In the Blink of an Eye

  IN THE BLINK

  OF AN EYE

  DALE, DAYTONA, AND THE DAY

  THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING

  MICHAEL WALTRIP

  AND ELLIS HENICAN

  FOR MY HEROES:

  If not for Darrell, I never would have started dreaming.

  If not for Richard, I might still be dreaming.

  If not for Dale, I don’t believe my dreams would have ever come true.

  Contents

  Introduction

  PART 1: DREAMING

  Chapter 1: Early Years

  Chapter 2: Headed South

  Chapter 3: Cool Brother

  Chapter 4: Gas Right

  Chapter 5: Car Ready

  PART 2: DRIVING

  Chapter 6: Finding Rides

  Chapter 7: Cup Debut

  Chapter 8: Meeting Dale

  Chapter 9: Racing Along

  Chapter 10: Getting Friendly

  Chapter 11: 0-fer

  Chapter 12: All-Star

  Chapter 13: Helping Dad

  Chapter 14: Pushing Dad

  PHOTOGRAPHIC INSERT

  PART 3: DAYTONA

  Chapter 15: Hello, Dale

  Chapter 16: The Decision

  Chapter 17: Testing, Testing

  Chapter 18: Daytona Bound

  Chapter 19: Dale’s Plan

  Chapter 20: Race Day

  Chapter 21: Green Flag

  Chapter 22: Checkered Flag

  Chapter 23: Victory Lane

  PART 4: DEALING WITH IT

  Chapter 24: The Coverage

  Chapter 25: Bad Hints

  Chapter 26: It’s Real

  Chapter 27: Day After

  Chapter 28: The Funeral

  Chapter 29: To Rockingham

  Chapter 30: Daytona Return

  Chapter 31: He’s Back

  Chapter 32: Going Forward

  About the Author

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  It was the four hundred and sixty-third time I had heard the National Anthem before a NASCAR Cup race. But somehow the song sounded different that day.

  More hopeful. More heartfelt. Loaded with emotion, optimism, and opportunity.

  O! say can you see by the dawn’s early light

  What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming,

  “Who are those boys up there singing?” I wondered. “O-Town? Yeah, I’ve heard of them.” But they weren’t the reason the song sounded special to me. It was where I was and what I knew could happen there: the Daytona International Speedway, February 18, 2001, a beautiful Sunday afternoon, opening day of my most anticipated NASCAR season ever.

  Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,

  O’er the ramparts we watched, were so were gallantly streaming?

  As the song continued, I thought: I love this racetrack. I love its high-banked turns and the tight racing action. Daytona was the perfect track to me. Running in the draft was what I did best. Being in Daytona always made me feel like a kid again. From the first time I laid eyes on that amazing track as an eleven-year-old boy, it had always felt like home to me. And there I stood beside my new ride, the #15 NAPA car, a car I knew I could win in. My crew was behind me. My confidence was solid. My karma was balanced, whatever karma is. I’d heard people use that expression before. I was surrounded by many of the people I loved: my wife, Buffy. My daughters, Caitlin and Macy. A whole bunch of other family and friends. They were all at the track that Sunday. They believed in me. They always had. All of us sensed this day could be something we would never forget.

  This was my first race with my new team. Not just any team, either. I had joined Dale Earnhardt, Inc. My new boss was one of NASCAR’s greatest drivers ever. He was also proving to be a brilliant team owner. Dale built winners. His teams had won championships in NASCAR, first in the truck series and then, with his son Dale Junior driving, in the Busch series too. After those championships, Dale turned his team’s focus to Cup racing, where the big boys play. He was already winning there.

  As I looked up ahead of me on the grid, I saw Dale standing beside his famous black #3 Chevy. I felt so lucky to be on his team. I was driving for the Man. “The Intimidator,” race fans called him. He was wildly aggressive and fiercely competitive. His driving style defined what our sport was all about. Dale had won seven NASCAR Cup championships. He and Richard Petty were tied with the most. The previous season, Dale had almost gotten his eighth. Pushing fifty, he still had it.

  Dale and I had shared a lot of good times together. He was my friend.

  And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,

  As the O-Town boys made their way through the hard-to-sing part, my mind was wandering all over the place: “How did they get this gig? Wouldn’t Hank Junior be more NASCAR? Aw, look at that.” I could see Dale up there putting his arm around Teresa, his wife. Smooth move, Dale, I thought. I put my arm around Buffy. Dale was my mentor, after all, and my racing coach and my hang-out-and-go-fishin’ buddy—and now, he was my car owner too. That meant he would be an ally on the track. Man, that sounded great! The guy who racers dreaded seeing in their mirror was now my partner and my boss. Just two days earlier, he had explained to me how we were going to win the Daytona 500. That was amazing. But I’ll tell you more about that later.

  Ever since I was a kid, Daytona was where I wanted to be in February. NASCAR kicked off every year with a bang, the Super Bowl of stock-car racing. That meant my first race on Dale’s team would be the forty-third running of the Great American Race, the Daytona 500.

  Winning the 500 is every NASCAR racer’s dream. To join the list of names inscribed on the Harley J. Earl trophy makes you part of the sport’s elite. Richard Petty’s name is on there seven times. Dale is there too, along with my brother Darrell. So are David Pearson, Jeff Gordon, Jimmie Johnson, Bobby Allison, Cale Yarborough, and Mario Andretti. And that’s just some of them. I fantasized about my name being on there with the greats. I certainly wasn’t shy about dreaming large, was I?

  Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.

  “Oh, I get it,” I said to myself. “O-Town, Orlando. They live close by. Hank’s all the way up in Tennessee. Guess he didn’t want to make the trip down.”

  Going into this race, I had been on quite a roll. A bad roll. Do I know a bad roll when I’m stuck on one? Yes, I think I do. This roll was four hundred and sixty-two NASCAR Cup losses long, without a single win. That’s right, 0–462.

  There. I said it.

  All those losses: That was always the pink elephant in most any room I was in.

  Four hundred and sixty-two times in a row, I had started my engine in a NASCAR Cup race and taken a green flag. When the checkered flag flew and I pulled in and shut my engine off, there was not a trophy queen in sight. No confetti flying. No champagne corks in the air. I had become very familiar with the look of long faces after long races.

  In the previous fifty-three years of NASCAR history, no one had ever lost that many races in a row—and then won one. All drivers lose more than they win. Even the King, Richard Petty. He got beat over eight hundred times. Of course, he also won a record two hundred races along the way. You do the math. That’s about one in every five starts the King would win. I think that puts my 0–462 into perspective, don’t you?

  I wondered why all that losing wasn’t bothering me that day. Because it didn’t bother Dale, I guess. He hired me and told me I’d win in his car. And I believed him.

  O! say does that star-spangled banner yet wave

  I was thinking about all that and a whole lot more as I stood with my hand on my heart. My head was crowded with all kinds of junk that didn’t mat
ter. I was glad it was almost time to climb into my car. When I got in there, nothing but racing would be getting in with me. But for a little while longer, my mind was shooting everywhere. I sure was missing my dad. He had always been in Daytona with me. He would have been so happy seeing me all suited up and ready to go racing for Dale.

  It sure felt weird that Darrell wasn’t racing with me this time. It was my first 500 without him on the track with me. But he’d be watching from way up top. It was his first day on his new job, calling the action for Fox television. My momma was going to love this, I thought. I could picture her back in North Carolina in front of that big TV I bought her, listening to DW talk about his little brother while the whole world watched with her.

  O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

  What happened after those boys stopped singing would ultimately change my life. If you’re thinking, “Oh, what a sweet story! Michael Waltrip finally wins a race!”—you’re right. I did. But there was so much more to it than that. In the blink of an eye, everything changed. And not just for me. Many people’s lives would never be the same. Racing wouldn’t. NASCAR wouldn’t. Millions of people around the world would feel like something important had been snatched from them—and it would have been.

  Up until now, I haven’t talked much about that day in Daytona. And I know the story better than anyone. For ten years, I did everything I could to avoid focusing on it at all. I didn’t want to go there. It was too painful. The memories hurt too much. And besides, I didn’t understand what some parts of the story meant. It was too deep for me. When people asked, I would change the subject. If they persisted, I would leave the room. For years, my strategy was just to squish it down and keep it there. Any psychologist would say that’s a bad strategy, but I thought I could make it work for me. Never once, until recently, had I even watched the TV coverage or a video of the race. I certainly knew the outcome, and I didn’t want to relive it.

  But nobody lived that day like I did. Nobody could tell the story like I could. I felt like I owed that to the people who were still hurting. Every year they return to Daytona and feel that pain again.

  I want to help those people. I want to tell them some Dale stories I bet they’ve never heard before, some stories that will make them smile. People loved the Intimidator. They’ll love the Dale I knew even more.

  Like any important story of triumph and tragedy, this one didn’t start on the day of its shocking climax. It didn’t end that day either. The story started decades earlier in a small town in western Kentucky. The story continues today.

  For many years, people in the racing world have known me as a sponsor-endorsing, TV-talking, commercial-making, fan-friendly race-car driver, a guy who loves his family and loves what he got to do. They might mention that I had a few losses on the track along the way.

  But of all those losses, there’s only one I think about every day.

  When I decided to tell this story, my deepest hope was that it would bring comfort to others. What I found is that it’s brought relief to me.

  Dale made me a winner that day in Daytona. He continues to do that today. You will see what I mean as you read my story. I’m so glad I am finally able to open up and share it with you.

  PART 1:

  DREAMING

  CHAPTER 1

  EARLY YEARS

  I love sports. When I was a kid, I played them all. You couldn’t find a boy in Owensboro, Kentucky, in the 1970s who played as many sports as I did, and played them with as much mediocrity. Football, baseball, basketball, tennis. I was amazingly average at them all.

  If there were twenty players on a team, I’d be chosen no better than twelfth every time. I once told one of my coaches I thought I might try to play some college ball. His reaction? “We have a very good shop program here at Burns Middle School. Maybe you should start looking into that.”

  That coach was also the guidance counselor. His guidance led me to think I probably wouldn’t be running, throwing, jumping, or tackling my way to a college scholarship. I actually could have been a pretty good tackler, I think, if I could have just caught someone.

  As I considered my options, I realized something extremely important: Chances were, when I grew up I’d have to make a living sitting on my butt. And looking around town, it seemed like everyone who had a sit-down job had gotten good grades in school. Unfortunately, I wasn’t that guy either.

  What did that leave? I could drive a cab, I figured, but we didn’t have any of those in Owensboro. I could be a security guard, but nobody ever stole much in our town.

  I knew one guy who got to make a living sitting down, and his job looked like a whole lot of fun to me. From what I could tell, it paid well too. This guy had figured it out. From what I’d heard, he was no better in the classroom than I was.

  My mom and dad, Margaret and Leroy, had five children. I was the baby. Darrell was the oldest. When I came along, he was sixteen and already making a name for himself sitting down in a car, driving fast and winning races.

  The idea sounded perfect. You sit on your butt to drive a race car. How ’bout that? That was it. I made up my mind. I wanted to be a race-car driver. Just like my brother was. My little-kid logic was solid, don’t you think?

  When I was born, our family of seven was living in a three-bedroom house on the west end of town. Mom had a part-time job as a cashier at the IGA grocery store. Dad worked at the Pepsi plant. Despite them working all day and raising us kids, we had a pretty regular routine. Mom served dinner in our kitchen every night at six, and Dad made sure we had the nicest yard on our street.

  Supporting a family with five children was tough. Yet my parents always found ways to give us kids whatever we needed. Needed, I said. Not wanted. I found it very difficult back then to understand the difference between needing and wanting. I felt like if I wanted something really badly—well, then I must need it.

  My perspective resulted in some lively debates between me and my parents. I mostly lost, but I wasn’t shy about letting them know where I stood. Some of my opinions resulted in some pretty tough love. I certainly got my share of whippings, as most kids did back then. That’s how my parents were raised. That’s how they raised us. My own girls should consider themselves lucky I didn’t elect to continue that tradition.

  Growing up, I was a busy, emotional, funny kid. My parents tried to teach me discipline and responsibility. I would say they had partial success. But I came away with something from my childhood I’ve always liked about myself: the way I respect and appreciate people. That’s how my parents treated everyone. As an adult, that’s how I’ve always tried to treat people too. I’m a reflection of my parents, and I’ve wanted to make them proud.

  My birth was an accident. Not so much the birth part, but the conception part. I came into the family late. But if you ask Mom today, she’ll say all five of us were accidents. Darrell told me it was embarrassing for him when Mom would come to get him at a track meet or some school function while she was all pregnant with me. None of the other high-school kids’ moms were expecting.

  When I came along, at least for a little while, Mom and Dad must have been like, “I thought we were done with all this kid-raising stuff. And now we got one more to deal with?”

  I say that because there is very limited evidence that I existed until I was four or five years old. No baby pictures. My binky and my blankie—where’s all that stuff? I never found it anywhere, not even in the box in the attic.

  You can imagine how crowded it was in our little house. Seven people, three bedrooms, one bath. But Darrell moved out quickly. With Dad working full-time and Mom part-time, my older sister Carolyn was left in charge of me a lot. I called Carolyn “Mom,” which certainly didn’t help her dating life.

  “You got a kid?” guys would ask her. “That little boy just said, ‘Come here, Momma.’ ”

  Even after Darrell and Carolyn left home, there were still five of us in the house: Mom and Dad, plus me, my brother Bobby,
and my sister Connie. Poor Connie grew up with a roommate: me. We shared a room until I was nine or ten. Connie could not wait for Bobby to move out so she could get rid of me and finally have her own room.

  Bobby had an Afro and would spend an unusual amount of time in the bathroom before school fixing his hair. Connie had hair too, and she certainly needed to get ready for school. But Bobby was the oldest still at home, and he pretty much ran the show—for sure when Mom and Dad weren’t around.

  I’ve always wondered if being an “accident” and taking orders from Darrell, Carolyn, Bobby, Connie, Mom, and Dad had anything to do with my lifelong need to prove myself. I don’t know. But I sure got tired of taking orders from all those people—and their friends too.

  My mom was devoted to all her children. But by the time she was down to the fifth one, she wasn’t all that lovey-dovey anymore. Her favorite saying was, “You’ll live.”

  Fall down, skin your knee raw? You’ll live.

  Didn’t make the baseball team? You’ll live.

  Girlfriend dumped you? You’ll live. Whatever happened, you’ll live.

  Today if I say to my little girl, Macy, “You’ll live,” we laugh. She knows that’s our little joke about her grandma.

  My mom is funny. She has a very quick wit. So being around her sometimes was cool. Since Mom worked only part-time, mostly I hung out with her. I’d go just about everywhere she did. We used to ride to my aunt’s to visit once a month or so. Aunt Emma lived in the little town of Henderson, Kentucky, about a half hour away.