He Crashed Me So I Crashed Him Back by Mark Bechtel

Author:Mark Bechtel [BECHTEL, MARK]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SPO028000
ISBN: 9780316072137
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2010-02-07T16:00:00+00:00

There was remarkable overlap in the life stories of Larry Joe Bird and Ralph Dale Earnhardt. Many of the similarities were superficial: The sandy hair. The beady blue eyes. The mustache. The twang in the voice. The I’m having the time of my life because I’m so damn good at what I do smirk. But their paths to stardom also had a lot of similar landmarks.

Bird was a self-described “hick from French Lick,” a factory town in southwestern Indiana, a place where everyone was obsessed with one sport—basketball. His early life had been bumpy. He’d had a difficult relationship with his father, a Korean War vet who had killed himself when he couldn’t adjust to life back in the States. Then he’d married early and dropped out of college for a year, which he spent working as a garbageman.

Earnhardt was a “linthead.” That’s what everyone from Kannapolis, North Carolina, was called, on account of the Cannon textile mill that dominated the town’s otherwise unremarkable skyline. Without the mill, there wouldn’t have been a Kannapolis. It was carved out of what had been a cotton plantation northeast of Charlotte in the first decade of the twentieth century by James William Cannon, who needed a place to house his workers and their families. Cannon-opolis, as it was originally called, was organized in a series of grids, with the street names in each grid sharing a theme. Earnhardt’s family lived in an area known as Car Town, at the corner of Sedan and Coach.

If basketball was made for Indiana, short-track auto racing was made for North Carolina. The soil—a thick red clay that packed just right—made a perfect racing surface. Tracks sprang up all over the Charlotte area, where every neighborhood had at least one or two shade-tree mechanics who turned wrenches on their cars after work or on the weekend. Ralph Earnhardt was one, at least until he quit his job at the mill and started racing full-time in cars he built in the cinder block shop in his backyard. His middle young ’un, as Dale’s mother called him, was Ralph’s biggest fan, and Dale often found himself drifting into the same kind of dazes that made Larry Bird such an average student. “I can remember being in school,” Dale said in 1979, “counting the seconds ticking off the clock until class was over and I could go home and help him in the racing shop.”

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