The intelligent head argued with the intelligent eyes. That was the thing. The eyes saw the severity of the crash. The eyes had seen other crashes in other places, the same speed, the same angle, the same unmerciful thud against a concrete wall. The eyes knew something terrible had happened. The intelligent head knew Dale Earnhardt was involved. He would be all right.

Eyes vs. head. What was a television color commentator supposed to say?

‘How about Dale?’ Darrell Waltrip asked into his Fox Sports microphone late on that Sunday afternoon of February 18, 2001. ‘I hope he’s OK.’

‘Of course he’s OK,’ the head screamed in response. ‘That’s Dale. He walks away. Dale Earnhardt. He always walks away.’

‘I just hope Dale’s OK,’ Waltrip said again into his microphone. ‘I guess he’s all right, isn’t he?’

The emotions that crowded inside the broadcast booth at the Daytona International Speedway were too much, too much, way too much to handle. Jesus, Good Lord, they were. Look out the window at one spot on the track and there was the surprise winner of the Daytona 500, Michael Waltrip, Darrell Waltrip’s thirty-seven-year-old baby brother, off on a victory lap in his yellow NAPA No. 15 car, happier than happy after capturing the biggest stock car race in all Creation, first win in his life in his 463rd race … look at another spot on the track and there was Dale.

Was he all right?

The monitors in the control truck blinked out all the color-camera choices. Happy winner. Happy. Live. Crash on tape. The black No. 3 car is going all right, going all right, wait a minute, nudged, going left, going right… slow it down …that’s the No. 36 car, the yellow car, Kenny Schrader, coming in from the side, the M&M’s car, hits the No. 3 car and they go into the wall together and, wow, everything flies everywhere. Crash live. The car is back on the grass, rolled down the embankment from the wall. What are they doing? Why isn’t Dale crawling out of there? The rescue workers have arrived. Maybe he broke a leg. Maybe the side was caved in. Boy, is he going to be pissed at somebody. Won’t he? Where is Dale?

Way too much.

The voices from the truck came through Darrell Waltrip’s earpiece and joined the voice in his head. Dale will be fine. Dale has been in about a billion of these crashes, much worse than this one. If he comes out of that car soon enough, we may even get a word with him. Won’t that be a hoot? The eyes of Waltrip, a fifty-four-year-old man who had driven for thirty years, won 84 races and three Winston Cup championships, knew better. They had seen just about all of the good things and all of the bad that can happen on a racetrack. This was bad.

‘This is bad,’ he told the voices in the truck.

The other color man in the booth, Larry McReynolds, was pretty much speechless. He didn’t know what to say. This was his debut as a color commentator after a lifetime of work as a race car mechanic. For two years in his career, he had been Dale Earnhardt’s crew chief. He trained his binoculars on the activity around the mangled No. 3 car down the track, the car he once had treated with the same love and care he gave his children, and found himself paralyzed by the inner debate.

‘Schrader is looking in the car … backing off in a hurry … that’s not good … oh, could be anything … maybe Dale’s unconscious… . '

‘The emergency crew is reaching inside, working on him … that could be something bad. No, that could be anything… . '

‘The emergency crew is cutting off the roof … that’s not good … then, again, it’s standard procedure. If Dale broke something…’

‘They’re putting him on a stretcher, taking him to the ambulance … OK, that’s standard procedure… . '

‘They’re covering up the car… . '

‘The ambulance is not going very fast… . '

Shit.

The idea that the greatest driver in NASCAR history could crash and die on the final turn of the final lap of the biggest race on the NASCAR schedule simply did not compute. Especially if that driver was Dale Earnhardt. …

‘TV does not do that [crash] justice,’ Waltrip said into his microphone after watching the replay at the same time as viewers. ‘That is incredible impact. Those are the kind of accidents that are absolutely frightening.’

The head still battled the eyes. Maybe … You never know … Maybe. … Waltrip thought that maybe he should say more, that this was what he was being paid to do, give his analysis, but what if you said the fateful words and they were wrong? Half the television stations in the country had killed off driver Ernie Irvan after a crash at Michigan and Ernie Irvan was walking and talking and probably eating dinner right now. Caution had to be the guide.

The telecast was scheduled to end at five o’clock and David Hill, head of Fox Sports, was in the studio and said the schedule would be followed. What more could be said if nobody knew the answer for certain to the awful question? An answer might take a long time to arrive. The broadcast ended with Dale Earnhardt still alive at five. Later reports said Dale Earnhardt was pronounced dead at 5:16 at Halifax Medical Center. The rescue workers and doctor at the track later said that they were sure he was dead while he was still in the car.

He had suffered a basal skull fracture, eight broken ribs on his left side, a broken left ankle, a fractured breastbone and collarbone, and hip abrasions. The basal skull fracture, the newest fear of race car drivers, had killed him. The whole thing, even listing the injuries, one after another, seemed almost beyond belief…

Waltrip was supposed to go to Victory Lane to see his brother. He had a friend, a Daytona policeman, who was going to escort him through the crowd. The policeman’s wife worked at Halifax Medical Center. She called her husband and told him that Waltrip should come to the hospital. Waltrip went, talked with Earnhardt’s wife, Teresa, and members of the family, then returned to the condo he had rented to be with his own wife, Stevie. She had been close with Earnhardt, had taped a Bible verse on the steering column of his car before the race, a tradition. Waltrip and his wife talked for a while and then went back to the track. His brother, Michael, was still there, not really knowing what to do. …

As a boy Earnhardt learned about cars from watching his father, Ralph, in Kannapolis, N.C.

He was born on April 29, 1951, in Kannapolis, a small city twenty miles northeast of Charlotte, the first son and third child of Ralph and Martha Earnhardt. …

Ralph Earnhardt was also born in Kannapolis. … His parents were farmers, and he married Martha Coleman from Concord, the daughter of farmers. The couple started a family young, and Ralph followed the other lint heads to the mills. Martha took a job at a downtown diner near the mills. That seemed to be the natural progression of Kannapolis life. Ralph had dropped out of school in the sixth grade. …

‘Ralph had a second job, helping out in a garage," [says Dub, Martha’s brother.] “He knew a lot about cars. The guy who owned the shop had a race car. Ralph put a big Cadillac engine in it for him. The guy got sick or something one time, and Ralph drove a couple of races. I guess that was it for Ralph in the mills. He was hooked on racing.’ …

For a kid, all of this stuff was magic. It was like being the son of a modern, crew-cut Sir Lancelot who always was off on some hopped-up, six-cylinder steed to slay steel dragons. Ralph’s nickname even was ‘Ironheart,’ a play on his last name, perhaps, but also a tribute to his determination and spirit. What could be better than being the son of someone named Ironheart?

When a race was won in one of those exotic locations–Columbia on a Thursday, Monroe on a Friday, Greenville-Pickens on a Saturday–Ralph and his one-man pit crew, Uncle Dub, would return home and great smells would come out of the kitchen and everyone would stay up half the night discussing the race. Who wouldn’t want to be part of that?

Dale always would recall his childhood in idyllic terms. There was a sweetness to his memories. Ralph was not the hands-on, hug-and-kiss dad of today’s suburbs–and Dale would not be that, either–but he was honest and available. A pat on the head or a smile had to be earned the same way a good whack on the rear had to be earned. The choice was up to his kids.

The [Kannapolis] neighborhood was something out of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” southern and slow and basic. Even now, a giant Walgreens no more than half a mile away, there is a soft touch to the place, as if you are waiting for someone’s mother to bring out a wash to a clothesline or to place an apple pie in a kitchen window to cool. Not a rural environment, perhaps, but not city. Small-town U.S.A. Country.

There were neighborhood bike races, go-kart races, competitions of all kinds. There were football games. There was Sunday school. There were dares and double dares, summer-afternoon leaps into ponds. There always was activity. …

‘Dale was kind of a unique kid,’ Dub remembers. ‘One thing he did … he could ride a bicycle backwards as well as he could forwards. He’d ride all over the place. Backwards. He’d build his own bikes, too. From an early age, he knew what to do in the garage.’

‘My cousin, Frank, had a little business, a slot car track, in Midway, which was a section of town,’ Gregg Dayvault says. ‘The store was called the D and D. You could bring your slot cars in from home and race ’em on the track. Actually, there were two tracks, a road course and a figure eight. You’d have to pay maybe 25 cents for 15 minutes, 50 cents for a half hour.

‘On Friday nights, Frank would hold races. The first trophy Dale Earnhardt ever won for racing was with a slot car at Frank’s track. We played everything when we were kids, but you always knew that Dale was mad for racing.’

This was not surprising. At home, the garage and the race cars were central to all activity. Men would appear to talk racing and engines with Ralph, to have cars tuned, engines rebuilt. He did work for other people, but his favorite work was for his own machine.

Dale learned the routine of the garage, the places for the tools. He would slip into his father’s quiet world and learn whatever he could. From the time he was, say, ten years old, he would be part of the traveling team to the shorter races. Ralph and Dale and Uncle Dub. Uncle Dub would do whatever work there was to do in the pits during a race, cleaning a window or changing a tire by hand, long before the time of the air wrench. Dale would watch from the top of his father’s truck. Or over with the sportswriters on top of another truck.

When he didn’t make the longer trips, his boundaries constricted by age and school, he would get out of bed early in the morning and go to the garage and try to figure out what had happened in the race. How did the car look? He tried to figure out what had happened by the dents or the dirt or the wear on the tires. He cleaned the car, had it ready, while his father slept late.

This continued into his teenage years, his role in the operation increasing as he grew older. He and then [brothers] Randy and Danny became the pit crew. Uncle Dub dropped off after a decade of service to raise his own kids. This was the foundation of all that would follow. Working on the cars. Going to the races. This was the family business. …

It wasn’t until he was nineteen that Dale Earnhardt drove in his first race. He drove his brother-in-law’s car.

‘I was driving a car for my dad,’ David Oliver says. ‘We had built a new car and still had the old car. I suggested to my dad that Dale drive the old car. He was family.’

The second generation of Earnhardt racers was about to begin.

The car was a six-cylinder 1956 Ford Club Sedan. The Club Sedan part is important, because it meant the car had an aerodynamically inefficient post on the side at both doors. This was a vehicle that looked as if it had been built more for a nuclear family of four than for some aspiring Fireball Roberts. David Oliver had raced in it, OK, but it still needed something more to look like the terror on the racetrack that it surely would become with this new man behind the wheel.

Though skeptical, I was gratified to discover that these meals are actually nutritionally balanced. Working with the U.N. and other food agencies, the U.S. military devised a 2,200-calorie meal that’s perfectly balanced between protein (10 to 13 percent), fat (27 to 30 percent) and carbohydrates (above 60 percent).

The idea was that maybe a coat of paint would do the job.

‘My cousins, Frank and Wayne, had a shop with a dyno machine,’ Gregg Dayvault says. ‘We’d done work for Ralph and David’s father, Ray, putting their cars on the rollers for ’em, giving ’em the dyno tune. We all knew Dale and his brothers, Danny and Randy. We were all young’uns together.

‘Helping Dale was just family helping family, the way it went. We had some paint around the shop. We just set about to painting the car.’

The color choice was avocado. The roof already was purple with little gold metallic flecks in it. Avocado would be a fine color to go with the roof. Wayne mixed the paint. Wayne mixed wrong. The color came out pink.

‘Dale Earnhardt drove a pink car in his first race,’ Wayne says. ‘That’s a fact.’ …

Earnhardt’s debut in Winston Cup competition came on Memorial Day in 1975 at the Charlotte Motor Speedway in the Charlotte 600. One of the stops on his perpetual garage tour for parts/help/conversation belonged to an owner/driver in Concord named Ed Negre. Negre had a newer, better car for the race, and his son, Norman, suggested he also enter the old car and let this kid Earnhardt, who always was around, drive it.

Norman was not being totally charitable. Norman wanted to be the crew chief for the race.

‘You kids’ll never qualify it,’ Negre said about the car.

‘Well, give us a chance,’ his son said. ‘Dale’s going to be a great driver.’

Negre was skeptical, but he went with Norman to watch a Sportsman race at Metrolina to check out Earnhardt’s abilities. Flying to the front at the start, Earnhardt took the early lead. Norman had a told-you-so smile. He pointed out Earnhardt’s success to his dad.

‘Yeah, he’s good,’ Ed agreed. ‘But you know what, Norman? All these young guys are good. They’re the same. All good.’

Then funny things happened. Ed isn’t sure what the sequence was and what the actual events were, but Earnhardt ran into trouble a couple of times. Maybe a blown tire. Maybe something under the hood. At any rate, Earnhardt wound up losing his lead and going back to the pits. Ed wrote him off and kept watching the race. Oops, here was Earnhardt again, back at the front. How’d he do that? Oops, there he was, back in the pits. Told you so. Oops, here he was, back in front. How’d he do that? After about the third return to the lead, Ed turned to his son.

‘You know what, Norman?’ he said. ‘You’re right. This guy can drive.’

‘Driving a stock car on the small tracks and in the small races is like singing in a Holiday Inn lounge,’ someone once suggested to Freddie Smith, the dirt car driver. ‘You go out there, do the best you can every night, but you need that big agent to come through the door and sign you to the contract. No matter how well you sing, you’ll go nowhere until the guy shows up.’

‘Yeah, you’re at the Holiday Inn,’ Freddie Smith replied. ‘You’re waiting, but most times they don’t find your room. They never found mine.’

The wait for Dale Earnhardt seemed endless. The one-shot, thirsty ride at the Charlotte 600 was just that, a one-shot, thirsty ride that left him still as an ‘ain’t nobody.’ He was still bumping around garages, still driving his own Sportsman car, still scuffling, looking for sponsors, for a better ride, for the big chance. He was moving from apartment to apartment to trailer home. His second marriage was going, going, eventually gone in 1977 with the stress of it all. The creditors were calling. He was back in his mother’s house, living in the trailer in the backyard.

There were a few more shots at Winston Cup, two in ‘76, one more in ‘77, but they were the same as the ride with Ed Negre. ‘Strokin” was the term. Get out there in inferior equipment. Do the best you can. Understand you have no chance to win. The second ride in ‘76 was the only one most people remembered. And that was for the wrong reasons.

‘I’d crashed at Daytona and got hurt,’ Johnny Ray, a former owner/driver from Eastaboga, Alabama, says. ‘They took the car to Robert Gee’s shop in Concord to get fixed. The car was fixed pretty soon, but I wasn’t. I knew Dale from hanging around the shop. He wanted to drive the car at Atlanta. It seemed like a good idea. I wasn’t going to drive.’

The good idea turned bad on lap 271 of a 328-lap race, the Dixie 500. The steering on driver Dick Brooks’s car failed. Earnhardt, following directly behind Brooks, hit the car squarely and went flying. He flipped ‘four or five times … the scariest accident in the superspeedway’s 17-year history,’ according to the Charlotte Observer. He walked away with a slightly cut hand.

‘He would have driven more for me, he was doing good before the crash, but that was my only car,’ Johnny Ray says. ‘I was out of business and he was out of business.’

Earnhardt had become so frustrated at his lack of progress, he’d gone back to dirt cars. Enough was enough. He was driving for Robert Gee, his father-in-law, even as the marriage fell apart and then died, winning a bunch of dirt races just to win races and to try to pay bills. He was test-driving a Chrysler product called the Kit Car for veteran crew chief Harry Hyde, a sort of do-it-yourself race car kit. He was floundering. He was thinking about selling some of his racing equipment to pay bills. …

Would it never end? What did he have to do? He was getting older now. Was he going to be in the long line of close-but-never-beens with his father? What? Time was running out on him. He had passed his twenty-seventh birthday. He still needed the big break.

He had no idea the wheels had begun to spin already.

‘My middle daughter was going out with this boy who drove at the Santa Clara County Fairgrounds on Saturday nights,’ California businessman Rod Osterlund, now retired at Lake Tahoe, says. ‘I wound up helping him a little bit, sponsoring the car, things like that. I’d never been involved in racing, except maybe a little drag racing as a kid, but I wound up going. It was a good time and so forth.

‘I also wound up helping out another driver, Roland Wlodyka. That went on for a while, and then my daughter’s boyfriend stopped driving and then stopped being my daughter’s boyfriend and I probably would have been out of racing. Except I still had Roland.’

This all was happening around the same time in 1975 when Earnhardt was making that first ride in the Winston Cup at Charlotte. Osterlund was a builder and developer of real estate on the West Coast. He sponsored Wlodyka, after the boyfriend left, for another season in sprint cars and, surprise, saw a return on his investment. Needing a place to diversify his income, Osterlund decided this might be a good and fun possibility. He talked with Wlodyka about options for further involvement. Wlodyka talked about the racing ‘back east.’ He meant Winston Cup, NASCAR.

‘Let’s check it out,’ Osterlund said. …

When the ‘78 season unfolded, with all of this attention and hope, Osterlund and Wlodyka quickly decided they had made one major miscalculation. They didn’t like their choice of driver. They didn’t think [Dave] Marcis was testing the car in races enough. They felt he was solid, a fine guy, certainly competent, stayed away from trouble, finished most of the time in a respectable third or fourth or fifth … but he never won. He didn’t take the chances they wanted.

Osterlund and Wlodyka, impatient, began looking for a different driver. They didn’t have to look far. Of course.

‘Dale came around the shop all the time,’ Wlodyka says. ‘We gave him used parts. So I knew him pretty well.’

The idea was to have someone drive a second Osterlund car, the No. 98 car, in the final race of the year in Atlanta. The car was a rebuilt Monte Carlo that had been wrecked by Benny Parsons. Putting it into the race would give the team a two-car entry, also something that was new at the time. If it worked out, perhaps the team would run two drivers for the entire ‘79 season.

Wlodyka campaigned for Earnhardt as the driver. That made Osterlund interested. Humpy Wheeler, who had become a friend, also campaigned for Earnhardt. That made Osterlund doubly interested. Humpy offered Osterlund $5,000 if he put Earnhardt in the car. That clinched the deal.

‘There’s a lot of stories about how Dale Earnhardt’s success began,’ Osterlund says. ‘The real story is that Humpy gave me $5,000. I was in business. Five thousand dollars was not an insignificant amount of money at the time.’ …

Osterlund decided he should meet this new driver. He went to a Sportsman race, watched Earnhardt banging around the track. Very nice. Humpy made the introductions at the end.

‘And here was this ragtag guy,’ Osterlund says. ‘That’s the only way I can describe him. This ragtag guy. I remember telling him once, ‘You know that fashion the kids have with the holes in the knees of their jeans? You were there a long time before them.’ I said, ‘Jesus, criminy, where’d this guy come from?’ He was divorced, on the verge of bankruptcy. And he wasn’t even young. He was twenty-seven years old. That’s the thing a lot of people forget. Dale Earnhardt didn’t start out as a young rookie.

“He was something else. I have a painting of him now in my office from that time. The artist did a wonderful job. It’s such a different picture of what you see in most of the pictures of him today. You see Dale as he was as a wild young man.”

That was that Holiday Inn moment. The wild, young-but-not-really-young man had his chance.