The Intimidator: Dale Earnhardt's Life In The Fast Lane

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Visit applevacations.com. This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. Very rarely can one man encapsulate the image of a particular sport to the average observer. In basketball, perhaps Kobe Bryant. LeBron James.

Magic Johnson. Notice it's not a singular name. But in NASCAR, only one name comes to mind for most people. And that's Dale Earnhardt, who died on this day in February of 2001. And the millions of us who are watching, well we'll never forget that day. Here to tell the story of Dale is Jay Busby, a lead writer at Yahoo Sports and the author of Earnhardt Nation.

Take it away, Jay. Daytona International Speedway can house as many as 150,000 fans. And on this day, the entire track was sold out.

It was a beautiful day, blue skies, warm weather. It's the kind of weather that everybody else in the country is looking at Daytona and saying, Man, I wish I was there. Down below on the pits, you can see the cars lined up in a row one after the other. And on pit row, it's absolute chaos. There are drivers there. There are crew chiefs there. There's family there.

There is media there. But right there by the number three, right there by Dale Earnhardt's black Goodrich number three is Teresa Earnhardt. Sharp and businesslike in a deep purple blazer, black slacks and sunglasses, she kisses him once. Her right hand curled around the back of his head. Then she kisses him again. They're not long kisses or deep, meaningful ones.

There's a loving but routine kiss as a wife gives her husband as he heads off to his job. Broadly speaking, the Daytona 500 is called NASCAR Super Bowl. That's not quite fair for a number of reasons. First of all, the Daytona 500 is older than the Super Bowl. And second of all, the Daytona 500 can house more people in the track than the Super Bowl can.

Sometimes by as much as a factor of three. Also, most importantly, the Daytona 500 starts the season rather than ending it. And on this particular Daytona 500, you had the start of a new century.

You had the start of a new millennium. You had the start of a new era in NASCAR. And you had both young drivers and old drivers in the field. Drivers like Dale Earnhardt. Drivers like Bobby and Terry Labonte. Drivers like Mark Martin, who had been around for a long time. And then you had new drivers who were coming along, like Dale Earnhardt Jr., like Matt Kenseth.

And then like Jeff Gordon. The Daytona 500 had a very special meaning for Dale Earnhardt. And he always loved this race more than any other.

He chased it for many, many years. On this day, he was preparing to run the race when NASCAR was experiencing a seismic change. The significance was Fox Sports had just begun broadcasting NASCAR.

This was going to be their first race. And the reason why this was significant was it marked NASCAR's elevation into a higher level of American sports. For many, many years beforehand, NASCAR had been spread out over as many as seven broadcast networks.

You had to check every single weekend to figure out where the race was going to be, what channel it was going to be on. Fox comes in and off of about ten years' worth of success broadcasting the NFL, they said, You know what? We're going to broadcast NASCAR now. We're going to make NASCAR huge. And what they did was, in their characteristic Fox way, made it into an event, made it into a spectacle.

And at the center of that spectacle was Dale Earnhardt. Can you win your second 500 today? Well, we got a good shot at it, got a good race car.

A little wind today. A little exciting. I think it's going to be exciting racing. Going to see something you probably had never seen on Fox. He was going to be the star for Fox going forward. They were going to have him have the entire season centered on him. They were going to be bringing Dale Earnhardt into the Fox NFL studios later that year. They had an entire plan, and this was legitimizing NASCAR in the eyes of the world. It had been thought of as a southern hillbilly sport, a bunch of rednecks running around in circles. And this was a sign that the entire country was going to be taking NASCAR more seriously.

So, it had all of the trappings, all of the celebration, all of the build-up that you would expect with a major Fox event. Every driver dreams of winning the Daytona 500. Michael Waltrip dreams just of winning. This race.

Any race. The Daytona 500 is 200 laps of racing on a two and a half mile track, hence the 500 in the race's name. And for many of those 200 laps, you have drivers who are kind of jockeying for position. It's one of the two biggest tracks on the NASCAR circuit, and it's a super speedway, which means drivers can go all out, hammer down, mash the pedal to the floor, and never let up all the way around the track. Come on, buddy.

You got two to go. What that also means is that the wrecks can be a lot more devastating, can be a lot more catastrophic. It's a high-speed chess match, except that in this case, the chess pieces often fly into the air. And you had that on lap 175, when Robbie Gordon hit the back of Ward Burton's car. Ward Burton runs into Tony Stewart, and Tony Stewart's car flips almost vertical with the car pointing straight up and down. Now, the sad irony of this is that the car narrowly misses Dale Earnhardt's number three. If Stewart had come down on Earnhardt's car, if he clipped it, if he caused a little bit of damage, who knows how the rest of the day would have turned out. In the end, what happened was in order to clean up this wreck, they stopped the race.

They prepare for the final few laps of the race. And at this point, what we have is Dale Earnhardt himself up at the front of the pack alongside Michael Waltrip and Dale Earnhardt Jr. These are two drivers who are the drivers for Dale Earnhardt's own team. So Earnhardt had his own interests at heart, but he also had these two drivers to look out for as well. And so as the final laps of the race wound down, it became apparent that what Earnhardt was doing was setting up these two drivers to win. They were at the front of the field, Michael Waltrip in first, Dale Jr. in second, Dale Sr. in third. And what Dale Sr. was doing was playing defense.

He was, as the old saying goes, driving three wide all by himself. He was trying to hold off the entire rest of the field to give his two drivers a chance to win. Now in the final turn of the 2001 Daytona 500, what happened was it got to be too much. Dale Sr. gets turned into the wall by a Sterling Marlins car, drives straight into the wall, and what happens then is that the car, Dale Sr.'s car, hits the wall at an angle at a sharp impact and then rolls back down the hill. Now seeing a wreck at the end of the Daytona 500 is not all that uncommon. It happens an awful lot as drivers are trying to jockey into position for that final run at the checkered flag.

What happened in this case was Dale Sr.'s car drifts back down into the infield and then nothing. When we come back, more of the remarkable story of Dale Earnhardt's life here on Our American Stories. Folks, if you love the stories we tell about this great country and especially the stories of America's rich past, know that all of our stories about American history are brought to us by the great folks at Hillsdale College, a place where students study all the things that are beautiful in life and all the things that are good in life. And if you can't get to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you with their free and terrific online courses.

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Let's get back to the story. Take Sunset Road off Interstate 77 just north of Charlotte. Cruise past the local McDonald's, Arby's and other classic symbols of Americana. Turn on Statesville Road and drive past the exhibit halls of the Metrolina Trade Show Expo, home of dusty rows of discount DVDs and decades-old Beanie Babies. Park in the open field near the rusty fence that encloses something large beyond.

From this distance, you can't quite tell what. There's a bouquet of plastic flowers jammed into the chain-link fence, a jarring splash of brilliant purple amid rust and ruin. The flowers mark the entry to the long-defunct Metrolina Speedway, a place every bit as legendary here as old Ebbets Field in Brooklyn. The chains that held the fence together lie on the ground, their locks beside them.

If you like, you can walk right in. A short, root-cracked paved road leads up to the top of the grandstands. The sign that used to arc over this walkway, Welcome to Metrolina Speedway, the I as Stylized Number One, is long gone. As are the red and white painted ticket booth at the base of the hill and the press box atop the grandstand. All that's left now are those grandstands, giant steps of painted concrete looking out on emptiness. Graffiti-covered walls circumscribe the track's half-mile oval. Weeds and time have claimed it all. Look a little closer, though.

Use a little imagination. Once, two dozen cars wheeled through these turns, spitting red Carolina clay into the exhaust and oil-scented air, the sound of their engines so loud it was just one unified, bone-rumbling hum. In these stands, families cheered on sons and brothers and fathers, and on rare occasions, daughters, who threw themselves hard into the turns, and often hard into the walls, where something they labored over for days, months, even years, could be reduced to scrap in moments.

Imagine the desperation of crews trying to coax life out of a dead engine. Imagine the exultation of drivers using wits, cunning, brains, and balls to triumph over a field of sons of just every bit as crafty as they were. The races often ran on Saturday night, yes, but what happened here was as holy and sanctified as anything you'd experience the next morning. The bracelet track is the place where family bonds were forged, broken, and then forged even stronger.

This once-proud arena is the place where the most famous story in racing first hit red line speed. A few miles up the road stands Kannapolis, North Carolina, a small town about 30 miles away from Charlotte. This is a company town built to house the workers who worked at the Cannon Mills. People who lived there worked in the mill morning, noon, and night.

Every day except Sunday the mill would run, and every day except Sunday the workers would leave their houses, work at the mill for their shift, and return home. It was a very programmed and defined existence, and this is exactly where the legend of Dale Earnhardt was born. Kannapolis was the home of Ralph Earnhardt, who was born in 1928 and dropped out of school in sixth grade to work in the Cannon Mills. He was expected to live his entire life the way that so many of his neighbors did.

He would grow up, go to school for a time, work in the mills, raise a family, and keep on working until he retired. But Ralph Earnhardt was built as something different than most mill workers. Ralph Earnhardt had a need and a desire to race. He had a talent for it, and he nurtured it, and he raced as much as he possibly could while doing mill work at the same time. He found the mill work to be unnecessarily confining, and he found the freedom of racing to be what brought him happiness. In 1953, after having spent years working full time and then racing in his off hours, he decided, I'm going to give racing full time a try. He told his wife, Martha, this.

She was horrified. They had a bunch of children there. They had five children, including young Dale, who was born in 1951. And yet, what Ralph did was managed to turn himself into a single person enterprise responsible for every single part of the racing machine, from driving the car in races to getting the car to and from races to repairing it during the week when he wasn't racing. And he managed to pull it off. He managed to run an entire racing operation for many, many years. And as he did, he built himself into one of the most significant figures in early NASCAR history. When Ralph Earnhardt was racing, it was a very different landscape than what we see today or even what Dale Earnhardt saw in his day. There was a lot of racing on dirt, there was a lot of racing on concrete, but there wasn't a whole lot of organization to either of them. A lot of drivers learned their racing style through bootlegging.

You learn to drive a car pretty quickly and pretty well when you're running from the law. And they learned how to handle a car, they learned how to set up a car, they learned how to wheel a car in a way that even today's drivers would have trouble matching. When Ralph Earnhardt made the decision to go full time into racing, he made the promise to his wife, Martha, that the children would not starve, that they wouldn't go hungry, that they wouldn't lose their house.

And having that always burning behind him made him that much more responsible and that much more driven to do everything possible to win. The way that NASCAR works now, even the last place finisher gets a paycheck. But at the time when Ralph Earnhardt was racing in all these little unsanctioned events all over North Carolina and all over the South, if you finished much further below second, you didn't get anything.

And worse, you could get your car wrecked and you could come out in the hole by several hundred or even thousand dollars if things didn't work out that way. That was a way for you to, it certainly focused your interest and your desire and your willpower in terms of racing if you knew that you were racing for your family's groceries that week. One of the innovations that Ralph Earnhardt brought to racing was something called tire stagger. And what this is, is a way for a driver to have his tires last longer and provide better grip. You've got to have strong tires, you've got to have tires that will hold you onto the track. And Ralph Earnhardt figured out a little bit of geometry in the sense that if you think of a car going in a straight line, then the tires are going to wear equally. But if you think of a car going around a turn, going around a left hand turn, then the left side tires are going to be traveling a shorter distance than the right side tires.

This means the right side tires are going to blow out quicker because there's more mileage being put on them over the course of a race. Ralph Earnhardt figured this out and started putting larger tires on the outside, therefore there was more tread to be worn off as they were driving around. He was able, using this, to outlast his competitors, to stay tight on a track when many of them couldn't. And he was able to use this technique to prolong the life of his tires, to prolong the life of his cars, and basically keep himself off the wall. He figured this out with a sixth grade education.

Obviously it's been refined to a much, much greater degree at this point. But Ralph was one of the first people to figure this out and use this in a race to start winning races and bringing home that money. Dale Earnhardt was born in 1951 and he grew up in kind of a perfect encapsulation of a certain kind of Americana. He played cowboys and Indians in the yard as a kid.

He played with cap guns. He would race go-carts and he would play in the afternoons and his mom would call him home for supper. So it was the sort of idyllic upbringing that really laid the foundation for him.

But along with that, he had the kind of classic American silent, reserved father who would not often give a lot of praise. Both because that was Ralph Earnhardt's personality and because he didn't see the need in it. He focused more on what was right in front of him and what was in front of him was trying to win a race. Dale Earnhardt grew up idolizing his father. Dale adored Ralph.

Dale worshipped Ralph. And he spent hours and hours out in the garage paying attention to what his father was doing, trying to learn from his father, trying to understand what it was that his father was doing under the hoods of all these cars. Dale Earnhardt decided to race for the same reason that his father had. He was good at it and it kept him out of the mill. And we've been listening to Jay Busby tell one heck of a story about Dale Earnhardt and his father. And we learned that his father had worked at the local mill in Kannapolis, North Carolina, where men, well, went to school for a time and then just went to the mill and worked till they retired. And there's nothing wrong in that.

There's honor and dignity in all work. But his father wanted something more and discovered a passion for racing. And the son would learn all about this passion and joy and freedom, watching his father do it every day in the garage and at the track.

When we come back, more of this remarkable story, a father son story, among many other things, here on Our American Stories. From football playoffs to basketball madness, TCL Roku TVs are the best way to stream your favorite live sports with all the biggest sports channels, a sports zone with all available games in one place and apps like iHeartRadio, with sports podcasts such as The Herd with Colin Cowherd. Cheering on your favorite team has never been easier. A big screen TCL Roku TV offers premium picture and sound quality, so you'll feel like you're right in the action. Find the perfect TCL Roku TV for you today at go dot TCL dot com slash TCL Roku TV. Thirty seven thousand twenty five one. These are the three numbers to remember to get the visibility and control you need to make the right business decisions instantly. Thirty seven thousand. That's the number of businesses which have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle. NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system streamlining accounting, financial management, inventory, HR and more. Twenty five. NetSuite turns twenty five this year. That's twenty five years of helping businesses do more with less. Close their books in days, not weeks, and drive down expenses. One, because your business is one of a kind. So you get a customized solution for all of your KPIs in one efficient system with one source of truth. Manage risk, get reliable forecasts and improve margins.

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Visit Apple Vacations dot com or call your local travel adviser to get started. And we return to our American stories and our story on Dale Earnhardt with Jay Busby, a lead writer at Yahoo! Sports and author of Earnhardt Nation.

Go to Amazon or the usual suspects and pick this book up. You won't put it down. When we last left off, Jay was talking about Dale Earnhardt's dad, Ralph, who decided to quit his mill job in the 1950s to go full time into racing. And my goodness, his wife.

Well, she was not pleased and could not have been pleased with that decision. Young Dale would follow in his dad's footsteps. Let's return to the story. Dale Earnhardt grew up idolizing his father and grew up wanting to be like Ralph, so much so that he, too, decided to quit school. He actually lasted three more grades longer than Ralph did. Dale quit in ninth, whereas Ralph had quit in sixth. It frustrated his parents to no end that Dale quit school, but they couldn't really say anything because Ralph had done the same thing and had been successful. Dale Earnhardt decided to race for the same reason that his father had. He was good at it and it kept him out of the mill. He understood that if he kept on going in the life that he was in, that he was going to be headed to a life of millwork. And he didn't want that.

He had he believed that he had the talent. He had the genetics and he had the willpower to get into a car and to start winning races and bringing home money like his father did. His very first car was an old, beat up 1956 Ford Victoria that was owned by his neighbors. And the irony of this is that the first car that Dale Earnhardt drove was pink. The Big Bad Intimidator with his future black number three car drove a pink car for the first time, largely because of a painting accident.

They thought that they were going to be painting it a sleek purple color. And once the paint dried, it turned into the pink of an uncooked steak. So his very first car was pink, but he drove it well enough to to get some financial backing to keep driving forward and to convince himself that he did belong in a race car and not necessarily working at a mill for the rest of his life. The legend was that Ralph Earnhardt died in his garage working on his car, but the truth is a little more mundane, but just as sad. He died at his kitchen table working on a carburetor in September 1973. He was just 45 years old, but he had lived a hard, hard life as a smoker.

He'd inhaled a whole lot of exhaust. He had lived with the stress of racing every single weekend to to provide for his family and it caught up to him sadly. And he died a young man and it devastated Dale. Dale didn't know what to do. He locked up his father's garage.

He didn't even touch anything within it. All the cars and the trophies. He sold his father's dogs. All of it was incredibly damaging and devastating to young Dale and it took him many, many years to get not even to get over it, but to be able to reconcile himself to his father's memory and start building his own life. Dale was living basically the life of a high school dropout.

He was working at an auto parts store. He was racing, but he was also making choices that he probably wouldn't have made later in life if he were an older man. He got married very young. He had a child very young and he got divorced for the first time very young. He spent most of his 20s without even seeing his first child. He began a second time and then had two young kids when he was still in his 20s.

Two more kids, I should say. And this is the point in Dale Earnhardt's life where life could have gone two very different ways. He could have ended up back in the mills. He could have ended up being just basically a guy who raced a couple times on the weekends and then gave up that silliness and went on and got himself a real job. But he decided to stick with the racing and it cost him a lot. It cost him his second marriage and it cost him his two children who went to live with their mother because he was not able to care for them in the way that he needed to to be a proper father. He was racing all the time.

He was enjoying life all the time. He was partying all the time and it just was not a good fit. By the late 1970s, Dale Earnhardt was a mess, quite frankly. He was a single guy living in a small apartment with a friend of his. He would wake up every morning at 6.30 to the sound of Lynyrd Skynyrd's Give Me Back My Bullets. That was his motivational song. He was a guy who had the hounds at his tail.

He was twice divorced. He had three kids and he had no real options other than racing his way out of poverty, racing his way out of a 9 to 5 clock punching life. And it wasn't until his ex-father-in-law of all people, a gentleman named Robert G, helped him find his way and figure out how he could make the talent that he had as a driver pay off. The problem was that Earnhardt was so aggressive, he tended to wreck everybody's equipment. He was really good, but he figured that the fastest way to the finish line wasn't around his competitors, it was through them. And more often than not, while he would win a lot of races, he would also wreck a lot of cars along the way. He was a very, very expensive driver to invest in and that made it difficult. Dale Earnhardt would drive at dirt tracks without a whole lot of regard for common sense or for anyone driving around him or for his own safety. One night at a dirt track, it could have been any dirt track, the exact name is lost to history, he was running in fourth place and the top three finishes paid. He knew that finishing third place would be enough to put food on his family's table and so he needed to get there. So in order to get there, he drove right on through a driver who went by the nickname of Stick Elliott.

This was a guy who had a bit of notoriety. He had allegedly taken Elvis Presley for a drive around Charlotte Motor Speedway and made the king throw up. So he had a little bit of cachet and here's young Dale Earnhardt just knocking him out of the way to go and get third place in this race. So after the race, a whole bunch of Stick Elliott's men were looking for Earnhardt. Earnhardt wheels out of the track in a hurry. The next week, Stick Elliott himself comes up to Earnhardt. Earnhardt's thinking, oh boy, this is going to be, this is going to end badly. Elliott walks up, sticks out his hand and says, you know son, you might just make a driver yet. The implication being of course that while Earnhardt didn't yet have the skill to be a driver, he had the guts and he had the spine to be a driver and that was going to be enough to get him going a little bit faster and a little bit further down the road. And so it took a number of people. It was Robert G. It was a gentleman named Suitcase Jake Elder who was a crew chief.

It was an owner by the name of Rod Osterlund. All of these men and many others saw some promise in Dale and they said, you've got this raw talent, we just need to figure a way to get you to harness it and point it in the right direction. So what they did over the course of the late 70s was take this lump of angry and intimidating clay and mold it into a driver who was able to go and run at a reasonable pace until he needed to run wide open. He was able to drive in a way that could get him to the front of the pack without wrecking the pack as he did so. And once Earnhardt figured out how to actually drive, then he started to take off. Dale made an application to race in NASCAR in 1975 and looking at it now, it's basically like a country music song. He had three children, Kerry, Kelly and Dale Jr. and he misspelled two of his kids' names. And then beside what happened in first race, he wrote finish 10th and beside ambition other than racing, he wrote none.

That was it. That was Dale Earnhardt right there. And what a story you're hearing.

The fact that the Intimidator's first car was pink, well, that's good enough for me as a takeaway and a water cooler moment. But my goodness, what he went through, the struggles, the divorces, choosing in the end his career over anything, anything. Ambition other than racing, none, none. And so often there's a price to pay for these things. And the price he paid was, my goodness, living as a single guy, alienated, angry until a few men parked into his life and helped mentor him and get his act together to become the talent he'd become. The story of Dale Earnhardt continued here on Our American Story. From football playoffs to basketball madness, TCL Roku TVs are the best way to stream your favorite live sports with all the biggest sports channels, a sports zone with all available games in one place and apps like iHeartRadio, with sports podcasts such as The Herd with Colin Cowherd. Cheering on your favorite team has never been easier. A big screen TCL Roku TV offers premium picture and sound quality, so you'll feel like you're right in the action. Find the perfect TCL.