Racing against his father’s legacy

Dale Earnhardt Jr. can’t escape his father’s shadow, said Pat Jordan in The New York Times. The 35-year-old NASCAR driver had a distant and complicated relationship with his dad, racing legend Dale Earnhardt, who dominated the sport for 20 years before his death in a 2001 crash. “I always thought he felt I wasn’t much like him,” Earnhardt Jr. says of his dad. “He never told me things. Racing is not like other sports. A kid can go in the backyard with his dad and throw a ball, and you see he can do it on the field, too. But in racing, you don’t know until you do it.”

He got into racing only because he felt he had no other choice. “What the hell am I gonna do with my life as Dale Earnhardt’s son if I don’t race?” It wasn’t until his larger-than-life dad died, he admits, that he began driving to win. “I wanted to honor him. But I wanted to distance myself from him, too.” Fueled by that mix of emotions, he won 13 races in the next three seasons and became one of the sport’s most popular drivers. But as a true introvert, he hated the limelight, and after a two-year drought of victories, he admits he’s lost his confidence on the track. “All my life,” he says, “I’ve been the smaller measure of the man.”

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