In the Blink of an Eye Page 7

  The talk would generally go from racing to deer hunting or something that involved shooting a gun or a bow and arrow. That talk would then lead to target practice. Those were the first times I’d ever shot a gun. I could tell that target practice helped Dale relax. While we were shooting one night, I asked Dale if he’d let me drive his Busch car sometime.

  “Darrell let me drive his, and I won,” I told him.

  I didn’t really need to add the “I won.” All I needed to say was, “Darrell let me drive his.” Dale didn’t want Darrell to have anything up on him.

  “Yeah,” he said. “You can drive it at Rockingham. And I’ll pay you half of what you win.”

  There. It had happened again. Me getting the answer I was looking for. This was getting fun.

  “Deal,” I said. “Me and the black Goodwrench car.” How cool would that be?

  Half was about fifty percent, I figured. That was way more than the ten percent Darrell had offered up.

  I couldn’t wait to find Darrell and tell him about my deal with Dale. I was going to be driving for Dale Earnhardt. Not only was I going to be driving for him, but he was going to be paying me half. No more of this ten-percent B.S.

  When I found Darrell, I told him, “I don’t think you’re aware of this, but I’m gonna be driving for Dale Earnhardt. And by the way, he’s gonna be paying me fifty percent of the winnings. Not bad, huh?”

  Darrell put his arm around me. “Little brother,” he said, “when you get your check from Dale, you let me know which one was more—the one for a thousand dollars I gave you or the one you get from Earnhardt.”

  I raced hard for Dale at Rockingham that day. But I finished seventh. Seventh place in a Busch Series race in Rockingham, North Carolina, in 1989 paid $1,025. About a week later, my check from Dale showed up. Five hundred and thirteen dollars. Well, lookie there. He rounded up. I got a little more than 50 percent. But it still came up well short of the $1,000 Darrell had paid.

  Big Brother was right. Darn it.

  What I wouldn’t give to still have Dale’s check today!

  That Rockingham race was my first opportunity to drive Dale’s car. We tried to work it out for me to drive his car some more. And I actually did in 1994 up in Dover, Delaware, the track where I’d gotten my first Busch win driving for Darrell. But sponsor and team conflicts—again!—got in the way.

  Even though I wasn’t racing for him, Dale and I continued to develop something even more important: our friendship.

  First it was just me, Dale, and the boys, shooting targets and racing cars. But then I started dating a girl named Buffy. Elizabeth Arrington “Buffy” Franks was the girl of my dreams, beautiful, sweet, and smart. She was a senior at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and a part-time waitress at the Sandwich Construction Company, a local restaurant where a bunch of us racing guys all hung out. What I liked most about her was she wouldn’t give me the time of day.

  I was one of many racer guys competing to be in her company. She wasn’t falling for me or for any of my lame friends—and our stupid boilerplate pickup lines. Lines like, “Does your heinie hurt? ’Cause it’s killing me.” Or, “Can I have your phone number? I lost mine.”

  Despite my lameness, I caught a break. When Buffy graduated from college, she got a job working at an apparel company that sold some of the drivers’ licensed souvenirs. The company’s star driver? Dale Earnhardt.

  I had talked Dale into letting me drive his race car. That worked out pretty well. Now I wanted Dale to talk Buffy into going out with me.

  Dale stepped up.

  “He ain’t that bad,” Dale told her when he got her alone. “I hesitate to say this, but he’s actually kinda smart.”

  “Like book-smart?” she asked.

  “No way,” Dale told her. “The people-smart kind. Definitely smart enough to know a good girl when he sees one.”

  Somehow, it must have worked.

  It was 1992 when we started dating. In early 1993 I decided it was time to pop the question. We had been dating for more than six months, and we were getting along great. It was a beautiful Wednesday in April. I was lying on the couch in my condo on Lake Norman, staring out the window, watching a couple of boats float by.

  The phone rang. It was my old buddy Mercer. He was in town and wanted to golf. He said, “It’s beautiful out. Let’s go hit ’em.”

  “Let me call you right back on that one, Merce,” I told him.

  I hung up and deliberated this decision.

  Here were my options, as I saw them that day. Behind door number one: marry Buffy. I was in love with her, and I wanted to marry her. Marriage was a little scary to me, but if I was going to marry her, it was time. I needed to buy a ring and do it.

  Door number two: golf with Mercer and goof off the rest of the day and maybe the rest of my life. As tempting as door number two was, I chose door number one. I called Mercer back. I told him I couldn’t go golfing. I damn sure didn’t tell him why, just that I couldn’t. I got up off the couch and drove to Hayes Jewelers. The owner, Bruce Hayes, was a friend of Dale’s. Any time I needed jewelry, he always gave me a deal.

  The races that April weekend were in Bristol, Tennessee. The weather was crappy that Thursday night. So Buffy and I drove up to Bristol instead of flying. That night, Alan Kulwicki, 1992 NASCAR Winston Cup champion, died in a plane crash while trying to land at the foggy Tri-Cities Airport. Alan and I had started in NASCAR together. In 1986 we were both rookies. He won Rookie of the Year honors. I was second. Alan and I weren’t friends, but we had raced together and hung around in some of the same places. I don’t think we had ever had a conversation about anything significant, but his death had a real effect on me. I appreciated that the guy I had raced for Rookie of the Year honors had become a champion so quickly.

  Despite Alan’s death, the races had to go on. They always do. The Busch Series race was the first event after the tragedy. I won the race that day and in his honor did what Alan called his “Polish victory lap.” Any time Alan would win a race—no one had ever done this before—he would take a victory lap in the opposite direction. That celebration was Alan’s way of poking fun at his culture.

  So that day, when I drove to Victory Lane, I did a backward lap and dedicated it to Alan. While I was being interviewed on live TV with Buffy by my side, I asked her to marry me.

  ESPN commentator and former race-car driver Benny Parsons was conducting the interview.

  “Are you serious, Mike?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I told him. “I got the ring in the truck.”

  I believe Jeff Foxworthy has a line about that exact situation. “If you ask someone to marry you, but you forgot your ring in the truck, you might be a redneck.”

  I actually did that.

  Buffy and I were married that November. The hours that Dale and I hung out in the Busch shop grew into us and our wives doing even more together. The four of us would go down to the Bahamas and spend time on the Earnhardts’ boat. We would fish all day and then eat dinner together at night. Dale and Teresa’s little girl, Taylor Nicole, often came with us. Sometimes, my daughter Caitlin, who was about Taylor’s age, would come too. It wasn’t much longer until Buffy and I had Macy. She loved the Bahamas too. When the season was finally done, Dale, Teresa, Buffy, and I would fly up to New York. We’d leave the kids at home and enjoy the big-city nightlife.

  I kept going by Dale’s shop just to shoot the bull with him—and sometimes targets too. It’s funny though: Despite my prowess hitting targets, Dale never once asked me to go hunting with him. I always got to go fishing on the boat though. I couldn’t figure out why I didn’t get to go hunting too. I came up with two possible explanations. Either he didn’t like the thought of me walking beside him carrying a loaded gun, or he couldn’t figure out a way to convince Buffy to wear a bikini in the woods.

  I liked being on the boat better anyway. So who cares?

  As we spent more time together, our conversations kept getting d
eeper. Instead of talking about fights at the dirt track, which we still sometimes did, we talked more about kids and family and losing loved ones. We talked about the things we cared about.

  When we would talk about me and racing, Dale always said the same thing: “You can win in Cup,” he’d tell me. “I know you can. I can make you a winner. Maybe one day you’ll drive for me.”

  “I hope so,” I told him.

  I would do anything for that chance. I’d do anything to prove him right.

  CHAPTER 11

  0-FER

  For a guy who wasn’t winning races, I sure had a lot to smile about. If you graphed the first eleven years of my Cup driving career, from 1985, when I made my first start, to 1996, the line actually sloped up.

  That’s kind of strange to say for someone who’d lost as many races as I had. But when I started off on Dick Bahre’s team, neither one of us had much experience in the NASCAR world. We had even less money. And I’d been driving those stupid little four-cylinder cars. In no way were they anything like Cup cars. Less power, less weight, shorter wheel base—everything was different. I’m sure glad I wound up on Richard Petty’s couch when I did, or no telling how many years I’d have wasted.

  But with Dick in 1985 and ’86, I was gaining experience in the right kind of cars. In ’87, I had some competitive runs. I started making progress. In ’88, a little more progress. We still didn’t have the funds to build the fastest cars in the garage. But I was patiently learning my craft. With my head down, I kept on making progress.

  In 1991, I won two poles in Cup, my first two. Then I earned a spot in the All-Star event by winning the qualifying race for nonwinners. I was definitely the best of them by then. I’m sure I had at least progressed from beginner to mediocre—maybe even better than that.

  By then, I was getting so close, I could almost taste my first Cup victory. So close . . . Twice, early in ’91, I had the best car on the track, once in Atlanta, then again a couple of weeks later in Darlington. We led both events. At Darlington, we led the most laps. Late in the race, it looked like I had a sure victory at the track Too Tough to Tame. Well, I had it tamed that day. Unfortunately, my pit crew didn’t. The last stop of the day, the one I needed, was a disaster. What should have taken about fifteen seconds ended up taking forty or so. I sat there helplessly as my team struggled and the win slipped away. I ended up finishing third.

  All the way through ’91, we were contending and competing and doing well. I felt like it would just be a matter of time till I would be pulling into Victory Lane as a Cup winner, just like I had done in every other form of racing. But it never happened.

  Nineteen ninety-two started off strong, too. I was running second in the Daytona 500 with just five laps to go when a blown engine took away my chance of winning. I had a couple of engine failures early in that season and our performance trailed off from there.

  In ’93, ’94, and ’95, we did well, finishing twelfth in the points two out of three of those seasons. Very competitive? Sure. Also for sure: no wins.

  People definitely noticed. “No wins . . . no wins”—that’s all the media wanted to talk about.

  “Ten years . . . three hundred races . . . no wins.”

  It was something I couldn’t hide from. All you had to do was look at the record. It was right there in black and white. That stupid zero kept getting bigger and bigger. I was doing something right, I suppose. The fans still seemed to like me okay. My sponsors hung around. And I always had owners wanting me to drive their cars. I’d seen drivers come into Cup all hyped up to be the next Richard Petty only to be out of NASCAR and back to their local tracks a year or two later.

  If nothing else, I hung in there.

  There were a few new drivers who did really well—Jeff Gordon and Bobby Labonte specifically. They started in Cup well after me. Both of them won the championship before I could win a race. This 0-fer-whatever-it-was was becoming quite a burden for me.

  I’d never gone 0–3 at anything in my life, let alone 0–300. Go-karts, 1–0. Stock cars, 1–0. Busch Series? I won in my third start. This stupid losing streak was getting ridiculous.

  Let me try to break it down for you.

  For me the tough phase began in the upper 200s, somewhere around 0–275. I was progressing in my driving, I felt. I had other signs of encouragement. My team, my sponsors—they were all solidly behind me. I was loving what I was doing. But still, 275, 280, 285, 290—that’s a lot of races to start without a victory, even if I did have all those reasons for hope.

  I’d slip in an occasional Busch Series win here and there. Still, I’d hear all the talk.

  “You think he’ll ever win one?” someone would wonder.

  “That’s an awful long losing streak.”

  “Has anyone ever lost that many?”

  If I were a boxer, I’d have definitely been given the standing-eight count. But I was determined not to let my record get me down. Another driver might have given up. Not me. Despite the 0-fer record, I believed it was just a matter of time. I’d get a win one day.

  I’d amassed this long record of futility while driving for the same team, though the name had changed. Dick Bahre Racing was now BAHARI Racing. Two businessmen, Lowrance Harry and Chuck Rider, had bought the majority of Dick Bahre’s team, and they were now calling the shots. BAHARI was a combination of the first two letters of each man’s last name.

  But by the middle of 1995, for the first time ever, I began hearing rumors that I was about to get canned. My performance in ’95 was solid, but it looked like the Curse of the 0-fer was about to take me down.

  My losing streak was approaching 300 by then. There were some other factors too. The owners of BAHARI Racing supposedly had their eye on a young hotshot driver named Johnny Benson Jr. How young? Not quite two months younger than me. That must have been a hell of a couple of months!

  JB was on his way to winning the NASCAR Busch Series championship in 1995. He appeared to be the real deal. Pennzoil was our sponsor, and the man who was running Pennzoil when the company started sponsoring me, Jim Pate, had retired. Jim had become a good friend of mine. But now there was a new management team in charge, and none of them were my friends. They were putting pressure on BAHARI Racing to produce some wins.

  Chuck Rider told them: “Johnny Benson Jr. will be a star in NASCAR. Johnny will take BAHARI Racing and Pennzoil to the championship table in New York City.” And Pennzoil bought it.

  History shows this wasn’t exactly correct, but I’m sure it sounded good at the time.

  Dale and I were talking one day, and I told him what I was hearing. “What do you think I should do?” I asked him.

  He didn’t seem too worried for me. “Somebody will want you to drive their car,” he said. “I got an idea. Let me get back with you.”

  Which he did after a couple of days.

  “Yeah,” he told me, “you’re getting fired. They’re kicking you out at the end of the year. They’re putting Benson in your car.”

  Well, I’ll be darned! He knew way more than me about what was going on. “Do you have any idea when they’ll actually tell me this?” I did have a contract for the ’96 season, which I planned on honoring.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Dale said. “I got you a better ride anyway. Go up there and talk to Eddie and Len.”

  The Wood brothers. One of the most famous teams in NASCAR, and Dale’s endorsement got me the ride.

  Sound familiar? His endorsement also got me my first date with my wife. And he got me a new Cup opportunity with a legendary winning team.

  Before I went to speak with them, I made a point of brushing up on my Wood Brothers history. Wood Brothers Racing went all the way back to 1950. Glen and Leonard Wood came from Stuart, Virginia, in the Blue Ridge Mountains in the southwestern part of the state. They worked full-time preparing the cars, while three other Wood brothers pitched in on nights and weekends.

  In addition to being famous for winning races, Wood Brothers are gi
ven credit for inventing the modern pit stop. In the early days of racing, it wasn’t uncommon for a driver to pull into the pit, turn off his engine, get out, and smoke a cigarette while the crew serviced the car. Wood Brothers recognized there were races to be won by reducing the off-track time.

  Sounds kind of obvious now, right? That’s how Ricky Bobby got his chance.

  Wood Brothers Racing’s Ford carried the #21, and that number became as notorious in NASCAR as Richard Petty’s #43 and Dale’s #3. Some of the greats drove for Wood Brothers—Dan Gurney, Donnie Allison, A.J. Foyt, David Pearson, Neil Bonnett, my buddy Kyle Petty—but the team’s real NASCAR dominance came in the 1970s.

  David Pearson signed on to drive the #21 Ford. It was one of the most successful strings of victories in motorsports history. In only seven years, from 1972 to 1979, Wood Brothers entered 143 races, winning a staggering 46 victories and 51 pole positions.

  Also in the ’70s, Glen Wood’s sons, Eddie and Len Wood, began to take a more active role on the team. By the time I met with them, Len and Eddie were making all the calls. They were the ones who’d talked with Dale about hiring me.

  I first met with Eddie and Len in mid-September. Eddie did all the talking. We agreed to the contractual terms of the deal in about two minutes. It was, “This is what it pays, this is how long we want you to do it, and you pretty much have to do what Citgo, our sponsor, wants you to.”

  About all I said was: “Check. Check. Check. Gotcha!”

  A couple of weeks later, when it came time to sign my contract we were at the track in North Wilkesboro, North Carolina. I found Dale in the garage and asked him if he could come down to the Wood Brothers trailer and witness us signing the contract.

  That seemed only right. Dale was the guy who put me and the Wood brothers together. He belonged at the signing party. This signing party was held in the back of a tractor-trailer used to haul cars around. That’s how we used to do it in NASCAR.

  Just like that, it was official. In 1996, I would be driving the famous #21 Wood Brothers Ford in the NASCAR Winston Cup Series.