At the northern tip of the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, just up the ramp from the end of Remsen Street, the linear park ends with a little circular plaza, perfect for getting a classic picture of the Manhattan skyline.
It’s a great spot for tourists, but an even better one for a little kid. It’s at the Promenade where the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, one of Robert Moses’ lasting scars on New York, turns into a double-decker highway on the underside of the cliff where the Promenade sits. The fact that it does so, rather than cut through Brooklyn Heights, is a testament to community organization. The success of the neighborhood in fighting off the highway came with a downside, the legacy of NIMBYism that kept Brooklyn Bridge Park from being built during my childhood.
What I had as a kid, and what I loved as a kid, was that Promenade cul-de-sac, watching all the cars and trucks on the BQE go flying by or crawling by down below, depending on the traffic. It was endless entertainment that the playground two blocks down could only hope to match.
I couldn’t wait to be able to drive one day, and to be able to take the subway to Manhattan like my parents did every day, to go into that skyline. Maybe the only thing I liked better than watching the cars from the Promenade was the sight of the 4 train barreling into Borough Hall station. After all, that meant a train ride, and winding up among the skyscrapers or better still, Yankee Stadium.
Just like the early visits to the Promenade, I was too young to have a vivid memory of my first time at The House That Ruth Built. That’s probably fine: my first memories of other sports are the Madison Square Garden escalators on a night the Rangers lost 8-2 when I was 6, getting a free promotional raincoat and watching the back of a tall person’s head as Michael Jordan torched the Knicks in 1987, and the combination of the cold and the Jets being so miserable that my dad actually left a game early.
I was 2 when my parents took me to see the Yankees for the first time, July 3, 1983. That’s one day before Dave Righetti’s no-hitter. Had it been three weeks later, my first game would’ve been the Pine Tar Game. Instead of not remembering those games, I have no memory of a 7-3 Red Sox breeze, although maybe when Jay Howell relieved Shane Rawley in the ninth inning, I got my first look at the Yankees’ pinstriped bullpen Toyota Celica (most likely - there’s a Celica ad in the yearbook, where the next year there’s a sweepstakes for a pinstriped Toyota pickup). Maybe that’s why I grew up wanting to be a relief pitcher.
Most of my first sports experiences were with my parents, but it was my uncle who took me to that first Rangers game. My parents were very much of the George Carlin school of thought that baseball, football, and basketball were the only sports, although my mom wound up becoming a huge hockey fan when I started covering it, and it was funny bonding with my dad over World Cup soccer when I was wildly engrossed in the Japan/Korea edition, and he just couldn’t sleep despite years of proclaiming soccer’s chamomile tea properties.
Auto racing was not part of the regular rotation, as summer afternoons were for the Yankees and Mets, not Wide World of Sports. All I knew of the sport as a kid was that the Indianapolis 500 was a big deal, and also every year one of the first signs of getting through winter was the Daytona 500 popping up on CBS some Sunday in February.
As Carlin joked about it being “the same five rednecks” who win every week, Daytona in my childhood was about who wasn’t winning, Dale Earnhardt. I loved the black car, the 3, the mustache, how you could always see his humanity, good and bad. The first time I really got upset about Earnhardt losing the 500 was 1995, when Sterling Marlin passed the 3 late. Earnhardt nearly ran him down after getting fresh tires but came up just short as Marlin won for the second straight year.
Sterling Marlin was very much not one of five guys winning every week. From 1975-2009, he started 748 NASCAR Cup Series races and won 10 of them. What business did he have winning Daytona, which they tell us is NASCAR’s Super Bowl, let alone winning it twice?
If Earnhardt had to lose, it should have been to Rusty Wallace, or Bill Elliott, or Mark Martin, one of his regular rivals for the championship that I never got a chance to watch. When Dale Jarrett beat Earnhardt on another late tire call in 1996, it didn’t feel as wrong as when Marlin did it the year before.
I didn’t know as a teenager that Marlin during his years in the No. 4 car was an absolute force at restrictor plate races, also winning at Talladega in 1995 and 1996, and the summer Daytona race in ’96 to boot. I also didn’t know how the sport was changing, in a way that Carlin’s line illustrates.
From 1967-83, you could claim that the same five guys win every week and generally be correct. In all of those seasons, the top five drivers in NASCAR combined to win at least 70% of the Cup races. In 1974, Carlin would have been completely correct: Richard Petty and Cale Yarborough each won 10 of the 30 races, with seven wins for David Pearson, a pair by Bobby Allison, and the first-ever NASCAR win for a Canadian, Earl Ross at Martinsville in September.
Along the way, Earnhardt debuted in 1979 and won his first Winston Cup in 1980. That year, he won five races, one fewer than Yarborough but enough for the title. Waltrip also won five, Allison four, and Benny Parsons three. Earnhardt won 11 races in 1987, and between him and Elliott’s six wins, that was more than half of the 29 races on the schedule. When Earnhardt won the last of his six titles in 1994, it was the fourth time in five seasons that fewer than 70% of races were won by a group of five drivers at the top of the circuit. There haven’t been back-to-back such Carlin-verified seasons in NASCAR this century.
Earnhardt bridged NASCAR eras, and between him and Elliott (who was voted NASCAR’s most popular driver 16 times), it was easy to miss the development that more drivers had a chance to win any given race, bringing us to the world where Ward Burton, Trevor Bayne, and Austin Cindric are Daytona 500 winners, but the last five Cup champions – Kyle Busch, Chase Elliott, Kyle Larson, Joey Logano, and Ryan Blaney – have combined for one career win at The Great American Race, by Logano nine years ago.
It’s a different sport now than when Carlin mused about the same five rednecks winning every week. If you want top-heavy dominance today, check out Formula 1, where Max Verstappen won all but three races in 2023, and there have been more than five victorious drivers in a season exactly once in the last 11 years: 2021, when Verstappen won 10, Lewis Hamilton won eight, and four other drivers won a race apiece.
I wanna be a race car passenger. … Just a guy who bugs the driver. … Say man, can I turn on the radio? … You should slow down. … Why do we gotta keep going in circles? … Man, you really like Tide.
I don’t have a childhood NASCAR memory other than Daytona on television. I’ve been to only one race, when a friend asked if I wanted to come along to Dover in 2003. Ryan Newman got one of his eight wins that season, a total that somehow couldn’t get him the final Winston Cup over one-win Matt Kenseth – it was coincidence that NASCAR introduced playoffs the following season with the Nextel Cup, though they still called it the Matt Kenseth rule. The most exciting part of the race in person was, yes, the crashes. My memories are of the pre-race atmosphere, how loud everything was all day, and a lifetime’s worth of mud because it rained the night before and the parking lot was not paved.
It was already too late for me to see my childhood racing hero. I don’t regret never having seen Dale Earnhardt Sr. race in person, because it wasn’t like that time I said “no thanks” to some Yankees tickets and then Dwight Gooden threw a no-hitter. I’m glad that when I went to Dover, I got to see Dale Earnhardt Jr. drive a race car.
Dale Jr. entered NASCAR’s top level in 1999, got two wins in his first full season as a Cup driver in 2000, and then the 2001 Daytona 500 happened. It would be nice to remember it as the race where Dale Sr. visibly flipped off Kurt Busch in the middle of the race as they rolled through Turn 4, or as the race where Darrell Waltrip was in the booth to call Michael’s first career win, or as the dawn of Dale Jr.’s superspeedway dominance as he finished just behind his teammate – on a team owned by Dale Sr.
It’s all those things, of course, but the 2001 Daytona 500 is the race that ended with Dale Sr., who had been in third place moments earlier, dying in a crash on the final lap. He died a winning car owner, with Waltrip and Dale Jr. finishing 1-2 in Dale Earnhardt, Inc. Chevrolets, ahead of the field caught back in the fatal wreck.
And then Dale Jr. came back and won the next Daytona race that summer, and four straight races at Talladega, and the 2004 Daytona 500. He never won a Cup title, although maybe he could’ve in the current era, given that Dale Jr. won three times at Phoenix, now the home of NASCAR’s championship race. What if Dale Jr. hadn’t had to deal with grieving his father (and boss)? What if his emergence as a Chevy driver hadn’t coincided with Ford’s first signs of life in NASCAR for decades? What if the former coach of Dale Jr.’s favorite football team, Joe Gibbs, hadn’t gotten into racing and started winning championships with Pontiac? What if Junior had been a rival to peak Jimmie Johnson rather than a teammate?
Dale Jr. didn’t drive the Tide car, but it’s always felt like he had a sponsor that Mitch Hedberg could’ve egged him on about as a race car passenger. He’d drink a Budweiser or a Mountain Dew with you, he surely supports the troops, and if he doesn’t put mayo on his sandwiches, it would be a shocker.
Jeff Gordon does enunciate, and he was on TV doing it for Fox until a couple of years ago, when he went back to work in Hendrick Motorsports’ executive suite full time.
Dale Earnhardt Jr. also enunciates, and he continues on TV for NBC today, and online on his Dirty Mo Media podcast network. Dale Jr. also owns JR Motorsports, and still sometimes gets behind the wheel – his runs at Bristol and Homestead last year were special moments in an already captivating Xfinity Series season.
It’s not just that Gordon is a California hotshot while Earnhardt’s clear communication is with a Carolina twang. Gordon was a guy who drove race cars. Dale Jr. was – is – a race car driver, a race car guy. You can see it in their websites: jeffgordon.com is a website about a brand called Jeff Gordon, while dalejr.com is a racing website even though the only things there are Dale Jr.’s latest podcasts and social media posts, because that’s what he’s up to. Gordon was never a great broadcaster because it was a gig, and that’s fine, but it never builds the same connection with fans. For Dale Jr., it’s always been his life.
Jeff Foxworthy’s bit about Gordon starts with the acknowledgement that while there were a lot of haters, Gordon had a ton of fans, too. And I can say, too, it’s not because Gordon won every other week. Or because Jeff Gordon enunciates.
It’s hard to conceptualize it now because the polished guy has become the norm across sports thanks to him and Derek Jeter and pick any number of quarterbacks, but when Jeff Gordon started winning, Jeff Gordon was different. He was the first Gen X champion of NASCAR, born 15 years after anyone who had been champion to that point. Then there was the pit crew, the revolutionary Rainbow Warriors, assembled by Ray Evernham not to be simply mechanics going as fast as they could, but athletes wielding tools to gain position on pit road.
The most popular driver in NASCAR during Dale Earnhardt Sr.’s prime was Bill Elliott, known to me forever by his top-tier nickname, Awesome Bill From Dawsonville. They gave the award to Earnhardt posthumously in 2001, and then Elliott won it again one more time in 2002. After that, Dale Jr. had a 15-year run. Since his retirement, it’s been Bill’s son Chase Elliott, six years running.
Dale Jr.’s move to Hendrick in 2008, highlighted by his second Daytona 500 win, means that for the last decade and a half, the most popular athlete in the sport has been in the HMS stable, which is enormously important in a sport so heavily financed by sponsorship money. But Hendrick’s success in the sport — starting with the Rainbow Warriors, continuing with Chad Knaus’ cheatin’ ass, and through to today’s superteam licking the wounds of two straight losses to Roger Penske’s Fords — has been less about the specific driver and more about the tremendous strength of the team.
Elliott becoming champion in 2020, followed by Larson, the only person on Earth who could argue with Max Verstappen about being the planet’s best race car driver, was the culmination of another generational shift. We’ve gone from a NASCAR where Jeff Gordon is an outsider to one where Gordon is running strategy at Hendrick Motorsports, and the guy who does things a little differently than the rest is eighth-generation Florida watermelon farmer Ross Chastain.
Chastain, who races for a team owned by Pitbull, is the guy who did the video game move in the 2022 playoffs to make the championship four. Last year, he was out of contention when NASCAR got to Phoenix, but raced hard and beat Ryan Blaney to the checkered flag. Chastain somehow wound up on the defensive afterward, largely because it had been 10 years since other than the champion won the season-ending race, and the first time it happened in the Championship Four format. He was rightfully incredulous about being questioned over whether it was right for him to race so hard to try to win.
Maybe it’s more than just a generational shift, but a fundamental one, from a sport based on running moonshine to one where in 2020, Kyle Weatherman raced a Blue Lives Matter car in the Xfinity Series.
We took a family trip to the east end of Long Island this fall and the main draw for me was the Islip 300 at Riverhead Raceway, a track that was always just a couple of exits on the LIE from my parents’ best friends’ house in Patchogue, yet I never knew existed until I was an adult. It was awesome to experience a kind of racing I’d never seen before, and also a reminder that Bubba Wallace doesn’t get booed every week because of anything he’s done on the racetrack.
Chastain and Wallace are my favorite drivers, and Denny Hamlin won me over last year by actively turning heel. Chase Elliott missed a bunch of races after a snowboarding accident in Colorado? I’m sorry, but there really ain’t a place for that kind of stuff in NASCAR.
This summer, I sat on the balcony at a Jersey Shore motel (not the Daytona, alas), awash in the grief of losing both of my parents in less than two years’ time and the struggle of adapting to life with long covid. Everywhere I turned, it felt like there was something to strike a nerve, both figuratively and, in the case of cool ocean water that I once loved, literally. I escaped to the balcony not to hear the far-off waves, but to enjoy NASCAR, something that’s been mine, singularly, as a stress-free comfort.
With five laps to go, Ryan Preece got nudged from behind in the middle of the pack. His No. 41 car immediately swung left, and in a fraction of a second… the YouTube video that NBC posted is titled “Ryan Preece withstands countless aerial barrel rolls in wild Daytona crash” and, yes, it’s fully 10 seconds between the first contact between Preece and the No. 43 car and Preece’s wrecked car coming to a full stop on the infield.
It still wasn’t clear yet that Preece was okay when Dale Jr. started talking – “it’s been a long time since we’ve seen a car get up in the air like that” – and that was the last thing I really heard for a bit because I just started crying. It was that little hitch in his voice that got me, the unbearable weight of all my emotions coming tumbling down through my eyes, maybe to protect myself from seeing if, in a moment when I felt like death was around every corner, death had come around the corner in the sport where death is around every corner.
That’s a terrifying place to be and it feels suffocating. I had hoped to find an escape in NASCAR that night on the shore, and I did, in a lane I hadn’t seen open before. Flip off Kurt Busch, put some tire marks on the wall, and run it the best you can until the big one.