Dale Earnhardt died Sunday at the Daytona Motor Speedway coming off of the same Turn 4 that he’d handled so many times before. His black No. 3 stockcar, an image that has become almost synonymous with auto racing, careened off-course in the final lap of the Daytona 500, NASCAR’s most famous race, and smashed into a concrete wall at 180 mph. The impact fractured his skull, his sternum and eight ribs. He died before the paramedics could get him out of the wreckage.
Across the country Earnhardt’s death became the lead news story, not just on the sports page, but everywhere. News producers from CNN to ESPN scrambled to get everyone and anyone who knew something about Dale Earnhardt. I’m struggling to remember the last time auto racing made Page One of anything.
Such is the testament to how popular Dale Earnhardt had become. He was a cult hero to hundreds of thousands of people across America and not just to hillbillies in the South as the stereotypes would suggest. In January 2000, The Harris Interactive Poll determined that 90 percent of Americans recognized Earnhardt’s name. Most of these people couldn’t have told you he’d won seven Winston Cup titles or that he drove a Chevrolet, but in the world of sports, recognition is all that matters.
Recognition sells tickets, gets you higher TV ratings and puts more money in the pockets of corporate owners and shareholders. And face it, that’s what all the major sports in America have become these days, even NASCAR, which still likes to think of itself as the down-home answer to all the evils of the Big Four?baseball, basketball, football and hockey. This year NASCAR finally sold its soul to FOX for the big bucks. They wanted to make that push into the mainstream. It all gives Earnhardt’s death that ironic twist that makes for such good programming.
But even before his death, Dale Earnhardt had become a commodity. He was as important to NASCAR as the sport was to him. The Harris Poll also found that almost half of the fans who went to NASCAR events said Earnhardt was their favorite driver. He was the one they came to see. Yes, they came to enjoy the race, but they wanted to see him win. Only Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan and maybe Wayne Gretzky in his prime, had that kind of fan appeal. Imagine any of those sports without those men and you have an idea of what Earnhardt’s loss means to NASCAR.
If you’ve ever traveled anywhere in the South, you’re bound to have noticed at least one little boy wearing a Dale Earnhardt T-shirt or seen cars painted to look like his No. 3 stock car, complete with BF Goodrich decals and spoilers. Dale Earnhardt had appeal, he was the good old boy’s good old boy; he drove fast and hard and didn’t give a shit about who got knocked off along the way. They called him “The Intimidator.” But even those who hated him, and there were many, respected him. Because he always gave everything he had. And by doing so he defined his sport.
The masses loved him because he was a working class shmoe who’d made it big, a ninth-grade dropout from Kannapolis, North Carolina who worked his way to the top. He was the personification of the American Dream: start poor, work hard, make lots of money, buy a fishing boat. Perhaps that’s why this has all hit so hard. When heroes die, it makes everyone question their own mortality. If Dale Earnhardt can die behind the wheel of a car, the machine he had mastered almost to the point of perfection, then what has the world come to? He was supposed to be different. Superman isn’t just supposed to fall out of the sky one day.
And, as sickening as it is to think of all the people who will be making money off of Earnhardt’s death (over 60,000 pieces of Dale Earnhardt memorabilia were already being auctioned on eBay as of Tuesday), these have become the rules of the game. How many people who have never watched a NASCAR race in their lives do you think are going to tune in to watch Earnhardt’s son, Dale, Jr., get behind the wheel at Rockingham this Sunday? You might be looking at the highest ratings ever for a NASCAR event. Do you think the networks and sponsers haven’t already thought of this?
In Darren Rovell’s article for ESPN.com, David Allen?Earnhardt’s promotor for the last 20 years?best sums up all of the news coverage. “It’s a sad and tough way to get it and I’d far rather have the second or third page and have Dale here. But let’s look at what’s there. It’s the cover of the New York Times, a People cover story on him, Connie Chung is interested, Larry King’s people calling. Right now, we have a huge worldwide audience, and maybe in some ironic twist of fate, we could really grow from this.”
Grow, maybe. But for a long time, perhaps forever, NASCAR will find itself without a signature.
