IN MY OPINION

It took a daredevil to make NASCAR respectable

By Joe Posnanski

The Kansas City Star

Tuesday, Nov. 18, 2008

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They say Cale Yarborough wrestled alligators. They say he jumped from planes. They say he won a Golden Gloves boxing tournament in South Carolina. They say he was on the fourth floor of a hotel in Vietnam during the war when Viet Cong soldiers attacked and made it up to the second floor before being repelled.

They say that once during the week of the Indianapolis 500, when Cale was trying a little open-wheel racing, he had a little too much liquid courage and decided it would be fun to do a long series of hot laps around the Speedway Motel, conveniently located at turn two. So, of course, that's exactly what Cale Yarborough did. And no matter how many people tried to wave him down, he would not stop.

He did not stop, in fact, until the security guard shot the Firestone tires out from under him and Yarborough got dragged off to jail. He was bailed out, of course, by an official from Firestone.

They say a lot of things about Cale Yarborough, which is a big reason why NASCAR is the monster sport that it is today. If you think about it, there doesn't seem to be any compelling reason why fast cars, smothered in advertising, racing around in circles, would fascinate the masses. But, see, it isn't the fast cars. It's the people driving those cars. There is something dangerous about them.

Or anyway, we like to believe that. Today, Jimmie Johnson — should he avoid a crash at Homestead-Miami Speedway — will become the first driver since Cale Yarborough to win three consecutive NASCAR Cup championships.

Nowadays it's called the NASCAR Sprint Cup championship, because no other sport manages to so thoroughly integrate sponsors into the sport. Imagine it being called the "Super Glue Bowl" or the "U.S. Air Open." And Jimmie Johnson didn't get here wrestling alligators. He made it to the top of his sport by being a brilliant driver, sure, but also by being the savviest businessman — a guy who networked and worked up win-win business plans and persuaded the right money people that he was worth the investment.

In other words, yeah, it has changed some. But people still remember. They remember Dale Earnhardt, the man in black, who was going to get to the finish line first one way or another. They remember Richard Petty, the everyman, who wore his cowboy hat and sunglasses and signed every autograph. They remember Junior Johnson, the last American hero, who took on all the big racing teams with a homemade Chevy and the same guts he had used to elude the law when he was running moonshine.

And even if people don't exactly remember those drivers, they still believe in that spirit, believe in watching drivers push the limits, cheat death, laugh in the face of danger and all those clichés that were not quite clichés when Cale Yarborough was doing them.

Yarborough grew up on a tobacco farm in Timmonsville, S.C., one town over from the racetrack at Darlington. He raced for the first time at Darlington when he was 18 years old. He finished 44th, won 100 bucks and didn't race in NASCAR again for a year, until the next time the show came to Darlington. Won 150 bucks the second time.

There was nothing subtle about Yarborough's racing style once he got established and was able to get pretty good cars: He liked to get up front and stay up front. Twice in his remarkable career, he led every single lap of a race. More than twice, his engine blew up and his pit crew — led by the moonshiner Junior Johnson himself — would put a whole new engine in the car while he waited patiently in the driver's seat. Well, he would do anything to get to the finish line. Yarborough would finish every single race in 1977 — all 30 of them — and that was the second of his three consecutive championships. He won 83 races. He won four Daytona 500s. He was the first guy to break 200 mph at Daytona.

He came from tough times; his father died when Cale was 11. Yarborough played a little football around South Carolina and made a few dimes. He tried turkey farming, but that did not work out. He turned to racing. His first big moment, according to legend, happened around Christmas in 1963, just after the turkey farm went bust. Yarborough cashed a check for his last 10 bucks, put his pregnant wife, Betty Joe, in the car and they drove down to Savannah, Ga., where he had somehow secured a stock car to race.

On the way down, he paid that 10 bucks to a policeman after getting caught for speeding. He scrounged up 37 cents in car-cushion change to pay a 50-cent toll (his crying wife apparently made good the other 13 cents), got to Savannah, blew the engine on the warm-up lap, borrowed 20 bucks and went back home (stopping at the toll booth to pay back the 13 cents he had borrowed).

That was the beginning. His first real job in racing was as a janitor at the Holman-Moody shop in Charlotte, N.C., where they built cars for Fireball Roberts and Fred Lorenzen and Benny Parsons and the other greats of their time. By the end of the year, Holman-Moody put Yarborough in a car. He won his first race at Valdosta, Ga., the next year. And then some car sponsors started to realize this guy wanted to win like nobody else, and they started to give him better cars.

When he finally got a fair chance, he proved to be the toughest son of a gun out there. In '68, he did not even compete in half the races, but he won more money than any body else. He scoffed at the cool suits that were supposed to help drivers endure the almost unbearable heat. He refused to use any of the safety devices of the day — but, let's be honest, there weren't many safety devices available in the 1970s. He refused to let anyone get by him once he strangled the lead.

And, it was Yarborough's performance in the 1979 Daytona 500 that probably, more than anything else, made NASCAR a national sport. Early on in that race, Yarborough fell three laps behind — three laps — which should have meant that his race was over. But Yarborough was a stubborn son of a gun, and he felt like he had a pretty good running car, and so this was his plan: He would pull up behind the leader and ride that leader's bumper until a yellow flag came out. And then, soon as the flag came out, he would roar past the leader and make up one of those laps.

Well, he passed the leader once, to get behind two laps. Then he worked his way through traffic and got on the bumper of the new leader, Donnie Allison. Another yellow flag came out, and he roared by Allison. Now he was just one lap behind.

Again, the green flag came out. Again, Cale Yarborough weaved through traffic, worked his way behind Donnie Allison's bumper, rode him for a while, and then another crash and another yellow flag came out. Yarborough passed Allison one more time. Now he was on the lead lap, and he might have realized right about then that he was about to pull off the single greatest comeback in the history of NASCAR.

So he weaved through traffic one more time, got on Donnie Allison's bumper one more time, and he stayed close to that bumper, he followed Allison for 26 laps. Years later, Yarborough would say that he could have passed Allison at any time. He should have passed Allison, in fact. But he could not help himself. He had come from so far behind. He had to make it look good.

"I should have gone on and passed him handily," Yarborough says. "I was trying to make a show of it."

He would get the show. They went into turn three of the final lap — Yarborough just behind Allison — and then Yarborough dropped down for his dramatic pass. And Donnie Allison, tired of getting passed by this son of a gun, dropped down to block him off. And to add to the joy, Bobby Allison, Donnie's brother, was there in the middle of it all, too. He wasn't anywhere near the lead lap, but his car was ahead of Yarborough's, and he was there for his brother.

So Yarborough dropped all the way down, into the grass, and he tried to pass everybody. His car bumped with Donnie's, and they both crashed. And Richard Petty, who was way back in third place, breezed through the wreckage and won the race.

Right about that time, Cale Yarborough was having a fistfight with Bobby and Donnie Allison. "One Yarborough against two Allisons, that wasn't even fair," Yarborough said years later. He did not clarify to whom it was unfair, but he did say that they were friends after that day. That was NASCAR then. You could punch one another and stay friends.

NASCAR grew quickly and exponentially after that race. In so many ways, NASCAR still lives off the sparks of that race and the passion of the drivers of that time.

NASCAR now is, obviously, a safer, more settled, more corporate world. Today, Jimmie Johnson will probably match Yarborough's consecutive-championship record, and most racing observers will concede that now, with the intense competition out there and the millions of dollars spent, it's a much more difficult accomplishment.

The only thing that could stop Jimmie Johnson, it seems, is having someone shoot out his tires. But that's the thing. They don't really do that anymore.

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