At the Altar of Speed: The Fast Life and Tragic Death of Dale Earnhardt - Rilegato

A senior writer for Sports Illustrated, LEIGH MONTVILLE also served for twenty-one years as a sports columnist for The Boston Globe. His previous books include Manute: The Center of Two Worlds and, with Jim Calhoun, Dare to Dream (Broadway Books, 1999). Montville lives in Winthrop, Massachusetts.

AT THE ALTAR - A man in Cocoa Beach, Fl. plowed a giant, 353-foot No. 3 in his pasture. He said he just wanted to do it. To honor Dale...
A thirty-five-year-old tow truck operator in Kenosha, Wisconsin. finished work, picked up his son and his father and started driving. Twenty hours later, they were in Mooresville in front of the offices of Dale Earnhardt Incorporated. Just wanted to be there. He said he had left money with friends back in Kenosha to rent a billboard to say goodbye to Dale...

A traveler from Los Angeles reported on the internet that he was near Daytona Beach, taking pictures of a Titan rocket launch from the Space Center a week after the accident. The contrails from the rocket, moved by the wind, formed a giant No. 3 in the sky. He posted a picture...

The proprietor of Tropical Tattoos in Daytona Beach, Fl. said he did a number of Dale Earnhardt tattoos on a number of bodies. He said he did two on the Monday after the accident...

Crowds gathered. People cried.

Everywhere you looked, if you looked hard enough, there seemed to be a tribute. Something....

THE CRASH

The intelligent head argued with the intelligent eyes. That was the thing. The eyes saw the severity of the crash. The eyes had seen other crashes in other places, the same speed, the same angle, the same unmerciful thud against a concrete wall. The eyes knew something terrible had happened. The intelligent head knew Dale Earnhardt was involved. He would be all right.

Eyes vs. head. What was a television color commentator supposed to say?

"How about Dale?" Darrell Waltrip asked into his Fox Sports microphone late on that Sunday afternoon of February 18, 2001. "I hope he's OK."

"Of course he's OK," the head screamed in response. "That's Dale. He walks away. Dale Earnhardt. He always walks away."

"I just hope Dale's OK," Waltrip said again into his microphone. "I guess he's all right, isn't he?"

The emotions that crowded inside the broadcast booth at the Daytona International Speedway were too much, too much, way too much to handle. Jesus, Good Lord, they were. Look out the window at one spot on the track and there was the surprise winner of the Daytona 500, Michael Waltrip, Darrell Waltrip's thirty-seven-year-old baby brother, off on a victory lap in his yellow NAPA No. 15 car, happier than happy after capturing the biggest stock car race in all Creation, first win in his life in his 463rd race...look at another spot on the track and there was Dale.

Was he all right?

The monitors in the control truck blinked out all the color-camera choices. Happy winner. Happy. Live. Crash on tape. The black No. 3 car is going all right, going all right, wait a minute, nudged, going left, going right - slow it down - that's the No. 36 car, the yellow car, Kenny Schrader, coming in from the side, the M&M's car, hits the No. 3 car and they go into the wall together and, wow, everything flies everywhere. Crash live. The car is back on the grass, rolled down the embankment from the wall. What are they doing? Why isn't Dale crawling out of there? The rescue workers have arrived. Maybe he broke a leg. Maybe the side was caved in. Boy, is he going to be pissed at somebody. Won't he? Where is Dale?

Way too much.

The voices from the truck came through Darrell Waltrip's ear piece and joined the voice in his head. Dale will be fine. Dale has been in about a billion of these crashes, much worse than this one. If he comes out of that car soon enough, we may even get a word with him. Won't that be a hoot? The eyes of Waltrip, a fifty-four-year-old man who had driven for thirty years, won 84 races and three Winston Cup championships, knew better. They had seen just about all of the good things and all of the bad that can happen on a race track. This was bad.

"This is bad," he told the voices in the truck.

The other color man in the booth, Larry McReynolds, was pretty much speechless. He didn't know what to say. This was his debut as a color commentator after a lifetime of work as a race car mechanic. For two years in his career, he had been Dale Earnhardt's crew chief. He trained his binoculars on the activity around the mangled No. 3 car down the track, the car he once had treated with the same love and care he gave his children, and found himself paralyzed by the inner debate.

"Schrader is looking in the car...backing off in a hurry...that's not good...oh, could be anything...maybe Dale's unconscious...

"The emergency crew is reaching inside, working on him...that could be something bad. No, that could be anything...

"The emergency crew is cutting off the roof...that's not good...then, again, it's standard procedure. If Dale broke something...

"They're putting him on a stretcher, taking him to the ambulance...OK, that's standard procedure...

"They're covering up the car...

"The ambulance is not going very fast...

Shit.

The idea that the greatest driver in NASCAR history could crash and die on the final turn of the final lap of the biggest race on the NASCAR schedule simply did not compute. Especially if that driver was Dale Earnhardt.