February 6, 2011
By Kim Roberson
Kim Roberson
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I have mentioned before that the reason I became a fan of NASCAR was due to a crash involving Michael Waltrip.
It was the 2004 Daytona 500 and Michael was involved in a spectacular crash that had the No. 15 NAPA Chevy flipping numerous times through the grass and dirt of the backfield. I had been through a similar crash just two months earlier and for some reason, seeing that happen to a NASCAR driver finally was the switch that clicked in my head that NASCAR was a great sport.
It wasn’t until later that I started hearing about Michael’s history -- his never having won a points paying Cup race until Daytona 2001, his salesmanship for everything connected to him.
But nothing has quite given me insight into the man himself like his new book, “In the Blink of an Eye: Dale, Daytona, and the Day that Changed Everything”.
I have heard several people comment that there is nothing about Michael Waltrip that would make them want to read this book. They feel he is a NASCAR PR shill who only got into NASCAR because his big brother was a NASCAR Champion and paved his way into racing.
Maybe he is a company’s PR dream, but the road to where he is today, NASCAR team owner with two winning drivers racing for him each weekend, was hardly an easy one.
“In the Blink of an Eye” gives the reader a lot of background into what makes Michael the man he is today. He talks about how he was an “accident”, the youngest child of five and 16 years younger than his older and famous older brother Darrell. How by the time he was old enough to remember, his brother was off racing, and how he idolized his older brother, but his older brother was embarrassed by him because his mother was pregnant while DW was a teenager.
Waltrip talks about his decision as a young child to want to be a race car driver like his older brother Darrell to his efforts to just get his foot in the door with the help of his older brother Bobby (DW wouldn’t help him, nor would his parents); once he got into go karting, he had to rely on the assistance of Bobby and the Green family (the Green brothers lived just down the road from the Waltrips) to get to and from races.
For his first race, he took a bus to his brothers home because his parents wouldn’t drive him: he ended up winning that first race, and received sage advice from an older woman who noted the young boy proudly holding his trophy on the bus ride back: Never take it for granted. He took that message to heart, and has never forgotten it, or taken anything for granted.
For a man who almost always seems to have a smile on his face, you would hardly know he had the childhood he had without reading the book.
The young driver overcame the challenges placed in his way and went on to win almost everything he entered, slowly moving from go-karts to modifieds to the Goody's Dash Series. When he decided he wanted to try his hand at bigger things, he moved to North Carolina, and in with Kyle and Patti Petty and their young children.
Michael recounts how he used to let a young Adam Petty drive on his lap when his parents weren’t around.
When Kyle finally decided it was time for Michael to move out (a point when Kyle tossed Michael’s smelly shoes into the pond behind the house) Miss Linda Petty called Michael up and invited him to move in with her and the King -- a move that set Michael on the path that would eventually lead him to skip the Busch Series completely and go straight to the Cup Series.
That move led to a friendship with Dale Earnhardt, who eventually sent him to the Wood Brothers and his first non-points win, and then brought him under his own wing, starting a team for Michael with DEI in just a week when it was clear that Michael was about to lose his job with the No. 7 team in 2000.
Nothing that Michael Waltrip has ever undertaken has been easy or just handed to him. Just when he thought he had the world on a string, he lost his team owner and close friend who died working to ensure that Michael would win his first race that day in Daytona. Michael discusses how he was so emotionally wrapped up in that first win to realize just what had happened behind him in Turn’s Three and Four, and how he wasn’t told that Dale was seriously hurt, or had died, until after he had finished his duties in Victory Lane.
The book then takes you through the weeks, months and years after the crash, and his time with DEI, and then the decision to begin his own team. And that terrible first year when he almost closed his doors almost as soon as he had opened them.
Waltrip also discusses his divorce from wife Buffy, and that infamous car accident that had him staggering home in the middle of the night, leaving police and fans wondering just what he had been doing in the middle of the night.
This is not the happy go lucky read you might expect it to be. I won’t go into more details because the book needs to be read to be understood and appreciated. Needless to say, it will make you chuckle, but it is just as likely to make you cry. Most of all, it will give you a little peek into what makes the 6’5” good old boy from Owensboro, Kentucky the guy who took that first walk around the wrong track and turned a relationship with a sponsor into something that has morphed into the team owner, TV commentator and sponsor pitchman that we all know today.
“In the Blink of an Eye” is available in a 233 page paperback or is downloadable for e-reader. I highly recommend you get it. It is honest, often painfully so, and worth every minute you spend reading it.
The thoughts and ideas expressed by this writer or any other writer on Insider Racing News, are not necessarily the views of the staff and/or management of IRN.
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