Hard Driving by Brian Donovan

Author:Brian Donovan [Donovan, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Steerforth Press
Published: 2021-08-03T00:00:00+00:00

20

“We used to be the cleanup boys.”

After Scott’s crash at Charlotte, a fan, Peter Davis of Raleigh, sent him a letter of praise and support. “It is an inbred characteristic of Americans to pull for the underdog,” he wrote. Scott’s appeal, he said, reflected the struggles of the unsponsored drivers against the factory teams. “You and other independent drivers show courage by continuing against these hardships and heartbreaks,” he said, adding that NASCAR racing “is going to suffer in the long run from this practice of favoring a certain few.”

The letter lifted Scott’s spirits — he kept it for the rest of his life — and it offered a partial explanation for a new, somewhat surprising development in his career.

Despite the South’s embattled racial atmosphere, despite the fact that most NASCAR fans were working-class white people, Scott was becoming one of the circuit’s most popular drivers. At the pre-race driver-introduction ceremonies, the applause for him was getting more and more enthusiastic. When his turn came to run his qualifying laps, crowds now cheered him loudly.

This was a big change, of course, from his first Grand National four years earlier, when the announcer was ordered to fudge his name so that spectators wouldn’t realize that the field included a black driver. “By about 1965, Wendell would draw almost as much applause as the top drivers,” said Roy Moody, an ardent NASCAR fan who watched Scott race at many tracks. Often, the crowds cheered almost as loudly for Scott as they did for Junior Johnson, Fred Lorenzen, and Richard Petty, Lorenzen recalled. Sometimes only Petty got a bigger response, said Scott’s crewman Ray Arnold.

At Bristol, Tennessee, on May 2, 1965, applause for Scott during the driver introductions “was as great as that received by the pre-race favorites, Johnson and Lorenzen,” the Danville Commercial Appeal reported, even though he qualified only eighteenth. In the race, Scott slowly worked his way forward in the thirty-three-car field. When he got up to fifth, where he would finish, his car number, thirty-four, flashed onto the scoreboard for the first time. “As soon as it did, the 20,000 fans stood and roared their approval.”

Scott’s perseverance as an independent, however, wasn’t the only reason for his growing fan support. Clearly his status as NASCAR’S first black driver also figured strongly in his appeal, as did his choice to avoid any public comments on racial matters. The white independents, drivers such as Tom Pistone, Roy Tyner, Neil Castles, and G.C. Spencer, had their admirers, but Scott got far more crowd reaction. NASCAR fans understood perfectly well which driver was the underdog among underdogs.

At a time when many white southerners felt maligned and stereotyped by civil rights activists and journalists, Scott presented the image of an integration pioneer who nevertheless was quiet, polite, hardworking, and nonaccusatory. He had the rough, scarred hands of a workingman, and he understood blue-collar things such as bearings and bushings and valve-spring compressors. For the first time in their lives, thousands of white spectators were beginning to find themselves rooting for a black man to outperform white men.

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