His memory looms large
Remembering ‘The Intimidator’ 20 years after his death at the Daytona 500
Twenty years later, my most vivid memory of that day is glancing to my immediate left in the press box and seeing the somber look on Orlando Sentinel colleague Ed Hinton’s face.
Hinton, then the Sentinel’s iconic racing writer, simply shook his head and said three words, “This ain’t good.”
It would be a couple of hours before NASCAR made the official announcement that the legendary Dale Earnhardt had died when he slammed head-on into the wall on the final lap of the Daytona 500, but Hinton already knew because he had been covering death for decades.
Maybe Eddie knew when he saw NASCAR track officials immediately working to obscure the view of Earnhardt’s wrecked car by draping a tarp over it.
Or maybe he knew even before that when he saw the ashen look on fellow racer Kenny Schrader’s face. Schrader was also involved in that final-lap crash and his car came to rest on the infield grass next to Earnhardt’s. Schrader got
out of his car to go commiserate with Earnhardt and expected to see “The Intimidator” fuming mad after the wreck. Instead, he looked in the window and saw a dead man covered in blood slumped over the steering wheel. He gestured frantically for the safety crews.
Don McLean, in his iconic song American Pie, sang about the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly and referred to it as “The day the music died.” As we get ready for the Daytona 500 on Sunday 20 years after Earnhardt’s death, I have many memories of what I call “The day the thunder died.”
In fact, I remember writing from the press box that night on Feb. 18, 2001:
”The Days of Thunder turned to a night of ghastly stillness.
The Great American Race turned into the Great American Wake.
The roar of the engines melted into sobbing.
Silent sobbing. Gentlemen, start your tear ducts.
Dale Earnhardt is dead.”
I remember being so excited before the race because of all the hype and hoopla that Fox was giving its inaugural broadcast of a NASCAR event.
I remember thinking how miraculous it was with 25 laps to go that Tony Stewart could walk away from a crash that looked much more serious than Earnhardt’s — a wreck in which Stewart’s car slammed into the wall, got hit, went airborne, flipped, pirouetted, barrel-rolled, caught on fire and landed on the roof of another car. Later, we would find out that Stewart perhaps avoided the same fatal injury as Earnhardt because Stewart’s head thankfully slammed into his steering wheel, stopping his neck from hyperextending so violently that it destroyed nerves, severed arteries and killed instantly.
I remember the crowd roaring when Earnhardt wrecked; Earnhardt fans angry at their hero’s bad luck and Earnhardt haters relishing his misfortune. And that was the power of Dale Earnhardt. Never before had we seen a sport’s greatest athlete be simultaneously so unifying and polarizing. Earnhardt was both hero and villain, revered and reviled, loved and hated at the same time.
I remember walking out of the press box late that night and fans camped out in the infield, holding vigils, shedding tears, sharing memories. Jessie Lynch, a Jeff Gordon fan from Atlanta, stood with his buddies on that black and moonless Sunday night in Daytona Beach and tried to explain the magic of Earnhardt. “I cheered when he crashed,” said Lynch, draining the last of a cooler-full of cheap beer. “I cried when he died. I love Jeff Gordon, but I think I loved hating Dale Earnhardt more. This sport will never be the same.”
I remember getting in my car and driving out of the track when the Jimmy Buffett song Incommunicado came on the radio.
“Now on the day that John Wayne died,
I found myself on the Continental Divide.
Tell me where do I go from here, Think I’ll ride into Leadville and have a few beers.
But now he’s incommunicado, Leavin’ such a hole in a world that believed,
That a life with such bravado, Was takin’ the right way home.” That song stuck with me and the next day I wrote, “Dale Earnhardt was like John Wayne on a 3,000-pound steel horse, spurs sparkling, guns blazing, kicking up grass and taking names. Much of his appeal to the male-dominated NASCAR crowd is that he embodied everything they secretly wanted to be.”
I remember being at the memorial service for Earnhardt in Charlotte four days later and seeing a grim-faced Jeff Gordon sitting in one of the pews. I wondered why Gordon was one of only a few drivers that attended the service and learned then that historically many racers — including Earnhardt himself — avoided funerals because it brings to mind their own mortality and reminds them of what the English racer Jackie Stewart once said, “In my line of work, the fastest are too often listed among the deadest.”
It was wet and dreary outside of the memorial service that day when many soggy, shivering fans stood outside the invitation-only ceremony to pay their respects.
“I think this weather is God’s way of saying the world is a cold and lonely place without Dale Earnhardt,” said one fan, Terry Wright, who made the trek from Trenton, N.J.
I remember going to the race in Rockingham, N.C., the week after Dale died and wondering how in the hell these brave men could actually get back into a race car when the sport’s most indelible, indestructible figure had just passed away.
“We’re a different breed,” driver Kenny Wallace said the day before the race. “We’re like F-18 fighter pilots. We know we’re going into combat. We know we could die. And we still get in the car.”
Said Schrader, who days earlier was the first to see Earnhardt dead in his car: “Racing is what we do to heal.”
I remember visiting my own hometown of Interlachen — a no-stoplight speck on the map 25 miles east of Gainesville — a year after Earnhardt died to do a story on a goat named Lil Dale. It was a 4-month-old Nubian female goat who a became living, breathing, bleating NASCAR shrine because of a distinct birthmark. The goat was born with a large white “3” perfectly etched into its otherwise brown fur. That was on the right side. And, eerily, on her left side was a discernible image of a ghost.
Hundreds of NASCAR fans made the pilgrimage to this little farm in Interlachen to pay homage to their holy goat.
“They literally get tears in their eyes,” Jerry Pierson, the owner of the goat, told me. “It’s like a religious experience for some of them.”
I remember years later talking to Michael Waltrip, who outdueled Dale Earnhardt Jr. to win that fateful Daytona 500 in 2001. Waltrip and Dale Jr. both were driving for Dale Sr.’s up-and-coming DEI (Dale Earnhardt Enterprises) race team and finished 1-2 in the 500. Waltrip had been hired by Earnhardt Sr. to drive for DEI despite having gone an embarrassing 462 races without a single victory.
Waltrip celebrated raucously in victory lane as he kept waiting ... and waiting ... and waiting for Earnhardt to show up and celebrate with him. He so desperately wanted to see the look of validation on Dale Earnhardt’s face.
“More than money, more than the trophy, I just wanted him to know that he was right for believing in me,” Waltrip said.
Of course, Dale Earnhardt never showed up in victory lane.
“It was a quarter-mile away from being maybe the best Daytona 500 ever,” Waltrip said. “It was an amazing race that had everything — an upset winner and Dale battling it out at the end. Now it’s the worst Daytona 500 ever, and I’m the winner of that race. I live with that.”
Mostly, as a journalist, I can remember never being more proud of newspaper that I worked for than I was of the Orlando Sentinel 20 years ago and still today. On the week leading up to the 2001 Daytona 500, the Sentinel completed its six-month investigation into NASCAR’s shoddy safety record with a series of stories titled: “NASCAR Idles While Drivers Die.”
NASCAR officials kicked and screamed and refuted the investigative stories written by Sentinel writers Hinton, Jim Leusner and Henry Pierson Curtis detailing how NASCAR could have prevented three deaths in the previous nine months to drivers such as Adam Petty, Kenny Irwin and Tony Roper.
The stories detailed how those three deaths and most racing deaths occur because of basal skull fractures and similar injuries caused by the violent, whipping head movement during high-speed crashes. If only NASCAR would mandate a headand-neck restraining apparatus known as the HANS Device that had been invented 20 years earlier.
Ironically, during the Sentinel investigation Earnhardt himself said of the HANS Device, “I ain’t wearing that damn noose.”
If he had, he likely would have survived.
But after Earnhardt died, racing officials stopped refuting the Sentinel investigation and finally started getting serious about safety.
NASCAR shifted into high gear, issued directives, made the HANS Device mandatory and launched its first-ever high-tech research effort to produce safer cars and tracks.
And here we are 20 years later and not a single driver in NASCAR’s top three national series has died since Earnhardt.
I still remember that day back then when Ed Hinton looked at me, shook his head and said, “This ain’t good.”
Yeah, Eddie, but at least something good — something very good — happened because of it.