Google “Jeff Gordon is gay” and you’ll get nearly 4,000 entries. Of course, he is not gay. But that doesn’t seem to matter.
The first time I met him was at the 2002 Daytona 500, when he was the reigning Winston Cup champion. It was the year after Nascar’s bitter-eyed alpha dog, Earnhardt Sr. — the Intimidator — died in a last-lap crash, and the maudlin crowd was in no mood to honor Gordon. During driver introductions, the horizon-wide grandstands whooped and cheered for has-beens (Sterling Martin) and hacks (Buckshot Jones), but when Gordon was introduced, I thought they were going to stone him to death with Budweiser cans. A black, poisonous pall of anger and frustration gathered over the crowd. Beer-bellied ogres held up signs that read “FAG: FANS AGAINST GORDON. “
Gordon, by then accustomed to being the most gay-bashed straight man in America, smiled and waved. If it hurt, if he felt that it was unjust, if he wondered what these damn “fans” wanted, he didn’t show it.
The man has liquid nitrogen in his veins and carbon-steel castanets in his fireproof undies.
Yes, that describes Gordon alright, but more than that I appreciate Gordon’s willingness to be the millionaire, sports mogul, model-izer, metro-sexual he has become without apology. I appreciate Gordon’s unwillingness to pander to Southern cultures and pleasantries simply to please a crowd.
For this, a large faction of NASCAR fans hate him. And more of them hate him because of his natural ability behind the wheel. And most of them hate the fact that this time last year, Gordon garnered his first victory at Phoenix International Raceway, tying him with the late Dale Earnhardt for sixth in all-time wins.
How did the biggest star in one of the world’s most popular sports, a man adored by millions, come to be so reviled by millions more?
It helps to understand the history of the sport. Organized stock car racing was born on red-clay short tracks bulldozed into the woods of the Appalachians in the 1940s and early fifties. Its first heroes were hard men, moonshiners and grease monkeys and country boys whose smiles missed teeth like abandoned buildings miss windows. Stock-car racing was an outgrowth of Southern culture, where the greatest tribute was a trophy named after cigarettes, where the tradition of the honor duel was observed with 3,000-pound hunks of steel, where God and Goodyear were thanked in equal measure. It’s hard to imagine, now that Nascar is a galling lollapalooza of mega-corporate advertising — Sprint, Red Bull, the Principal Financial Group, and so on — but when Gordon entered the sport in the early nineties, it was still a relatively rinky-dink operation.
Then: cosmic inflation. Within the space of a decade, Nascar had gone corporate. The France family, running the sport out of Daytona Beach, brought racing to Wall Street. Ticket prices skyrocketed. Races at venerated battlefields like Darlington and Rockingham gave way to events in California and Las Vegas. The hard men with the scuffed knuckles and marbles in their mouths started to disappear, replaced by fit young drivers with Hollywood smiles who spoke in complete sentences.
Gordon was one of the first of the new breed, and by far the most successful. He was born in that faraway Gomorrah of California. He grew up in Indiana and learned to race in open-wheel sprint cars, whatever the hell they were. He was slight and nice looking, more jockey than driver. In the multi-generational patriarchy of Nascar, where fathers pass down their cars to sons (Earnhardt, Petty, Baker, Jarrett, Allison), Gordon was nobody’s kin in particular.
Traditional Nascar fans, particularly in the Deep South, can’t forgive him. They associate him with the corporatization of racing, its Californication, merchandizing, suburbanization, and feminization. And then, the deepest cut of all: Earnhardt Sr. ‘s death. The mourning for Earnhardt Sr. — who, by the way, had nothing but respect for Gordon, whom he nicknamed “Wonder Boy” — was galvanized by resentment. Earnhardt embodied everything stock car racing had been. He was from Kannapolis, N.C., a high school dropout, the son of another hard man, the racer Ralph Earnhardt. Dale never spoke pretty. Gordon was careful to mention his sponsor, to thank the Lord, to shave his cleft chin a shiny blue. And he had the awful manners to whup up on Earnhardt Sr. As of this moment, he is the only driver who has a chance to eclipse Earnhardt Sr. ‘s record seven championships (shared with Richard Petty).
These days, Gordon is his own man, and except for the fact that he’s one of the nicest people you’d ever want to meet, you might think he’s on the verge of becoming an urban sophisticate. He announced his engagement to Ingrid at a California croquet event. He has his own wine label, the Jeff Gordon Collection. Plainly, he is way past worrying what the grandstands think.
Gordon is the pocket full of cool points I dip into when arguing with non-NASCAR types who choose to believe the sport is still steeped in moonshine and Southern fried.
Gordon can captivate and convert Gen-Xers at home watching Saturday Night Live to avid NASCAR fans and speak to stay-at-home moms hooked to daytime TV like Live with Regis and Kelly.
As someone who has hosted to both network shows, Gordon is the pop culture pass NASCAR needs to keep the sport relevant with mainstream audiences.
He takes NASCAR to a new dimension and satisfies the appetites of fans who follow the sport as a lifestyle, not just camber and carbon fiber seats.
Still, Gordon remains a man apart, a distant champion. He’s enjoying the immunity of being one of the sport’s veterans and leaders and is speaking his mind more than ever. For example, Gordon doesn’t think much of Nascar’s new car, the larger, boxier, and safer “Car of Tomorrow” — “We could have done so much more with the clean slate, ” he says. He even wonders how racing will remain relevant in the face of global warming. Would he drive a hybrid race car? “Absolutely. I think we all want to be green, we all want to do things that are good for the environment, and racing isn’t necessarily what’s good for the environment. So of course we should move forward with the rest of the world. ” But much of Nascar Nation thinks global warming is some sort of liberal hoax and hybrid cars are for sissies. “Well, I guess I’m not keeping up with the pulse of the fans because to me it only makes sense. “
Some things never change. Gordon is still ahead of the field, ahead of the curve, and the sport is still trying to catch up to him.
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