Remembering Earnhardt’s farcical side on racing’s biggest day

Like many, I spent Sunday watching three big races. It started during breakfast with the Monaco Grand Prix. For lunch, I watched the Indianapolis 500 during lunch, and for dinner, I watched the Coca-Cola 600 NASCAR race from the Charlotte Motor Speedway.

Days like that take me back to my 40-year-plus motorsports career. I’ve covered several IndyCar Series races, but never the Indy 500, because I was in Charlotte for 35 consecutive years. But The Greatest Spectacle in Racing is on my Bucket List. Monaco isn’t.

It’s hard to think about a big day of racing without thinking of funny stories about Dale Earnhardt. I was fortunate, make that stupidly lucky, to start in NASCAR the same year Earnhardt got his first full-time ride for Rod Osterlund in 1979.

Known for being rough and unforgiving, those who knew Earnhardt best saw a different side of him. He was playful and witty. Most called him The Intimidator. I knew him as The Instigator.

I remember it was raining one Saturday at the Talladega Superspeedway, so most reporters stayed at their hotels and drivers remained holed up in their motorcoaches.

I was one of three reporters who decided to work from the media center because I stayed at a cheap hotel with lousy Wi-Fi. Earnhardt and Darrell Waltrip were getting stir-crazy when they came to the media center. The next hour was hilarious.

They discussed signing autographs. Waltrip insisted he could sign 600 autographs an hour. Earnhardt called him out. He got a stopwatch from behind the counter and timed Waltrip signing his name three times. He had someone else do the math, and we concluded it would have been impossible to accomplish that feat.

Waltrip then turned to Earnhardt and asked how many he could sign in an hour. Without hesitation, Earnhardt answered:

“Ten thousand dollars worth.”

I’m one of the few who saw Earnhardt without his famed mustache. During a rare off week, he went to the Bahamas on his boat, “Sunday Money.” He went diving for Caribbean lobster, but his mask kept leaking because of his facial hair.

I asked him what did he do.

With a gambler’s grin, he looked at me and said, “We ate lobster that night.”

He was willing to shave his mustache to avoid losing to a lobster. His mustache grew back, and only a handful knew about it. Until now.

Remember the famous “I meant to rattle his cage” comment after he crashed Terry Labonte on the final lap of the 1999 night race at the Bristol Motor Speedway? When Earnhardt came to the main press box after the win, he was with his public relations manager, J.R. Rhodes. He looked at Rhodes and asked about business at the souvenir trailer after the crash.

“There’s long lines,” Rhodes said.

“Keep it open another hour,” Earnhardt said softly with a wink.

I’ll never forget one Sunday afternoon in Darlington, S.C., when I left my hotel room in Florence and took a back road to the track. A few of us knew a secret route to save an hour of heavy traffic on U.S. Highway 52.

Just as I approached some railroad tracks in the remote South Carolina farmland, a Chevrolet Suburban quickly ran up behind me. Suddenly, it bumped me. Then again. That was back in the days of chrome bumpers, so it wasn’t damaging the car. Shortly after the third bump, the Suburban passed me, and Earnhardt laughed and waved at me as he went by.

To better understand Earnhardt’s humor, his team mounted a deer’s backside inside the hauler, and they had a single glass eye inserted under the tail, playing peek-a-boo.

We’ll save stories about him putting a fish in Rusty Wallace’s car, stealing Wallace's race car, laughing at a Bill Elliott threat, and his practical joke on Alan Kulwicki at the NASCAR Banquet for another time.