Game Over 
Speed
Will NASCAR auto racing be a driving force in Texas? With 150,000 tickets sold for its debut this month at a plush new track near Fort Worth, it’s certainly off to a fast start.
(Page 3 of 3)
A handsome, square-shouldered 40-year-old guy’s guy with a distinctive mustache, Labonte is a perennial fan favorite and the winner of the 1996 Winston Cup point series. He clinched the title last November at the NAPA 500 in Atlanta, the final Winston Cup race of the season, by finishing fifth; even though his 32-year-old brother, Bobby, won the race, Terry earned just enough points to take the series championship and a prize of almost $2 million. (At this year’s Daytona 500, he finished second behind 25-year-old teammate Jeff Gordon.)
Every one of Labonte’s fans showered praise on the beloved Iron Man, as Labonte is known in NASCAR circles, a tribute to his reputation as the Cal Ripken, Jr., of motor sports (he has started 537 consecutive races despite the inevitable injuries and equipment troubles). “He’s consistent, he stays out of trouble, and he’s always there at the end of the race,” said Joseph Goetz, a slight man in his late twenties who drove down from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Goetz was wearing a yellow racing jacket just like Labonte’s, down to the logos for Hendrick Motorsports, Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, Frosted Mini-Wheats, Raisin Bran, and Quaker State oil. The jacket cost Goetz $180, but it was a good deal, all things considered. “Other sports, you have to pay for the autographs,” he noted.
Randy Zimmerman, a forty-year-old former Marine from nearby Greensboro, brought along his ten-year-old son, Joshua. Zimmerman told me about how they got hooked on Labonte last summer at a Winston Cup race in North Wilkesboro: “After the race, we were waiting near the press tent when a sheriff’s deputy near Terry saw my boy and said, ‘Take care of that little guy,’ and Terry said, ‘I sure will.’ He took my son’s shirt, signed it, and said, ‘There you go, little man.’ Terry made a NASCAR fan for life. Now Joshua has his room filled with Terry Labonte stuff.”
IF TERRY AND BOBBY LABONTE WEREN’T born to be race car drivers, they come pretty close. Their father, Bob, raced stock cars in Maine before joining the Navy. Living in Corpus Christi after his discharge, he made a habit of taking his sons to see his friend Al Yoemans, who had a stock car Bob liked to tinker with. When Terry was five, Bob took him to the local racetrack. “You want to do this?” he asked his son.
“Yeah, but not around all these people,” Terry quietly told him. He quickly got over his shyness and began racing quarter-midgets, scaled-down cars built for kids, at a track his father and some friends had built. “I started in the slowest class and worked my way up,” Terry said later. “We’d go all over, to Refugio, San Antonio, and Houston at first, then to the West Coast and up north.” It was a pastime the whole family enjoyed. “My brother, my father, my mother—we still go together.”
In 1966 ten-year-old Terry won the quarter-midget nationals in Tulsa. By the time he turned sixteen, legal driving age, the Carroll High School student was ready to move up to stock cars. Terry realized he was good. But he had no idea how good until five years later, when the owner of the old Meyer Speedway in Houston, where Terry was racing, summoned a Winston Cup team owner named Billy Hagan to see him drive. Hagan liked what he saw and signed Labonte to race his cars, first on short tracks in San Antonio and Louisiana and later in the Winston Cup series. Eventually the whole family packed up and moved to North Carolina, the hub of NASCAR racing. Terry finished fourth in his first Winston Cup race, the 1978 Southern 500 at Darlington, South Carolina. Six years later he won the Winston Cup point series, at age 27 the youngest champ ever. But that triumph was followed by an extended dry spell. In 1995 he was 39 and seemed destined to fade as a Winston Cup driver when he signed on with Rick Hendrick’s prestigious team; his comeback to win the Winston Cup point series the next year is considered one of the greatest ever in his sport.
For all the humble qualities a racing champion exudes, he must also patiently fulfill his obligations to NASCAR and Winston, as Terry ably demonstrated at the preview earlier this year. His entrance into the arena for an afternoon autograph session was pure show-biz theatrics. Labonte materialized at one end of the coliseum, emerging from a cloud of fog and flashing lights to the accompaniment of “Thus Spake Zarathustra” and blasting rock music. He was escorted by a young lady in a red Winston Cup pantsuit and a guy in a Tony the Tiger outfit.
After the expected explosion of flashbulbs, the trio walked to the stage, where Labonte held his 1996 championship trophy aloft and waved to the crowd. He fielded a few questions from the announcer, thanked the fans, and promised, “We’re going to give it our best shot this year.” A bit red-faced over all the attention, Labonte was led off the stage to a table where he sat down (flanked by his entourage, including his thirteen-year-old daughter, Kristy), picked up a black marking pen, and for the next two hours scribbled his name and posed for pictures with a steady line of fans.
He kept signing autographs as he participated in a charity auction in the arena and even as he was escorted into a dressing area, where he sat for photographs that would be used on NASCAR trading cards. Next up was an interview with ESPN’s Dave Despain, who talked with him about his remarkable career and about capturing the Winston Cup a second time. Winning hasn’t changed things that much, Labonte said, except that now he sees more cameras and microphones pointed at him—a reflection of both Labonte’s popularity and his sport’s. “When I won in ’84, I think I did three personal appearances all year,” he told Despain. “I’ll do three appearances in a weekend now.”
Then Labonte moved over to the media room for the obligatory press conference with the racing media. After that it was on to an interview with the Nashville Network, and then one final sit-down. Labonte impressed me as one of the most grounded sports stars I’ve ever been around, particularly when he finished his last answer to the last question in the last interview of the day. “Here’s my number,” he volunteered, telling me he could be reached at the Labonte family garage up the road.
He gathered his belongings and escorted Kristy down the empty hallway under the coliseum. The publicists and Tony the Tiger were nowhere to be seen. The 1997 Winston Cup Preview was over. But before father and daughter could reach the door leading to the parking lot, a voice shouting from one of the dressing rooms stopped them in their tracks. “Hey, Terry! Can I have your autograph?”
MEANWHILE, BACK IN FORT WORTH, there was evidence that for all the image spinning, there were still plenty of stereotypes to overcome. In early February city councilman Jim Lane, who is also the chairman of the Fort Worth Sports Authority, broke the news that world-famous classical pianist and hometown hero Van Cliburn would play “The Star-Spangled Banner” before the running of the Interstate Batteries 500 on April 6. “Van Cliburn is going to play for Bubba,” Lane crowed to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
The offhand comment got Eddie Gossage so riled up that he fired off a seething letter to Lane. “Please do not refer to race fans as ‘bubbas’ or ‘rednecks,’” Gossage wrote. “Race fans are supposedly tourists valued by the city of Fort Worth. The use of the term ‘bubba’ or ‘redneck’ can be considered a racial epithet.”
Gossage’s reaction is understandable: He and his cohorts have spent most of their careers dispelling the old Bubba label. He would rather point out that the average NASCAR fan makes $50,000 to $75,000 a year, that half of them are professionals or managers, that 77 percent attended college, that 69 percent own their own homes, or that 38 percent of them are women. Then again, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see Cliburn clutching a can of Busch and wearing a gimme cap and a racing jacket plastered with logos. After all, 150,000 NASCAR fans can’t be wrong.
My Library
