“At the Altar of Speed: The Fast Life and Tragic Death of Dale Earnhardt,” by Leigh Montville. Doubleday. 203 pp. $24.95.
In the beginning, he was just another lint head from the sweaty side of town, a ninth-grade dropout grinding his way through a string of deadend jobs to support an obsession with jockeying cobbled-together race cars around dusty tracks.
He crashed often in those early days, and not only on the track, twice divorced before he was 30, with a reputation for leaving infatuated women and unpaid bills in his wake. There might have been some symbolism in those dusty oval tracks. The kid from Kannapolis seemed to be going nowhere fast.
But this wasn’t just another good ol’ boy going in circles on Saturday night to escape the bleak reality of a Southern mill town. His name was Dale Earnhardt, and along with a dream, he had the talent and single-minded determination to turn that dream into a racing legend: The Intimidator, the Man in Black, with seven Winston Cup championships and his own racing team, a virtual corporate complex unto himself with wealth beyond anything a grease-stained hellion from Kannapolis might ever have imagined.
By now, most racing fans are acquainted with the basic Earnhardt legend. We know about his beginnings in Kannapolis, his tutelage under father Ralph Earnhardt, a racer and car builder of no small skill himself, and — finally — the partnership with Richard Childress and the remarkable run of Winston Cup championships that followed.
But what sort of a man was he, really, beneath the grease-stained greatness?
In this slim volume, Sports Illustrated writer Leigh Montville attempts to dig deeper into the Earnhardt mystique — to explore an intriguing personality and explain Earnhardt’s phenomenal impact on stock-car racing. If he succeeds more at the latter than the former, it’s no indictment of his abilities as a reporter and writer. NASCAR drivers comprise an elite, self-contained — and somewhat self-protective — fraternity. It’s easy to get a look inside their race cars; getting inside their heads is another matter.
Thankfully, Montville doesn’t try to play psychologist or indulge in esoteric ruminations. His writing is lean, punchy and down to earth. He lets us see Earnhardt through the eyes of people who had the most intimate view, the people who knew him growing up in Kannapolis or competed against him at the track. People like Earnhardt’s “Uncle Dub” who recalls: “Dale was kind of a unique kid. One thing he did ... he could ride a bicycle backwards as well as he could forwards. He’d ride all over the place. Backwards. He’d build his own bikes, too. From an early age, he knew what to do in the garage.”
Or, for a much later view, there’s racing impresario Humpy Wheeler: “I always think of him, for some reason, as the last Confederate soldier, sort of heroic, bound by honor. Johnny Reb. Dale Earnhardt was Johnny Reb. He was the last of a breed.”
Unfortunately, such anecdotal glimpses can leave the reader hungering for more depth that Montville doesn’t always deliver. He offers some broad-brush generalities about Earnhardt’s wild days — alluding to his carousing, his failed marriages and his sometimes mercurial attitude toward business partners — but ultimately, we gain little insight into the relationships that mattered most, such as his marriage to his third wife, Teresa.
“... They became a team,” Montville tells us. “Teresa, dark-haired and pretty, not only provided the domestic hand needed to run a family, but also brought solid business sense to the operation. She was a trusted, knowledgeable voice as the piles of money started coming through the doors. ...”
Surely, however, she was more than an attractive bookkeeper who kept the kids in line as well. We’re left to wonder about the chemistry between them — and, especially, what kept the marriage intact through the high-stress and high-temptation atmosphere of racing.
Earnhardt’s relationship with his namesake son, Dale Jr., is depicted more fully. In one of the more poignant passages in the book, Montville describes Dale Jr.’s disappointment when the father — who preached the value of education — failed to attend his son’s high school graduation. Later, he shows us the solidifying bond between father and son as Dale Jr.’s own racing career begins to flourish.
Where Montville succeeds best is in portraying the raw emotion that linked Earnhardt and his fans. Through interviews with the racing faithful — the legions who make weekly pilgrimages to pack the infield at Daytona and Talladega and other storied tracks — Montville takes us past the stereotypical portrayal of race fans as the great unwashed, guzzling beer while waiting for carnage to occur. At its bunched-up, fender-banging, full-bore best, stock-car racing is a circle that loops back into the renegade soul — and that’s the place where a few drivers and their fans sometimes find common ground. It’s ground that Montville obviously appreciates.
As for the soul of his subject, “the truth of the man is somewhere else,” Montville concedes. Maybe that’s a way of acknowledging that mere words on paper can never fully contain — or reveal — Dale Earnhardt. It was only on those tilted ribbons of pavement, on a few golden Sunday afternoons that he could fully be himself.
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