Petty's impact unmistakable, even in his absence

CONCORD, N.C. – There are 12 guys, drivers, crew chiefs and officials, in matching blue shirts Tuesday at the Richard Petty Motorsports news conference.

But there is no Richard Petty. He had to attend to a family matter, a spokesman says.

So there is no tall skinny guy wearing a white cowboy hat, cowboy boots, a belt buckle the size of a paperback novel, dark sunglasses you can't see through and teeth as white as the sunglasses are dark.

Even though Petty doesn't have anything close to a controlling financial interest in Richard Petty Motorsports (RPM), the organization wisely bears his name. If his drivers win, he wins.

So when the announcement comes that he will not join us in the Embassy Suites hotel ballroom, enthusiasm deflates. It's like going to play basketball and discovering the ball is out of air.

The sport can get by without the King, who is 72, for one morning. But can you imagine a day when he no longer is part of racing?

“Sure I can,” says Ray Evernham, the former team owner and crew chief. “If you can imagine a day when Muhammad Ali no longer is part of boxing.”

I'm not saying there wasn't a family emergency; I have no idea. Petty will be in Daytona for the Daytona 500, the spokesman adds. But his absence Tuesday changes everything.

Some people make you turn your head when they enter a room. Petty makes you turn your head when he doesn't.

One of my favorite Charlotte Motor Speedway media tour moments took place in one of these ballrooms. I showed up a half hour early and there was the King, standing by himself in a corner. I said hello and he started to talk, and the sentence became a paragraph and the paragraph became a story. When he finished, I looked up and there were so many people around us the room was beginning to tilt.

NASCAR, Evernham points out, is young enough that many of the great ones still walk among us. And when they stop to talk, we stop to listen.

Although Petty won 200 races, he is more than a guy who drove. His legacy is the template he established for the treatment of fans. It's not a legacy you find on a plaque. He still lives it.

“If he sees you mistreat a fan, he'll let you know, I guarantee that,” says Sammy Johns, RPM's director of operations. “He tells you the fans are why we're here.”

I watched Petty sign hundreds of autographs on his Level Cross porch one predictably scorching July 4th afternoon. He told me his hand had gone numb. I thought he was kidding. But it was numb; it no longer worked. He waited until his hand began to function and he again began to sign.

Every time an outsider wants to know what racing is like, NASCAR can point to him.

“Oh, man, I wouldn't want to think of racing without him,” says Robbie Loomis, RPM's director of competition. “It would be like when (Dale) Earnhardt died.”

For many fans, Earnhardt was racing. For many fans, Petty still is.

“He sees the big picture,” says Loomis, who worked with Petty 11 years, moved to Hendrick Motorsports for six years and is beginning the fourth year of his second Petty tour. “He'll see a kid in a wheelchair. Instead of waiting for the kid to come to him, he'll go to the kid. I've seen it a thousand times.”

Have you ever seen him refuse a request for an autograph?

“Yeah,” says Loomis. “When he was driving and he had to do something he'd say, ‘Can you wait until I'm finished?' But he was more likely to tell me to wait, because he knew he'd see me later.”

Paul Menard, who drives the Menard Ford, remembers seeing the white hat high above the infield and beneath it smaller men and women scrambling to be near him.

After RPM hired him, Menard had coffee with Petty. He saw a sight few do – the King without his hat or sunglasses.

So they do come off. What did he look like?

“Just a guy having coffee,” Menard says.

Elliott Sadler, who will drive the Stanley Ford Fusion for RPM, remembers flying with Petty for an appearance. He can't remember where. But he can remember the conversation.

“It was just surreal,” says Sadler. “I looked at him and thought about my dad and my uncles. I was in the airplane with him for two hours. I wondered what they would think.”

They would think their son/nephew was fortunate.

They would be correct.