McGee: Relationship between boss Rick Hendrick, driver Jeff Gordon deeper than that
— -- The legend goes that on Saturday, March 14, 1992, Rick Hendrick was about to enter the pedestrian tunnel at the Atlanta Motor Speedway when he heard tires squealing. The legend says that Hendrick paused, craned his neck to try and spot which Busch Series car was producing all that rubber rubbing racket.
The legend goes on to say that Hendrick, who was almost never around to see Busch races but was in the Atlanta infield on his way to a sponsor meeting, stopped those walking with him, pointed to the No.1 white Baby Ruth-sponsored Ford and said, "Let's watch this guy a minute. He's about to bust his butt." But the guy never did, even through lap after lap of sliding sideways, or as racers like to call it, slideways. The guy led 103 of 197 laps and won the race.
Legend has it that Hendrick asked his companions who was behind the wheel. He was told Jeff Gordon, a 20-year-old kid with a bad mustache and a wicked record from Midwestern USAC short-track open-wheel racing. They'd all seen him on ESPN's late night racing shows, but figured he'd be racing IndyCars. Instead, he was trying to make it in NASCAR.
Now NASCAR lore says that the following day Hendrick couldn't shake what he'd seen. He started asking questions and making calls to see if he might be able to hire the 20-year-old, based solely on what he'd seen at Atlanta. That summer he did, stealing the kid away from Bill Davis Racing and putting him in a Cup car at season's end.
But here's the thing about this legend. It's no legend at all.
"That's 100 percent true," Hendrick confirms, laughing. "Because, you know, I'm just that smart and have such a natural eye for talent. I'm just that good, man."
The Rick Hendrick who spotted Gordon that day was 43 years-old. He'd been a Winston Cup team owner for less than a decade. That tenure had started out so poorly that the car salesman had nearly closed up shop barely two months in.
On that day in Atlanta in 1992, the knock on Hendrick Motorsports as a team was that they couldn't close the deal. They had money. They'd had a conga line of future Hall of Famers behind the wheel, from Geoff Bodine to Tim Richmond to Benny Parsons to Ricky Rudd to the just-departed Darrell Waltrip. Yeah, they could win races but they didn't have the wherewithal to pull it off over the long haul consistently enough to win a Cup Series title.
No, seriously, there was a time when people said that. And they said it a lot.
"It seemed like there was just always something back then holding us back a little," he recalls now. "We were still relatively new at it. Guys like Junior Johnson and Richard Childress and the Pettys and the Wood Brothers, they'd been around so long and had so much success. I was new. We were trying a lot of new things, expanding to three cars, stuff like that.
"We had such talented drivers, but no championships to show for it. People might not remember that now, but we were always working from behind."
So, what changed?
"The reason we're talking right now," Hendrick answers. "Because we hired Jeff Gordon."
Hendrick, now 66, is quick to follow up his comment by adding that it's not exactly that black and white. But when the history of his race team is laid out on paper, the reality is that, yeah, it kind of is.
There are two distinct eras. There's a BG and an AG, Before Gordon and After Gordon. The BG era, covering 1984-92, brought the team 32 wins and zero Cup titles. The AG era, covering 1993 until now, has produced 208 wins and a dozen Cup Series championships.
Gordon's name is on 93 of those race trophies and four of those Cups. This weekend at the Homestead-Miami Speedway he will make his 797th and final Winston/Nextel/Sprint Cup start, retiring at race's end, but not before a shot to finish with 94 wins and five Cups.
All four of his championships and 58 of those wins came between 1994 and 2001, an eight-year crucible from which was forged the greatest dynasty in NASCAR history.
But the kid's impact reached far beyond the ever-expanding walls of his Hendrick Motorsports race shop. He became a genuine crossover superstar, the name that the general public invoked whenever they wanted to talk about auto racing or, really, anything fast. He became his generation's Mario Andretti.
"I always think back to Tim Richmond, who drove for us in the '80s, as a guy who was really ahead of his time," Hendrick recalls. "He came from the Indy 500. He hung out with movie stars. He was a good-looking guy who could work a room full of redneck race fans just as easy as he could a room full of sponsors. But when Jeff came along, he took all of that to a level that none of us could have ever anticipated."
On the business side, everyone wanted to be associated with the handsome youngster from California, whose image and ability dared to go head-to-head with Dale Earnhardt and his fellow members of the 40-something leather-faced NASCAR establishment. Says Hendrick: "Jeff was such a contrast to anything we'd seen before. He made selling sponsorship a breeze."
On the motorsports side, Gordon and Ray Evernham, the crew chief he brought with him from the Busch Series, pushed the envelope when it came to car construction, data collection, and pit stop processes.
Says Hendrick: "A lot of people thought they were nuts and they thought I was nuts for letting them do it. All those news ideas created a lot of tension on pit road. And in the beginning it created a lot of tension between our teams here at Hendrick Motorsports."
On the racetrack, Hendrick knew that the fearlessness Gordon had bird-dogged at Atlanta would take some time to translate into heavier, faster Cup cars -- and he was right. Gordon wrecked a lot of Hendrick Chevys, but only for a year.
By May '94, less than halfway through his second full season, the car control that Hendrick had spotted in '92 not only clicked, it changed the game.
Says Hendrick: "By the time he'd won, what was it, 13 races in 1998, all those people who had questioned hiring a guy that was so young who came from open-wheel racing, now they were looking all over the place for a guy just like him."
At the time it was called the "Young Gun" craze. The teams that Hendrick used to chase were now working to reinvent his formula. Yes, it did lead to the NASCAR migration of other open-wheelers such at Tony Stewart and Ryan Newman. But for every one of them, there were dozens of misfires, a scrap pile of since-forgotten next Jeff Gordons.
"I have apologized to other team owners for all the money that deal cost them in wrecked race cars and money paid to kids who never worked out," Hendrick admits. "But I got into the driver development business for a long time, too. Then I realized I needed to not do it that way anymore."
As it turned out, Gordon was doing the scouting for him. Less than a decade after Hendrick had spotted Gordon at Atlanta, Gordon himself was intrigued by someone he'd seen in the Busch Series. It was another youngster from California dirt, and he too was manhandling a second-division race car around the track. Like Hendrick in '92, Gordon inquired about the racer's availability. He went to that racer and explained to him that Hendrick Motorsports was adding a fourth car, co-owned by Gordon, and he wanted the little-known racer to drive it.
That youngster was Jimmie Johnson. All he's done is carry Jeff Gordon's baton even further up the mountain, winning 75 races and six championships, all with Gordon listed as his co-car owner with Hendrick.
Hendrick laughs again. "So, we're all out there doing all this scouting and searching and research and spending all this money to try and find the next Jeff Gordon, and then the guy who discovered the next Jeff Gordon was Jeff Gordon. I'm just glad he brought him to me and they didn't go off and do their own thing."
He's joking. He knew that wouldn't happen. Why? Because, even as NASCAR, thanks in no small part to Gordon, has become more and more cutthroat, the relationship between the racer and his boss has always felt more like family.
When asked to describe their relationship, Hendrick pauses to sort out how he's going to frame it up. He says father-son is too easy, too simple. This is more layered than that. "Some days it's father and son. Some days it's like a little brother. And some days, not many, we argue like all of the above."
He refers back to 2002, just after Gordon's fourth title, when the racer found himself in the middle of NASCAR's first high-profile divorce. A byproduct to his unexpected popularity, he and former Miss Winston Brooke Sealey had become a genuine celebrity couple, even starring together in TV commercials. So when they split up, it became tabloid fodder. Gordon found refuge by temporarily moving in with Hendrick and his wife, Linda.
"I joke now that it was like having another son in the house," Hendrick recalls. "We'd be in the den and Jeff would come through and say, 'I'll see you guys later, I'm going to the mall.' We'd laugh and say, 'OK, son!' "
But that time under the same roof also brought late nights of sitting up and talking about life and their lives together. That life that has been so hard at times, but also so much greater than they either man could have possibly imagined.
"You think about that divorce, about my bout with leukemia, about the plane crash (in 2004, taking the lives of 10, including Hendrick's actual son, Ricky), and then the good times, too. All the races we've won. All the things we've been able to build. Now he has his young children and we have grandchildren. We've really grown up together."
As he continues to talk, Hendrick's laughter vanishes. His smile does not.
"I think about what this team was and who I was before Jeff Gordon came here. Then I think about what this team is now and who I am now and who Jeff is now. It's been the most amazing life. It's been way more than any of us could have ever expected. And I can tell you this, just because he's not going to be driving a race car anymore, he'll never slow down. He'll always be a part of what we're doing here. I can't wait to see what happens next."
Rick Hendrick pauses again and then interjects one more comment.
"Man, I am so glad I had that sponsor meeting at Atlanta."