A.L. Brown High baseball coach Empsy Thompson fielded a call from the Post about setting up Wonder team photos last Sunday night, but his mind wasn’t on the diamond. Like most of the sporting world, Empsy’s thoughts were on the events at Daytona and the passing of Dale Earnhardt.
“I didn’t even know the man,” said Thompson. “But this is a blow to me. It’s a blow to this town. All over the world, people knew about Kannapolis because of Dale Earnhardt.”
Most people in Kannapolis did know Earnhardt.
Eight thousand of them — roughly 25 percent of the population — turned out eight years ago when the road where he drove his 1956 Chevrolet as a teen— usually sideways — was christened Dale Earnhardt Boulevard.
Earnhardt was the rags-to-riches story of the century in the Towel City. A shy T-shirt-and-blue jeans kid who dropped out of high school early, then somehow evolved into a smooth-talking, tuxedo-wearing, merchandise-selling giant who could drive a Chevy through a keyhole.
Earnhardt was that local boy made good — multiplied by a thousand. He was the best racer of his generation and the consensus choice of experts as the best ever to put pedal to metal — the Michael Jordan of his sport.
Kannapolis will never be the same. Millworkers, schoolteachers and businessmen alike cheered for Earnhardt. In a town that spent most of the last century searching for an identity — dominated by a textile mill, unincorporated and sprawling across two counties — Earnhardt’s success was a source of immense pride.
Local kids went away to college in the 1980s and were pleased to learn that everyone knew about Kannapolis. That was Dale Earnhardt’s hometown. Earnhardt put Kannapolis on the map in ways that even the celebrated A.L. Brown football team couldn’t.
That’s why people in Kannapolis are lighting candles and crying their eyes out and driving with their headlights on. And why country music stations stopped playing Faith Hill and Tim McGraw and have instead opened up the phone lines so listeners can call in with their favorite Earnhardt anecdotes.
In racing circles, the impact of Earnhardt’s death is being compared to that of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. One of those events where you’ll remember for the rest of your life where you were and what you were doing when you heard the news.
Earnhardt did for racing what Arnold Palmer did for golf and Muhammad Ali for boxing. Bigger than life with his cocky smile, scary stare and bushy mustache, Earnhardt was The Intimidator. He was the driver you loved or the driver you loved to hate. No one was neutral.
Half the crowd cheered him, half booed him. But everyone was fascinated by his style. More than any other driver, he was responsible for racing’s growth from bootleggers bumping and grinding on Southern dirt-tracks for a limited audience of good ol’ boys to a sport with a white-collar audience and big-time corporate sponsors. Thanks to the interest generated by the black-clad Earnhardt and his evil No. 3 machines, drivers now race for millions instead of hundreds.
Earnhardt was the most dynamic figure in his sport for nearly 20 years — winning the first of his seven championships in 1980 and remarkably finishing second in the points race in 2000 at age 49.
There is no driver on the circuit who doesn’t have a trembling tale of that first terrible day that he glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the menacing Earnhardt grinning at him.
Every Earnhardt hater has a story of Dale sending his favorite driver into a wall, and every Earnhardt supporter has a tale about an amazing comeback that led to one of his 76 victories.
The races that everyone remembered prior to Sunday’s disaster were his win in the 1998 Daytona 500 — his first after 20 tries — and the 1995 Bristol race. At Bristol, Earnhardt was sent to the back of the pack as punishment for wiping out hated rival Rusty Wallace. Then he traded paint with two more drivers as he charged toward the front. On the last lap, Earnhardt spun out Terry Labonte to win the race with a car that looked like it had just been salvaged from a junkyard.
The legend grew and grew and never diminished.
I barely knew Earnhardt, although I do remember him often coming by my dad’s business in China Grove — Dainty Maid Food Products — to fill up at the single pump in the back where the delivery trucks took on gas. Those were the days when the energy crunch had people waiting in line at service stations. Dale was so skinny in those days that I always felt like offering him a sandwich.
A very young Earnhardt was actually my dad’s pit crew of one when Dad raced at Concord in the late ’60s. Dad returned the favor by making Dainty Maid Food Products Dale’s first official sponsor a few years later.
Dad says if Dale wasn’t the best driver who ever lived, it was because Dale’s father, Ralph, was. Ralph was his friend, a Kannapolis legend they called “Mr. Dirt Track.” Long before they kept precise records, Ralph won hundreds of races in the ’50s and ’60s. He used to win four races a week in his heyday.
Dad says Dale inherited quite a few things from his father — among them driving talent and stubbornness.
Ralph also schooled his kid on the finer points of keeping an audience on the edge of its seat. Ralph was actually banned for a year from the Hickory track because he was winning so easily he was wrecking the suspense. Ralph learned that lesson and advised his son to win on the last lap when possible. Dale took the advice to heart and became racing’s greatest showman.
I called my father on Sunday night to see how he was taking the awful news. He’d watched the race on TV, like always, and hadn’t thought the crash nearly as bad as some Dale had walked away from. Later, on his car radio, Dad got the word that Dale had not survived hitting the outside wall at 180 mph.
Dad talked about how Earnhardt’s angle of collision with the wall was so similar to that of Earnhardt’s pal, Neil Bonnett, who was killed at the same track in 1994.
Dad remembered that if Ralph Earnhardt had any fear at all in the world, it was of fire. But fire didn’t get him. He died in 1973 in his mid-40s of a heart attack while working on a car — likely the way he would have wanted to go.
Ralph’s son also went out the way he might have chosen. Dale was two months from turning 50 and not a very good candidate to grow old gracefully.
Instead, he blazed out on the final turn of the final lap of his sport’s biggest show. He led part of his farewell race and even found time to initiate rookie Kurt Busch with one of those famous Earnhardt gestures (half of the peace sign) as he went whizzing by.
Perhaps Earnhardt’s buddy, Michael Waltrip, who finally, in one of the great ironies in sports history, won his first race in 463 attempts, and his son, Dale Jr., who took second, saw him smiling grimly in their rearview mirror just before his final moments.
Earnhardt’s death affected everyone.
A.L. Brown girls basketball coach Doug Wilson is busy with his team’s first playoff appearance in 15 years, but his mind is on Earnhardt.
“It seems like yesterday I went out to the lake and saw Dale and Neil Bonnett fishing,” said Wilson. “Now they’re both gone. It’s just hard to believe.”
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