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By Root 2377 0

ESPN, and that’s including guys like Jeff Gordon and Tony Stewart. He was one of our early stars, although Gordon was quickly becoming one. Rich was not sophisticated, just kind of a blue-collar guy, but an unbelievable racer. We were in Salem, Indiana, a rickety old half-mile-high banked track. Rich was scheduled to make his Winston Cup debut in Pocono, so he was flying back and forth trying to qualify in Pocono, but came back to Salem to race that Saturday night. It was kind of a career weekend for him because he was going to make a nice step up to the big leagues, if you will, and he was running away with the race. He was so fast, he had Gordon and everybody just completely buried. I had a theory that he wanted to have such a great race, to almost spit in Jeff’s eye, like, “Not only do I deserve to go on NASCAR, but I’m going to kick your ass here on live TV.” A lap and a half from the end of the feature race, he ran up over the top of another guy and hit with such force that it actually threw his helmet off, which was really scary to see. It was a horrible accident and he was killed. It was a really sad day for me—that’s the sad part of getting to know these guys really well.

RICHARD PETTY:

The thing about crashes is everybody wants to know what’s going on and if you’re really hurt. One time I got hurt and I was just lying in the infirmary, watching the replays over and over again on TV. You know a little bit, but you really want to see what happened. I had family and fans wanting to know as much as possible, and TV’s helpful at times like that. ESPN would cover the good, bad, and indifferent, which was good for us. The more attention we got, and the more the drivers and crews cooperated, the better chance we had getting to new fans. The way they covered us really worked out well for us, and them. It certainly helped us grow.

JEFF GORDON, Race Car Driver:

Racing on ESPN turned my career around for me—not turned it around, but really took it to that next level, because I’d been racing sprint cars on a lot of different tracks, and the next step was probably go to outlaw racing, and somebody talked me into going and racing a midget the night before the 500 and said, “Oh, by the way, it’s on ESPN, live on ESPN, so it’s good publicity as well.” And I went, won, and set a track record. All of a sudden my phone starts ringing off the hook after that ’cause everybody saw it. I was like, “Wow, this is unbelievable—one race on TV and look what happens.” So we really started focusing on the ESPN TV races, even out west.

Larry Newberry, who was working the broadcast booth for those events, he and I had become friends and he was helping me with advice on career options. He brought up NASCAR to me, and I told him I didn’t really know a whole lot about it, so he said, “Well, go down to Buck Baker driving school in Rockingham and just give it a shot. See if you like it.” And so he kind of worked it out with ESPN for them to follow me down there, and they brought some cameras down there and filmed a little bit of it for Saturday Night Thunder. I enjoyed the heck out of stock car, I liked it a lot more than I thought I would, and the tracks were cool ’cause they’re type 8 tracks and ovals, and that’s what I grew up on. I met a guy there that had a Busch Grand National car, and he showed some interest, and the next thing I know, I’m being talked to about driving a car.

JEFF BURTON, Race Car Driver:

ESPN made us relevant. Even back then, people were looking to ESPN for things that were relevant in sports, and their coverage of our sport made the basketball fan, the football fan, and the baseball fan stop and say, “What is this? Is it a stereotypical southern sport?” So ESPN brought to the sport a lot of people who otherwise wouldn’t have paid attention.

BRIAN FRANCE, Chairman, NASCAR:

I think that our sport, maybe more than any other for ESPN, at least in the early days, had the biggest influence because we had quality programming available that wasn’t picked up at that point by network television. Finally, there was a sports channel