The fans saw themselves in the drivers, forging the most powerful link between fan and athlete in modern sport. Petty, who was said to have run a little corn likker hisself, was among the first (with Junior Johnson) to realize that folks might pay to watch these cars and personality-rich drivers duke it out on an oval track, with only one another in pursuit. They were Tom Cruise years before "Top Gun." On the dark and twisty back roads, even with 100 jiggling Mason jars of hooch in the trunk, the wild-eyed Southern boys deployed unheard-of horsepower and unmatchable driving skills to make fools of the trailing revenooers. The first stock car racers were American entrepreneurs-wily southern Appalachian shade-tree mechanics and moonshine-makers who souped up their off-the-line Fords, Chevys and Chryslers to outrun federal agents trying to stanch the free flow of commerce. James Naismith and his peach basket.īut no sport digs to the core of what we are as Americans-good, bad and in-between-as stock car racing. Sportologists reasonably point to basketball as a solely American creation-the brainchild of one Dr. Baseball, probably from the English games of cricket and rounders. At this year's Daytona 500, in February, 190,000 Americans came together in a patriotic orgy of ethanol excess and unfettered capitalism.įootball came from rugby, an English sport. With his Rushmore jaw and his buzz cut, Petty won the first Daytona 500 way back in 1959, when it was little more than a beach race for a handful of red-faced Florida swamp-runners. In the process, Lee Petty saw NASCAR bloom. He raced a couple of times thereafter, but focused instead on his growing racing organization, Petty Enterprises. He tangled with another driver and his car was hurled off the track, flying more than 100 feet before crashing in a parking lot. Lee's racing career was ended by a spectacular crash during a qualifying race for the 1961 Daytona 500. If your game is baseball, and your teenage son starts to hit your best heat, what do you do? Congratulate him? Are you kidding? You brush him back with a high, hard one. Later, Lee Petty said: "I would have protested even if it was my mother." Father raced son on a dirt track in North Carolina and, in a photo finish, the son was declared the winner.īut Lee Petty howled like a stuck pig and the result was reversed. 45.īut it all began with Lee Petty, who started racing on a dirt track in 1949. Lee's great-grandson Adam, who at 17 made his NASCAR debut only last weekend, naturally drives No. Lee's grandson Kyle, an estimable NASCAR racer himself, wears No. 42, and the number rose with each successive generation of Pettys. 3 had been by a nation of baseball fans two generations earlier. 43 car became as recognized throughout the mostly Southern stock car circuit as Babe Ruth's No. NASCAR racers are known by their car numbers, and Richard Petty's No. Richard wore shades and a cowboy hat with an open rattlesnake mouth on the brim and bleached his smiling teeth so they shone extra white. Richard Petty won seven Winston Cups, the championship trophy of NASCAR, the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing. Petty is best known for his surname and its attachment to the given name of his son Richard, who for a long time was stock car racing's biggest hero. Junior Johnson may be the father of stock car racing, but Petty was its Johnny Appleseed, the patriarch of the only four-generation family of athletes in major American sports. He was being treated for a stomach aneurysm, which is a cruel joke played by death-the man's gut never betrayed him while he was behind the wheel of his fin-tailed Oldsmobile 88. Yesterday, Petty died at 86 in a hospital in North Carolina. None of them ever mashed the throttle to the floor and played steely-eyed tailgater on an asphalt track at 150 mph in an ear-piercing celebration of everything that is American. War hero, patriotic tunesmith and framer of the Constitution though they were, none of them ever strapped into a 300-horsepower, rubber-burning, fire-snorting, spleen-busting hot rod he had built by himself. Passed, all of them, like they're standing in Turn 3 at Darlington.
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