Even as a toddler he was proud of who he was. If you asked him his name he would say it like this: “Dale! . . . Earnhardt! . . . Junior!”
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By the time he was 5–soon after his parents divorced, and his father hit the big time–I saw, up close, how hard it was to be Dale Earnhardt Jr.
He is 32 now. It hasn’t gotten any easier. And I don’t think it’s going to–until and unless he frees himself from Dale Earnhardt Inc.
The issue teeters now, in his ongoing negotiations for a new contract.
The only thing new about his long-difficult relationship with his stepmother, Teresa Earnhardt, is that it’s out in the open at last.
It has boiled over into the media in recent weeks, since he acknowledged to reporters at a Daytona test session that the relationship “ain’t a bed of roses,” and that it “has always been very black-and-white, very strict and in-your-face.”
There. He said it. He finally said what he has stepped to the precipice of saying so many times since his father’s death in 2001.
Indeed, “the relationship we have today is the same relationship we had when I was 6 years old when I moved into that house with Dad and her,” he said. “It hasn’t gotten worse over the last couple of years or couple of months . . . the way I felt about her then is the way I feel about her now.”
That was his first public response to her remark in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, published Dec. 14, that “the ball is in his court to decide whether he wants to be a NASCAR driver or whether he wants to be a public personality.”
“I really didn’t appreciate it,” he said at Daytona, after nearly a month–on top of years and years–of biting his tongue. He was if nothing else bewildered–all NASCAR drivers must be public personalities, to please their sponsors.
This week, sympathetic peers, particularly Jeff Gordon and Kevin Harvick, fueled the uproar with comments in defense of their friend during NASCAR’s preseason media tour of team compounds in North Carolina.
Harvick called Teresa “a deadbeat owner” to one group of reporters. Perhaps he meant “absentee” owner, since she rarely comes to races, while most other owners show up every Sunday.
Gordon, while expressing hope that Junior will stay at DEI, added his doubts: “I think [the public squabble] has gone too far. When it gets ugly in the media, it’s usually very, very difficult to rebound from that.”
Gordon didn’t let up.
“He can go to any team,’ Gordon said. “He can start his own team. He’s got the sponsors who are willing to back him, and the fans that are going to back him. He’s really in the power position, and if Teresa isn’t recognizing that, then shame on her.”
Teresa Earnhardt is unknowable to the media. The December interview was beyond rare. It’s impossible to give her side of the story when she won’t tell it.
Even at the height of the storm (so far), Wednesday night at the DEI media function, she gave a perfunctory welcoming speech of less than a minute, took no questions, and left.
Back when the toddler proclaimed himself to be “Dale! . . . Earnhardt! . . . Junior!” his father was a struggling racer, often running on borrowed money, sometimes spinning out other dirt-trackers just to finish well enough to pay off the 90-day notes and maybe buy some groceries.
The father and mother–Dale Earnhardt’s second wife, Brenda–were together then. Big E told me years later that at the time, “we probably should have been on welfare.”
The strain of doing without things led to divorce. Soon afterward, in a tragic irony for Brenda, Dale Earnhardt grew rich and famous. She gave him custody of Dale Jr. and his older sister, Kelley.
In 1979 the Intimidator-to-be brought a new girlfriend to a race at Riverside, Calif. Her name was Teresa Houston. While she was briefly away from the table at dinner one night, Earnhardt nudged me and said, “Cute lil’ ol’ girl, ain’t she, Hinton? I think I might marry her.”
They dated fairly steadily for some years, and married in 1982. During the courtship, a nanny Dale Jr. and Kelley loved–“Annie the Nanny,” we all called her–was let go.
Soon it was evident that the real business force inside Dale Earnhardt Inc. was Teresa.
Coincidentally or not, the relationship of Dale Jr. and Kelley became almost Dickensian: They looked out for each other as if each was all the other had.
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After Dale Jr. was sent off to military school, Kelley worried so much about him that she enrolled in the same academy herself, just to make sure he was OK.
In these contract negotiations, as always, Dale Jr.’s primary adviser, confidante and de facto agent is his sister, Kelley Earnhardt Elledge.
Still, they look out for each other above all else.
Jeff Gordon is right about one thing: Reconciliation won’t come easy.
And all the liberation of Dale Earnhardt Jr. would take is a cell phone call to his father’s treasured friend Richard Childress, who still owns the rights to the number “3.”
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