Why I dread February 18 each year
It wasn't supposed to happen this way: When NASCAR lost its greatest and most popular driver ever, Dale Earnhardt
There are certain dates that many of us would rather forget if we were able to.
It could be the date a parent or a child died.
It could be the date that something so tragic or catastrophic happened, like 9/11/2001 or November 22, 1963, the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
There’s also days where some of our heroes unexpectedly passed away, like Elvis Presley (August 16, 1977), Princess Diana (August 31, 1997), Michael Jackson (June 25, 2009), Prince (April 21, 2016) or Robin Williams (August 11, 2014). Or even going back to February 3, 1959 when Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens perished in a plane crash.
For long-time NASCAR fans, February 18, 2001 will be a day they’ll never forget, the day the sport lost one of its greatest drivers ever, perhaps the biggest fan favorite there ever was, when Dale Earnhardt was killed in a last-lap crash in the Daytona 500.
Compared to other more violent crashes that the sport has seen over the years, Earnhardt’s wreck was certainly serious but seemingly nothing that a man known as “The Intimidator” couldn’t emerge from unscathed.
Unfortunately, about an hour after the crash, NASCAR vice-president Mike Helton uttered those four words that will forever be seared in our memory banks: “We’ve lost Dale Earnhardt.”
Those words were barely out of Helton’s mouth when the sport almost immediately embarked upon a series of some of the biggest changes it has ever undergone. Earnhardt was the fourth driver within less than a year’s time – the others were Adam Petty, Kenny Irwin and Tony Roper – who were killed in crashes.
Not to discount the significance of the deaths of the others, but if Earnhardt could be killed, any driver could be killed. That led to NASCAR to aggressively begin the largest and most significant safety initiative that any sport has ever undergone.
The most basic goal of people like Helton, the late Bill France and his son and successor as NASCAR Chairman, Brian France, and so many others was so simple, yet also so complicated: they all were united in one task, bound and determined to not only stop the carnage that the sport had undergone far too frequently over the years, but also to keep it from ever happening again.
More than anything, the sport did not want to go through the loss of another driver of Earnhardt’s caliber, someone like a Jeff Gordon, Rusty Wallace, Tony Stewart, Mark Martin or others.
And today, while we celebrate Earnhardt’s life by raising our glass or three fingers in the air to pay homage to the driver of the No. 3, it’s also a day that we simply will never, ever forget.
From a personal standpoint, I like most others cannot believe it’s been 20 years since we lost Earnhardt. I dread whenever February 18 approaches each year because of what it symbolizes and what it will always mean.
If you would indulge me for a moment, I don’t want to detract from Earnhardt’s tragic death, but at the same time I want to share a story that only a select very few know.
I had just been hired to be the National NASCAR Columnist for ESPN.com. Because of scheduling, I was not slated to start my job until, ironically enough, February 19, 2001 – one day after the day that shook NASCAR to its core.
I had spent so much time away from home over the previous two decades traveling the country for USA Today and other media outlets – sometimes as many as 150 days a year – that my family life suffered. So when my younger daughter and aspiring swimmer Sarah was to take part in an awards ceremony that fateful Sunday afternoon, honoring her and other members of her high school swim team, there was no way I was going to miss it.
The ceremony was almost completed and the assembled 100 or so swimmers, coaches and family members and friends prepared to sit down to a post-celebration dinner, I received a phone call from my editor, telling me that Earnhardt was involved in a serious crash and asked if I could quickly get home to write a column reflecting on what happened.
This was maybe 30 minutes before I and the rest of the world would learn that NASCAR’s Superman had died. My daughter implored me to leave the dinner and do what I had to do, even being so kind to forego the rest of the dinner and being with her teammates and friends so that I could write a testimonial to Earnhardt.
By the time we got home, the news had broken: Earnhardt had passed away.
How do you write a column about such a tragic incident – and with a looming deadline in less than an hour’s time from the moment I sat down at my computer, no less – to try and make sense of something that seemed so senseless.
I began to write and the first thing that came to my mind followed that same train of thought: It (Earnhardt’s death) wasn’t supposed to happen this way.
The most invincible man in NASCAR history, someone who had laughed at danger for so many years, was suddenly no longer with us.
As I wrote more of that column, I kept thinking to myself about how the 49-year-old Earnhardt, just two months shy of turning 50, would be deprived – or rather, robbed – of so much more that he should have experienced in the coming years and at such a far-too-early age:
* He’d miss his namesake company – Dale Earnhardt Inc. – potentially battling for several NASCAR Cup championships.
* He’d miss out on the developing Cup career of his son and namesake, Dale Earnhardt Jr. I’m sure I, along with many others, are of the same mindset that if Dale Sr. survived, he would have led Junior to multiple Cup championships.
* He’d miss out on not seeing Dale Jr. get married, but also his young son’s becoming a parent, as well as the elder Dale being robbed of never knowing or being able to spoil his eventual grandchildren.
* He’d miss out on watching NASCAR continue to grow in popularity and attention, rather than what actually happened when the sport, having lost its greatest driver ever, would begin to implode in the following five-plus years as fans lost interest or withdrew because they didn’t have their favorite driver around anymore.
Here’s what I wrote in that debut column for ESPN.com – and my words back then are still so relevant today, two decades later:
“Earnhardt, 49, was supposed to grow old, watch his son and namesake Dale Earnhardt Jr. grow into a potential Winston Cup champion like his father, who achieved NASCAR's highest accomplishment -- a season championship -- not once, not twice, but an incredible seven times.
“Just a little over two months shy of his 50th birthday, Earnhardt was supposed to not only watch Dale Jr. mature into a middle-aged adult, he was supposed to be around to watch any potential grandsons Dale Jr. would father, perhaps a precursor to another generation of Earnhardts behind the wheel.”
Perhaps the scariest element of that fateful date was how Earnhardt, in a prerace interview celebrating the debut of FOX TV coverage of NASCAR, told Matt Yocum these haunting words in what would be Earnhardt’s last interview and would ultimately prove to be a prophesy: "I think it's going to be some exciting racing. You're gonna see something you probably had never seen on Fox."
Indeed, we did.
Yes, the sport has gone on without the senior Earnhardt. His son grew up to be a heck of a driver, a NASCAR Hall of Fame inductee, a father, husband, talented broadcaster and just like his father, NASCAR’s most popular driver for the following decade and a half after his father’s passing.
Thursday’s milestone 20th anniversary of Dale Sr.’s death brought back so many memories of that fateful day and the days and weeks to follow as the NASCAR community and the sports world as a whole tried to understand a tragedy that we’ll never be able to understand.
If there’s some solace we have been able to take over the last 20 years, Earnhardt didn’t die in vain. He helped turn a sport into one of the safest there is, one that set an example for other forms of motorsports to follow.
To borrow a well-worn line, sometimes it takes a great person to be taken away from us to bring about necessary change. If there was a way, I’m sure every Dale Sr. fan today wishes they could have had one more day to watch that black No. 3 Chevrolet do what he did best: striking fear into his fellow opponents as his car drew closer in their rearview mirrors before slingshotting around to yet another win and visit to victory lane.
No, Earnhardt’s death wasn’t supposed to happen this way. But it did. That’s one reason why I and so many other NASCAR fans dread every February 18 so much – even 20 years later – because it once again reopens wounds that we hoped would remain permanently closed.
To read my original ESPN.com column of the Earnhardt tragedy from 2001, click here.