No. 164: DALE EARNHARDT SR. / No. 3 was talking freely to a media scrum, yet I came away with a big fat zero.
When asked about sportswriting, I used to say that anyone could do this. When I trusted a piece of simple secretarial work to a friend not in the business, I learned the hard way that it ain't so.
THIS SubStack is supposed to be, among other things, an humour-rich archive of the mess-ups in my sportswriting career. (Why did the auto-correct first change that to tumour-rich? Everyone is a critic.) This little preamble here though is an advisory and an aside about messing up my newsletter … or more precisely the newsletter’s delivery.
Last week I mangled the inputting of the publication time and date of a linchpin chapter from my Audible Original that was supposed to be this SubStack’s Monday-morning entry. Instead, it went out Saturday afternoon—the most inconvenient time for our loyal readers and thus a black hole when it comes to traffic here. Making it worse, it went out in the newsletter hard on the heels of a epic-length, shaggy-dog story that ran on five days running last week.
Thus the chapter was almost surely missed by those of you who go into airplane mode on the weekend and avoid iPhone and laptop screens for a couple of days—yeah, both of you. So for your benefit here’s a handy link to one of the most frustrated episodes in a career rife with them: No. 163: MUHAMMAD ALI, ROCKY MARCIANO, THE HISTORIAN & THE NCR 315 / Chasing the story about the dawn of computer sports and bargaining with the boxing's esteemed hoarder.
The tale of Ali, Marciano et al is a personal favourite—how I tracked down a living connection to a piece of modern sports history that was considered lost (all film of it ordered destroyed). My Stanley-meets-Livingstone didn’t roll out as I planned, of course and not to oversell it became one of my most frustrating episodes.
AND now on to today’s entry: Over the course of my sportswriting career, I’ve written two, count’em two NASCAR stories and this pertains to one of them.
(I write “NASCAR,” mind you, not a broader automotive because there’s a third story that I wrote about the things automotive: I ghost-wrote a review of executive cars, the reviewer on the byline being my father, a licensed mechanic who brought authority to the assignment that I couldn’t. Even that I messed up.)
No shortage of colourful characters in NASCAR and I had hoped to make Dale Earnhardt a secondary one in a profile of one of his best friends. Here’s the late Earnhardt on Letterman in 1990.
My first NASCAR story resulted in an utter debacle—I hit a wall with regard to Earnhardt. What I got out of it mostly was a chapter in my Audible Original. Every title chapter in the memoir is a word of caution and a piece of advice if you ever entertain the idea of going into sportswriting, and it’s the same here. Without further ado …
DON’T TRUST A CONSTRUCTION WORKER TO DO TOM WOLFE’S WORK
Tom Wolfe in all his glory before he started writing bad novels
I know zilch about cars. I have to refer to the owner’s manual every time I want to check my oil—which, really, I feel is best left to the professionals. I decided early in life that a car was a convenience, a means of getting from Point A to Point B and beyond that nothing more. It was a choice I made early in life. My father was a mechanic, and in our family, I always felt like I was his third favourite—I ran a lap of two behind my sibling rivals, his ’56 Caddy and a ’69 Buick Skylark. I walked around in last year’s shoes so they might have paint jobs. To this day, as soon as the ignition fires up so do my lifelong resentments. I have an over-active auto-immune system.
Over the years, I’ve drawn the short straw several times. With those luckless draws, I’ve been saddled with assignments any sportswriter would dread, including equestrian show jumping, alpine skiing events, and league commissioners’ press conferences. (I had started to type “any self-respecting sportswriter” but hit delete because the irony would be too obvious.) The teachable lesson here submitted revolves around my single professional foray into the NASCAR demimonde.
In normal circumstances, I’d have avoided it, but I had burned my last sick day, so I couldn’t dodge a couple of hours of hearing loss and the inhalation of enough rubber particulate to construct a sketch-artist’s eraser.
Not that I considered myself better than the assignment. Legendary typists watched wheels go ‘round and ‘round ovals, redolent with carbon monoxide, grits and Wild Turkey. At least once a year I set aside time to re-read “The Last American Hero Is Junior Johnson. Yes!”, Tom Wolfe’s essay for Esquire: the urbane, white-suited founder of the new-school Journalism meets the asbestos-clad stock-car champ who honed his skills on the backroads as a getaway driver for moonshiners. Doesn’t get better than that.
In fact, I had gone to a NASCAR event a few months before the assignment—with a day to kill in Dallas, a friend coaxed me to go to the Interstate 500 at the Texas Motor Speedway. You haven’t experienced hardcore fandom until you’ve seen people lining up for the ultimate in merch: race-worn tires. A fan would sling a still-warm Goodyear over head and shoulder. Thus, did an over-size souvenir become a wearable accessory. Gear Eye for the Straight Guy.
My real NASCAR education came after the race. Our day at the Speedway ended with a crawl-away. The exits were jammed with the 150,000 motorheads in attendance. Over the first hour I advanced my rental car no more than 100 yards, more or less apace with my career. In all, I managed to get back to my hotel at midnight.
So, when I drew an assignment at Pocono Speedway, my pre-race research took a backseat to finding someone else for the front seat, someone to split the drive with me. It took no hard sell to convince my friend Hefty, a big-boned construction worker, to come along. An irredeemable motorhead—if you peeled back Hefty’s scalp, you’d find a 358-cubic-inch 90-degree pushrod V8 to scale. He could rhyme off the car numbers, makes and sponsors like a chemistry professor working his way through the periodic table.
I couldn’t ask Hefty to take out a home loan to buy a ticket. Fair value for his share of the driving was a press pass to get into the infield. I devised a plan for smuggling him into the restricted area, a little less risky than driving a Honda Civic into a sacred ground for American-built rides.
When I submitted my application for a credential, I filled out a second form in my friend’s name (not actually Hefty) and cited as his affiliation La Gazzetta dello Sports, a sports daily published in Milan. I also put down that he was a photographer. It might seem unnecessarily complicated, but it was all calculated. Italian media outlets were harder to Google search for the NASCAR media-relations staff—further, a name check of photo credits, the fine type outside the frame, was harder still.
One of my sweetest cons and thus guaranteed to go sideways.
The ruse rolled out as designed en route. I was lucky to have someone I could split the time behind the wheel with. The drive to Pocono was an endurance test just as the exit from the Interstate 500 had been—approximating a stage through the sub-Saharan sands in the Paris to Dakar race.
When we pulled into the credential checkpoint, Hefty (now going by Giuseppe) pretended to speak no English when questioned by a security guard. I pointed to his name on the list and offered to translate, reciting a couple of Marcello Mastroianni’s lines from La Dolce Vita. Hefty nodded and muttered in Sicilian. I helpfully advised the guard that my paparazzo’s equipment would be arriving shorty and to be on the look-out if he saw any ne’er-do-wells lurking around it.
“If you can make sure we get it, well, my friend here will make sure there’ll be a little something in it for you,” I said. Hey, if you’re going to lie, you got to put the pedal to the metal.
I headed down to Pocono to write a profile of Dave Marcis. Yeah, I had never heard of him either. He stood No. 50 in the standings but was remarkable in his own way—he was the last of the independent drivers, owning the car he raced in, and in fact, working as his team’s lead mechanic. Elite racers in the Soapbox Derby are less self-reliant. Marcis was the ultimate throwback: the only driver on the circuit whose career dated back to the 1960s—he’d been racing longer that a lot of the field had been alive.
Old-school Dave Marcis.
The name value in my story came by way of professional association: Marcis financed his operation by working as a test driver for Dale Earnhardt Sr., the legendary Intimidator and direct heir to Junior Johnson. I had set up an interview with Marcis but just as I was walking over to his threadbare set-up, I saw Earnhardt emerge from his plush trailer and start taking questions from reporters.
“Go over there and get some quotes,” I said to Hefty. “Just take a place in the pack. Hit the red button on the recorder and hold it a few feet from him. It’ll pick whatever he says. Maybe I can use something. And if you can ask him about Dave Marcis that would be amazing.”
Hefty, who proudly owned a 4XL Earnhardt No. 3 windbreaker, a No. 3 ballcap and a No. 3 Zippo lighter, ripped the recorder from my hand without a word and quick-marched over to the spot where No. 3 himself was holding court.
The Terminator himself.
Sportswriting attracts flamboyant, pushy people and demands that the more reserved and demure adapt or get left behind. I’m more or less a case of the latter, noted for my timidity as much as my long-windedness. I tend to lurk on the perimeter. I don’t interview so much as eavesdrop.
Instead of tiptoeing uncertainly as I would have, Hefty ran directly for the Intimidator and hit the scrum full on. He knocked the assembled reporters akimbo just like so many ten-pins. The remainder of the Q and A was done under the yellow flag. The human pile-up in the scrum didn’t seem to unsettle Earnhardt. Perhaps he thought Hefty was paying homage to his paint-trading style.
Meanwhile I ducked out to talk to Dave Marcis, who spoke to me while ducking under the hood of the No. 71 car, changing his oil—or air filter. I couldn’t tell and don’t ask me what make it was either.
When I caught up with my friend an hour later, he was still beaming. Triumph, I presumed.
“It looked good. How did it go?”
“Pal, I got this fuckin’ close.”
He pinched his thick calloused thumb and index finger an eighth of an inch apart.
I dreaded the next question.
“You did remember to hit record, right?”
He said nothing. His facepalm spoke the necessary volumes—as if the cement had hardened but only after the fact did he realize he had left out the rebar. Surely Tom Wolfe had retained a future Pulitzer-winner as his research intern.
“Just tell me that you didn’t ask for an autograph, okay,” I said.
“Nah, but I did get a photo.”
He waved a drugstore-purchased disposable camera.
“On the way home should we stop at CVS and get that shot up Earnhardt’s nose developed for Gazzetto dello Sport?”
THAT’S the end of the chapter from my Audible memoir. What follows here below the paywall is the finished piece about NASCAR and Dave Marcis that is, cough, light on material about No. 3.
Chasing the big boys is his stock in trade Marcis doesn't have the fame or fortune of Earnhardt, but he may be the last of the drivers who represent racing's humble roots
The Globe and Mail, 1 August 1998
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