Hey, every sport needs its villains.
NASCAR has had plenty of villains over the years, drivers who fans love to hate for one reason or another. Of course most of the time the drivers who are the most hated are also the ones who win the most, with legendary drivers like Dale Earnhardt, Jeff Gordon, Darrell Waltrip, Kyle Busch, and many more receiving more than their fair share of boos over the course of their career.
Well if you go to any NASCAR race right now, chances are you’ll hear plenty of those boos raining down on Joey Logano.
The driver of the #22 car for Team Penske is a three-time NASCAR Cup Series champion with 38 wins over his 19 years in the sport’s top series. But after most of those wins, including this past weekend’s victory at North Wilkesboro, there were a lot more boos than cheers as Logano celebrated.
It’s not a new phenomenon: Ever since Joey entered the Cup Series, he’s ruffled feathers of both fans and his fellow competitors. He took over the #20 car of Joe Gibbs Racing after Tony Stewart left the team back in 2009, and found immediate success in his first season – but he also found controversy early in his career thanks to run-ins with drivers like Kevin Harvick, Ryan Newman, Denny Hamlin, and others.
His winning ways combined with his both on-and-off track feuds, as well as his brash attitude early in his career, didn’t exactly earn Logano many fans. And according to Joey, he understands why he gets the boos from NASCAR fans.
During an appearance on the Door Bumper Clear podcast this week, Logano was asked whether he could pinpoint the moment that fans started hating him. And according to Joey, it was…well, the beginning of his career:
“It was my rookie season. It was right off the bat.”
Logano says there are several things that he believes have gone into fans’ perception (i.e. hatred) of him over the course of his career – including the fact that he’s from Connecticut and not the south:
“I think there’s multiple things – because I’ve had a lot of years to think about this, and I’ve realized there’s no coming back from it.
But I think one of it’s where I’m from, because I’ve noticed as I travel further south to races I get booed more, so I think there’s a little bit of that.
I think the way I came into the sport with a lot of hype, and I was supposed to be all this, I think that was a piece of it. Guilty, I was very cocky and arrogant as a youngster when I came into the sport, and I picked fights with legends. Like Tony Stewart, Kevin Harvick, Kesenth, all these guys, I picked some good ones to go after, and they had a huge fan base.
So if someone fights your driver- and Tony Stewart had a lot of freaking fans, and when he says – I forgot what he said about me, but a lot of things that were really nice. …
And when you have that many fans, they’re on his side, and then you’re screwed, and you’re that forever.
Everybody can look back when you were 19 and say, ‘I probably shouldn’t have said that, I shouldn’t have done that, I regret this, I regret that.’ And yeah, you got to live with those consequences your whole life, but boy, I’m really living with a lot of it.”
Of course Joey would probably never say it, but the fact that he wins a lot probably has something to do with it too. If he were running 35th every week, fans wouldn’t care enough to boo – so at least they’re passionate enough to react.
We had Joey on our podcast last year, and honestly he was the nicest guy in the world. Great dude to chat with, funny, and self-aware enough that he understands the boos but confident enough that he doesn’t let it bother him. We chatted a little bit about the hate he gets from NASCAR fans, and as Joey pointed out, those are people who have never met him and know nothing about him other than what they see on the track.
Every sport needs a villain, and as we’ve seen many times the villain ultimately ends up becoming the hero later in their career.
Whether Joey makes that transition with fans is yet to be seen, but I have a feeling that the three championships and 39 wins make the boos a little easier to deal with.
