Dozens of sportswriters knew Dale Earnhardt better than I did, or covered him longer. But watching Earnhardt, the four-part documentary now available on Amazon Prime Video, it’s immediately evident that while this program certainly centers around Earnhardt, there are so many ancillary satellites revolving around the main planet, and as part four concludes with an obligatory, sad Willie Nelson song, you click off the remote and think: Man, so much about that time I forgot.
So much about his life, and his death, his friends and his enemies, the way he treated the people he liked, which was different from how he treated his family. How one day Earnhardt started showing up wearing a suit, glamorous third wife Teresa on his arm, became a tycoon, built his Dale Earnhardt, Inc. offices and shop, promptly dubbed the “Garage Mahal,” in 1999. Inside, it was chilly and confusing. Mixed messages abounded. Granite, with gold drinking fountains, plus a stuffed deer that Dale shot, and the shotgun he used to kill it. So many shiny trophies that, lumped together, sort of lose meaning. It reminded me of Graceland.
Let’s face it: We all know how this movie ends, in a comparatively innocuous-looking crash on the last lap of the 2001 Daytona 500. So you’re signing up to watch a four-hour documentary because you are either interested in NASCAR in general, Dale Earnhardt in particular, or you just enjoy a well-told story.
The documentary, executive-produced by Ron Howard and his longtime business partner, Brian Grazer, will win awards, and it deserves to: I’ve worked on projects like this, and through all four parts I marveled at the precise footage and perfect soundbites the production team was able to unearth, because I know for every minute of aired footage, they must have had to plow through hours and hours of archives, beg friends and families and fans for home movies, refuse to take no for an answer when they knew what they needed exists, out there somewhere.
You don’t have to be a race fan to appreciate Earnhardt, though it helps, especially if you’ve been around for a while.
I met Dale Earnhardt on November 19, 1989, at what was then the Atlanta International Raceway. It was the Winston Cup season finale—and isn’t that the smartest marketing you ever saw, when you had to actually say the name of a cigarette company when you were referencing the series?—where the ’89 champion would be crowned. I was covering it for the Dallas Times Herald. It was my first NASCAR race. I wasn’t a Times Herald sportswriter; I was actually the paper’s television critic, and I had timed a visit to CNN studios to write a feature on the news network’s upcoming 10th anniversary for an airline magazine (remember those?). It was not a coincidence that there was an important NASCAR race there that weekend—I’d been writing about motorsports for a while, and it came time for me to check that NASCAR box.
So I joined 15 or 20 actual sportswriters in the Atlanta track’s small infield press room, accompanied by nobody I knew, but several I’d heard of. I was not accustomed to being in a room that had no view of the actual racetrack, but soon learned that wasn’t unusual.
It was not a particularly eventful race, until lap 202, when the orange number 22 car of journeyman driver Grant Adcox pancaked the outside wall and burst into flames as the car traveled down the embankment, into the infield. It seemed to take forever to get Adcox out of the car: They had to use the Jaws of Life to cut off the roof. He was taken to the infield care center, then helicoptered to an Atlanta hospital. There’s little question that Adcox was dead before his car stopped rolling, as the mounting for his seat came loose in the impact, and unrestrained, he suffered fatal head and chest trauma, but it is typical of all forms of motorsports to transport the driver to the hospital, where the family can gather and an appropriate member of the clergy breaks the news, and the carefully structured official announcement is made later, so fans can leave unaware that they’d just seen someone die. To a T, that script would be followed 12 years later for Earnhardt himself.
Adcox worked with his father at Herb Adcox Chevrolet in Chattanooga. He never had enough money to compete full-time in NASCAR, but raced regularly in the ARCA series, which used older Cup cars. Dale Earnhardt had said in an interview earlier in the season that he was impressed with Adcox’s talent, and with enough money, maybe he could be a success in the Cup series.
Some of the Cup races Adcox had managed to run seemed cursed. In 1974, Adcox qualified for a race at Talladega Superspeedway. Midway through the event, the caution flag flew, and the drivers dashed for pit road. As he started to pull into his pit stall, Adcox’s car began to slide, right into Gary Bettenhausen’s Roger Penske–owned AMC Matador, which was being serviced by the crew. Several of them were struck and injured, the worst being Don Miller, who lost a leg.
The following year, Adcox again qualified for the race at Talladega, but his crew chief dropped dead from a heart attack right there in the garage. The car was withdrawn, but Adcox found another ride, and then the race was delayed a week by rain. Adcox, a working man, had to cancel, and his spot in the field was given to fan favorite Tiny Lund, the affable 6-foot, 5-inch, 270-pound winner of the 1963 Daytona 500. In a multi-car crash on lap seven, Lund’s car was struck broadside, and he was killed. He was 45. Had Adcox been able to race, Lund would have been watching from the grandstands.
Earnhardt won that race at Atlanta, though he lost the 1989 championship to Rusty Wallace. Earnhardt was cheerful when he came into the press room to talk to us: One of his first comments was, “Boy, I hope Grant’s OK. That was a hard hit he took.” A sportswriter sitting next to me leaned over and whispered, “Did nobody tell him?”
Apparently not, and we sure didn’t. I spoke to Earnhardt briefly, then was soon back in my hotel room, about to type out the story on my wretched Radio Shack TRS 80 laptop. But what was my lede? That Earnhardt won? That Wallace was the champion? That Adcox was the first Cup driver to die in five years? I don’t recall what I typed into the Trash 80, but I typed away. And I had covered my first NASCAR race.
As I went to more and more races, Earnhardt was always a looming presence. He was hated and adored. I fell somewhere in between. Rubbing may be racing, but Earnhardt’s aggressiveness often rubbed me the wrong way, especially earlier in his career. He was polarizing—you either got him or you didn’t.
I apologize for the above autobiography, and I need to get back to Earnhardt. The praise is deserved, and the use of film and clips from TV broadcasts is Emmy-worthy. The TV critic in me was a little put off by the staging of some of the present-day interviews: It isn’t unusual for the interviewer, unseen and unheard in this case, to tell the subject to look at me, not at the camera, but several of the subjects appear to be speaking to someone in another room. The interviews with bass fishing legend Hank Parker, an Earnhardt confidant, are so dark and distant it’s almost like he was being filmed by a hidden camera. But that would be nitpicking director Joshua Altman’s style. Taken as a whole, Earnhardt is top-shelf. Part three drags a bit, but the rest seem right-sized.
As I watched, I took notes. Following are some expansions on those notes, in no particular order, which fans of the man and the documentary might find of interest.
I wanted more from Earnhardt about Ralph Earnhardt than we were served. The importance he played in his son Dale’s life, perhaps not so much by action as inaction, was telling at every turn. Growing up at racetracks in the south, I’d seen dozens of Ralph Earnhardts: Lean, hard-bitten, tanned, wary and suspicious, usually with a pack of Lucky Strikes tucked in their shirt pocket. Ralph was a talented driver, perhaps an even more talented car- and engine-builder, as often as not working for the drivers he competed against on Saturday nights.
Ralph toiled for years in cotton gins, looking for a way out. That would be racing. With his typically German meticulous, practical personality, he wanted more, but didn’t crave it, didn’t demand superstardom, didn’t much want to travel, but he dominated racing for years at local tracks, where he made enough money and got to sleep in his own bed every night. He was sick most of 1973 with heart trouble, had to let his friend Stick Elliott race his car, but was back behind the wheel that summer, and won two races at Concord Speedway. “Veteran Ralph Earnhardt is back in high gear,” said the Charlotte News in July.
Two months later, Ralph Earnhardt died, at home, from a heart attack. He was 45. Years after, Dale spoke about his father in an interview. “That’s the last funeral I’ve ever gone to. It took me a year or so to get over being mad. I felt like I was robbed. I felt hurt,” Dale said. “It was too tough to take. The memories. All the things I wanted to tell him.”
Which, we learn from Earnhardt, isn’t at all dissimilar from the way Junior felt after losing his father, who was 49.
Teresa Houston was pretty, and she knew it. She had grown up around racing—her uncle is Tommy Houston, who had 24 wins and 198 top-10 finishes in the NASCAR Busch series, and her cousin Andy Houston raced in all three of the major NASCAR series. She naturally met Earnhardt at the track, and they married on November 14, 1982.
She wanted to be a mother—her daughter Taylor Nicole was born on December 20, 1988—but she wasn’t crazy about being a stepmother. The relationship between her and Dale’s other kids, son Kerry, daughter Kelley, and Dale Earnhardt, Jr., was icy from the start. Kerry related on Dale Jr.’s podcast that when he was finally invited to his father’s house for the first time—at age 16—Teresa slammed the door in his face.
It may seem that Teresa, now 66, has been unfairly painted as the evil stepmother, but she certainly hasn’t helped her own cause. She virtually disappeared after Earnhardt was killed. She inherited everything: The Garage Mahal, the race teams, so much property, and the spectacularly profitable souvenir business.
Kelley, Kerry, and Dale Jr. got nothing, not even their own names. When Kerry and his wife Rene signed a deal with Schumacher Homes to help design and promote new houses, they called it the “Earnhardt Collection.” The ads were benign, in no way suggesting that Dale Earnhardt or his estate had anything to do with the project. Nonetheless, Teresa filed suit against her stepson in 2017, contending that Kerry, by using the name he was born with, was infringing on her copyright. Kelley and Junior were properly appalled, but not surprised. The case dragged on for years. It’s difficult to even conceive of a reason why Teresa would do this, aside from spite.
It’s worth noting, too, that Teresa had Senior buried on “her” land, and Junior revealed in a very recent Washington Post interview that he has only been able to visit his father’s grave once since he died, because Teresa has forbidden him and Kelley to access her property. Which may or may not be legal, given North Carolina’s confusing laws pertaining to whether or not a property owner can legally bar the next of kin from a gravesite.
With the possible exception of Brooke Sealey, Jeff Gordon’s first wife, no NASCAR ex has maintained a lower public profile than Teresa. Her name was most recently in the news last October, when she revealed plans for a portion of what the Charlotte Observer called her “vast landholdings.” The paper reported that she had asked the local planning board to rezone 399 acres in Mooresville so she could build an industrial park.
Earnhardt mentioned that Dale Jr. continued to race for the now-Teresa-owned Dale Earnhardt, Inc., until 2007, when the situation just became untenable. After his move to Hendrick Motorsports, sponsors fled DEI, and Teresa had to merge with Chip Ganassi Racing in 2008.
The extent to which Teresa is reviled by so many NASCAR fans wasn’t fully explored in Earnhardt, nor was her toxic relationship with her three stepchildren. It’s just so sad.
No one is more surprised than I am that I’m describing Junior as a deeply complex man. In his younger years, that would have seemed absurd: What’s so complex about a kid who loves pickup trucks and beer and video games, and hanging out with his buddies, and who very possibly could have found happiness working forever at his father’s Chevrolet dealership?
One thing Earnhardt puts in laser focus was Junior’s need to earn his father’s respect, and he saw racing as being the road to that. Despite being a very wealthy man, Senior repeatedly balked at helping his children race, ostensibly because he wanted them to experience the same maturing desperation that he met and eventually conquered.
Hank Parker says in Earnhardt that he convinced Dale to spend some money helping them out, and Senior did buy them each a late-model car to run at local paved ovals, and a truck and trailer to haul them around in. It’s downright stunning when Junior says that he raced in 159 late-model races, and his father never came to a single one. Junior knew nothing about racecraft, and the man who possibly knew more about it than anyone declined to teach him.
Still, Junior battled through all that to win races—and a burgeoning fan base. When he moved to Hendrick, many of us thought he had it made, but Junior struggled. He had the same equipment Jimmie Johnson and Jeff Gordon did, but they were winning championships and he wasn’t. After a colleague and I interviewed him during the now-defunct NASCAR media tour, we walked away disheartened by how sad Dale seemed. I asked him if he felt he had good chemistry with his current crew chief, and he said, “I’m not sure I’ve ever had good chemistry with a crew chief. I don’t even know what that is.” NASCAR drivers just don’t say things like that to reporters holding tape recorders. Afterward, my friend suggested, not entirely kidding, that Hendrick needed to put him on suicide watch.
When Dale Jr. retired at the end of the 2017 season, he had amassed a very respectable record: 26 wins, two of them the Daytona 500, with 260 top-10s in 631 races.
He and Kelley formed JR Motorsports, which in 2016 began fielding NASCAR Nationwide (now Xfinity) series cars, with the help of Rick Hendrick. The team began winning that first year and hasn’t stopped. Sponsors are delighted to bask in Junior’s company, and he and Kelley seem really happy in their respective roles.
Junior was one of NASCAR’s early adopters when it came to social media, founding the Dale Jr. Download in 2013, with Junior becoming the regular host in 2017. The podcast added video, and as Earnhardt honed his skill as a broadcaster, the Dale Jr. Download has become possibly the single most influential media source there is in the racing world—not just NASCAR, as Junior can and does have guests from all forms of racing. The way Howard Stern can get celebrities to emotionally expose themselves in a way they won’t anywhere else, racers will reveal parts of their lives to Junior that would typically be off limits elsewhere.
Never has Junior seemed so comfortable in his own skin. Years ago, I said this on a radio show that I hosted: If any racer had a license to be an asshole, it’s Dale Earnhardt, Jr. But he isn’t. In person, he’s polite, interested in what you have to say, patient with fans wanting autographs and selfies, and a genuinely nice guy.
I think that comes across in Earnhardt. Because the documentary is supposed to be about Senior, but Junior carries the day. Good for him, and Kelley, and Kerry.
I grew up in a stock car vulture much like Sr. We worked in a shop much like Ralph’s. I learned by working how it was done. SR did the same with Jr starting out. He wanted him to learn the nuts and bolts. Bobby Allison did the same for Davy and I feel it made both of them better.
I understand Dale as I remember him even before the first championship. He was ruff but he learned and adapted. He loved the sport more than anything. He would have done it even if it made no money. Few drivers are like that today.
I did meet him several times connected to Goodyear. He truly was the last of the old school drivers. The kind we could use more of today. Guys that made it on skill not money.
I’m please Jr is today’s keeper of NASCAR history. He is keeping many of the best of NASCAR not being forgotten. His pod cast are great to bring these great people back before they are gone.
NASCAR today needs to get back to the basics. The old point system and solid rear axles that don’t break scraping the wall.
Bobby Allison decided he’d been too hands off with Davey to Davey’s detriment. He changed that with his younger son Clifford.
When he started he made Davy work on the cars and work for what he had. Nothing was given.
While I always thought Dale Sr was a VERY good & talented driver, I saw a lot of times him doing something on the track that caused problems for another driver & he was allowed to get by with it. Where as anybody else would be penalized for the same tactic, sometimes in the same race. He was NASCAR superstar so I can see where they would let him get by with certain things on the track
Dale sold tickets filled seats and filled the pockets of all the racers of this era.
NASCAR is racing but also entertainment. He was the show love him or hate him and Bill France Jr knew it.
The shame is if Tim Richmond had lived it would have been even a bigger show. Dale even said he would not had have 7 championship had he lived.