By The Commish

(Part 1 of 2)

It’s inevitable. Barring accident or totally unanticipated change of circumstances, sometime in the next year Jeff Gordon will surpass Dale Earnhardt’s impressive total of 76 victories and move into sixth on the all-time wins list. Already the debates have begun about which was the better driver. I don’t mean to enter that discussion, because I don’t think that the two totals can be compared: the eras, the competition, and the situations are totally different. But we now can begin to consider the legacy both drivers have shaped—that is, how they have changed the sport they excelled at, for better or for worse.

Dale Earnhardt is an American cultural icon, much like his Southern contemporary, Elvis Presley. And both men’s legends share many points of reference—rising from working-class poverty to fame and fortune, creating a marketing empire that lasts long after the icon himself is gone, and an enduring sense that the icon died too soon. Earnhardt’s reputation is not just a “Southern thing;” his legend rests in his ability to portray himself as the working stiff with dirt under his fingernails who overcame his hardscrabble background to achieve the wealth and notoriety that in many ways defines success to people of his class. And he worked hard to project that idea of the farmer/hunter/fisherman, rather than the picture of the hard-drinking, often skirt-chasing obsessive who was divorced twice by age 25 and whose three oldest children still struggle with their relation to their deceased father.

I’ve spoken to people in New Jersey and Michigan and Arizona about him, and a similar theme emerges: “He was one of us and he hit it big.” The implied undertone is that Earnhardt’s success—at his death he was worth over $100 million, owned an island in the Caribbean and a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, and enjoyed all the luxuries such wealth brings—somehow substitutes for all the success his followers can only dream of having. Elvis gave away Cadillacs to strangers; Dale secretly paid for paving church parking lots. Yet a lot of their most avid followers exist paycheck to paycheck, living vicariously through the success of their hero.

But that’s a measure of Earnhardt’s cultural and anthropological success, not his influence on the sport. When you come down to it, Earnhardt’s real legacies to stock car racing are the invention of personal brand marketing and, posthumously, a move to make the sport safer for drivers. Earnhardt was the first driver to translate his on-track persona (“The Intimidator”) into a marketable product—the T-shirts, the die-casts, and above all the image—and to significantly improve his income from it. Earnhardt didn’t develop this concept by himself—a superb team of marketers, including Don Hawk and Teresa Earnhardt, were part of the core group that designed the plan—but it’s his name that is associated with it. Other drivers, most notably Earnhardt’s son Dale Jr., who requires three full-time P.R. representatives, have capitalized on the elder Earnhardt’s image marketing, and most drivers at the highest level of racing now enjoy a tidy income from returns on souvenir and die-cast sales (allowing team owners to artificially depress their actual driving salaries). So Earnhardt’s first legacy is economic: he invented a major income stream for drivers and teams.

Earnhardt’s other legacy — a sad and ironic one — is driver safety. The driver who refused to wear full-face helmets, installed his seats and Simpson belts in a non-conforming manner just because he liked them that way, and referred to drivers (especially Jeff Burton) who called for increased safety efforts as “candy asses” is responsible for a number of changes to NASCAR practices enacted after his death at Daytona. Full-face helmets, head-and-neck restraints, and improved seats are now required in NASCAR; it’s highly unlikely they would be if Earnhardt were still alive, since he campaigned actively and loudly for driver choice in the matter. Earnhardt was probably the one driver whom the France family allowed to influence its decisions. His opposition to safety innovations would likely have kept the SAFER barriers from being implemented as quickly or as universally as they have been in NASCAR in the past three years. The tragic deaths of Tony Roper, Kenny Irwin Jr., and Adam Petty should have been plenty of reason to inspire change, but the Intimidator stood in the way. Perhaps his attitude would have changed over the years, as he saw his sons and eldest grandson start to race. But Earnhardt stubbornness was legendary. It’s ironic, then, that his other lasting legacy to the sport is one he would have opposed had he lived.

By comparison, Jeff Gordon’s cultural status is nothing like Earnhardt’s. Though Gordon also came from a modest background and made considerable sacrifices to achieve his racing success, he’s never marketed that background; he doesn’t talk much about his parents and the struggles he had growing up and rarely brings his family into his public world. Earnhardt flaunted his third wife and his “recovery” from divorce; Gordon asked for privacy and has never commented publicly about his personal response to the issue, other than a few statements about how it affected his 2002 racing. You never see pictures of Gordon at home like the pictures Earnhardt used to release of himself working in a barn or on a hunting trip; Gordon has refused to participate in reality shows like NASCAR 360 because of the imact on his privacy. It appears to be a deliberate choice on his part, and one that has cost him a number of fans; as a consequence, Gordon’s legacy is not likely to be cultural.

But in racing terms, it’s possible to argue that Gordon’s impact on NASCAR has been much larger than Earnhardt’s. In fact, there are five areas where we can say that Gordon has significantly changed his sport. The first is the Age Thing. Gordon had won more than a thousand races when he moved up to stock cars at age 19; his first national championship had come at age 8. Were it not for his youth, his career arc from quarter-midgets to USAC to NASCAR wouldn’t have been so remarkable; but he made the leap at an age when the Rusty Wallaces and Sterling Marlins of the world were still begging for an occasional ride. (Dale Jarrett once tellingly remarked that he and Jeff started racing at the same time, but he was just 15 years older.)

Gordon, already a star on ESPN’s Thunder racing shows, is still perceived by some fans as having not paid his dues because of his early entry (such fans don’t understand the rigors of USAC or the kinds of toughness developed by racing competitors three and four times one’s age). But his success — not so much in the Busch series as what he did when he joined Hendrick Motorsports — changed NASCAR forever. The idea that teams didn’t have to wait for a driver to “grow up,” that they could hire young, telegenic drivers who would please their sponsors while running competitively—totally altered the way drivers get rides in the best series in Stock Car racing. When’s the last time you heard an owner talk about looking for “the next Dale Earnhardt” or “the next Mark Martin”? That’s not an insult to those drivers, it’s just a recognition of Gordon’s legacy: teams are hungry for the next Jeff Gordon. The recent move to driver development contracts only emphasizes this element of his legacy.

A second element to Gordon’s legacy comes from how his team changed the approach of owners and teams to the nature of racing as a team sport (with the help of Rick Hendrick and Ray Evernham). The last real innovations in pit crew performance had been achieved by the Wood Brothers’ teams in the late 70s. When HMS hired Andy Papathanassiou with his master’s degree from Stanford in organizational behavior as Gordon’s first pit crew coach in 1992, it signaled a new approach to the driver/team relationship. With Andy Papa’s coaching and Ray Evernham’s attention to detail, the Rainbow Warriors lowered the average time on pit stops by almost five seconds, systematized at-track preparation, treated the over-the-wall guys as athletes who had to train and practice, and made the pit stop a major part of race strategy. In the heady run from 1995-1998, Gordon’s pit crew was the class of the sport, and their impeccable teamwork was a key element of Gordon’s first three championships. Gordon fans know that Robert Yates was so desperate to improve his crews that he hired Gordon’s crew wholesale after the 1999 season, doubling the members’ salaries. Today, the best pit crew members can command six-figure salaries and are now being signed to long-term contracts, just like drivers and crew chiefs. The legacy of Gordon’s Rainbow Warriors is one of professionalizing pit crews and making team dynamics a visible part of racing success.

Part Two of "Legacy" will come in July

Copyright ©2005 Jeff Gordon Online. All rights reserved.