The mystery deepens…
Dale Earnhardt Jr. has finally addressed his mysterious brother, Figgy Earnhardt, who took the internet by storm over the weekend.
If you’re not familiar with Figgy Earnhardt, let me fill you in on the story before getting to what Dale Jr. had to say about him.
It all started with a Reddit post, when someone took to the NASCAR subreddit seeking information for what they claimed was a son of the legendary Dale Earnhardt named Figgy who they remembered but nobody else seemed to know anything about:
“I distinctly remember Dale Earnhardt having an additional son named Figgy Earnhardt alongside Dale Jr and Kerry. One of my other friends also swears he remembers this son.
I feel like I’m going crazy searching online. I got curious one day a couple weeks ago about what happened to Figgy cause I didn’t remember him going into nascar like Dale’s other sons. I can find no trace of him online. I’m posting this here to see if anyone else remembers Figgy Earnhardt / knows why he seems to have been scrubbed from the internet.”
The post absolutely took over the NASCAR chatter online, with tons of jokes on X and Reddit about “Figgy Earnhardt.” People created a whole backstory for Figgy, and threw out allegations of a massive coverup to erase Figgy from the history books:
“He was the result of an affair so he went to live with his mother and her husband. These days he goes by the name of Chase Elliott”
“He had a traumatic injury at Chuck E Cheese as a young adult and was never the same..”
“Fun fact, ol’ Fightin’ Figgy Earnhardt went and got himself banned from every single zoo in Texas.”
“I got in a fist fight with Figgy outside of a Winn Dixie after a race in Hickory in 1996.”
“Figgy was lost on the same flight as the other missing family member, Amelia Earnhardt”
“I remember he drove the Fig Newton car for 3 years in the nationwide series. He would go around the garage fist bumping people saying “fruit n cake baby!!””
“Figmund Newton Earnhardt is his full name. The first human to partake in greyhound racing. Unfortunately, Figgy got lost on his way home from the Plainfield greyhound track after chasing a rabbit and wound up in DPRK and that’s why we don’t hear about him anymore.”
“Figgy was disowned by the Earnhardts, moved to Europe, and changed his last name to “Verstappen””
“Old Figgy is still selling appliances just outside of Mooresville”
This is what happens when NASCAR has an off weekend and fans don’t have anything else to talk about…
Now, it appears that the original Figgy post was simply a troll, because somebody posted (and has since deleted) a tweet claiming their friend was behind it simply because he was bored at work. But Figgy somehow took on a life of his own, and got the entire NASCAR community talking online.
There was one person, though, who everybody was anxious to hear from: Dale Earnhardt Jr.
Junior is pretty online, keeps up with what the internet is saying and even gets involved in the conversations on Twitter sometimes. So there’s no doubt he had seen people talking about this non-existent brother of his. In fact, Junior’s media company, Dirty Mo Media, even jumped in on the jokes:
And this morning, Junior went live on YouTube for his weekly “Ask Jr.” segment on his podcast, Dale Jr. Download, where the chat was predictably all about Figgy and demanding that Junior address it.
Well they finally got around to talking about Figgy Earnhardt – and Junior neither confirmed nor denied his existence:
“I don’t want to ruin this thing for them, because they’re having a good time with it. If I just said it didn’t exist… they’d be like, ‘Man, what an a–hole.'”
Junior’s co-host TJ Majors tried to get Junior to say that Figgy either does or does not exist, but he wasn’t taking the bait:
“It doesn’t exist.”
“Are you sure?”
“No. I mean, I’m assuming. Are you saying it does?”
“No. I’ve done genealogy. I know the answer.”
He was clearly getting a kick out of messing with his co-host and producer Travis Rockhold, who didn’t seem to find the whole thing as amusing. But Junior admitted that he thought the whole thing was funny:
“I don’t know how these things come out of nowhere. From what I can tell it literally came from a single tweet or post on Reddit that there’s this mythical son of dad named Figgy that existed. I mean the internet’s just having fun I guess. Just being goofy.”
And Junior was also amused at how far and fast the whole thing spread based on a single Reddit post:
“It’s interesting how those things kinda pop up. The internet’s undefeated. …
It’s wild that everyone literally – how quickly everyone picked up on it. The things that you want to take off like this, don’t. And then this does.”
I guess the legend of Figgy continues on…
