Swerve or Die by Kyle Petty

Author:Kyle Petty
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Part III

DAD

16

BOY WONDER

“Let’s go to Caraway … Let’s go to Myrtle Beach.”

Adam was just a kid. That’s what I remember most. He was just a kid. I have in my mind a chunky little boy of eight or nine years old wanting to drive a go-kart. And I had to think for a minute how I was going to answer him.

I had seen other kids whose fathers I knew. Other racing people. At some point, the kid said, “I wanna go go-kart racing.” The dad would get a pickup, get a big trailer, buy two or three go-karts and some spare motors, and pay a guy to go with his son to the go-kart track. Within six months or a year, most of those kids didn’t want to race go-karts anymore. They were done with it. They would get bored and go off in some other direction.

I thought Adam would be better off if it wasn’t all handed to him.

When he asked about go-kart racing, I said, “OK, you can go-kart race. I never go-kart raced. You can, but it’s supposed to be fun. Always remember that.”

We had a friend who eventually ended up driving my dad’s bus, Archie Kennedy. And Archie would take Adam to the go-kart track. He didn’t go all the time. I went with him a couple of times. I couldn’t always go with him because he would run while I was at the track. Archie would always take him, whether I was there or not.

Adam would drive the go-kart, and as soon as the race was over, he would just go play with the other kids. That’s what Archie told me, and that’s what I saw when I was there. That’s what kids do when they’re eight or nine and they’re driving a go-kart.

Adam came back after he’d run five or six races, and he said to me, “They’re faster than me. I need a better motor.”

I thought, Here we go!

“You don’t know how to drive yet,” I told him. “How do you know you need a better motor? You learn to drive and do the best with what you’ve got, and then we’ll start working on it.”

He went back and won a go-kart race with the equipment he had.

He called me, all excited. “I won,” he said.

“That’s great, man,” I told him. He had a right to be excited. He’d done it with his driving ability. His excitement made me excited. It wasn’t the motor. It was him.

“I got fifteen dollars for winning,” he said.

“Fifteen dollars? You’re kidding!”

“No.”

“That’s good,” I said.

He’d thought it all out. “I’m gonna help pay for the go-kart,” he said, “and I’m gonna help pay for the tires, and I’m gonna pay for the gas.”

“That sounds good,” I said. “What about the trophy? They give you a trophy?”

“I didn’t get a trophy,” he told me. “You could get a trophy or you could get fifteen dollars. I took the fifteen dollars.”

Was he his great-grandfather’s great-grandson, racing for the money and nothing else? I had to think about that for a second.

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