llichard Petty mastered the fine art of hugging thewall at 200 miles per hour. Now that stock -car racing

is the fastest-growing sport in the country, he's trying tomaster the art of cashing in. By ShaUll Assael

ELECTION EVE IN ERWIN, NORTH CAROLINA. Ahot-dog-and-hallelujah rally is under way at theTriton High School. The gymnasium is packedwith party faithful who've braved this rain-soaked night to be teassured that the tednecks

still rule. Halfway through, racing legend Richard Petty, acandidate fot secretary of state, glides in under police es-cort. A candidate for Congress who's been carnival bark-ing stops long enough to acknowledge the new GOP starin the cowboy hat and shades, then resumes his screed."Do we want Hollywood homosexuals deciding ourmorals? Do we want a First Mother who's gonna be raisingher child from jail? Do we want another four years of thatskirt-chasin', pot-smokin' draft dodger in the White House?"

The loud chant "No!" dances off the cinder-block walls.Petty gets up next. His face looks like a parched map,

each line a road crisscrossing its surface. It is taut andtanned, rugged in the manner of Clint Eastwood, of theoutlaw gunslinger. He gazes at the bedsheet by the hay bale,on which two brothers have written RICHARD FOREVER. Hesees the fans who've heard he'll sign the T-shirts he sells forfifteen bucks and who have begun forming a long line. Henods to the shriveled old man in the front row, who'll stophim later and say, ':Around here, people have opinionsabout three things: dogs, the land, and women," and he'llask sensibly about the old guy's dog.

Petty has no notes as he leans into the microphone, forhis campaign is simple. It's about keeping North Carolina in

ILLUSTRATION BY LADY PINK 103

The King gets FAT:Peny reinvemed Nascar with 1992's Fan AppreCiation Tour.-

the family. Who better to elect than its legendary racer, theson of its back-road bosom?

"I wanna thank y'all for everything you done," Richardstarts, sincerely, "and promise I won't mess up the office ofsecretary of state." Here he smiles. "'Cause I won't spend allmy time there. I'll be at the races." The room breaks intogales oflaughter.

The next evening, he, along with the half dozen othercandidates on the stage, will be defeated. All these rootsyRepublican campaigns, with Petty as theit standard-bearer,will run into a mammoth roadblock in the suburbs. Andwhen Richard Petty can't get elected in North Carolina, youlmow it's time for a new map. That, or a moment of silencefor the quiet passing of the redneck South.

The local Republican party had seen Richard, the win-ningest stock-car racer ever, as its translucent star. And forevidence of why they were right and wrong, back up to a fewhours before the preelection rally. Richard, deciding to tweakthe Democtats, parked his campaign bus in front of theirRaleigh headquarters, a postbellum mansion on a quiet, leafystreet. A Catholic-school playground lay next door, and as hegot out, a gaggle of gitls in checkered skirts began to squeal,"That's him. That racer man." Delighted, Petty started sign-ing unsolicited autograph cards beneath a shade tree. Severalof the girls told him he was theit dad's favorite racer.

The problem is, North Carolina is becoming one bigNationsBank mall, and the guy driving the paver is the fatherof those pigtailed gitls. Call them pool-and-patio suburban-ites, people with Range Rovers, Panthers season tickets, anda taste for Thai food who don't think of themselves assoutherners. They have outregistered Democrats six to onesince 1990, and they-not the Democrats-are the ones whoturned Richard's political career into roadkill.

There's a saying in North Carolina that the state is avalley of humility between two mountains of conceit. Prettyenough words, but that valley produced the moonshinets,who, having to do business in a hurry, produced stock-carracing, which in tum produced the Petty family. But Pettysare not accustomed to humbling experiences. Richardfigured that public service would be his for the askingwhen he retired. Hillbilly oblige. He was wrong. 00 themorning after Election Day, he awoke in a suburbanizedRepublican southern state that had defeated him by eightpoints. After the shellacking he got, you'd expect Petty tobe contemplative, exhausted, sullen. But he's positivelybouncy in defeat. "Only three men got more publicity thanme," he grins, "and they were all running for president."

But what was this politi-cal thing really all about? Inthe sixties, Petty was the kidstar with matinee looks. Inthe ga.s~starved seventies, hisnumber 43 single-handedlycarried stock. In the eighties,he was the icon who hadPresident Reagan bowingbefore him at his two-hun-dredth win. And in '992, theKing was the legend whoserock~star;size retirement toursparked a merchandisingboom that has yet to crest.Now he's the fifty-nine-year-

old patriarch racing the clock io his empite-building days.A sponsor used to be the guy who didn't take your furni-

ture if you were late on the payment. Now a sponsor is DuPont or Tide or the Cartoon Netwotk, Kellogg's, Kodak. Justfive years ago, it took SI million to finance a competitive racingteam. Now in ordet to dominate, you need s8 million, and toget money like that you need to drive a car that looks like abox of Frosted Flakes or Fred Flintstone, or maybe the Hoot-ers car. And the National Association for Stock Car AutoRacing is building new stadiums in cities such as Fort Worth,Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and Miami, and it's selling them out,even though they have nearly twice the capacity of NFL sta-diums. The oval io Texas, which will be one of the largestvenues io the world, has a planned capacity of 163,000. •

And here's the irony: The same suburban families thatshelled Petty at the polls will shell out four hundred bucksto fill up those seats. When they get there, he will get theminto his souvenir trailers. He'll get them into his new driv-ing schools. He'll get them to buy Pontiacs, Pepsi, Goody'sheadache powder, and, of course, STP. And if they leaveuntouched, he'll get them in their malls when they gethome. Richard has married his son, Kyle, to MatteI's HotWheels, sponsor of his new race team. Petty action figurescan't be far behind.

Let the people Petty calls "Yankee rednecks" come-thebankers who've traded theit Armani for checkered leathers."Those people from Boston," he says, "who come downhere to yell yahoo." As Nascar enters its fifiieth year, andstock-car racing is being called the fastest-growing commer-cial sport in the country. and drivers are now unscarred andglowing corporate spokesmen with all their own teethand stock portfolios and television accents, all Richard Pettywants is his piece.

PETTY COUNTRY IS BRANSON MILL ROAD, A WIND;

ing, hilly stretch that cuts through the family'shomestead in Level Cross, North Carolina. Youcan acquire many useful things on Branson Mill: aWeedwacker with a microwave cheese sandwich

thrown in at Whitt's Grocery, a cow at Reg Holstein'sColtrane farm, a horse at one of the pastures with picture-book picket fences, spiritual salvation at the Welcome BaptistChurch, or the Shania Twain look at Delphine's BeautyShop. At the end of the road is a white-plank farmhousenext to a small, stately home right out of To Killa Mockingbird.This is where Richard and his brother, Maurice, were raisedby Elizabeth Petty and her racing husband, Lee.

Lee quit his small truck-ing business at thirtrfive tobecome a stock;car racer,and he took his boys withhim. He had a generous spir-it, but he stoked his bubblingblood by dusting moonshin-ers, whose livings dependedon outgunning revenuers inthe hills. These races col-orized suffocatingly similarcotton-mill towns. They alsoschooled a boy of twelve inthe rules of the road.

"I was fortunate startingyoung, not having any habits

104· ESQUIRE· MARCH 1997

Orivinga car that would "kickyour ass standingstill," Peny reigned in thegas,starved '70s, Below, in 19B4, President Reagan lauds win number 200.

..

tona 500 in 1959, they stillhad just a couple of housepayments in the bank.Then Lee's Pontiac wentairborne at Daytona in1961, sailing over the third-turn guardrail. The sick-ening sound of a front endbeing mashed into thecockpit could be heard inthe cheap seats.

Lee didn't so muchencourage Richard to driveas not stand in his way.As he lay in a hospitalbed, with a puncturedlung, fractured chest, andbroken left thigh, he toldRichard the family carwas now his to ride. Hewondered if his boy'sblood bubbled the sameas his.

By then, the speed-way era was in fullswing. The debut of the2smile Daytona Speed-way was followed by I.S-mile tracks in Charlotteand Atlanta. Racing wasabout two-hundred-mile-per-hour speeds. It neededa new, more calculatingdriver. Lee bluntly drovethe bullrings. His son de-cided to try somethingdifferent. He seduced thespeedways.

Richard drove closerto the wall than anyone,which is like leaning intoa Mike Tyson punch, ex-cept that the wall hitsharder. But Richard gotalong well with the wall.He was economical, de-liberative, patient. Whenhe saw that your tires

were getting bald after all your foolish banging, he'd comedown off the high groove like the devil himself, andyou'd be passed, son.

"When they start the next race," he says matter-of-factly, "I won more than all them put together. Next wasDavid Pearson. Then Bobby Allison. Dale Earnhardt mayhave won seven championships, hut he ain't won butseventy~four races. He ain't but an honorable mention.After that, there's guys who won ten. And I won twohundred." How did that two hundredth feel, coming onJuly 4, 1984, with fireworks and a personal embrace byPresident Ronald Reagan? "Just another day in the life ofRichard Petty," he says.

He could be as smooth as his smile when in the lead,buthe'd use his car like an Everlastglove [continued on page 144]

as far as eating and sleep-ing," he says. "I never got. , .what kind of clock you callit? A body clock? Yeah. Mybody don't know what timeit is. Don't care what time itis. I eat to refuel. Sleep thesame way. IfI went to Alas-ka and it stayed light forthree Ot four days, I'd prob-ably stay up that long."

Petty was made world-ly by the small world, hav-ing traveled across the coun~try when boys from LevelCross wete lucky to havebeen to Charlotte. Even to-day, he sees its old face inthe new facades. A cam-paign rally took him to aball field in Asheville, NorthCarolina, where the minor-league Colorado Rockiesteam, the Tourists, play. Aswell-coiffed ladies balancedplastic plates of barbecue ontheir arms and hoi polloidanced beneath burnishedbrick arches, Richard staredat the outfield.

"Daddy didn't come tomy first race in '58, 'causehe had one here," he saysabruptly. "T~: field was thesame, but ...

He pauses. as if rerun~ning a thirty-eight-year-oldrace. ''There was tires allaround. Every time some orboy flipped up over 'em, theowner went after him,shakin' his fist, 'cause itmessed up the grass." _

Here, you wait for him -~to sound sentimental, but hedisappoints. "Eighty percentof the tracks we ran on are ..'gone, but the only people -who care are old-timers, and, hell, they can't see,anyway."

The Pettys have always been pragmatic, which insome quaners is read as cheap. But Nascar furnishes neitherpensions nor disability coverage, and more drivers thanyou'd think are one head-on away from being broke. Justlook at Nascar's working-class hero, Bobby Allison, overin Hueytown, Alabama. Last March, he had to auction offeverything he owned, including the newspaper clippingsabout his two dead boys, Davey and Clifford, because hecouldn't pay the medical bills from the horrifying 1988crash that left him in a coma for three weeks and in ther-apy since. And he was Petty's greatest rival, the third-win-ningesr driver in racing history.

After Richard and Maurice rode shotgun for Leethrough three titles and his winning of the inaugural Day-

MARCH 1997· ESQUIRE· 105

THE KING'S LAST LAP[continuedfrom pagnosl"wl1en behind. "Toughest son of abitch I ever met," says his longtime crew chief.and secondcousin, Dale Inman. How could you not be to comethrough the 1960s, the bloodiest decade in racing, whenspeed passed safety, when cars that were the aerodynamicequivalent of your fat aunt Ethel were pushing two bun-dred miles per hour?

"In '980, I broke my neck in Pocono," Richard says. "Ithurt so bad, I knew something was wrong. But I didn'tknow how bad. So I come to the hospital, and the doctorcomes in for the X ray. I could see my neck was an eighthof an inch off. The doctor asked me, 'When did you breakyour neckbefore?' I said, 'Huh?' I never knew I broke myneck. I was probably hurtin' so much from somethin' else,I didn't notice."

Richard's good looks and tufts of thick black hair alsomade him stand out from the other broken and soiledmen, many of whom would not make it through the 1960s.Most of these men were poor, and many were illiterate. Ifyou asked for an autograph from one of those racers, yougot back a gnarled, angry scrawl, maybe just an X. ButRichard, who'd taken a business class that taught penman-ship, gave them a beautiful incongruity: a flowery, curlingsignature that looked as if it belonged to a king.

And so it was that the King, that wonderful cre-ation, that alter ego, that smiling, relentlessly polite auto-graph signer, was born. He was no doubt born of eco-nomic necessity, but no one would deny that Richarddeveloped a strong physical craving for these kineticbursts of contact.

You still see it at the racetrack. He will take the issueof Hot Rod magazine you've handed him, the one thatshows his '67 Plymouth or '70 Super Bird, and tell you"that was one hell of a race car," and this makes you feelyou know something more about him, something deep.Then he'll hug the wife and say to the kid, "Howyadoin',buddy?" as he settles down to sign. You watch his impossi-bly long fingers. Somehow, you expect them to be ganglyor scarred, but they're perfectly manicured and smooth,which is a fair enough description of the man. They gripthe pen, and then you notice his secret: He pushes it withhis arm, as he was taught in that business class. That's whyhe can sign for so long. His fingers don't tire. Each auto-graph is exactly the same.

Fans stalk him like a zoo animal, jabbing him withautograph cards as if they were food pellets to see if whatthey've heard is true, to see if he'll grab them. And healways does. "I have to say, after thirty-five years, I stillfeel good about being recognized," he says. And why not?The King giveth away his name and his soul so we mayall know him. All he asks is that we go forth to collecthis kitsch.

Half the town of Eden is at the Railroad Cafe, a smallluncheonette on the Virginia-North Carolina border. It's asummer Saturday night, and they're drinking strawberrymoonshine and dancing to the country jukebox. Someoneshouts to the owner, "Show them new boys the museum,Homer," and so he does. It is little more than a white-washed concrete room, but the bearded cook, HomerWood, has filled it with all sorts of number 43 cars, cerealboxes, figurines, cardboard cutouts, all signed by Richard.His prized possession is a limited-edition print of Pettystaring godlike into a powder-blue sky, and be keeps it

144· ESQUIRE· MARCH 199?

meticulously wrapped in tissue. Homer leans it beside amilk crate and lets Richard's eyes follow him as he drinksand talks.

Traveling thtough the Nascar South, you see endlesspaintings like this, bung in homes next to pictures of thekids, Jesus, occasionally Elvis. People feel oddly compelledto render him, as if only by creating him with brusbstrokescan they understand the frozen, feel-good face. His usedtires sit in more dens than you might think. His crash debriswas always a hot item to walk away from a race with, like acaught foul ball. Richard can't leave his leather jacket, sun-glasses, even his ever-present tin of chew out for long.Someone always steals it.

With mania such as this, he could have withdrawninto a huge, gated Graceland, with plenty of room fortacky gift shops, bus tours, and your basic Lourdes-likeshrine for the freak parade. Instead, he's crammed hiscareer into that homey little white-plank farmhouse at theend of Branson Mill Road. For three dollars, you can seethe jumpsuit Richard wore when he won his two-hun-dredth race, the King with Ronnie Reagan, the nation'sMedal of Freedom, the cases of apostolic kitsch-a number43 electric guitar, a rhinestone jacket of Richard's face-thewalls of trophies, the photo of Richard sitting on the hoodof a I9SOPlymouth by the Coltrane Feed Mill, the waxstatue of Petty with the blue Richard Petty rocking chairto rest your tired bones.

Why not something larger, something, you know, bigand flashy and interactive? Petty gives an answer one day ashe's riding in his private plane. "Look down there," he says."What do you see?" There is nothing to see beneath theclouds. "From up here, no one is bigger than anyone else."

THE PETTYS CAME VERY CLOSE TO LOSING IT ALL.

And it happened when Richard was flying ontop of the world and shouldn't have bad to wor-ry. We have to go back to the early eighties,wben Richard, then closing in on the two-hun-

dred-win mark, decided to break his son, Kyle, into thebusiness. The boy was raised to be humble. When Presi-dent Nixon invited Kyle's fatbet for an audience at theWhite House, his teachet had to read about it in tbe papers."How come you didn't tell us?" she asked. "I didn't know Iwas supposed to," he answered.

Kyle was also raised to take over the family business, asRichard had been at his age. And so when he reached histwenties, Richard ceded him more and more control andexpected him to become the driver in the family. But run-ning a two-car shop in 1983was nothing like it had been in1963- Richard began losing. His brother, Maurice, was nearthe breaking point from building engines for both cars. DaleInman, his crew chief, defected for better pay. Lee, who wasin his late sixties, became a dyspeptic presence. And Kylehad somehow turned into a liberal! Lord, how he would ar-gue with everyone. "If you stood still for a minute, I wasgonna argue with you," he says.

The Pettys had turned into a soap opera. To save thefamily farm, Richard left Petty Enterprises for a high-payingdriving job elsewhere. Kyle had to start selling bis laod inthe Carolina hills to pay bills. Three weeks after Richatdwon his two-hundredth race, Kyle announced he was leav-ing Petty Enterprises, too.

He became a racing version of Shakespeare's Prince

Hal, carousing to escape the burden that one day he'd beKing. First, he went to drive for the Pettys' archrivals, theWood Brothers, for the princely sum of $50,000,and he dab-bled for a while in country music. With Richard at the verypinnacle of his career and Kyle off finding himself, Petty En-terprises went dormant. For the nrst time since 1947. therewasn't the sound of Richard's car buzz-sawing the silencearound Branson Mill Road.

"It was always 'the Shop.' Those words," Kyle says."The Shop was where you went to get your Coca-Cola.The Shop was where you went when your bicycle broke,or where you got gas when you were sixteen. Your wholelife revolved around the Shop, and all of a sudden itwasn't there."

In 1986,Richard decided that he'd had enough of driv-ing somebody else's car and returned to Branson MillRoad. "When they closed that place up, when there wasnothing there, it tore Richard's heart out," his wife, Lynda,remembers. "He said, 'I can't stand this. I'm going home.' "But the road back was long, and Richard didn't help mat-ters by going off on odd, self-indulgent tangents. At theage of forty-nine, with nothing more to lose or gain, hebecame something of an eccentric, hiring engineers withfar-fetched ideas about redesigning the most basic ele-ments of the race car. His new crew, made up of inexpe-rienced Level Cross locals, watched helplessly as one ideaafter anothet failed, as number 43 became punch-drunk.The sight of him needing oxygen after races didn't do theimage proud.

"If J"dlooked at what the fans thought, I woulda quit in1986,"Richard says. "Yaknow, when I was born, God said,'You've got twenty-five years of good luck.' I just tried tostretch it to thitty-five."

Then something remarkable happened. Just when itlooked as if the King was going to hang on too long, be-coming a cheap ornament used to dress up bad awardsbanquets in second-rate hotels, he decided to throw him-self a yearlong farewell tour. In doing so, Petty single-handedly reinvented Nascar as a modern commercialjuggernaut.

He called it the Fan Appreciation Tour (FAT), whichin and of itself suggested that the time had arrived foreverybody to pay Richard back for all the free face he'dgiven us over the years. Petty issued a different souvenirmodel car for each race of the tour and charged twelvedollars. Do the math: twenty-five thousand units for eachof the thirty races at twelve dollars a car. A pretty nice401(k) plan, right?

The first souvenir car sold out five days before the 1992Daytona 500. By race Sunday, speculators were selling themfor three times the list price. Suddenly, every licenser withkneepads was at Richard's door. He lent his name to knives,trading cards, shirts, caps. Pepsi came out with twelve com-memorative longnecks. There was even Richard PettyChicken on a Stick.

The tour raked in staggering amounts of cash, butmore important, it demonstrated just how narrowly thesport was being managed. There existed no stock-carequivalent of NFL Ptoperties, no central branding arm.Nascar was America's fifth-largest sport, yet it was still acorporate backwater. Petty's tour, modeled after theOlympics, with sponsors paying between a hundredgrand and half a million dollars for official logos, awak-

ened Nascar's sleeping giant."The memorabilia was so mind-boggling, it staggered

all of us," says the racing promoter Humpy Wheeler. ':Andeverything sold. If we'd have seen it coming, a lot of uswould have made much more money than we did."

Nowadays, you can't watch television without gettingblown back by the wind shear of racing-product pitch.There's RPM 2Night daily on ESPN2, RaceDay on TNN,Road to the Championship on TBS, and a Nascar-producedshow called 1his Week in Nascar. In all, there's close to thir-ty hours of Nascar programming created each weekfor you to look at on your basic cable, fueling a $600 mil-lion souvenir and collectibles industry. You can shop inNascar Thunder stores, eat in Nascar restaurants. and buyeverything from Nascar water to Nascar motor oil. Themarket is so active that Dale Earnhardt, who sells moreT-shirts than the Rolling Stones, has licensed his namefor $30 million. Nascar probably sells more die-casttchotchkes and painted plates thin Star Trek and 1he CivilWar combined.

"The deal is, I went downhill in winnings, but I didn'tgo downhill as far as popularity," Petty says. "In fact, I mighthave gone up."

Here he stops and grins coyly."People feeling sorry for me and all."

ITIS OCTOBER 27. AND RICHARD PETTY IS WATCHINGhis number 43 Pontiac disappear into the fust tum ofthe Phoenix International Raceway for the DuraLube500. He is at the office, on his chair, a Goodyear radialstanding on the pit-toad wall. A grandstand with fifty

thousand people spreads like a pair of condor wings beforehim. He keeps his eyes on the asphalt.

Retirement hasn't been easy for him. The problemsthat his celebrity papered over in the latter eighties didn'tdisappear. In fact, they were exaggerated as he tried tofind a driver to fill his size-ll shoes. Like his father,Richard is known for paying poorly, so he couldn't lureveterans who earn half a million dollars or more. Theygiggled when the old man said, "You win and the moneytakes care of itself" He briefly hired racing scion JohnAndretti, but the marriage of two great racing names end-ed when Richard wouldn't pay Indy-size wages to thejockey-size upstart.

So he hited a low-profile Nashvillian named BobbyHamilton on a handshake. Hamilton has never won a race.But at present, he is blazing out of the fourth turn. In thelead. There is one more lap to go, thirty more seconds. It'sbeen said that there will be riots in North Carolim whenthe Petty Pontiac finally wins again.

Number 43 spills out of the flat fourth turn again, 1.2seconds ahead of the nearest machine. Amid the war-tornsmoke of cars giving out all around him, Hamilton bellowsunder the checkered flag, the winner. His crew spills ontothe track. Forty-three teams watch their ritual deliriumwith envy.

This is the first time Petty has won since July 4, '984.And as the action moves to the reviewing stand of victorylane, the photographers are ravenous for Richard. But noone can find him. Where is he? Still sitting on that tire.Head down. The winningest driver in the world, tasting thewin on dry lips.

Richard spends less and less time with these men.

MARCH 1997· ESQUIRE· 145

When he wasn't tunningJor office in 1996, he was manag-ing his Nascar truck team, collecting $15,000 for appear-ances, or working for his dozens of sponsors. No longer in~timate with the cars that bear his number, he's becomedistant from the day-to-day details that once obsessed him.He nearly has to be pulled to victory lane and, once there,wanders like a visitor. "That was their moment," he says.not quite sadly. "I wanted them to enjoy it."

THE WALDORF-ASTORIA IN NEW YORK IS DECO~

rated for Christmas. A green crushed-velvetsleigh in the lobby is buried beneath shinyboxes with red ribbons. The ladies who lunchare all corning back from saks Fifth Avenue

trailed by bellhops and their bags. Standing beside thefour-sided Waldorf clock, the 1893 model with the Statueof Liberty on top, Kyle Petty, his long hair pulled into aponytail and wearing a flowing khaki duster, takes in thescene. He has a bemused, they-don't-make-these-in-Level-Cross expression on his face. Out of nowhere, a family offour runs toward him from behind a pillar, and the eight-year-old son, who's looking for an autograph, screams,"Mr. Petty, Mr. Petty!"

The scene seems a bit off in a place like this, absentbig-haired chicks in painted pants, roaring engines, andthe pungent smell of petrol. But Kyle is unfazed, as iffamilies in Nascar caps always find him in the lobbies offive-star hotels. Compared with Richard, he's the MTVPetty, ,urbane, funny, accessible. But since his split withhis father, his career has been uneven. Now, at thirty-six,a dozen years delayed, he's accepting his inheritance andrejoining Petty Enterprises. That's why he's in the wal-dorf-Astoria, of all places. Nascar's having its big awardswingding, and this hotel is filled with drivers and me-chanics who could fix the New York City bus fleet if setloose for half a day.

Kyle flashes his father's smile at the delighted boy andsigns a photo of himself with his daddy's big, looping let-ters. He writes only KYLE, the y and I running together toform a racetrack figure eight.

"The sport will cool off at some point," he says after theboy and his family have skipped out to Park Avenue. "Butwith Kyle Petty and MatteI's Hot Wheels, Richard Petty andBobby Hamilton, all coming together, the pieces are in placefor Petty Enterprises to get hack where it once was. Weshould be fine. Theoretically."

Kyle disappears down the hall to attend a press confer-ence in the Empire Room, just missing his parents walkingup the red-carpeted entrance. The place is swarming withPettys. Elvis is in the building, wearing a black topcoat un-buttoned just enough to hint at an Italian tie underneath.An aide hands him a schedule, and Richard flips open hisChristian Dior bifocals to read it. "Okay," he whispers fromthe side of his mouth. "So I get this award and I'm out infive minutes, right?"

The press conference has been called to announcesome "special awards" in anticipation of the larger cere~mony in the Grand Ballroom tomorrow night. It's sup-posed to be for the stock-car press, and you can imaginewhat that might mean, but the line of people to get insidelooks more Fifth Avenue than Fayetteville. Nascar has justopened an office two blocks away, right across the streetfrom Major League Baseball and within four blocks of

146· ESQUIRE· MARCH 1997

both the NBA and the NFL, so most are probably invited.guests who'll take the train home to Long Island. Every-one else lives in Charlotte, which might as well be At-lanta, which might as well be Long Island.

As Richard gets noticed, VIPs peel off the line towardhim. "I got a sweet deal I wancha to think about, King."

"There's this boy I think you gotta meet, King.""Now, about that trading-card deal, King." ,People do actually call him King. Petty considers each

request equally and earnestly. "Sounds good, buddy," hesays to every one. He started calling people buddy after toomuch time in number 43 blasted his hearing away. Now theKing calls almost no one by name.

The lights blink on and off, beckoniog Richard inside.On the stage is Terry Labonte, this year's Nascar champi-on. A quiet Texan with twenty years in the business,Labonte stopped being a loner when his career went slacka few years ago. He hired himself out to a racing con~glomerate run by the nation's largest car dealer and reigo-ing Nascar moneyman, Rick Hendrick. The operationmade $40 million last year when Hendrick's other driver,Jeff Gordon, won the title. Labonte, whose all-Americanface has already graced a Kellogg's Cornflakes box, willmake at least that.

Richard, whose last title in '979 was celebrated in asomewhat smaller, boozier Daytona Beach aflirir,joins in thestanding ovation for Labonte. The longer the meo in the suitsclap for the reigning earner of the Nascar universe, the morethe room takes on a decidedly Predator's Ball feeling.There's talk of renting out Radio City next time, becausethe Waldorf's gilded Gtand Ballroom is now too small tocontain the sport.

But as Nascar realizes its commercial potential andmakes its corporate machinery indistinguishable fromthat of its new sports neighbors on Park Avenue, it needsRichard Petty more than ever. It needs him to summonits past, that big, brawling Juniot Johnson circus thatsprang from the clay gulches of the Carolinas. No onewill ever touch his record. Even now, at fifty-nine, he looksas if he could race for four hours and then drink untildawn and deck any Yankee who gets cheeky.

With the applause for Labonte dying down, the roombegins to buzz with excitement about the next award: themost exciting moment in Nascar history, decided by a pollof fans. And the winner is ...

Richard Petty', two-hundredth victory!Petty strides to the stage and cradles the crystal cup.

"That was what racing's all about," he says. "We ran fourhundred miles, and I beat someone by three feet. That wasa heck of a deal for us. I'm glad the fans still remember it,'cause it's the last thing I done."

And then the King walks off with an expensive trophyfor a twelve-year-old victory, reminding you of WilliamFaulkner's line about the South: "The past is never dead. Itisn't even past."

He reaches the back of the Empire Room and says, as ifcontinuing his thought, "I mean, hey, buddy, the Fords andRockefellers haven't lasted as long in their granddaddy'sbusiness as us Pettys."

And fifty years after his daddy, Lee, started the Pettyfamily business, city boys and corporate visionaries finallycotton to the American love of hot rods. All Richard Pettywants is his piece. Fl