How could anyone possibly hate Dale Earnhardt Jr.?
He’s easily one of the most beloved drivers to ever race in NASCAR, as is evidenced by his 15-time most popular driver wins, but he had quite a run-in with someone on vacation recently that you have to hear about.
This week on the his podcast Dale Jr. Download, he talked about his trip to Key Largo, Florida, with his wife Amy and another couple, which he had just gotten back from.
They stayed at an all-inclusive resort, and he told podcast co-host Mike Davis that everyone they met there was having great time, noting that you rarely leave the resort at places like that, so you wind up seeing the same people at dinner, the bar, pretty much everywhere else on-property:
“There’s an understanding man, that you all gotta get along.
‘Cuz your ass is gonna be around each other when you go to the bar later that night, when you go to dinner, everybody has to keep it together. Don’t start no shit, right.”
I mean, it feels like that’s obvious, especially considering everyone there is actually on vacation and would be wanting to relax and enjoy it.
But on their last night there, Amy, Dale and the other couple were hanging out at the hot tub, when a woman with another group nearby recognized him and told Jr. what a big fan her son was.
He said it was a really nice interaction, and he told her to tell her son he said hello.
Right about that time, another guy from that crew stumbled over, after he had apparently been at the tiki bar for quite a while.
Clearly very drunk on rum, he looked right at Jr. and was a complete asshole, saying:
“He figures out who I am in the moment, walks right up to me and goes, first thing he says, only thing he says, ‘Jimmie Johnson won a lot more races than you, didn’t he?'”
At this moment, in the story Mike cracks up, and once he catches his breathe, asks Jr. what he said to the guy, to which he had the perfect response:
“I said, ‘He’s a seven-time champion.’ And that was it. He just walked on away.”
I mean, I’ve never heard anything but great things about Jr., and he was clearly minding his own business just enjoying some time off, so you just hate to hear that some random drunk guy had to go and be like that for no reason.
Jr. also added that he knew he couldn’t say what he really wanted to back, because word would’ve traveled so fast around the resort, and who knows what kind of story it would’ve turned into:
“I was sittin’ there thinking, this is exactly one of those moments where if I say something, if I say what I wanna say, it’s gonna escalate, and everybody in this place…
It’s gonna take seconds for it to travel around and everybody in the place will have their own version of whatever it is that happened… he got me.”
Dale Jr., always a class act. Just another reason to love him.
And Mike hilariously added at the end of the video:
“You know when you been got… You’ve been got.”
Touché, I guess, Mike…
Make sure you check out the whole story here, it’s pretty damn funny:
