Shedding some light on who he was before he became a racing icon.
It’s no secret that Dale Earnhardt Jr. had a very complicated relationship with his dad while he was still alive, though as he got older and started racing for his father’s company DEI, their relationship grew and they were able to have some special bonding moments.
But way before Dale Jr. was born, Dale Earnhardt was struggling to become a full-time professional race car driver in NASCAR, though by 1980, he had won his very first Winston Cup Series Championship in only his second season racing at that level. It was the first of seven for The Intimidator, and it had been quite a journey for him to get to that point. Dale grew up in small town Kannapolis, North Carolina, the son of a famous driver in Ralph Earnhardt, and all he ever wanted to do was race like his daddy.
Well, he did that and then some, and award-winning motorsports journalist Deb Williams was there to document it all. She’s the guest on Dale Jr.’s Dale Jr. Download this week, and when she first started reporting on Dale in the late 70s and early 80s, she says he was a different person:
“A lot of people don’t realize how much Dale changed from the late 70s and early 80s.”
Dale agreed that he wasn’t the same, and Deb explained that he was always very “self-conscious” about not finishing high school, and there were very few reporters or media figures he was comfortable talking with because of it:
“No, he wasn’t. Even dealing with him in the 1990s was entirely different than dealing with him in the early 1980s. Because he was very uncomfortable, self-conscious about not having finished high school. It made him uncomfortable to be in those situations. And you know, he was comfortable with Tom Higgins, of the Charlotte Observer, and they could do hunting and fishing and discuss that.”
Obviously, I know he was a human being, but it’s really hard to imagine Dale Sr., who had such a reputation as a bad***, take no crap person, being self-conscious about anything.
But Dale said that his mom, Dale Sr.’s second ex-wife, opened up about some of the stories that painted him in a not-so-great light before she passed from cancer, and while Jr. obviously kept the details private, he said he realized how much of an “idiot” his dad could be before he “became somebody”:
“When dad passed away, that person I knew so well, and I could almost predict exactly how he was gonna act and what he was gonna say when he walk into a room.
And I really didn’t realize just how different he was until my mom, when she got sick with cancer, she finally said, ‘Alright, I’ll tell you some of the real deal stories that me and your dad went through.’ And some things didn’t paint dad in the best light. He was a bit of a goofball, an idiot sometimes, before he became somebody.”
I’ve heard many different people make the comment about how much Dale was affect by his dropping out of high school, and in the recent Earnhardt documentary, his eldest daughter Kelley talked about how badly her dad wanted her to go to college and have a more “normal” career.
It’s truly incredible the way he became the legend and icon that he did, and it’s incredibly interesting to hear from the people who were there for his entire career to shed light on the aspects of Dale Earnhardt we don’t know as much about.
The full podcast is available below, and it’s fantastic.
