In my naiveté (Cosell was right about that), I had thought the gay athlete stories would have a more visible impact. But they just rolled off the table. Was I the only straight journalist interested? What was wrong with those sycophantic dummies, too busy fluffing upcoming events and godding up or beating down athletes to follow real issues? Was Jock Culture that impenetrable?
I felt stuck. The Times column read stale to me. Like Ishmael, I was feeling “a damp, drizzly November in my soul.” Where’s Moby Dick when you need him? As usual, I turned to Neil Amdur, the Times sports editor, a pinwheel of ideas. As usual, he had an idea for me. He tossed me the keys to the car.
Speed thrills.
The Charlotte, North Carolina, racetrack was hosting ride-alongs for journalists, and on Thursday, January 11, 2001, I maneuvered into a line for a driver who seemed a little steadier, more careful than the others, although I have no idea how I could have made such a judgment on my third day covering NASCAR. I had never heard of Mark Martin. I was also attracted by the sponsor for his blue Ford Taurus: Viagra. Even if I hated the ride, I figured, I’d get a few paragraphs out of the brand-new drug, at that time a late-night joke more than a staple of late-night life.
Martin, small, wiry, leathery, at forty-two already old to be the contender he was, barely looked at me as I was stuffed through the window into the seatless passenger side of his car. Hands reached in to fasten a makeshift seat belt and push a red helmet down over my head. The number 6 Viagra growled into life under Martin’s foot. The sound, abrasive at first, became comforting as it enclosed me. By the time we burst onto the track, I felt part of the car.
The first one-and-a-half-mile lap, the warm-up, was faster than I had ever gone before, perhaps 100 MPH, but still slow enough for fantasy. I imagined the Speedway skyboxes filled with corporate sponsors eager to bankroll my NASCAR campaign, the 150,000 seats filled with hard-core fans screaming through the roar of forty-two other cars for me to find a hole in the snips of air between our metal skins and drive around them, through them, before I was crushed by the looming wall.
And then we were at speed, the qualifying lap, and I gave myself up to sheer pleasure. My body pressed back against the seat on the straightaway, but my mind lifted out of my head, a balloon freed of thought, and I felt an exhilaration so intense it seemed a white light. At each corner, as Martin braked and the car slipped down the banked track, I thought, Faster! Faster! and then he accelerated out of the curve and I lived again.
Into the last lap, approaching the checkered flag, Bob (Lippy) Lipsyte in the number 6 blue Ford about to make his move, passing the leader on the inside . . .
Martin’s hand was out the window as he slowed into the third and final lap. I felt satisfied yet incomplete as we rolled back into Pit Road. The rush had lasted less than two minutes. I wanted more. I thanked him. He nodded and looked for his next passenger.
Back at the garage, I was told that we had averaged 163.64 MPH on that second lap, probably somewhere between 175 and 180 on the straightaways. Someone looked into my eyes. “You okay?”
I raised a thumb. I wasn’t ready to talk. I had sensed what NASCAR was all about, and I thought, I am spoiled forever. I have known speed. I want to drive!
Amdur was delighted by my experience, and quite a few readers and colleagues turned out to be closet NASCAR fans, but most Manhattan friends were bemused by my enthusiasm. Some were merely ignorant, some judgmental. Why was I helping to promote a wasteful “sport” of no social value, environmentally destructive, dangerous, obscenely commercial? Isn’t oil the root of all international evil? I tried not to be too defensive. After all, did you have to love war to cover it? In truth, I was loving NASCAR for jump-starting my stalled column.
What was supposed to have been another short-term Times hitch had already lasted ten years. For six of those years I had also written a column for the Times’ weekly City section called “Coping,” whose conceit was that one man’s neighborhood was the city writ small and in my daily rub in the Union Square–Gramercy Park area of lower Manhattan with neighbors, tradespeople, the bureaucracy, I could explore the life of the city.
The two columns, so different in content and tone, created a wonderful professional balance for me. The city column was so much warmer and more intimate than the sports column that I felt like two Bobs. Or Bobbin and Lippy. Readers thought so, too. I’d meet couples at parties who claimed to be fans of mine. The husband would glance at his wife. “Since when did you start reading sports?” and she would say, “Oh, he doesn’t write sports.” I loved that, and I loved the opportunity to merge the personal and the political in “Coping.” But I came up against a wall because another marriage, my third, was falling apart. Though I could write about my mom’s slow death in 1998 and what I learned about the health care system, I couldn’t write about the central issue in my personal life, and “Coping,” this purportedly personal journal, felt bogus. So I quit it.
I’d been through illness and divorce and raggedy times before, but the sports column—or the new book or the TV show—had always been the guideline that led me through the storm. As Billie Jean King said, no matter what was going on in your life, at least you could lose yourself in the game. But this time I wasn’t losing myself in the game. I needed a new game.
Back in 1992, Amdur had suggested I spend an academic year following the boys’ and girls’ varsity teams of a big, diverse high school in Elizabeth, New Jersey. I met the remarkable former football coach turned principal, Frank Cicarell, who opened all doors for me. I vividly remember being taken by a sixteen-year-old football player to the school’s day care center so I could see the baby son he had sired with his former girlfriend. He was trying to impress me and his new fifteen-year-old girlfriend with his manhood.
A year later, Amdur deemed that ice hockey, a sport that I and most Times readers thought we knew enough about not to want to know more, was worthy of my intermittent attention. I spent two glorious seasons sporadically hanging out with the amiable roughnecks of the New York Rangers, including the Beowulf of pro athletes, Mark Messier, and came away with enormous admiration for their hardiness, professionalism, and decency. Unlike most baseball, football, and basketball players, who tend to answer simple questions with something like “Why the fuck didn’t your editor send someone who knows something?,” hockey players seemed delighted to educate a reporter. Besides the obvious fact—that the sport was hungry for major-league publicity—I think the attitude also reflected the traditional, dad-driven, Canadian/midwestern/Eastern European families in which most players had been raised. And I was their dads’ age! The two seasons ended in a made-for-Lippy finish—the Rangers won their first Stanley Cup in fifty-four years.
Then, under pressure from soccer fans, Amdur thought we needed to pay some attention to the world’s most popular game. That turned into years of stories about the teams of immigrant West African, Caribbean, and South American boys who had turned Martin Luther King, Jr. High School in Manhattan—otherwise known in the tabloids as Horror High—into a nationally ranked power. The coach, Martin Jacobson, a former drug abuser and petty criminal, took control of his life by creating opportunities for his players. As long as they showed up, played hard, and eschewed the hip-hop life around them, Jake would be their father, guidance counselor, college guide, immigration adviser, nutritionist, dating consultant. “We are so good,” a Trinidadian player once told me, “ ’cause Coach Jake got no life but us.” It wasn’t true, but Jake had created an environment in which greenhorn kids felt safe. Being with Jake is like running inside a hurricane. He is still a recurring character in my life.
For 2001, Amdur came up with the most excellent of our adventures, a sport most Times readers were content to know nothing about. Amdur believed, rightly, that NASCAR would be the new century’s hot sport. We thought I’d write about stock car racing every six or seven weeks, features, tutorials, a little dilettante anthropology.
But as I had been thirty-seven years earlier on the exotic island of boxing, I was soon enthralled. I met Dale Earnhardt, Sr., the crusty John Wayne of wheels, learned about restrictor plates and drafting, marveled at the layers of sponsorship and the autocracy of the France family, which had created and owned the sport. From owners to mechanics, everyone was glad to see me, eager to explain their sport to a Yankee from Moneyworld. It felt like hockey, only easier: better weather, more free food and drink, more publicity people, many of them northern corporate operatives. I was surprised to find how interested I became in the economics and the technology. And in the traditional Christian family values, a NASCAR theme. Generations of fans rooted together in the stands, and generations of mechanics passed wrenches in the garages. I was particularly interested early on in the relationship between Dale and Dale, Jr., who was expected to become an even better, and more popular, driver than his dad.
Less than a month after my Big Ride, I went to Florida for the Daytona 500, the first and most celebrated race of the season. It was scheduled for February 18, the same date I’d met Ali and the Beatles in Miami Beach in 1964. The race week buildup felt just like the buildup to a heavyweight championship fight. I was renewed. The Kid Comes Back!
On the eve of the race, the first person I went to interview at length was Mark Martin. It would be his seventeenth 500. He had never won one. I wanted to talk about the love of speed.
“I don’t particularly love anything about the sport except winning,” he snapped. “Racing’s not about speed for me, it’s about being better than other people.” The drum-tight skin on his pale, sharp-featured face creased with a humorless smile. “You’re the one who liked the speed. What did you feel?”
I told him about the pleasure of becoming part of the machine when he hit 175 MPH on the straightaway, about an exhilaration so intense it had become a white light.
“You weren’t scared?” He looked skeptical.
“I picked your car because I trusted the way you drove, very methodical, precise. I sensed it was a chore for you, but you were going to do it right, you weren’t going to embarrass NASCAR and get me killed.”
Martin’s smile softened then, and the pale blue eyes seemed to lose some of their locked-in focus. “That’s true. I’m compulsive about everything I do. I hate testing cars, it’s boring because you’re not racing against anybody, but once I start I do more laps than anybody else. I block out the world. Always like that. Tropical fish, ceramics, motorcycles, going from thing to thing until I found stock car racing when I was fifteen.”
Martin, I had been happy to find out after our ride, was a NASCAR stalwart, popular with fans and other drivers, steady, a clean racer. He was known as the best driver never to have won the championship. The word around the garage was that Martin was unlucky and that he lacked the killer instinct of the three superstars to whom he had finished as championship runner-up: Dale Earnhardt (twice), Tony Stewart, and Jeff Gordon. Jeff and Tony might wreck you if you were in their way. Dale would wreck you just because he could. Martin might not even wreck you to win. Some people I talked to about Martin seemed disdainful of his innate decency. I admired him for it. He had a prickly integrity. He wouldn’t answer a question if he couldn’t be honest. The chip on his shoulder from old personal and professional defeats, from too much drinking and the early death of his father, his racing mentor, had been sanded and painted over the years as he made himself sober and competitive. But it was still there as time ran out for him. He said he knew he was old, that he was not the future of the sport. I could put myself in that category, too, I thought.
Earnhardt at forty-nine was pretty much past a prime in which he had won seven championships. Dale—“The Intimidator”—was one of the last of the laconic, hard-charging carburetor cowboys with whom southern workingmen could identify. They flew Confederate flags with his face superimposed. They wore hats and shirts with his number 3 and grew imitations of his push-broom mustache. And they plastered their pickups and rec vehicles with pictures of his main rival, the California-born Gordon. There would be a red slash through Gordon’s pretty face and the words “Fans Against Gordon” (FAG). It was the worst they could throw at Gordon, who drove as hard as Earnhardt, who liked and mentored the younger man.
I didn’t get Dale. I had spent a little time with him that week in Charlotte. He was gruffly charming, and I found what I considered his contradictions amusing. Here was a rural populist hero whose North Carolina office/race shop complex, the so-called Garage Mahal, contained a curated display of his hunting rifles, mounted animal heads, and pictures of his executive chef cooking up his kills. I was simply too new to the sport, maybe too New York, to appreciate his mythic place and how what seemed like contradictory excesses for a country boy were aspirational to his constituency; someone like them could make it big, could have the northern suits begging for his time.
Dale seemed like a bully to me on and off the track and not a particularly winning father—the tough love he’d practiced with Dale, Jr., wasn’t making the kid into a great driver. Did Junior even want to race? He was twenty-six at the time and seemed happier with his video games, his pals, his guitar.
A Times reporter had been sent down to cover the Daytona 500. I was doing a long piece on the crowd, the drivers, the scene. Introduce Times readers to the smell of NASCAR Nation, gas fumes, sizzling ribs, beer sweat. I’d spent most of the night roaming the infield, the area inside the 2.5-mile track in which thousands camped out in fancy double-wide trailers and the beds of rusty pickups. There were jolly four-generation family groups and packs of surly, stringy, tattooed rednecks. There were concession stands, a lake, tubs of iced Bud. Everybody seemed wasted by midnight, when girls were eager to lift their T-shirts at demands to “Show your tits!”
During the race, I was still typing my long piece when the track exploded in an eighteen-car collision. One car was actually airborne. This was the Big One people were always talking about, a monster wreck. I jumped up in the press box looking for Mark Martin, whose car had been torn up in the crash. Not Mark! I was ready to run down to count the dead. How could anyone walk out of that pileup? But everyone did.
Which certainly lulled me, a few hours later, at the very end of the race, on the final turn of the last lap, when Earnhardt slammed into the wall near where I sat.
I can still hear the frantic voice of Earnhardt’s crew chief calling to him through my radio scanner: “You okay, Dale? Talk to us, talk to us.”
Minutes later, a blue tarp was thrown over that famous black number 3 Goodwrench Chevrolet. I didn’t understand the symbolism of the blue tarp until I heard a terrible moan rise from the 200,000 people in the grandstand. Then people around me in the press box began to cry. Earnhardt’s body was being covered.
The office called and asked me to write the story. For page one. There was a shivery moment—Can I still bring it on deadline?—before the adrenaline kicked in and I remembered all those nights at ringside energized by the ticking of the clock. Didn’t I used to tell new kids, “Deadlines clear the rust out of your ass”? Let’s see what you got, Lippy. It’s 1964, and Clay just won the title from Liston and the teletype operator is waiting for you to rip copy out of your little manual Olivetti, paragraph by paragraph. You’ve got more time now since you only have to press your own computer send button.
By Robert Lipsyte
DAYTONA BEACH, Feb. 18—Stock car racing’s greatest current star and one of its most popular and celebrated figures, Dale Earnhardt, crashed and was killed today after he made a characteristically bold lunge for the lead on the last turn of the last lap of the sport’s premier event, the Daytona 500. One of the two cars he was trying to overtake was driven by his son, Dale, Jr., who never saw his father smash into the wall.
Popular opinion and most other writers had a different, more poignant spin. They had Dale gallantly blocking the rest of the field for the two front-runners, Dale, Jr., and his protégé and employee Michael Waltrip, a thirty-seven-year-old journeyman who went on to win his first Cup race.
I could have been wrong in my conclusion, which was based on a sense that Dale, Sr., would never not try to win himself. It was my first race, and I didn’t know any of the principals well. The legend is fine by me.
More interesting was the clash of reactions to Earnhardt’s death—“Oh, God” versus “So what?”—which led me into a political take on NASCAR. This was just a few months after that chad-choked 2000 election in which George W. Bush beat Al Gore. Earnhardt’s death became a signifier of America’s cultural divide. Red states v. Blue states. Beer drinkers v. wine drinkers. Carnivores v. herbivores. The estimated 75 million Americans who lived through NASCAR, defined themselves by the drivers they followed, the products they bought, the vacations they took v. millions of Americans who thought of NASCAR as numbing Sunday afternoons of gas guzzlers mindlessly snarling around a track while rednecks got hammered. The term “NASCAR dads” replaced “soccer moms” as shorthand for the latest demographic to be wooed by politicians.
Earnhardt’s name did not appear in the headline of my page-one story: “Stock Car Star Killed on Last Lap of Daytona 500.” The editors decided that not enough Times readers knew who he was. They were probably right, yet another indication of the red-blue divide.
In death, Dale not only became a passing political symbol but gave NASCAR a mythological figure, its own Babe Ruth. It also gave NASCAR an increased aura of danger that lifted it above what gearheads contemptuously call “the stick-and-ball sports.” And it gave the Times more reason to refuse to let me drive a car even when I found a way to do it. It didn’t want me under a blue tarp while it supported my survivors.
Despite my rooting, Mark had one of his worst seasons in years, finishing twelfth in the standings. But his main sponsor, Viagra, which paid something like the standard $12 million to finance the season, was racing alone on the erectile dysfunction track and winning big. Racing purists, mostly older writers, were offended by the sponsorship. Next would come hard booze sponsors and then foreign cars, they’d grumble, and it turned out they were right. Fans might have wished that the big V on Mark’s car still stood for the oil products of Valvoline, his former sponsor, but they didn’t quit on Mark. Pfizer, the pharmaceutical company that produced Viagra, set up a medical tent at racetracks offering free blood and urine exams by local doctors for diabetes and other disorders (and sexual performance advice if asked for). I sat in one day and was amazed at the number of overweight men and women with dangerously high glucose and blood pressure levels. For many, this was their only medical exam of the year. Some said they had made a choice between their medicine and their grandstand tickets. “Why live if you can’t go racin’?” was the way they put it. The doctors told me they thought the fans were making an understandable—if regrettable—“quality of life” decision.
I ended up writing more than occasional NASCAR columns. Times editors and readers liked them, NASCAR management was pleased with the attention (it hoped for a New York–area track), and old-timey race writers went out of their way to help me—their stock rose with mainstream coverage. I was no rival for their inside-the-engine fanzine pieces.
Sometimes I wondered if the positive reaction I was getting made me willing to overlook or at least try to justify the dark side of NASCAR, its ostentatious commercialism, its union-busting stance, totalitarian structure, reactionary politics, environmental pollution, and discriminatory exclusivity (there is no racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, or sexism in NASCAR, I’d say at Manhattan parties, because almost everyone, including Jeff Gordon, is a white Christian hetero male).
Hey, I own a big story, I’m feeling young again. Especially after Friday, May 25, 2001, 4 P.M., when I got the chance to drive.
In retrospect, I probably should have turned it down; there was more than a hint of gift giving, conflict of interest. Publicists from Fox (the network broadcasting the races), Lowe’s Speedway, and the Richard Petty Driving Experience—a fantasy day camp that offered a menu of rides and drives from $89 to $2,999 at twenty-four tracks—figured out a way to clear track time after the drivers’ regular practice session so I could fulfill my need for speed.
I had no qualms about safety, liability, or ethics, only about performance; my experiences with manual transmissions, in a laundry truck as a college kid at a summer job, and in a U.S. Army jeep, had been unhappy and were at least forty years in the past. I spent the day before my drive grinding the gears of John Jeppesen’s modified Volkswagon GTI. John has since become a friend, but at the time he was the Viagra PR guy. I was not exactly a model of journalistic integrity in this. I was obsessed. The day of my drive I found a Gold’s Gym and worked out for an hour to get my blood pumping. As Mark Martin did.
The afternoon of my drive was cool and overcast, threatening rain. The Petty guys dressed me in a fire-retardant jumpsuit and talked me through the controls of a race car. It’s surprisingly simple once you switch on the ignition and hit the starter: just keep steering left until it’s time to brake and come in. Hardly any shifting of gears. Remember to press the talk-back button on the wheel so the pit crew can hear you.
One more thing: they wanted me to meet with Darrell Waltrip, the retired NASCAR champion who had recently made a seamless transition to the Fox broadcast booth. He was famous for talking a lot. His nickname as a driver had been “Jaws.”
He was waiting for me in a corner of a garage he used as an office. It felt like an audience. I thought his eyes narrowed as he took in my jumpsuit. He started talking before I sat down.
“There’s not a guy on the road who doesn’t think he can do what I did. You will never really know what I felt unless you’re racin’ with forty guys right around you. Stay high on the straightaway, between the white lines and the wall. Take the center of the turn, clip the grass coming down. The car will pull left, trust it. The car knows what to do. No violent moves, you’ll only make the car unhappy.”
I nodded as humbly as I could. This was a great champion, a Hall of Famer. It wasn’t an interview, he was giving me advice. Why was I so anxious to get this over with and drive?
“Do everything slowly, but think ahead, anticipate your moves, anticipate where you want to be. You must always know where you are. Always. You must always know exactly where you are.”
I thanked him and said, “Sounds like advice for life.”
Waltrip laughed. “When you’re out there, you’ll be closer to God.”
My pit crew was waiting outside, Petty’s national quality assurance coordinator and two teenage tire wranglers. I clambered through the driver’s window of a blue-and-yellow Cheerios-sponsored Dodge, number 43, Richard Petty’s old number. I was strapped in. My helmet was slipped through the window and fitted on my head. They hooked up the neck brace and turned on the radio, snapped on the steering wheel, and flipped the ignition switch.
The teenagers adjusted the snarling throttle and drilled me on the emergency release of my safety restraint and use of the fire extinguisher. No one had ever needed to do it for real in a Petty fantasy car, they said. No one had ever died or even been seriously injured. One of them said, “You’ll have such fun, just don’t be nervous.”
In the pits, when the green panel light blinked on, my crew chief said, “You’re good to go.”
The growl of the motor insulated me; my mind was filled with the techniques I had learned. I let the clutch up, accelerated to 1,500 RPM, shifted to second and, once I was up to 4,000 RPM, to third. Now on the track, I pulled down into fourth and followed a pace car. We were the only cars on the track.
My gloved hands were welded to the wheel of the 3,400-pound car. I was surprised by the bumpiness of the speedway, littered with scabs of black tire rubber from the drivers’ practice sessions. I used them as markers to find my groove. I worried—although distantly, as if about someone I was watching—about rear-ending the pace car, scraping the wall, taking the turns so sharply I would flip. Over the radio, a crewman said, “Looking good,” but I was too absorbed to remember to press the talk button on the wheel when I acknowledged as instructed, “Ten-four.”
After eight laps, the checkered flag in the stands snapped. I slapped into neutral and rolled into Pit Road.
They checked my tires and said I’d been averaging about 110 MPH. Now that I seemed in control, the pace car would go faster.
I felt a surge of power. I couldn’t wait for the green light, to shift through the gears, to burst onto the track. I didn’t want to follow a pace car, I wanted to chase it, and as the car accelerated it became happier and the road was smoother and I was the brain of a gorgeous, howling 630-horsepower machine that lived only to fly on the straightaway and knife down through the middle of the turns and clip the green and rocket back up.
Suddenly I didn’t want to chase the pace car—I wanted to pass it. But it stayed three car lengths ahead no matter how hard I mashed the gas. If I had had a coherent thought it might have been Just give me a few more horses, just a little more road, and I will spin gravel into your windshield, for I was born to run.
I hated to see the checkered flag. I eased into neutral and coasted home. My pit crew was cheering and waving, there were a couple of photographers, even a Victory Lane beauty, the Petty marketing director. I felt an overwhelming warmth for them all. They seemed bubbly with gratitude that I was alive. Someone estimated that I had reached about 130 MPH.
I swaggered away, brimming with adrenaline, suddenly wanting to eat, drink, smoke, make love, call everybody I had ever met. I was glad I didn’t have to give a news conference and remember to thank all the sponsors whose names were on my car.
Two days later, Tony Stewart drove 1,100 miles in two races on one day, the Indy 500, averaging about 153.6 MPH for about three hours, fifty-two minutes, and then the Coca-Cola 600, 138.1 MPH for four hours, twenty-one minutes. All the while dozens of other drivers were bumping and scraping him, trying to run him off the track, and he was remembering to push the talk-back button to discuss gas consumption, tire use, and who was coming up behind him. Watching Stewart bounce and babble after his long day, I thought of my own 24-mile, twelve-minute taste of absolute concentration under incomparably less challenging conditions and was awed by his feat. If I had ever thought that all you needed was a heavy foot and a death wish to drive wide open on a banked track, I was now disabused.
Later on the evening of my run, after my adrenaline had drained, driving a rental car with far less aggression than usual, I felt amused at and offended by road hogs, ragers, and show-offs. They couldn’t get to me anymore. I had driven at speed.
For a while after that I found myself writing more about race tactics, but I eventually settled back into my version of anthropology, the circuit-riding NASCAR preachers, the winking attitude toward cheating (after all, NASCAR’s heritage was moonshiners outracing revenue agents), and the military culture in NASCAR families. All those brothers, sisters, cousins, and friends on active duty were making satellite calls and sending e-mails back to the garage. The citizens of NASCAR Nation were among the first to raise money to buy armor for Humvees in Afghanistan and Iraq.
I followed Mark Martin, of course, but as he faded that year it was harder to justify writing about him. By the end of that “Year at Speed,” as my NASCAR columns were titled, the rest of the country had caught on and I was feeling nostalgic for the old days. I remembered that at my first NASCAR cocktail party I had bellied up to the bar and asked for a white wine. The room had fallen silent. An old-time writer had told me kindly that I could order any kind of Budweiser I wanted. At my last cocktail party of that year, I bellied up and asked for a white wine, and the bartender asked, “Chardonnay, Pinot Grigio, or sauvignon blanc?”
Pour it, pal. Ishmael’s damp drizzle was gone, I was smiling. I was living with Lois, clearly the woman for me, sharp, quirky, fun, independent. She wrote about psychology and was not shy about analyzing me. We squabbled, but always worked through it, something I had never achieved before. I wondered why her dog, Rudy, was in bed with us. “Why are you in bed with us?” she’d snap. It was not always amusing. If I married her, it would be the fourth. Analyze that.
My dad thought four was a questionable number, but he loved Lois (“She is your format,” he said) and Rudy, too. Mom was dead two years now, and Dad, ninety-six, was living alone an hour away. I went up to see him often, and the blooming of our relationship was a joy. We roamed the county looking for secondhand books, ate in truck-stop diners, retold old stories in a relaxed way we had never shared before. When I slept over, I could count on being awoken to the kind of scrambled-egg or French toast breakfast I’d had as a kid. Only I didn’t have to rush off to school. Dad was very independent, and when he let me cut his toenails, I knew he was feeling as easy as I was.
I kept a fan’s eye on NASCAR over the next couple of years. I wrote a young adult novel, Yellow Flag, about a teenager in a famous stock car family who wasn’t sure he wanted to race. Promoting that in 2007 with John Jeppesen got me back to the races, which was fun, although seeing my old writer pals from a new angle was not; they scarfed up copies of my book, promotional plastic coffee cups, and free food as if I were just another sponsor, and for all their promises to mention Yellow Flag in their notes columns, few did. I sensed begrudgment. Did they think I had I crossed to the other side, did they resent me as a scorpion who’d gotten out of the barrel? “Bunch of freeloaders,” I groused to John, who shrugged. He’d been at this a long time. I thought more about My Great Drive, now six years in the past. Who was I calling a freeloader?
By then Mark had retired after nineteen years with the same team. He raced part-time here and there. Eventually, the recession hit NASCAR. Corporations were reluctant to spend millions of dollars to run a competitive car, and fans were hard-pressed to pay hundreds for tickets.
And then, in 2009, Mark Martin came back. It was the summer of the old dogs. Fifty-nine-year-old Tom Watson came within a putt of winning the British Open; forty-year-old quarterback Brett Favre unretired to lead the Minnesota Vikings to a winning season; thirty-seven-year-old Lance Armstrong, after a three-season layoff, finished third in the Tour de France; and I was the host of LIFE (Part 2), a weekly PBS show about the challenges and opportunities of later life, something I knew about.
Martin had a powerful new owner, Hendrick Motorsports, and a new sponsor, Kellogg’s. He seemed happier than he had ever been. The word around the garage was that the mellower culture of Hendrick had something to do with his new mood. And the pressure was off: Mark’s teammates now included the superstar Gordon, the three-time champion Jimmie Johnson, and Dale, Jr., still underachieving but since his father’s death the sports’s most popular driver. Not much was expected of Martin beyond some mentoring.
I began writing this book as the NASCAR season began. Watching races on TV had become more and more rewarding. There were in-car cameras with a driver’s-eye view and little techno-tutorials by former crew chiefs. I could start worrying about tire tread and gas consumption along with Mark, as I now thought of him. That’s how you know you’re a fan.
“I know that my reaction times are not what they were 15 or 20 years ago,” Mark told Sporting News. “But I also know that what I do when I react is tempered by those 20 years of experience.”
When Mark won a fourth race, the most of any driver at that point in the season, he was suddenly in contention for the Chase for the Sprint Cup, in which the top twelve drivers in the standings enter a ten-race postseason play-off.
I became addicted to Scenedaily.com, the best site for NASCAR news and features. I read it before I read the Times. I was feeling more excited than Mark was sounding. “Everybody gets a little too caught up in all this points stuff,” he said. “I’m happy to be driving fast stuff.”
I had to fill out a publicity questionnaire that day for another YA novel. “I’m happy to be writing new stuff,” I wrote. It wasn’t until I wrote it that I realized it was true.
Mark said that he was not stressing as much as he used to. “I can’t help if we have a flat tire, or we get caught up in a wreck, or a part breaks, or if rain comes at an inopportune time. There’s things you can’t control that I’m not going to stay awake at night worrying about.”
Only an old guy could say that and believe it. Winning may be the payoff, but the real victory is riding to the buzzer.
But it would be nice if he won.
When Mark won the twenty-ninth race of the season, he moved into first place. It was possible! By the thirtieth race he was back in second place, his place. And he was sounding like the perennial runner-up, at least to Scenedaily.com.
“I have learned a lot and I have seen a lot and I have come to realize that I’m no Dale Earnhardt,” he said. “My record don’t stand up to his, just doesn’t. And when you stand me up against Jeff Gordon, it just don’t stand up to it, man. I understand that. . . . So I think it’s pretty awesome to hold my own against guys like that in the sport. I gave them something to shoot at in the race from time to time. I gave their fans something to be concerned about and I gave mine something to cheer about.”
With one race left, Mark was second in the standings, 108 points behind Jimmie Johnson, who seemed to be storming toward a record-breaking fourth straight championship. I began to wishful-think like a fan: if Johnson ran worse than twenty-fifth at the Homestead-Miami Speedway—a little accident, a blown engine, a fuel miscalculation could do it—and Martin finished first . . .
Johnson was a good-looking, amiable cipher, a fine, if boring, emissary for the sport. But I could sense that sentimental drumbeat of hope for Mark. Or maybe it was just my own heart. Can the old guy do it? Can I do it? Do what?
I made some calls to old NASCAR friends to talk about Mark. He really was happy, they said. He had come to terms with his place in the standings. “This has been the best year of my life,” he said. “You know, I found so much peace and happiness . . . as well as success on the racetrack.”
The last race was dull. Johnson and Mark drove carefully. Johnson finished fifth, good enough to cruise into NASCAR history. Mark finished twelfth in the race and, for the fifth time in his career, second in the championship standings.
“There’s no frustration,” he said afterward. “I don’t have one of those trophies, so I don’t know what one of those things would mean to me, but I can’t imagine it meaning any more than the feeling that I felt from so many people, competitors, and fans.”
He said there were a few things he would work on for next season.
Way to go, Mark. I don’t have the legs I had when I chased Ali, but I have smoother moves now. We’ll show the bastards our tailpipes.