Embracing the gray.
Dale Earnhardt Jr. is of course the son of the late, great Dale Earnhardt, and because he’s a Jr., he’s gone by plenty of nicknames over the years like Junior, Junebug and Little E. While he loved his dad very much, and wanted to be just like him, he’s talked a lot about how tough it was to essentially be in his shadow and try to live up to that incredible legacy for so many years.
And now that he’s in his 50s, he’s started to have a good bit of gray coming in, taking over his signature ginger color (which at times had some blonde due to his frosted tips he rocked for a while). He told his wife, Amy, that he was gonna lean into the gray, and going to let them continue to “get grayer”:
“We ain’t doing nothing with these grays. They’re just gonna get grayer.”
And he had a really interesting response as to why he was adamant about embracing the gray, as Amy explained:
“You know what told me the other day? We were in Costa Rica sitting around, we’re all kind of in all of how gray his hair has gotten, his facial hair too. Like he’s got a little bit of a handlebar that’s still got some of that ginger in it, and the rest of him is silver.
And so he’s just like, you know, my entire life, I’ve been a junior, I’m embracing this gray because now I feel like I’m an old man, I’m established, I’m not a junior anymore. In my whole life, I’ve been a junior, I’ve been kind of treated like a kid, talked about like the kid, because I’m junior.”
He then asked his wife if she knew what it was like to be a junior, and Amy admitted she had “no clue” because she was both the oldest child and oldest grandchild, and Jr. told her that he had felt like he was in “junior high” for his entire life:
“You remember when you were in junior high, and then you got to go to senior high? Remember when you were in junior high, and you were looking at the kids and senior high, and looking at the other girls and how they palled around, their little popular clicks, or how just everybody looked older and smarter?
And they’re driving around and you’re still riding the school bus, and you’re like, I wanna get to senior high. You finally get a senior high, and now you get to senior high and you’re looking down at the junior high kids, and you’re like yeah, you little f*****, I was a junior.
I remember what it was like not having a car, wearing goofy clothes that your parents bought you. Now I’m buying my own clothes. You know, so I’ve been a junior, I’ve been stuck in junior high. Now I’m extremely happy and proud and of course. When guys can start growing a little facial hair, it’s like a milestone.”
It’s honestly a really interesting point, and Amy told him that on that same trip, he told her another fascinating story about when he first started to be able to grow a beard:
“This is the other thing he told me, same trip, he’s like, when I first got my hair, it was a little blonde, just tiny little blonde things. He’s like, I used to take a sharpie to, just to make them dark. and it was probably a black sharpie, because we didn’t really have brown ones. I was like, that’s so weird that you would do that.”
I mean, I’ll give him points for creativity…
He also revealed that he once chemically straightened his hair with his bus driver one time while out of town at a race, and you can probably imagine where this is going. It didn’t work, or turn out how he wanted, so he decided to have his bus driver cut it for him. And all this happened to be the week before his sister was getting married… not good. He admitted that he walked her down the aisle with this straight hair that resulted in him trying to give himself an insane haircut. Dale… we absolutely need pictures.
I think his gray looks good, he pulls it off and it’s certainly distinguished. I love his reasoning for embracing it… I never would have thought of it that way, but Jr. has discussed many times about how he was trying to live up to his dad’s career and standards for a long time, which was very hard on him, and he’s obviously very much come into his own as both a NASCAR driver, personality and ambassador of the sport… and now he has the gray to prove it.
