Despite age, Petty has no plans to leave the track,
At 80, Richard Petty still a NASCAR giant
Richard Petty heard someone shout for the King to stop as his golf cart sped past rows of RVs parked in the Pocono Raceway infield.
Petty couldn’t ask his driver to hit the brakes for one fan, not with a hundred or more waiting in line for him outside the track. All were eager for a greeting and a bit of his perfect penmanship — with that looping script in the R and P — on a piece of memorabilia, a signature as much a part of his persona as his feathered cowboy hats, dark glasses and cowboy boots.
“Finally, I’m going to meet the man,” said 52-year-old Steve Millett of Syracuse, N.Y. “It’s been 44 years of being a fan.”
Millett bought a ticket for just his third NASCAR race simply because he wanted to meet the King. Millett packed his camper for the three-hour drive, slipped on a Petty T-shirt and STP hat, then had Petty sign the hood of a model 1971 Dodge Charger. Millet just wanted to thank Petty for a lifetime of memories.
Most of the fans didn’t, or couldn’t, remember Petty from his days as the greatest stock car driver alive. Kids dressed in Dinoco blue shirts smiled as parents pointed and said, “Yes, that’s the King. You know, from ‘Cars’?” The rest waited because Dad was a fan — or maybe because Grandpa told them about the time he was at Pocono when Petty broke his neck in an accident.
Petty, who had six colored Sharpies and a can of Skoal in his pocket, never stopped smiling and shook hands for every selfie and snapshot. Yes, the bluehairs and graybeards had old-school actual cameras for their audience with the King, perfect for a race car owner who keeps tabs of his meetand-greets on a paper schedule. One by one, they trudged to the front with a variation of the stories Petty has heard on repeat for nearly 60 years.
“It pays the bills,” Petty said. “I’m just an old guy walking around, hasn’t been in a race car in 25 years and people still want an autograph or a picture. I guess it’s because I’m that old.”
Petty waved goodbye after an hour and grabbed a seat on the cart. On the way back to his motorhome, he directed his driver back to the area where he remembered that fan calling for him. Richard Keller had devoted a shrine to Petty around his RV and was elated when the Hall of Fame driver signed his name next to a Tony Stewart banner on the trailer wall.
The King is synonymous with NASCAR, and he showed no inclination of retiring from public life anytime soon as he approached his 80th birthday, which was Sunday. Few sports figures can rival Petty in popularity and accessibility, and the calls for the King never cease at tracks around the country.
“I just wonder if my name is Joe what they would have called me,” Petty said. “King Joe don’t go over too good.”
Just keep going
Richard Lee Petty has no sage wisdom on how to live to 80.
Still strikingly slender, he walks with a full, healthy stride around the garage, belying the physical anguish from a 35-year career riddled with injuries. Petty’s final two of his seven Daytona 500 victories — 1979 and 1981 — both came after operations to remove part of his stomach after serious ulcer problems. He had his gallbladder removed between the 1985 and 1986 seasons.
Concussions? Sure, Petty suffered from a bunch of those. But who kept count back in the day, when drivers hit 200 mph wearing not much more protective gear than a helmet (with no face shield) and a seat belt? Petty broke a leg, his fingers, his knees. He broke his neck in 1980 at Pocono when the No. 43 car careered up a wall and was eventually struck on the driver’s side by another car. When Petty went to the hospital, the doctor looked at the X-rays and asked in amazement: “When did you break your neck before?”
Petty laughed as he recalled the exam.
He shrugged. Who knows? There was the broken left arm and shoulder (seen dangling from the window in a horrific 1970 crash at Darlington Raceway) that caused him to pass out from pain and forced him to miss starts for the only time his career. In 1988, at the age of 51, Petty was involved in a horrifying crash during the Daytona 500. His car hit the wall, flew into the air and barrel-rolled violently before it smashed the track and slid back into the wall.
“When things happen, they happen so fast,” Petty said, “you haven’t got time to get scared.”
If Petty feels major pains or has bouts of memory loss from a lifetime of jarring hits, he hides it well. Tracks have feted him all year, and he has shown up for every Q&A session and birthday bash.
“All my joints is working,” Petty said. “All the broken bones has healed back up.”
Petty still dips tobacco. Who’s going to tell him to quit? He enjoys his wine (merlot) and his steaks (rare) as red as they come. He snacks daily on popcorn but eschews coffee. The King is known to even sneak a pinch of raw meat off a hamburger right before it hits the grill.
Like many in his generation, he has no use for a cellphone. And he sleeps. A lot. Petty is fresh and focused for his fans because he never skips a chance at a nap.
The NASCAR circus stretches from early February to late November with few days off in one of the more grueling schedules in sports. Plane. Race. Plane. Garage. Countless appearances for sponsors, who all want a piece of Petty. He has never slowed down — not even in the face of tragedy — and has no plans to ease up with Richard Petty Motorsports boasting only a handful of checkered flags.
Kyle Petty, his 57-year-old son and former driver, said racing is life for his father.
“If he couldn’t go to the race track, he would just sit down and wither away,” Kyle said. “I honestly believe that until the day they put him in the ground, he’s going to be at a race track somewhere.”
But the King wants to get the No. 43 car competitive again.
Wayne Gretzky flopped coaching the Phoenix Coyotes. Magic Johnson lasted 16 games as coach of the Los Angeles Lakers. Ted Williams lost 100 games his last year managing the Washington Senators. The greatest in the game can’t always find triumph calling the shots.
Petty has never rekindled the dominant days in retirement running RPM that came so easily behind the wheel. He made just $7.5 million in his racing career and doesn’t have the funding to compete with heavyweights Roger Penske, Rick Hendrick or Joe Gibbs. Petty’s teams failed to win a race from 1999 to 2009, and his cars have reached victory lane just three times this decade.
“I’ve made a bad car owner,” Petty said. “We haven’t won but five or six races in 30 years. So that means somewhere down the line I didn’t have the deal of being able to put the team together and let them run the show. The combinations have never gelled like what you would think they would be. It’s not that you tell the driver how to drive or what needs to be done, but the cars are so much different than when I was running them that I can’t even suggest what to do with the race car.”
Petty’s difficulty with straightening out his team pale compared with the tragedies over the years. He was drag racing in 1965 when his car veered off track and into the crowd, killing an 8-year-old boy. Petty’s brother-in-law, 20-year-old Randy Owens, worked as part of his crew and was killed in the pits during a freak 1975 accident. Adam Petty, Kyle’s son and a fourth-generation Petty driver, was killed in 2000 during practice at New Hampshire.
“It’s not been all glory,” Richard said. “We’ve had some really, really bad, low times. But you can’t live yesterday over again. So you say, what can we do coming up? The living’s got to go on. My living has got to go on. I don’t know how you do it, you just do it.”
Petty has forged ahead alone since his wife, Lynda, died of cancer in 2004. The Pettys were married for 55 years and had children Kyle, Lisa, Rebecca and Sharon. His days at the track help him cope with loneliness as the days spent at the family retreat in Wyoming have dwindled.
“He’s a lot closer with my sisters now,” Kyle said. “A lot more caring, a lot more open, a lot more emotional.”
A life of racing
Saturday night’s Coke Zero 400 at Daytona International Speedway was NASCAR’s 2,514th Cup Series race. Petty was just a kid at the first one and figures he hasn’t missed many more than 200 races over the years.
His daddy, Lee, was a three-time champion and knocked Richard (in his first race) out of the way and wrecked him to win a $575 purse in Toronto. The racing gene was passed on to 16-yearold grandson Thad Moffitt, who races in ARCA and has dreams of a NASCAR ride.
Petty’s family tree stretches across some 69 years of NASCAR history.
In 1,184 starts, Petty had a record 200 wins, 157 second-place finishes, 712 top10 finishes and 123 pole positions. He won series championships in 1964, 1967, 1971, 1972, 1974, 1975 and 1979, a total matched by Dale Earnhardt and Jimmie Johnson.
This weekend at Daytona, the track had Petty’s 1974 Daytona 500-winning Dodge Charger on display and a wall for fans to write him messages. Drivers taped special greetings that were played on the big screen all weekend, and the King was introduced during ceremonies before the race.
Petty’s 200th victory came on July 4, 1984, at Daytona in the Firecracker 400. It was a gala day, with President Ronald Reagan on hand to congratulate Petty, perhaps his finest hour in a career stuffed with celebrations.
“I ran 1,100 of them. How do you pick one?” he said. “But the magic one was the 200th one, though … to win your 200th race in front of the president of the United States, on the last green-flag lap — I always told him he put us on the front page and we put him in the sports page. Nobody would believe something like that would happen. But it happened to us.”
Because he didn’t have a race to attend Sunday, Petty was set to spend his birthday at his North Carolina home with family. Kyle said they planned to grill hot dogs, hamburgers and steaks (rare, of course).
“This is going to be his real birthday,” Kyle said, “and it’s going to be the most low-key event of his entire year.”
No appearances, no autographs, no interviews.
And if he felt 80 before he got there, it was hard for Petty to say.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I ain’t never been this old.”
“It pays the bills. I’m just an old guy walking around, hasn’t been in a race car in 25 years and people still want an autograph or a picture. I guess it’s because I’m that old.”
— RICHARD PETTY