Beachbash2002

Earnhardt has been profiled in Rolling Stone and interviewed by Playboy (in which he used words like dude and f* a lot), and has given MTV's cribs a tour of his home, paying particular attention to the dance club he constructed in his basement, which he had dubbed Club E. Recently, he was asked to photograph Playboy's Dahm triplets in the garage behind his house, where he works on race cars, drinks beer, and eats beef jerky with his posse of friends. "It was cool dude," he says. "[The Dahms] were buck-a$$ naked. I was really nervous, but it was just a job to them."

When it comes to his driving, Earnhardt has been called more hype than hero, better at drawing crowds than at winning races, a driver who has failed to live up to expectations and who is being surpassed on the track by younger, less experienced drivers. Last season, E finished 11th in point standings. Three drivers with fewer career wins finished ahead of him. Richard Petty, the retired "King" of NASCAR, said that E had the potential to be "as good a driver as his daddy", but Jeff Green a contemporary of Junior's said, "If it wasn't for his dad, he wouldn't be here." Which goes a long way toward explaining why DE Jr is the most conflicted member of a family that friends charitably call "very strange, very complex." They mean "dysfunctional".

There are four E's involved in NASCAR: Dale Jr and his half brother, Kerry, 32 are drivers. Dale's sister, Kelly, 30 runs his JR Motorsports Company; and Teresa, 44, his stepmother, runs DE Incorporated (DEI), for which Dale races under the Budweiser banner. He and Teresa live in the same neighborhood and work within a few hundred yards of each other yet communicate mostly by e-mail. They describe their relationship as "professional" and "businesslike", and each other as "loner[s[" and recluses. Their conflictedness is a legacy from the E patriarch, the most famous and successful NASCAR driver of his time. DE Sr. was lean and leathery, with the mean narrowed eyes and dark brush mustache of Wyatt Earp. He was called the Intimidator, Big E, and the Man in Black and was revered by his fans for the ruthless way in which he wrecked the cars that stood in his way on the track. He won seven NASCAR championships before he died, at 48, in a crash at Daytona Speedway. His fans, mostly poor, hardworking southerners from rural areas, were devastated. One fan commented that it was "like the death of Elvis." In commemoration, white doves were released into the air at the start of races, and fans pout decals of his car's number, 3, with wings and a halo above it on the backs of their pickup trucks. E Jr called such devotion "sick" and "retarded".

Dale Sr was a cold, distant, one-dimensional man who in his personal life was as close to his racing image as a man could be. He damaged not only race cards but also the psyches of his family. He was married three times and left twice, turning his back on both families. He had a son, Kerry, with his first wife Latane; Dale Jr and Kelly with his second wife, Brenda; and a daughter, Taylor, with his third wife Teresa. After he left his first two families, he had so little contact with his children that Dale Jr says that he "hardly knew him". Dale Jr wasn't even aware that he had a half brother until Kerry was 16. One legacy Dale Sr left his families, says Dale Jr, is "a competitiveness among me, Kelly, Kerry and Taylor, and Teresa to be the most recognizable in his eyes, even now that he's gone."

Even as the E's strive to be "recognizable", they know that whatever successes they have in life with always be tied to their name and relationship to their father. That's why Dale Jr is so conflicted and why his self-image is so tenuous. It changes from year to year, month to month sometimes moment to moment. He seems to be constantly struggling to find out who he is and who he wants to be, while, at the same time, the people guiding his career (Kelly, Teresa, Dale Sr's former PR person and the DEI publicist J.R. Rhodes, and Jade Gurss Jr's personal publicist) are fighting, sometimes amongst themselves, to convince him to assume the persona, both public and private, that would enhance his career as well as theirs. Everyone around him, has a great stake in the name DE Jr and what that name means to his fans.

The trouble is that of the E children, Dale is the least like his father. He says that Kelley, who raced briefly before going to college, "was the best driver of us all". She was fearless like her father, driving deep into corners before braking, and everyone who knows her says she is most like Dale Sr., Kerry described by Kelly as a "caring, loving person" bears a striking physical resemblance to his father in a way that Junior doesn't. Dale Jr admits that if Kerry had been named DE Jr, then he'd probably have become the most famous member of the family. (Kerry drives a Busch Series car and regularly finishes in the middle of the pack.) "I wouldn't be where I am today," says Dale, who prefers to be called Junior or Little E, "if I didn't have my dad's name."

Junior was there when his father left the family. He rarely saw him over the next three years, while his mother struggled financially. Then, in 1981, their house burned down and his single mother was no longer able to support him and Kelly. "We lost everything," Junior says. His mother handed the kids over to Dale Sr, who was living with Teresa, 24 at that time. Even then, Junior didn't get to know his father much, since Dale Dr and Teresa traveled to races constantly, leaving the children with nannies.

The lived in a sort of lonely rich-kid's life that common to urban areas but not to Moorseville, NC, a small town 30 miles north of Charlotte, whose younger residents generally have more in common with Dale Sr than with Dale Jr. Because the E's father was so popular and rich, they were picked on by other kids, who "had this stereotype of what we were like," says Kelley. The E's went to a new school every three years and had no friends and no father who went to their games. "Dad was strict" says Kelley. "We couldn't have kids come over to spend the night. WE never sat down as a family to dinner. We didn't get everything we wanted. For 15 years, we had a 13 inch black-and-white TV." The worst times, says junior, were when their mother visited. "She'd come for a weekend and we'd stay with her at some crummy-ass motel. When she left she'd cry. It tore us up. I love my mother. That's why it took me a long time to have a relationship with Teresa. I didn't give her a lot of respect."

Instead, Junior retreated to his room, where he played with Matchbox cars and computers while his father raced cars and hunted. It must have dawned on his father that his slight, pale son not only looked nothing like him but also had none of his fiery nature. When Junior became a teenager, his father tried to make a man of him in a way fathers often do with sons they feel are too delicate. One time, Dale Sr gave his 12-year-old son a sex talk about rubbers and getting girls pregnant, because "that's the trap he fell into. My brother, Kerry, too," says Jr. He told his son that "pull[ing] out in time" wasn't enough protection without a rubber. "I was a little embarrassed," says Jr. "I didn't want to hear that from my daddy."

Another time, Dale Sr took his son for a ride to teach him how to handle a car when it swerves off the road. "Here's how you do it," his father said, jerking the steering wheel, forcing the car off the pavement. "Never yank it back," he said, "just bring it back gradually". His son was screaming in fear, "All right, Daddy! I get it!" Today, Junior says, "Dad got pissed off at me. He said "you don't trust me? I never worried driving with my daddy."

"I always felt that my father thought I wasn't like him," says Jr. "He was worried I didn't have what it takes to be a tough guy. He thought I was a pushover." He remembers thinking that he didn't want to be the sensitive son; he wanted to be the Intimidator. "But I didn't try to [sensitive]," he says. "That's just me. Maybe when I get older, I'll get meaner."

By the time he was ready for high school, Jr was, in his words "a bad kid. I lied to my parents and didn't do what I was told, so they sent me to a military school." He got kicked out and was then sent to a Christian school until he graduated and left home at 18. By then, he had befriended Kerry, and the boys lived together in a trailer, where they hung around drinking beer. Jr's first real job was as a mechanic in his father's auto dealership. It was a menial job at first he mostly did oil changes but he loved it. "Eating with the guys," he says, "the camaraderie, Christmas parties. Everyone was real, as opposed to famous people who don't know who their friends are. If I ever left racing, I'd go back to being a mechanic. It was a good, honest job."

Still, he got no approval from his father and realized that he'd "never forge a relationship with him if I didn't race." So he began to race late-model stock cars. Tony Eury Sr, Dale Sr's chief mechanic, has said "Jr wasn't doing well because Dale made him use his own money and get his own sponsors just like he'd had to do." That's when Jr began to effect the first change in his personality, going out of his way to prove his manliness. He started talking about how he loved the danger of racing cars. He bragged that he drank beer only to get drunk and that he could drink a case of beer a night. And then a funny thing happened: Jr, and his father, discovered that he had a very real talent for racing.

Jr, it seems, has a race-car drivers most important physical ability: to see images at more frames per second than ordinary people do. "It didn't take long for my mind to catch up to what my eyes were seeing and then for my mind to tell my body what to do," he says. He also had the ability to maintain his composure in racing traffic. "Some guys get confused, disoriented easily," he says. "I was able to focus on what I was doing. I was other drivers lose their composure and get frustrated, but I was good at maintaining my composure." He was also smarter than most drivers, and patient, studying his competitor's flaws lap after lap; when they were most vulnerable, he'd pass them.

By 1998, Dale Sr was so impressed with his son's driving that he offered him a Busch Series car to race out of his DEI stable. Jr wont the Busch series championship that year and the next, and at the start of the 2000 season, he was driving his No. 8 Budweiser car for DEI in the big leagues, the Winston Cup Series. Jr recorded his first Winston Cup victory, at Texas Motor Speedway, in only his 12th start. Afterward, his father came over to him in the winners circle and said, "good job. I love you. Get the f* out of the car."

"He didn't say he loved me often," says Jr. At the time, "he felt content with what I was doing in my life." Still, Jr says, "I had problems driving for my father. I didn't get much respect as a driver from his employees. I was the SOB, Son of Boss." After one race, Jr got into a fight with a member of Tony Stewarts crew, who called him a daddy's boy who had everything handed to him. Jr contributed to this resentment by breaking the NASCAR protocol in the driver's prerace meetings, at which only veteran drivers sat in the front row. In his second season, Jr began sitting in the front row beside his father. Because of Dale Sr's status, none of the other drivers complained openly, but the older ones resented Jr's presumptuousness. It began to dawn on Jr that the close relationship he was beginning to enjoy with his father was giving people the perception that his driving successes were more related to his father's help than to his own skill. So he began to try to distance himself from his father's image, that of the typical NASCAR driver, a good old Christian boy who listened to country-western music, hunted and did his shopping at Wal-mart. He made a point of telling reporters what his favorite band was he'd mention some obscure grunge band and watched as they scratched their heads in ignorance. He also trashed his father's favorite pastime, hunting, telling reporters that preferred to spend his free time on his computer. During one interview he said he would he wouldn't "have to go to some Wal-mart in the middle of Texas to sign autographs for 2 hours." His DEI handler at the time interjected, "To all the sponsors who have taken us to Wal-marts, we love you, too." Jr countered, "speak for yourself."

Since Dale Sr was still the major moneymaker at DEI, nobody at the company (including Teresa and publicist JR Rhodes) cared much about Jr's attempt to stake out his own counterculture, anti-NASCAR stance. Jr's image was just his, sort of like a toy for a little boy. The Dahm triplets. MTV's Cribs. Drunken parties in his basement nightclub. Talk of his sexual conquests in Playboy. His penchant for dissing country music, hunting and Wal-mart the NASCAR trinity and even his own father. If anything, Jr was just being true to himself, at least to the self he had created at the time. Then on February 18, 2001, his father died at Daytona.

"After dad died, Dale was thrown into the spotlight," says Kelley. "Everyone followed him now." Without DE Sr, the name DE Jr became very important to DEI. Without that name and its identification with a racing legend, DEI would probably not exist in its present form. Now everything Jr said, everything he did, every race didn't win, was magnified under a microscope for DEI to scrutinize.

When his father was alive, Jr says "I always had him to fall back on. Now where do I fit in?" Suddenly, he was the go-to man. He had to make the decisions that affected his career and, more important to others, the success of DEI. But he wasn't used to making decisions for himself, says Kelley. "Dad liked handling all aspects of his own career," She says. "But Dale can't juggle things. He can handle only thing at a time. Besides, before Dad died, he and Teresa made all of Dale's decisions where he banked, all his insurance, etc." So Kelley convinced her brother he needed someone he could trust to guide his career, to handle the unpleasant details. Jr agreed to put her in charge of JR Motorsports, where she could oversee the licensing of his products, fan requests, and beyond that, help out with day-to-day troubles, like accounting.

Now that his career had suddenly gotten hot, Jr let others control it. It belonged to DEI, NASCAR, and his growing legion of fans. His father's fans flocked to him as the dauphin of the E dynasty. "It didn't bother me that I inherited his fans," Jr says, "but I liked to think that not all of my fans aren't my dad's. I earned some of them." At times, the devotion of his father's fans to him was mindless, and it frustrated him. At times, "I ran like crap," he says, "and still got all the attention."

The only thing in his career that got worse was his standing among drivers. They began to take shots at him in the press, potshots they never would have taken if Big E had still been there to watch his son's back. Jr no longer sat in the front row at the driver's meetings. "I didn't want to sit up front anymore," he says, "I moved back to the sixth row. I'll go back and take my front row seat again one day.

The biggest change by far in his career was that he no longer had the luxury of developing his career as a driver in relative anonymity. His role as the E standard-bearer took precedence. And because his image was now even more tightly entwined with his father's, he inherited the much greater expectations people had of the driver they predicted would replace the beloved Man in Black on the track. Yet, despite all the articles in NASCAR magazines about how Junior had not lived up to those expectations, he actually had been advancing his career at a pace much like Dale Sr's. In fact, he had won seven races in his first three seasons exactly as many as his father had.

In early February, I went to the Daytona Speedway to talk to Jr. He was testing cars there in preparations for the Daytona 500, the same race in which his father had been killed two years earlier. I wondered with Jr I would meet. The sensitive Jr? The macho, swaggering Jr? The counterculture Jr? Or maybe the new Jr that had begun to emerge, a more conventional, professional NASCAR driver?

It was bitter cold in Daytona, the coldest February on record. Jr was already out on the track, testing a car. I heard a high-pitch whistle, like that of a jet plane, and his car came hurtling past me at more than 190mph on the high-banked oval. Just as quickly, it was gone. After a few laps he pulled off the track and drove to his garage. He parked the car and remained inside, silent and still, in his Budweiser racing suit and helmet with black visor, while his crew bustled around the car, making adjustments. I looked for J.R. Rhodes and told that I wanted to interview Jr over dinner. "That's not possible," he said. "Jr doesn't go to dinner with writers." "Can I talk to him on the track, then?" I asked. "Jr doesn't talk to writers at the track." When could I talk to Jr? The answer: in my hotel room, after testing.

Later that night, Jr appeared at my hotel room, trailed by two friends and Rhodes. He sat across from me in the cramped room while his friends took the floor and Rhodes sat behind me. Rhodes had told me not ask Jr about his father, but when I did, Jr didn't seem to mind talking about him. "It doesn't bother me that I'll be compared with my daddy all my life," he said. "My father taught me to be a man." His father also taught him how important it was to "try to be someone that fans can relate to," he said. He heard fans boo Jeff Gordon once. "I never want to get booed", he said. For the next 40 minutes, Jr, leaning toward me, answered my questions in a soft voice, with a directness and intelligence that I had rarely encountered among celebrities. Maybe it was because he still didn't like to think of himself as famous.

He said one of the problems with fame is that he can't be as amiable to people as he once was. He doesn't let his friends bring strangers to his house anymore. "I don't like people I don't know to see my house," he said. "I didn't used to be like that. But daddy always told me I'd get like that one day. You gotta always be in control. If a situation gets outta hand in a bar, I say, 'let's take off'. I have to worry about my image. I have to choose who to be myself with."

It had been reported recently that Teresa, representing DEI, had offered him a lifetime contract to race for DEI and that he turned her down on the advice of Kelley. Instead he signed a five-year contract. When I asked Jr about this he said, "Things change in 5 years. This protects me. I don't want to tie myself to a tree. I'd lose a lot of credibility." "That's it," a voice from behind me. Rhodes stood up and motioned to Jr that it was time to leave. "We're going out to dinner," he said. "Mind if I tag along?" I asked. "I told you, Jr doesn't go out to dinner with writers," said Rhodes. I looked at Jr, a pale younger man in baggy hip-hop clothes. There was something sweet-natured about him, something he could never have hidden no matter how famous he'd become, how hard he'd tried to cultivate the various images thrust on him. But there was also a curious remove about him, as if he were always talking and acting in public outside his real self. Jr looked away and followed Rhodes out of the room.

I was supposed to talk to Jr again in late March, in Moorseville, on the day he would pose for a photographer for this magazine. Before I left I tried to reach Teresa, to see if she would talk to me while I was in town. She relayed a message that she "declined to be interviewed for an article about Junior," which was strange, since the future of DEI rests on it's most famous race-car driver. Jr had told me that she was "real private. I'm in the dark about that, too. She wants me to do publicity. I don't mind; it's part of being a race-car driver. But Teresa has her days when doesn't mind coming out from behind the curtain." Kelly told me, "Teresa has a lot left to do in her eyes, to fulfill dad's legacy."

I arrived in Moorseville five weeks are Daytona. I was supposed to meet Jr at his house at 11:00am, so at nine I drove out to the country to JR Motorsports, which is located next to DEI, to talk to Kelley. DEI is a huge complex of white concrete buildings with blacked-out windows, which NASCAR people call the Garage Mahal. The complex is home of the Dale Earnhardt museum, the DEI corporate offices, and all the race-car and engine-building facilities. JR Motorsports is in a much smaller building to the left of DEI. Kelley met me in the front room. She told me she didn't want to be interviewed in her office, so we stayed in the waiting room, under posters of Jr in his racing suit, near the receptionist. She said Dale Jr's image was the result of "collective effort" by her, Dale, Teresa, Jade Gurss and Rhodes. Of the Dahm triplets, she said "It's kinda weird that people think of my little brother as a sex symbol. That Playboy thing I don't agree with all the things he does." (Part of DEI's public strategy for Jr is to maximize photo ops and minimize in-depth interviews, which, because of Jr's innate honestly, can't be controlled.)

At 11, I had to wait at the electronically controlled gate leading up the long driveway to Jr's house. The gate opened, and I drove up and parked in front of his garage. One part of the garage houses Jr's personal cars (a Humvee, a custom-made Camaro, a Mini Cooper S); the other part holds a race car he's been working on with his friends. While the camera crew was setting up a stylist was laying out clothes for him to wear, Jr came into the garage with Rhodes. He wore an oversize red-and-white striped rugby shirt, and he was smoking a cigarette and drinking from a can of Mountain Dew. The women from the camera crew fluttered around him. He smiled and seemed charming, not an attribute I'd found common in the Earnhardt clan. Rhodes refused to let me interview Jr in his house. Instead, we would drive in separate cars a few hundred yards to DEI. I asked Rhodes why he was limiting my access to Jr. MTV's Cribs had filmed in his house. A Rolling Stone writer followed him around for days. "That was a mistake," Rhodes told me. "Now we're limiting interviews to less than 45 minutes. He won't go on Leno or Letterman, either. They ask, but we turn them down."

At DEI, Jr sat behind a desk and smiled at me. "What's up, dude?" he asked. I asked him if he was abandoning his previous anti-NASCAR image as a means of trying to position himself closer to his father's image. "I'm getting more conventional all around," he said. "I used to be carefree and outspoken. That was me. Now I want to be more focused. If I don't win, I don't want people to pile it up to the fact that I'm not focused. Because I was carefree before, they assumed it didn't matter to me. F*! I drove hard all my life. It's not like I don't give a sh*t." He paused. "Like I can't have a personality and be a winner, too? They never questioned by dad's determination. He had this old trick that he'd be this tough-a$$ dude no one ever f* with. But I always worried about not pleasing everybody." He stopped for a moment. "That still matters to me. Earlier I made a conscious effort to distance myself from my dad's image. It was kinda wearing me out, always makin' a statement, 'I'm not him'. Now it doesn't matter. I credit my father for giving me his name, and everything else. I didn't have the vision for all this it's a headache, all this hype. It was much funner earlier in my career. No politics. No Bullshi*."

When we finished talking, he stood up, smiling widely, like a kid. "Hey, dude," he said, "you wanna see my cars?" He led me into the big garage, where his crew was assembling all the different cars. He explained the difference between setting up an oval car and a road-racing car, how the suspension of an oval car is offset to the left because the car is only turning left, while the road-racing car's suspension has to be perfectly square for left and right turns.

I asked one more question, and then I left. Driving out of Moorseville, I wondered what his answer had meant. It was a simple question for a race-car driver: What did he fear the most? Failure? Dying in a crash, as his father, the man who had shaped his career and psyche, had? Without hesitation, Junior the product of a broken home, the son of a man who wrecked two homes said: "Divorce"