Newsmaker of the Year: Love him or hate him, Earnhardt was an icon

Dale Earnhardt was an unstoppable force, or so it seemed.

That’s why, when he met an immovable object on Feb. 18, many expected it to move.

But the concrete wall at Daytona International Speedway in Daytona, Fla., did not give. Earnhardt suffered a skull fracture. The man who lived for the race track died on one.

A seven-time champion of NASCAR, the premier stock-car racing league. A larger-than-life figure, known as “The Intimidator”for his take-no-prisoners driving style.

He was loved and he was hated.

He was an icon.

And, at 49, he was gone.

The Salisbury Post editorial board has chosen Earnhardt as Newsmaker of the Year, recognizing him as the local person who generated the most news in 2001. Earnhardt’s death came in February, but his life and legend appear to have left a lasting mark on this region of North Carolina and on the sporting world.

It seemed natural, knowing how popular the Kannapolis native was in these parts, that local folks immediately got in their cars and drove to his Mooresville race shop after his death.

They lined N.C. 136, gathered outside the gates of Dale Earnhardt Inc. and mourned. Some wept. Some talked. Some just stood there, stunned and dumbstruck.

They left flowers, hats, balloons, poems scrawled on scraps of paper on the side of the road, next to the iron fence.

Gleaming in the sunshine only hours before, the sprawling complex sat under a pall. Dubbed the “Garage Mahal” for its opulence, it now seemed an empty reminder of the gaping hole ripped in the fabric of local life and lore.

After all, this is where people hung pictures of their hero in their living rooms, right next to pictures of mama.

This is where the No. 3 meant something besides the Trinity — and something nearly as holy — to a lot of folks.

And this is where some looked at you funny if you had to ask who they pulled for on race day.

Susan Johnson, whose family owns Johnson’s Superette in China Grove, summed it up for everyone that night.

“You can’t help but feel like you’ve lost a member of the family,” she said.

But Earnhardt’s death wasn’t felt just in Kannapolis, Mooresville and surrounding towns where both he and NASCAR grew up.

Even as the crowds outside DEI swelled with new arrivals from surrounding counties, travelers from other states were already making their way to the land of textiles and racing.

Messages flooded Internet bulletin boards from people who just wanted, who just needed, to say something.

Phones started ringing, maps unfolding. Kannapolis became a destination, not only for fans from across the nation and around the world, but for big-time media outlets like the New York Times, the Orlando Sentinel, ESPN and CNN.

Earnhardt’s death was a shock felt around the sporting world, and beyond. Though it may not have been fully realized until Feb. 18, his popularity transcended stock cars, even racing itself.

Mourners, friends and observers compared Earnhardt, as they had before his death, to Michael Jordan and Arnold Palmer for his impact on the sport of speed.

They likened his untimely death to national tragedies, like the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and to other cultural touchstones, like the passing of Elvis Presley.

“Dale Earnhardt was the greatest race car driver that ever lived,” said fellow driver Kyle Petty, whose son, Adam, died in a 1999 crash during a Busch series practice in New Hampshire. “He took the sport to new places. ... He leaves a big, big void here that will be very hard to fill.”

His demise swung the international spotlight on this region, and especially on Kannapolis, where his mother and other members of his family still live.

And its effects rippled out elsewhere, even getting a law changed in Florida governing what is and is not public information.

All of that is why the editorial board of the Salisbury Post chose Earnhardt as Newsmaker of the Year for 2001.

Dale Earnhardt was born April 29, 1951, in Kannapolis, a then-unincorporated patch of real estate in both Cabarrus and Rowan counties. He was one of five children born to Ralph and Martha Earnhardt.

It almost seems too good to be true, but the legendary driver really did grow up in a section of Kannapolis known as Car Town, on a street named Sedan and right near another called V8.

As a child, neighbors said, he tore around the neighborhood on his bike while watching his father, Ralph, make a name for himself as one of the pioneers of stock car racing.

Ralph Earnhardt worked out of a shop behind his house. He set up cars to run on short tracks from the old Concord Speedway to Winston-Salem, winning hundreds of races in the 1950s and 60s.

Ralph Earnhardt is still recognized as one of the best drivers the sport has seen. And he prepared his son to be one of the best, too, telling him that only hard work would get him there — and that showmanship wouldn’t hurt, either.

The younger Earnhardt took that to heart, and created an image as a driver who would win if he had to drive through another car to get to the finish line first.

He didn’t mind that some fans couldn’t stand him. They needed a bad guy, too.

Earnhardt’s father was 45 when he died in 1973, felled by a heart attack as he worked on his car in the garage. Earnhardt was 22 years old when he lost his own hero.

He’d already been racing several years by then — he quit school in the ninth grade — piloting Hobby-class cars in local races and working on cars at night while holding down full-time jobs during the day.

To support his wife and two children — Kerry and Kelley — he worked as a welder, did maintenance at a Denton mill and changed tires at “Punchy” Whitaker’s tire and wheel shop in Concord.

Every spare dollar, and then some, went to racing. In 1975, a year after the birth of his third child, Dale Jr., with his second wife, Earnhardt scrapped the day jobs to be a full-time race car driver.

Debuting on the Winston Cup circuit in 1975, he finished 22nd in the World 600 at Charlotte Motor Speedway in Concord. He made eight starts over the next three years.

In 1979, the year Richard Petty won the last of his seven championships, Earnhardt drove his first full season in a Chevrolet owned by Rod Osterlund. He was named rookie of the year.

The next year, at age 29, he won the first of seven championships. His other titles came in 1986, 1987, 1990, 1991, 1993 and 1994.

The last six titles all came as Earnhardt drove for team owner Richard Childress, who also owned the rights to No. 3 and who eventually put Earnhardt in the black Chevrolet that would become a trademark.

“Dale was my friend,” Childress said after the February crash. “We hunted and we raced together. We laughed and we cried together. We were able to work side by side and have the success we had for almost 20 years because we were friends first.”

n

Earnhardt was a pretty shrewd businessman, too, it turned out.

The man who started life as a mill-town boy began his own corporation using what he had — his name.

He was the first driver to brand his own name and image and market his own souvenirs. He trademarked his call sign, “The Intimidator.”

His visage — the bushy mustache hanging over a scowl or sly grin, eyes hidden behind mirrored sunglasses — became one of the best known in sports.

He drove his way to fame and glory, and along the way he made a fortune.

Earnhardt gave a lot of the credit for that to the business savvy of wife Teresa, whom he married in 1982. Together, they had a daughter, Taylor, and built an empire.

Dale Earnhardt Inc. bought automobile dealerships and restaurants and built a chicken farm. The company licensed hundreds of collectible items in the United States and abroad.

On the track, Earnhardt became the first American race car driver ever to surpass $30 million in winnings. That happened in 1997, when he also became the first driver to appear on a box of Wheaties.

He never strayed far from his hometown, though. In 1999, Earnhardt’s multimillion dollar business got fancy new digs. Dale Earnhardt Inc. opened on N.C. 136 near the Earnhardts’ estate.

Built of concrete, steel and smoked glass, the complex includes a showroom, retail center and museum featuring displays of cars and Earnhardt’s Winston Cup trophies.

The facilities also house shops for the three Winston Cup teams owned by the corporation. Dale Earnhardt Jr. drives one of the cars, joined by Michael Waltrip and Steve Park.

And just last year, Earnhardt bought into Larry Hedrick’s Piedmont Boll Weevils class A baseball club. The new ownership group, which included racing magnate Bruton Smith, renamed the team the Kannapolis Intimidators.

Souvenir sales skyrocketed, of course.

Through it all, he stayed a regular guy, say those who knew him. He helped other local farmers in times of need, drove a truck and relaxed by hunting, fishing and working on his huge spread.

He reportedly said once that he could live without the big house, the private airplanes and helicopters and the rest of the trappings. He said he could live out of the back of his pickup, if he had to, but he didn’t want to.

Earnhardt finished his career with more than $41 million in career earnings and untold millions more for business partnerships, endorsements and licensing deals. He left control of his empire and the bulk of his estate to his wife, Teresa.

n

Earnhardt’s impact and influence didn’t stop with his death.

NASCAR took a hard look at safety practices, and adopted more stringent requirements, including the use of a head and neck restraint, which many believe would have saved Earnhardt’s life.

A court battle over access to pictures taken at his autopsy led the Florida legislature to change public information laws in that state, making autopsy photos available to a select few.

Several local state legislators tried to get a bill passed doing the same in North Carolina, though that bill remained in committee during the General Assembly session.

Daytona speedway officials announced that an area at the track, where Earnhardt finally won the Daytona 500 in 1998 after 20 years trying, will be named for the fallen hero.

The extent of Earnhardt’s popularity was perhaps revealed only after Feb. 18.

Interest in a private memorial service for the late driver in Charlotte was so great that it was broadcast on several television networks.

Memorials were scheduled all over the NASCAR circuit and in other locales, including Earnhardt’s hometown, which had years earlier named Dale Earnhardt Boulevard in his honor.

At first, Kannapolis city officials meant to hold a small ceremony in the A.L. Brown High School auditorium.

But when word got out, city employees fielded dozens of telephone calls from all over this country and beyond. If Kannapolis was going to honor its most famous son, fans who considered themselves almost extended family wanted to be there.

So the city officials moved the ceremony to Fieldcrest Cannon stadium, where they could accommodate thousands. It was the only fitting thing to do, Mayor Ray Moss said, since many folks knew of Kannapolis because of Earnhardt.

“Dale Earnhardt was a hometown boy and the hero of Kannapolis,” Moss said at the time.

The mayor said at conferences in other parts of the country, people would ask where he was from. When he said Kannapolis, many said “Oh, that’s where Dale Earnhardt is from.”

“He was known wherever people traveled, and that made Kannapolis known,”Moss said.

Around 4,500 people came. They traveled from as far away as England and drove for hours on end from far-flung places on this continent.

A number of Kannapolis residents, including the mayor and several councilman, formed a committee to raise money for a permanent memorial. NASCAR artist Sam Bass has signed on to design a memorial wall and Arizona artist Clyde Ross Morgan has been selected to sculpt a statue.

So far, the committee has raised about $15,000 of the expected $700,000 cost. But the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 delayed fund-raising efforts and the volunteers say they remain confident about getting the money.

The number of Internet sites devoted to Earnhardt only grew after his death. And letters to newspapers evoking his memory probably haven’t stopped yet.

At last month’s Winston Cup awards ceremony in New York City, Earnhardt won two posthumous honors.

Dale Jr. stood in for his father to accept the Myers Brothers Award for outstanding contributions to the sport.

And Teresa Earnhardt accepted the National Motorsport Press Association Most Popular Driver Award on her husband’s behalf.

It was the first time Earnhardt had won the award, which is based on fan ballots, after 27 years in the premier division of NASCAR racing. Driver Bill Elliot has won it 15 times, and the last 10 in a row, but he withdrew his name this year.

In remarks to the crowd in New York, Teresa Earnhardt said her husband knew “perfectly well” the extent of his appeal, but she was glad to accept the award officially naming him the most popular.

“Dale Earnhardt is an American dream,” she said. “He worked for it, he paid for it, he was sure of it, he was proud of it, and he enjoyed it. And so did we.”

Contact Scott Jenkins at 704-797-4248 or sjenkins@salisburypost.com .