The Earnhardts by Jay Busbee

Author:Jay Busbee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-12-22T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 14

EARNHARDT VS. EARNHARDT

LISTEN AT ANY NASCAR track, and you’ll hear it soon enough:

“Junior! JUNIOR! JOOOOOON-YERRRR!!!”

The fans are always there, just as they’ve been right from the start, right from the moment he began slinging his car around remote Carolina tracks. He was fast, but never fast enough to outrun his own name. They still call to him, even though they’ve seen him around the garage for nearly two decades. He used to disguise himself, moving among the crowds wearing jeans and a T-shirt, a cooler held on his shoulder. It was effective, since he looked exactly like his fans: pale, skinny, and clutching a beer. He doesn’t do that anymore, but the crowds remain. It’s part of the job, and only rarely is it a problem. (He once wore an expensive suede jacket while walking through a scrum of fans, and was dismayed to find that it had gotten ruined, covered with tiny dots from all the open Sharpies fans held around him.)

The only time the throngs of autograph seekers bothered Junior was early in his career, a time when he felt he hadn’t earned that level of acclaim. The idea of running twenty-fifth on some backwater track and then seeing dozens of fans waiting for his autograph never sat well with him.

“I’ve always kind of understood there was going to be a certain amount of attention everywhere I went just because of my last name,” Junior said in 2004. “That always made me very uncomfortable because I wasn’t getting the attention for anything I did.” However, despite the drawing power of his famous last name, or perhaps because of it, he made far more of a conscious effort to connect with fans than his father did. If you knew where to stand—and you were willing to stand there for hours on end—you could catch Junior for an autograph, each and every weekend.

THE CAR WAS a wreck, but what the hell—this was only practice.

Junior ran eight unremarkable races in the Busch Series in 1997. One afternoon during practice at Charlotte, Junior wrecked hard enough to put the body shop guys to work. There would be no more driving this day, but Junior could consult with the DEI garage guys, could stick his head under the hood, could learn something if he chose to stick around. But as an ESPN: The Magazine account noted, that didn’t exactly happen.

“Screw it,” Junior said to a few buddies. “Let’s go back to my house.”

“To do what?” one said.

“To get drunk!”

Many of Junior’s early interviews document just how much beer the kid could drink—eight to get warmed up, a case if he was feeling rowdy, he claimed—and he had plenty of running mates willing to crack a few with him. The problem for Junior was that he was still living under his father’s roof—legally if not necessarily literally. Senior took great pride in busting up Junior’s gatherings, once swooping in low with his private helicopter’s headlights glaring to roust a bunch of partygoers around the pool.

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