15 years ago, Gordon won … and the tears flowed
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- By Ed Hinton | May 23, 2009 9:05:55 AM PDT
CONCORD, N.C. -- You look at the old footage and see the kid weeping and covering his face in disbelief in Victory Lane after his first Cup win, and it somehow seems a lot longer than 15 years ago.
And yet for the man who is now graying at the temples, pushing age 38 and having problems with his back, the senior statesman of NASCAR drivers, "it's been a blur, kind of, ever since then …"
It's been 15 years since Jeff Gordon won his first one, the Coca-Cola 600 here at Lowe's Motor Speedway, known simply as "Charlotte" back then.
Now he has 82 victories, and a win Sunday night in the 600 would tie him with Cale Yarborough for fifth on the all-time winners list, and send him after the tie for third, at 84, between Bobby Allison and Darrell Waltrip.
The gruff driver who rode the kid unmercifully in 1994 about crying like a baby, Dale Earnhardt, is gone. When Earnhardt was killed in 2001, Gordon became the go-to guy, the driver of record, for all of us in the media whenever there was any sort of issue about NASCAR.
Earnhardt's sidekick, Rusty Wallace, who joined in the ribbing -- and whom Gordon beat that night -- is retired from driving and working as an ESPN commentator. Darrell Waltrip, who told the two tough guys to leave the kid alone, is long retired, long gone to the Fox broadcast booths.
Ray Evernham, the crew chief who made the two-tire call on the last stop, to get the kid out front and keep him there, went on to a career that brought him recognition as the best crew chief of all time in NASCAR, then became a team owner, and is now on a fun-only schedule, as a commentator for ESPN and the operator of a small dirt track in North Carolina.
So much has changed, so many milestones have been passed, that it seems an awfully long time since the kid wept uncontrollably.
I missed that race. My assignment that year was the Grand Prix of Monaco, in the wake of the deaths at Imola, Italy, of Ayrton Senna and Roland Ratzenberger, and the serious injury at Monaco to Karl Wendlinger. It was a fortnight so terrible that the French newspaper Le Figaro ran the headline: "Fomule 1: La Série Noire." Formula One: The Black Series.
"We thought we walked on water," F1 czar Bernie Ecclestone told me on race morning. "And now someone's drowned."
I tell you this to put in perspective just how long it's been since the kid wept. It was the weekend the world's great motor racing safety revolution began, with F1 going immediately into radical surgery on its cars.
Not for seven more years, until the death of Earnhardt, would NASCAR begin its own safety revolution. But F1 had already provided a road map to the HANS device, better seats, soft barriers.
Ascension Day came early that year, and Monaco was run in mid-May, and so I got home in time to see the kid weep on TV … in time to memorize the spelling of "Evernham," the guy who'd made the pit call, for it was pretty clear he was going places.
It seems so much longer since, when an F1 or Indy or NASCAR driver had a bad wreck, you knew there was a significant chance of death or serious injury. It's still a concern, but a relatively remote one.
The kid who wept has survived, without serious injury, so long that the constant pounding and wrenching of the routine act of racing has aged and deteriorated his back.
He's such a big name now that he can make headlines anytime he wants, with a quick comment. Take just the other day here. Somebody asked him whether his back problems could be enough to hasten his retirement.
He said yes, if it didn't get better. But it is getting better.
"If my back were the way that it was at Bristol this year, it's definitely going to shorten my career. I can't race like that for long periods of time."
Voilà! Headlines everywhere that back problems could shorten his career. But Gordon will turn 38 in August and has long questioned whether he'll race much past the age of 40.
If he goes out with back pain, he'll go out the way David Pearson did -- Pearson never suffered a serious injury, never so much as a broken bone, his entire career. He lasted long enough that back pain got him, the way it gets a lot of people, in and out of race cars.
Think of it: Jeff Gordon has lasted so long, between the kid who wept and the graying man, that it is taking back pain to raise questions of his retirement.
But to Gordon it's been a blur -- he first told me that in the spring of 1995, when he was clearly NASCAR's rising star. And he has told me that twice again this weekend here, as I've asked how vivid the memories of '94 remain in his mind.
Hard to remember the details for 15 years, he admitted, especially through the blur, "and to be honest, since 1994 the things that have happened to this team and me personally have just been unbelievable. It's been one heck of a ride."
For Gordon, for NASCAR, for all the motor racing world.
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