After I left the radio station, I didn't think much about racing. It went on in the background, of course, and my father remained interested. But I wasn't, not at all. My sport was baseball. Oh, how I loved it. I still didn't care for racing, though.
My old man, though, loved Dale Earnhardt. It's not hard to understand why. My dad's blue-collar, worked his way up from nothing to build what we had. Earnhardt was the hero for guys like him, men who valued that kind of quiet resolve, the kind who took nothing off anybody. One year, for my dad's birthday, I decided that instead of buying him a present, I'd build him one. So I got one of the Revellogram kits of a Goodwrench Monte Carlo and built that for him. It wasn't a great build; I wasn't interested in the subject, so I built it sort of halfheartedly. I also didn't like that it was molded in black, so I had a devil of a time painting the chassis and roll cage. (Note: you should have used a blocking primer.) My old man liked it, though, and kept it on his desk for a long time.
Nothing much happened with me and racing from then until 2000. I met someone, and my life was completely different afterward. Turned out, he was a racing fan. And an Earnhardt fan. Why was it I kept ending up with Earnhardt fans? Inevitability, I guess. That was fine. At first I hated racing, and I hated sitting around watching races when we could have been out doing something else (I especially remember being a little grumpy sitting around on a Saturday night watching the July race from Daytona, which was the last thing I wanted to do then).
But, somehow, it grew on me. I'm not sure why. As the season went on, I started caring about it. I think part of it was that, at a time when I was living far away from home in a strange and scary place, it reminded me of home. It was something Southern I could hold on to in a place that didn't seem Southern. And as I was surrounded by people who seemed shallow, it seemed like Earnhardt was somebody familiar, somebody with depth and character and strength, and I really came to appreciate what my new mate, and my dad, saw in him. I slowly started to assemble my own cast of good guys and bad guys: gritty respect for Dale Earnhardt (and the related interest in Junior); affection for outspoken and doughily handsome Tony Stewart; a perpetual underdog's sympathy for hapless Michael Waltrip. And, likewise, the consternation that somebody like Jeff Gordon could provoke. (He was too much like a racing version of Ned Flanders for my tastes. And too successful. With time, I've come to appreciate Gordon a lot more, but back then, ooh, I couldn't stand him. He reminded me too much of the popular kids in high school who always won the Student Council elections, won all the awards and everything, and ran with the "in" crowd. Now, though, let's just say there are plenty enough folks who have come along since that now make me think Gordon's okay, and now I don't mind when he does okay.)
One Saturday during our weekly hobby shop visit, I picked up a Revellogram kit of Tony Stewart's Pontiac. Just a tiny taste, I told myself; just something to have some fun. But, oh, how the car kits soon after multiplied. There were so many different cars I wanted to build. They were colorful and interesting and complicated. In a way, all those tiny parts reminded me of those wonderfully complex kits they made in the 1950s -- the cutaway nuclear submarines, for instance, where it's a dozen miniature dramas in injection-molded plastic.
So by the time the 2001 Daytona 500 came around, I was fully interested. I'd been following things. I was hoping to see a black #3 car in Victory Lane. But I also remember watching that race with kind of an eerie, sick feeling in my stomach the whole time. It's almost as if I was picking up on some vibe that something really bad was going to happen. When the inevitable "big one" happened, the one that looked scary, it turned out to not be that much. But the smaller one near the end, the one that looked innocuous, turned out being the one that justified my sick feelings. (No, I'm not linking to that one.) Right at what should have been a great moment -- a perpetual underdog winning the season's marquee race -- came heartbreak. We got the feeling, as the television screen showed the ambulance driving off just a little too slowly, that it was a lost cause. We were correct in our assumptions. What happened in that last turn that day broke my dad's heart. He took that model I built him of the #3 car, put it in a box and stored it on a shelf in his closet. It took him a while to get over, and to this day, I still think he mourns a little bit.
Over time my interest in stock cars grew, and then waned. I saw things happening that I didn't like, and I saw things that I felt should have been addressed go neglected for far too long. I also didn't like how commercial it was getting. It was neglecting its roots. It was eating its young. It was getting too much like showbiz. My interests started moving towards the sports car series, thanks in part to hubby's fascination with it. The sports car series aren't as widely-known, but they can really be entertaining, and they also seem a little more accessible. Success hasn't (yet) spoiled them. (I also started getting interested in Formula One, thanks in some part to a certain pen pal who is also a motorsports fan. Now, I know my interest in F1 seems weird given that I've just decried the carnival commercialization of stock car racing, but I got interested in F1 knowing full well what I was getting into. I knew from the start that F1 was a soap opera, and I think that's part of what attracted me to it. That, and how exotic it is.)
So that's the history of me and motorsports, boiled down to a couple of not very interesting blog posts. The older I get, the more interested I become in the stuff I lived through, but didn't care for at the time. There are things that bring back so many memories, and there are model projects I have planned for the near future. Before too long, I'll be building models of a #7 car and a black #28 car. They'll remind me of a couple of good racers who were gone too soon, and of all the Saturdays and Sundays I spent at a radio board as they made history.
Comments