This says it all for me.
"When I stopped, I looked at it and got in the ambulance and looked back over there and I said 'man, the wheels ain't knocked off that car yet,'" Earnhardt said.
"I went back over there and looked at the wheels and I told the guy in the car to fire it up. "It fired up and I said, 'Get out. Unhook me, I've got to go."
"We took off after 'em. You've got to get all the laps you can. That's what we're running for the championship for."
The other Earnhardt, Sr.
From the grandstands, he was beheld as superhuman. And somehow when the fans came close to him, to talk or touch him, they never could quite humanize him. They were skittish. They would grasp their autographs gratefully and hurry away, careful to keep their distance once more.
But if you knew him, really knew the complicated, enormously gruff but deeply compassionate man (oh, how he hated it when his big heart showed in public), risen from the textile mill town of Kannapolis, N.C., with a ninth-grade education . . . if you really knew him, then Ralph Dale Earnhardt was so very, very human, so deeply of the commonfolk who loved him.
"When I stopped, I looked at it and got in the ambulance and looked back over there and I said 'man, the wheels ain't knocked off that car yet,'" Earnhardt said.
"I went back over there and looked at the wheels and I told the guy in the car to fire it up. "It fired up and I said, 'Get out. Unhook me, I've got to go."
"We took off after 'em. You've got to get all the laps you can. That's what we're running for the championship for."
The other Earnhardt, Sr.
From the grandstands, he was beheld as superhuman. And somehow when the fans came close to him, to talk or touch him, they never could quite humanize him. They were skittish. They would grasp their autographs gratefully and hurry away, careful to keep their distance once more.
But if you knew him, really knew the complicated, enormously gruff but deeply compassionate man (oh, how he hated it when his big heart showed in public), risen from the textile mill town of Kannapolis, N.C., with a ninth-grade education . . . if you really knew him, then Ralph Dale Earnhardt was so very, very human, so deeply of the commonfolk who loved him.
.
Love him or hate him, Ralph Dale Earnhardt paid you back for your time and money everytime he raced.
