Hate still follows Wallace
It’s been nearly 16 months since Bubba Wallace was waiting out a rainstorm in his motorhome in the Talladega Superspeedway infield when NASCAR informed its only full-time Black driver that a noose had been found in his garage stall.
When the FBI later ruled that the noose had been fashioned to the end of a garage door pull during NASCAR’S visit to Talladega nine months earlier, making it mere coincidence that Wallace was assigned that stall, he was subjected to a barrage of online vitriol that spread to the grandstands at several tracks in the aftermath.
Wallace is used to being booed by now, and on the biggest day of his professional career the trolls came for him again when he darted to the front of the field to win Monday’s rain-shortened, rescheduled race at Talladega.
It was rigged, many cried, saying NASCAR called the race only because it would benefit Wallace. That claim was one of the gentler barbs directed at Wallace, the first Black driver since Wendell Scott in 1963 to win at the top level of the sport.
Not even in this pinnacle moment could Wallace escape the doubters who somehow believe he cooked up the noose as a hoax in June 2020 to garner support during the nationwide racial reckoning following the death of George Floyd.
Wallace was not a victim of a hate crime, but the hate has followed him since he became vocal in matters of social justice and successfully called on NASCAR to ban the Confederate flag at its events.
Denny Hamlin, a fellow driver and now Wallace’s boss as coowner along with Michael Jordan of the 23XI Racing team, encouraged Wallace to get off social media for his own mental health.
“People just automatically dislike me because I hired Bubba Wallace,” said Hamlin, a first-year team owner who also scoffed at the notion the race was fixed.
“I spend way too much money and these teams spend too much money to fix it,” he said. “Any time there’s unique circumstances, it’s fixed. When a team is close to winning a football game, they fumble on the one yard line, it’s fixed. It’s just (criticism from) someone that’s having a bad day.”
Wallace said after Monday’s race he had followed Hamlin’s advice several months ago and stopped reading social media.
“It’s helped out a ton. I would go and read the comments (and) after a bad race I would become one of those haters that doesn’t know anything. I would become one of them. Just start telling myself a bunch of dark thoughts,” Wallace said. “In high school, I was always worried about what other people thought of me. I finally let that go.
“I’m not going to be able to please everybody. Doesn’t matter if I won by a thousand laps or won a rain-shortened race, not everybody is going to be happy with it,” he said. “That’s OK because I know one person that is happy and that’s me because I’m a winner and they’re not.”
There’s no telling what this victory, the first for Wallace in the Cup Series in 143 starts spanning four seasons, will do for his own confidence. Wallace has admitted to previous bouts of depression and the day before the rescheduled Talladega race Hamlin revealed that teaching Wallace “emotional regulation” will play a pivotal role in Wallace’s development.
“Dealing with adversity, and these are things that he’d probably tell you, it’s just getting too high, too low, having super high expectations and when things don’t go perfectly as planned, how do you respond?” Hamlin said. “Every driver goes through some sort of adversity through the course of a race and how you respond to that is what dictates usually how you finish. I just think he needs to learn that emotional regulation because he wants it really, really bad.”
Little did Hamlin know he’d be celebrating with his driver the very next day in the first victory for 23XI Racing.
Wallace is working through the challenges that come from being Black in a predominately white sport with a past rooted in the Deep South.
“It’s my family pushing me and knowing that as I’m being the realistic — sometimes pessimistic — person, they hold the optimism for me and help me show back up at the racetrack with a good mindset.”