Word: racer
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...didn't start out as such a holy thing. Early on, stock-car-racing events ranged from illegal to highly illegal, emerging from races between law officers and moonshine runners. It wasn't until a racer named Bill France started the National championship circuit in 1946--which incorporated as the National Association of Stock Car Auto Racing in 1948--that jalopy races began to look like something resembling a league, an organization, a sport...
...accessible as some of the early characters, if better scrubbed. Richard Petty won 200 races. David Pearson beat Petty head to head 33 times to 30. Bobby Allison won 84 times in 25 years. Cale Yarborough won 83 times and was an entertaining throwback, a broad-bellied, bullheaded racer, maybe the biggest s.o.b. on the track this side...
Sometimes too hard. In one early-career incident, he tapped and spun the car of dirt-track driver Stick Elliot. The word went out that Stick's mechanic had a gun and was looking for Ironhead. The grease monkey didn't find him, and the racer who would soon be known by a second sobriquet, the Intimidator, drove off to greater glory. Earnhardt was NASCAR's rookie of the year in 1979 and won the season-long title in 1980. Even critics of his aggressive tactics acknowledged that in Earnhardt, NASCAR had as talented a driver as it had ever...
...Dale Earnhardt, whose life was racing, and like the cliché goes, he knew the risks. His wife and family knew the risks. Dale Jr. knew the risks, risks that basketball, baseball or even football would not tolerate. There is something undeniably noble about this superstar's exit, a racer dying in the thick of the thing he loved. A soldier carried out on his shield at the Daytona...
...those who knew Earnhardt's totemic name but not his story or his sport's, the rush of coverage surrounding his death this week was a stirring introduction. They saw NASCAR nation revealing its nobility in its tears. That Earnhardt was, by all accounts, not only a great racer but also a heck of a guy was flattering to the sport, and that he died on the track was in a grave way flattering to every driver who takes to the track this Sunday in Rockingham...