The ONLY person who could have gotten away with something like this.
Over the years, we’ve heard plenty of legendary tales about the late, great Dale Earnhardt from his son Dale Earnhardt Jr., mostly on his Dale Jr. Download podcast. From racing memories to hunting trips, there have been some wild tales, and they truly never get old.
But this might be the craziest one yet…
This week on the DJD, he recalled an incident that occurred on his dad’s property in Mooresville when he was around 22-years-old. Dale Earnhardt’s very best friend and fellow racer Neil Bonnett was in town, and he was going to go fishing on his property while Dale finished up some stuff in his office. He grabbed a fishing pole and headed down to the lake, where he came to face to face with the Earnhardt’s family pet of sorts, Pistol.
Pistol was a deer that had been hit by a car when he was very young, and they had taken in. Dale Jr. said he used to run around and play with him, almost like a dog, but eventually, as Pistol got older, he became rougher and more dangerous to play with, so Dale Earnhardt shooed him from the house and he lived like the rest of the deer on the expansive property.
Dale Jr. explained:
“Dad had a lot of deer on his property, but he had this one called Pistol that had been hit by car and raised by humans. And it was now an adult deer, and his nose was broken, like, severely bent, and one side of its rack was all messed up from the accident from years ago.
And I had played with this deer when it was a smaller deer, and just had a little spike rack. You know, he’d come up and rub on your leg and you could pet him and he’d come right around you like a dog. But as he got older, and he started to mature, he got a little more physical.
He’d get rougher, harder, pushing on you and hitting on you and stuff. And eventually, dad kind of shooed him away from the house, and was like, get out there in the property. Dad had 390 acres, he’s like, get out there and just be a deer.”
Bonnett was fishing on the bank of the pond, when Pistol came up behind him and nudged him in the back of the leg, because he wanted to play. Neil shooed him away and kept casting, and Pistol did NOT like that.
So he ran at him “wide a** open,” to use Dale Jr.’s words, and took him out and jumped on him, and started to attack him. Pistol punctured Neil’s chest, and Neil eventually was able to get close enough to grab a log and whack Pistol, putting him in shock:
“So Neil’s on this bank fishing, and Pistol come up behind Neil and nudged him in the back of the leg like, I wanna play. And Neil‘s, shoo, get on. Neil’s casting, that deer ran at him wide a** open and hit him at the knee and took him out, took him out. And then jumped on top of him.
And the deer punctured his chest, the deer is attacking him. So it’s rut, the deer get really aggressive around that time, and so now the deer is attacking him. Neil was able to grab the rack and get out from under the deer and get in between the deer and a tree.
And he grabbed a log, this is Neil’s story, he grabbed a log and swung and hit the deer in the head And stunned it, and was able to get out of there.”
No one else was over there at the time or knew anything like this had happened, and Dale Jr. recalled Neil coming int the shop looking for one of Dale Sr.’s guns:
“No one knows any of this is going on, and I’m in the deer head shop working on my late model car, and Neil comes into the shop and his shirt is kind of unbuttoned and torn, but he’s not bleeding all over the place or anything, but he’s mad as hell. And he says, ‘Where’s your daddy’s shotgun?’
And I was like, ‘There’s one in the office right behind the door.’ Or a rifle, not a shotgun. Daddy had like a 270 or .30-06 or something sitting in the office. He grabs that gun and goes, ‘Come on.’ So we get in the truck, and he’s in the passenger seat, and he’s like, take me down to the pond. So we’re driving down into the property, down the hill through the gate, Dad had a 10-foot fence around this property.
We drive through there, and it ain’t far to get to the pond, but we’re coming toward the pond and out in front of us on this sort of big grassy hill is Pistol, and he said, ‘Stop the truck.'”
You can probably imagine where this is going…
Neil put Pistol down, then had Jr. drive over to him where he “beat the s*** out of that deer,” clearly very upset about the fact that it could’ve easily been the other way around:
“And he got out and laid the gun across the hood of the truck and shot the deer, and I don’t know why. I have no clue. and he gets back in the truck, ‘Drive me over there.’ We drive over there, and we pull up on this deer, and he gets out and he beat the s*** out of that deer with that damn gun, cussing at it.
We drive back up to the shop, he walked in there, put the gun behind thing, he’s standing there in the shop, that’s when he starts looking at his chest and stuff. And I’m starting to put it together. I’m like, ‘What happened?’ He goes, ‘Man, that deer attacked the s*** out of me. I was fishing on the bank, and and he jumped on top of me. And he poked holes in me.’
And I was like, ‘Golly.’ And I had never, ever seen Neil Bonnet mad at anything, ever, right.”
But possibly the most surprising part of the whole story was how Dale Earnhardt reacted.
You probably know he answered to no one, and he did not mess around or play games with really anything, so it said a lot about the type of relationship Bonnett and Earnhardt had when it came to his reaction to everything once he finally heard the full story from Bonnett:
“He didn’t call dad and go, ‘Hey man, I’m gonna go take care of this deer.’ He just did it. That was that was the other dynamic of this whole thing. The process of all the playing out is big enough, right, that’s a wild enough story. But he shot one of Dad‘s deer, and they were that close of friends… so later on, like, two hours later, Dad comes in, and I got to watch Dad learn what happened.
And I got to watch dad not say s*** to Neil Bonnet shooting his deer without saying, ‘Hey, I’m gonna go do this.’ Neil and Dad were so equal. You know, I always looked at Dad as like, bigger, better, stronger, tougher, more man, more common sense than anyone in the world. He was just the man’s man, no one was better than him, and no one was more of a bad a** than my dad.
But there was Neil Bonnett standing equal to him going, ‘He pissed me off, so I went and shot it. Only option you have, Dale Earnhardt, is to thank me. Or not say anything at all,’ right? Dad’s like, ‘Well alright, I guess that’s what happened. That’s That.'”
I have to imagine a young Dale Jr. was pretty stunned to see his dad just go along with it, because as you may recall in another story Jr. told about someone shooting a deer on his dad’s property, it went down VERY differently. Of course, that was because an employee did it for fun and not because they were attacked, but still… you get the point. Dale Sr. didn’t play about his deer.
It’s really an incredible story, and it certainly aligns with a lot of the insight we got about the closeness of these two in the Earnhardt docuseries that was released earlier this year. They talk in-depth about the friendship between Neil and Dale, and he was probably the one and only person Dale viewed as his equal following all of his racing success.
I’d love to have been a fly on the wall when Dale Sr. found all this out, though… something tells me Dale Jr. had the best reaction of all, though, and it’s obviously the kind of story you never, ever forget.
You can watch the full podcast below.
