Dale Earnhardt

From SPORTS ILLUSTRATED , February 6, 1995

DALE EARNHARDT HAS BEEN A HARD MAN, A MAN OF AND FOR HARSH times, since the ninth grade—when, as he once put it, he "couldn't hang, man, couldn't hang." He was always in a hurry, never knowing why. "Never dreamed much," he says. � He came up far harder than Richard Petty , the gentler man whom Earnhardt has replaced as the supreme figure of the NASCAR world. Petty stepped into a well-established racing team with his father, Lee. Earnhardt's father, Ralph, a maestro of the Carolina short tracks, died of a heart attack in 1973, leaving Dale to race on his own at age 22.

By 1975, when Petty was king, Earnhardt and his young family "probably should have been on welfare," he once said. He'd married at 17, had a son, Kerry, then divorced, then allowed his ex-wife and her new husband to adopt Kerry because, he said, "I couldn't afford to make the child-support payments."

Earnhardt and his second wife, Brenda, had a daughter, Kelly, and a son, Dale Jr., but the race car always came first. "For our family cars we drove old junk Chevelles—anything you could get for $200," Earnhardt said. He would borrow a few hundred dollars on Thursday to buy racing tires and parts, gambling that he would win enough money on Friday and Saturday nights to repay the loan on Monday.

Typical was one Friday-night dirt-track duel for third place with Stick Elliott. "Going into the last lap," Earnhardt said, "I got right up on old Stick's bumper and caught hold of him just right and spun him around just as pretty as you'll ever see. After the race I was getting out of my car when somebody came running and told me [an enraged mechanic] was coming with a pistol. I ran out of the racetrack, jumped over the wall and took off."

Wrecking other drivers wasn't gratuitous mischief—it was what Earnhardt felt he had to do to get by. And the instinct stuck with him. During his first nine years in the Winston Cup Series—beginning in 1979, when he was Rookie of the Year—his reputation for wildness on the track grew. In '87 Earnhardt won 11 races and his third Cup, but he wrecked so many other drivers along the way, inclining so many of his furious peers to payback, that even the mild-mannered Petty predicted, "There'll come a Sunday when there won't be enough wreckers to pick up the pieces of his car."

Earnhardt shrugged and accused all the other drivers of crying. "They ain't ever seen the kind of rough racing I've had to do in my life just to survive," he said. There it was: the direct tug on the heartstrings of an angry, hard-knocks segment of workaday America . Earnhardt's words could have come straight from a Hank Williams Jr. song.

The War of '87—Earnhardt versus all the rest—ended after Earnhardt was called on the carpet by NASCAR president Bill France Jr. But the bad-boy image abides, because every fan and every NASCAR driver knows that Earnhardt can still win a fender scuffle should the need arise.

Whether Earnhardt actually wins a race is almost irrelevant to the spectators, whose pulses he makes pound all afternoon. He turns a black Chevrolet into 3,500 pounds of virtual athlete, catching the draft with seat-of-the pants instinct, with pure feel for the turbulent air around him and the cars brushing his. He finds grooves where traction seems nonexistent, and he regularly gets in and out of jams no other driver could escape.

He is "a pure driver," says Petty.