KING TURNS 80
Richard Petty heard someone shout for the King to stop as his golf cart sped past rows of RVs parked at 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 has been 44 years of being a fan.”
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. Children smiled as parents pointed and said, yes, that’s the King. You know, from “Cars”?
Petty never stopped smiling and shook hands for every selfie and snapshot.
“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. On the way back to his motor home, Petty directed his driver 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.
Synonymous with NASCAR
The King is synonymous with NASCAR, and he has shown no inclination of retiring as he celebrates his 80th birthday on Sunday. Few athletes 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.”
Still strikingly slender, he walks around the garage that has belied the physical anguish from a 35-year career riddled with injuries. Petty’s last two of his seven Daytona 500 victories — 1979 and 1981 — came after operations to remove part of his stomach after serious ulcer problems. He had his gall bladder removed between the 1985-86 seasons.
Concussions? Petty suffered from a bunch of those. Petty broke a leg, his fingers, his knees. He broke his neck in 1980 at Pocono. Petty went to the hospital, the doctor looked at the X-rays, and asked in amazement: “When did you break your neck before?” Petty recalled, laughing.
There was the broken left arm and shoulder, seen dangling from the window in a horrific 1970 crash at Darlington, that caused him to pass out from pain and forced him to miss starts for the only time his career.
“When things happen, they happen so fast,” Petty said, “you haven’t got time to get scared.”
Petty still dips tobacco. He enjoys his wine (merlot) and his steaks (rare) as red as they come. He snacks daily on popcorn but eschews coffee. 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.
He has never slowed down 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 Petty said. “I honestly believe that until the day they put him in the ground, he’s going to be at a race track somewhere.”
‘I’ve made a bad car owner’
But the King wants to get the 43 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. Richard Petty’s teams failed to win a race from 1999-2009 and his cars reached victory lane 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.”
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 fourthgeneration Petty driver, was killed in 2000 during practice at New Hampshire.
“It’s not been all glory,” Richard Petty 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.”
Petty has forged ahead alone since his wife, Lynda, died in 2004 of cancer. The Pettys were married for 55 years and had children Kyle, Lisa, Rebecca and Sharon.
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 top10s and 123 poles. Petty won championships in 1964, 1967, 1971, 1972, 1974, 1975 and 1979, a total matched by Dale Earnhardt and Jimmie Johnson.
Petty’s 200th victory came on July 4, 1984, at Daytona in the Firecracker 400 with President Ronald Reagan on hand to congratulate Petty.
“I ran 1,100 of them. How do you pick one?” he said. “But the magic one was the 200th one, though. But 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.”