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Conversations With Junior Johnson and Richard Petty

An Opinion


May 26, 2010

By Kim Roberson

Kim Roberson
In the 60+ years since the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing was founded in a hotel meeting room in Daytona Beach, Florida, there have been thousands of men -- and women -- who have come and gone and left their mark on the sport. This past weekend, we honored five men who many consider to be founders and innovators who laid the groundwork for the sport so many of us love today: Bill France Sr., Bill France Jr., Junior Johnson, Richard Petty, and Dale Earnhardt Sr. All left their mark in one way or another in five different ways.

I was lucky enough to have the chance to sit down and talk with the two surviving members of the Inaugural NASCAR Hall of Fame class: Robert Glen "Junior" Johnson and the King Richard Petty. (Squirrel, Jr.)

One of the first things I noticed about Junior Johnson is that despite his bigger than life role in the evolution of the sport, he is actually a very quiet, gentle man. The afternoon that I had the chance to speak with him, we met in the drivers meeting tent at Richmond International Raceway. He was dressed in a lavender dress shirt, khaki pants, and loafers, and you had to strain to hear him over the air handlers that were keeping the tent cool. We didn't talk so much about his induction into the hall (which he has called "The greatest thing that has ever happened to me") as we did about his impressions of the NASCAR of old vs. the current state of the sport.

When I asked him how he looked at the rivalries of today compared to, say, the rivalries between Cale Yarborough and Darrell Waltrip, he said “They have gotten so tight on the thing, just bumping each other they end up suspended. We had a lot of that going on back in the day. Somebody got on me, you just beat the hell out of them and moved on. Back then it was more of a man to man thing. Everything has changed, and it will change again, there isn’t anything you can do about it."

While it was a threat of severe bodily harm that Kyle Busch made against his teammate, Denny Hamlin, on Saturday night after their battle in the All-Star race, it was a hollow threat because you know that while back in Junior's day they would have no problem "taking it behind the hauler" and using their fists to work out a problem, today Kyle and Denny would be watching the next few races from the sidelines if they tried to do the same.


Junior Johnson

Johnson came up in the early years of the sport, and is one of the few, if not only, drivers who has spent time in prison -- and then been pardoned by the President of the United States. Junior started his stock car career not outrunning other race car drivers, but the law. He would help his daddy make white lightning moonshine, and then run it down from the mountains, all the while trying to avoid the long arm of the law. Time ran out for him when, at age 25, he was sent out to light up the still the family kept on the property -- to make their moonshine -- and found himself surrounded by more than a dozen federal agents. He was sentenced to three years in prison, and served just over 11 months.

It would be nearly 30 years before President Ronald Reagan would remove that conviction from his record by pardoning Johnson for the crime.

One of the things that has made Junior Johnson so worthy of the honor he received on Sunday was the fact that not only was he a successful driver, he was an even more successful car owner. He has had a movie made about him (The Last American Hero, starring Jeff Bridges and Gary Busey) based off of an article written by Tom Wolfe (the man who also brought you "The Right Stuff" among other stories), and became one of the most popular figures in NASCAR in the 60's and 70's. Amazingly, with all of those wins, he never won a championship -- as a driver -- because he never ran a full season in the seat of a car. But when it comes to ownership, he was a champion six times over.

Johnson won 50 races as a driver, but when he gave up on the sport as a driver, due to the dangers involved, he took his ability to think outside of the box and turned it into 132 wins and half a dozen championships with drivers Cale Yarborough and Darrell Waltrip. He admits that he would have a much harder time being an owner in today’s NASCAR than when he wore the owner’s hat.

"I was an owner that didn’t have a lot. I didn’t buy ownership and knowledge and stuff. I did it with my race knowledge," he explained. It is not knowledge that you need as much as the cash to buy that knowledge that he feels is important in today’s sport. "Having the knowledge of the sport is one thing but if you don’t have the money to back it then you can’t get the best drivers, and that is the difference from when I was an owner.

"If I’m running the same car you’re running, and beat you all the time, it is hard work and common sense more than money. They do it with money and I did it with strength and common sense. Money is very important today, if you don’t have money today, you don’t have the key people to win."

The irony of this is that it was Johnson who brought RJ Reynolds and Winston to the sport when the sport needed the money to stay afloat. He had walked into the offices at RJR looking to gain sponsorship for his team. When he talked with the powers that be about needing a couple hundred thousand to run his car, they scoffed at him and said they had half a billion dollars in advertising money to spend to promote their product. Johnson took that information to NASCAR, and in 1971, Winston became the sponsor of the Cup Series -- a pairing that lasted 22 years. As for Johnson, he decided to approach Anhauser Busch, and ended up with Busch Beer on the hood of his cars, and eventually Budweiser.

In Dover last weekend, I had the chance to speak with the King.

While almost every person associated with NASCAR assumed the 72-year old Petty would be in the Hall on the first ballot, Petty says he feels others should have gone in ahead of him.

“I feel like there were people more important in getting NASCAR started than Richard Petty,” said Petty, who, with 200 wins and seven championships, holds records that will likely never be touched by another driver. "Being in the Hall of Fame is just something, when you go back and look at all the people from track promoters to drivers to owners to mechanics that got NASCAR this far along, and you are just one of the thousands that made it happen, and then when they do get down to the deal of having the hall of fame and stuff and you are chosen out of all of those people it’s a heck of an honor.


Richard Petty

"I know there’s a lot of people who were a lot more important to the whole deal because they put up the money and took the gamble and done everything that there was to make it what it is today, so basically that is what I like about the museum part is that a lot of these drivers that are doing pretty good today don’t realize what some of the guys went through to get it this way.

"So far as Bill France taking the gamble to get the deal and all the people following behind him and doing what it took, whether it was Junior Johnson or Curtis Turner or Lee Petty or whoever, they cycle past to a lot of what is going on today."

Petty, who was known first as "Squirrel Jr." before being tagged with the title of "King" of NASCAR, started off inauspiciously, crashing more cars than he finished with in his first season in the sport in 1958. It wasn't until his father was almost killed in a crash that sent him flying over the wall in a qualifying race at Daytona in 1961, that Richard fell into his role as lead driver for Petty Enterprises. With the help of his brother, Maurice, and his cousin, Dale Inman, they built the company that became Petty Enterprises.

Petty realizes that while the drivers are the ones who most fans focus on, the drivers are nothing without the men and women who supported them, and they deserve to be included in the Hall along with the drivers and founding 'fathers' of the sport.

"Hopefully the nominating committee will look at the people besides drivers, they’ll look at the people who made the drivers go, that paid the drivers or sacrificed for the driver," Petty said. "So hopefully when they get down to the Hall of Fame deal you’ll have owners or promoters or mechanics, you know, you’ve got a cross section, we’re a little bit different than football or baseball or basketball where you have the quarterback or the half back or the first baseman and he kind of stands alone.

"No driver stands alone. It’s a team effort, so when you put Richard Petty in the Hall of Fame, Richard Petty was just the one who was out front, you had all those people behind him pushing him and making him go and giving him the equipment to go with. So I hope that in the future we’ll get team members and mechanics and whatever it takes to really expand the thing and have the people out there running today understand where they came from."

It is the history of the sport that Petty feels is most important to keep in mind for both fans and the teams who run in today’s sport.

"A bunch of us old timers look back and say we hope the guys that are doing it now, whether it is mechanics or car owners or drivers, appreciate what these guys done," Petty continued. "Somebody had to lay the ground work, and we just happened to be there when the groundwork was laid. And it makes me feel good that you can look back and see how much our sport has grown.

"I think the first year we ran in 1949, I wasn’t running then but my dad was, I don’t think they had but eight races because it was so new nobody would take a gamble on committing themselves, but after those eight races, they sat down and said, "Hey this went pretty good and then we started going up to Pennsylvania and Ohio, even though it was a southern sport, we were trying to expand it, and every year it got a little bigger and a little bigger, and again it just took so many people.

"I was talking to a guy yesterday and he was talking to his grandma, and he was telling me about a guy who ran at Martinsville or Wilkesboro, or someplace I didn’t know the name, but without those people, we wouldn’t be here today. And you just hope the guys that are out there today appreciate the ground work."

The King is also known for his loyalty to the people who have been loyal to him: The fans. He never turns down an autograph request, and has been known to hold up planes as he has signed for fans in airports. You might wonder why a man who has been in the sport so long feels the need to give back to fans after more than 50 years -- but Petty says without the fans, he might not be in the Hall of Fame today.

"The basic deal is, for the first, I want to say, 15 or 20 years of NASCAR, there were no sponsors, so the fans were sponsoring (the sport and drivers)," said Petty. "They bought the tickets, and when the race was over you went over to pick up the money that was coming to you for the position you finished.

"So it was kind of a deal those were the people you had to play to because they were the ones that coming back and allowed you to do what you wanted to do, and it was pretty much a no brainer that 'OK we have to keep these guys on our side', keep them buying tickets, being fan friendly and all that. You got to figure that came through with the Allisons and the Pearsons…they realized that without the fans there wouldn’t have been any racing, and without the fans there wouldn’t have been a Richard Petty."

Richard Petty took his last laps on the track in Atlanta almost 18 years ago, but his absence from the activities on the track have not diminished the love and loyalty of his fans. He is still a common face around the Richard Petty Motorsports facilities, chatting with not only his crew, but the fans who come in to tour the facilities. Everyone who talks with him calls him "King", from the Executive Director of Racing Operations with RPM, Robbie Loomis, to the pit crew members out taking part in pit practice. It is a title he earned, and wears proudly yet humbly, as he reminds fans, new and old, about the history of the sport just by being at the track each and every week to support the next generation of drivers who someday might just be looking to join him in the halls of the NASCAR Hall of Fame.

I was honored, as a relatively new fan, to sit and talk with these two men who were so important to the foundation of this sport that I love so much. Next weekend, I look forward to stepping foot in the NASCAR Hall of Fame for the first time, and I'll be here to share what I see, and learn, with you in an effort to do my part in spreading the King's desire of sharing the history of NASCAR, from a 'new fan's' point of view.



You can contact Kim at.. Insider Racing News
You Can Read Other Articles By Kim


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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