Tony Stewart retirement opens up happy possibilities

— -- KANNAPOLIS, N.C. -- It was the summer of 2003, at a dirt track somewhere in rural Indiana, and the film crew had lost the man they were supposed to be following around.

They were there to work on a documentary about Tony Stewart. It was a project that he'd approved and agreed to participate in. It was a surprising agreement for a driver at the height of his ongoing war with the motorsports media, a time when he was known as much for his snarl as he was for his wins. There were always plenty of both, including during this summertime film shoot.

But now he was missing.

"Wait -- there he is!" the director shouted, pointing his crew's eyes across the dusty first turn to a man sitting alone atop the rickety wooden grandstand.

There, with no one else within 50 feet of him, the defending NASCAR Winston Cup champion had his legs stretched out, leaning back against the row behind him, watching little-known sprint car racers slide by during an essentially meaningless practice session.

And there, sitting in the middle of nowhere, amid clouds of red clay and during the grumpiest stanza of his racing career, Stewart was beaming.

"You ever seen him smile like that?" the director asked the cameraman, someone who'd befriended the racer after covering him for years.

"Sure," the photographer replied. "But only when he's at a place like this."

On Wednesday afternoon Stewart officially announced what had been widely reported at the start of the week and widely rumored for much longer before that. After the 2016 season he will end his career as a NASCAR Sprint Cup driver, continuing in his role as co-owner of Stewart-Haas Racing and moving to the front office as Clint Bowyer moves into his iconic No.14 Chevy.

Stewart doesn't want 2016 to become "a retirement tour," but that's exactly what it will be. He doesn't really want us to talk about his legacy, but we're going to. And it might take the entire year to sort out exactly what that legacy is.

He will be a first-ballot NASCAR Hall of Famer, the only driver to win a championship in America's top two motorsports series, taking the 1997 IndyCar title and three NASCAR Cup Series championships: Winston, Nextel and Sprint.

He wasn't the first driver to attempt the same-day Indy 500/Coca-Cola 600 double, but he was the first considered a legitimate shot to win both. He was already a racing legend before he'd even gotten a crack at the big leagues, becoming the first driver to sweep USAC's top three series -- Midget, Sprints and Silver Crown.

In the years since, he has taken a throwback page from the others who came before him in those series, such as A.J. Foyt, Parnelli Jones and Mario Andretti, punctuating his "day jobs" by racing somewhere in some machine nearly every night of the week.

To him, that was always the "real racing." He said on more than one occasion that the money he made as a NASCAR superstar is what allowed him to do what he really loved, short-tracking. (In fact, he would absolutely take offense to the reference in the previous paragraph that described NASCAR and IndyCar as the big leagues and not including sprint car racing on the list.)

"That's what makes him a legend among any of us who have made our living out here racing five nights a week in the dirt," World of Outlaws series legend Steve Kinser said earlier this year. "He got so big so fast, but he never got so big that he was no longer one of us."

"The world will never know what all he has done to keep short-track racing alive in this country," explained his childhood hero Foyt, the reason Stewart runs the No. 14. "He owns teams and tracks and all that, but it's also calling a short track somewhere and saying, 'Hey, I think I'll come up there and race Wednesday night, tell everybody so you can sell some tickets.' Or helping some old retired racer pay his medical bills. That's the stuff people don't know about."

It's the stuff they do know about that makes the Stewart legacy so complicated. It started with the temper tantrums, hated at first back when they were so frequent and embraced later on when they were triggered only occasionally, framed up as a wayback machine into NASCAR's rough-and-tumble past.

On a rainy November night in 2011 at the Homestead-Miami Speedway, he produced one of the greatest one-night performances in the history of American motorsports, manhandling his 3,400-pound Chevy through the field to win the season finale and his third Sprint Cup title, his first as a driver-owner.

When he arrived in the media center, he had to answer Champagne-soaked questions about firing his crew chief, which he'd done leading up to the race.

"There's always something, isn't there?" he said that night. "That won't keep us from enjoying this. This is too good not to enjoy."

But in the summer of 2013, the good times ended. He suffered major injuries to his right leg during a dirt race at Southern Iowa Speedway. One year later, another short-track incident, this time in upstate New York, took the life of young racer Kevin Ward Jr. and became a news cycle nightmare. The first incident led to months of physical rehabilitation. The second has led to mental rehabilitation, not to mention ongoing lawsuits from the family of the deceased.

Stewart hasn't raced on a dirt track since Ward's death. He hasn't been in any race that wasn't NASCAR-sanctioned. Admittedly, he also hasn't been himself.

His closest friends and co-workers, the ones who lined the walls of the auditorium for Wednesday's announcement, have spent so much of the past two years telling tales of dark days behind closed doors.

At 44, he has faced the cold brick wall that all great athletes eventually plow into, the realization that whatever it was that they were born with, that they always had that mere mortals did not, that allowed them to dig deep and conjure magic like that night at Homestead, is no longer there to be grabbed.

He said during Wednesday's news conference that there had been several times during this, the longest winless streak of his 17-year Cup career, he'd been ready to retire out of frustration. He had originally planned to walk away in November but was talked into one more year. But he also was quick to say that his injuries and Ward's death had "zero" to do with the timing of his retirement.

Now the same people who talked him into one more year are once again beginning to tell stories of "Old Tony" returning, his fire reignited by way of a target placed out over the horizon. Perhaps it's the kind of spark that might just find one more trick in that tattered bag of greatness.

"This added year is not a ride-it-out year," Stewart said, pointedly. "We're going to gouge our eyes out all we can to win races and win another championship."

It was a rare serious moment amid an hourlong news conference that would have played well at the local Chuckle Hut. He joked with co-owner Gene Haas about running for his new Formula One team. He took self-jabs over his prickly relationship with the media. He conceded that the past two years "have their challenges" and said he had no serious regrets in his career. He joked about still knowing how to "nut it up" by going 200 mph at Texas Motor Speedway, saying he could let it hang out in 2016 because "I don't have to worry about making anyone mad and having to race them again the next year."

And he told a reporter from his hometown newspaper in Columbus, Indiana, that he hadn't had enough time at home, only 21 days this year. Years ago he bought his childhood home, the place where he grew up visiting all those Indiana short tracks, finding heroes in Saturday night racers known only to the grandstands around them.

The only racing he's retiring from is NASCAR Sprint Cup racing. All that other stuff is still out there, a schedule he refused to elaborate on Wednesday, remaining noncommittal on returning to sprint car racing and only saying repeatedly that he was "excited about the racing I can do now."

Stewart keeps a list of every racetrack he's run and every race that he's won. There are dozens and dozens of each. And there are just as many tracks he still wants to see before his ultimate and final retirement, which isn't likely to come until, in his words, "I retire from living."

That's a lot of wooden bleachers to stretch out in. And the look he'll have there will be the same as the one he wore on Wednesday.

Smoke was smiling.

A lot.

Finally.