankster, and the garage was his theater.
“You never knew what to expect from him, and that was deliberate,” Fox Sports’ Matt Yocum said. “He wanted you off balance around him. I would be interviewing him and he’d be stomping on my foot or poking me in the ribs, out of the camera’s view. I couldn’t let on, of course, and he was having a great time.”
Any cameraman who tried for the NFL Films-style “hero shot” — shot from below as the cameraman walked backward — was in for a treat. Earnhardt regularly walked those cameramen into people’s legs or the backs of cars. He’d throw balls of tape at the camera, he’d grab a headset from a pit reporter and begin berating whoever was back in the studio.
“Every time you’d start laughing,” Fox’s Steve Byrnes said, “he’d say, ‘Why aren’t you taking this seriously?’ “
ESPN reporter Ryan McGee found out the hard way that earnestness made you an easy target. As a young reporter in 1997, he was headed for a date when his bosses asked him to swing by Charlotte Motor Speedway for some interviews. Earnhardt asked McGee why he was dressed so sportily, and McGee made the crucial mistake of mentioning that he was on his way to a date. As McGee was leaving, Earnhardt gave him a hearty slap on the back and wished him good luck. During the date, McGee discovered Earnhardt had dipped his hand in oil and left smears down the back of McGee’s crisply laundered shirt.
In the early 1980s, Eddie Gossage, now the president of Texas Motor Speedway, was leaving Bristol, the track where he then worked as a promoter. He was driving 60 miles per hour down 11E, the Tennessee highway that runs past the track, when he someone slammed his back bumper. “I looked in the rear-view mirror, and I saw those beady eyes,” Gossage said later, laughing. “Earnhardt was right on me, an inch off my bumper. What was I going to do? I wasn’t going to brake-check him, and no way I could outrun him.” Earnhardt, grinning all the way, didn’t leave Gossage alone until he reached his driveway.
Once, Earnhardt, Richard Childress, Bill France Jr., and NASCAR president Mike Helton were on a trip to Monaco when Earnhardt decided he wanted to drive the famed Formula 1 course there. Problem is, the course runs on public roads, and those roads that day were very public. Even so, Earnhardt whipped their rental car through the streets of Monaco like some Southern-fried James Bond. “No matter how he would drive,” Helton recalled, “you always felt like he was in control. There was something serene about him behind the wheel.”
Earnhardt tossed a rubber snake at Helton on a camping trip. He threw country music star Kix Brooks into the ocean off the Bahamas. At one champions’ weekend in New York at the Waldorf, he and Kenny Schrader raided the maids’ closet and bricked up the doorway of then-NASCAR VP Jim Hunter with towels. He handcuffed Geoff Bodine to a hotel railing in Louisville. He left Budweiser on the bed of Rusty Wallace, who was devoted to his sponsor Miller Lite, every time Wallace stayed on Earnhardt’s boat. He dumped a can of sardines under Wallace’s seat just before the Southern 500 on a day temperatures reached the ’90s. He’d hang out in the Talladega credentials office and tell unsuspecting reporters who called in that Talladega didn’t need their coverage and they didn’t need to bother coming to the track.
He also loved tweaking the fans. Many hung around outside the walls of the Garage Mahal, waiting for a glimpse of Earnhardt. He’d ride back and forth on his tractor, working the land and waiting to see how long it would take the fans to pick up on his presence. He once did a promotion for Darlington right in front of Daytona International Speedway, holding up a sign that read NEED TWO TICKETS TO DARLINGTON as astonished motorists drove by. While on hunting trips, he’d walk into a remote gas station somewhere in the middle of Alabama, and people would say, “You know who you look like?”
“When you would hang out with Dale,” former crew chief Larry McReynolds recalled, “you didn’t need your brain. You could take it out and let it rest. I’d go have dinner with him, and it’d be, ‘Don’t sit there, sit over there. Eat more of that. Why do you eat that first? Teresa, get him some more of that. You need to drink water. Drink some more water.’ I’d come back from dinners with him exhausted.”
But probably his rankest prank came at Bristol, when Earnhardt spotted Childress entering a portable toilet in the infield. He climbed in his truck, quietly rolled up to the plastic-walled toilet, and began gently tapping the front bumper of the truck against the door. Then he started striking harder and harder, until the entire toilet itself nearly fell over.
“DAMMIT, DALE,” Childress shouted as he stormed out of the john, but soon he was laughing along with Earnhardt because, well, what else could he do?
