Sterling Marlin - A County Boy Can Survive

"Man, working that 'backer will kill a mule,'' says Marlin. "You've gotta plant it and chop it and pull the suckers off it and dust it and strip it and hang it in the barn to cure. They call it a 13-month crop. 'Backer is a backbreaker.''

As a teenager, Sterling raised a plot of tobacco of his own and sank his profits into his first race car. He followed his father to Nashville Speedway, where Coo Coo was a track terror in the '60s. Coo Coo, who acquired his nickname not from his driving style but from his attempted pronouncement of his real name, Clifton, as a toddler, won a record four track championships at Nashville. Sterling won three titles before graduating to NASCAR's big leagues.

Sterling's first test on a superspeedway came at Talladega in an ARCA race. He and Coo Coo had built a car, but both lacked the nerve to break the news to Eula Faye that her child was going to tackle the biggest, most daunting track in racing.

"We knew Mama would pitch a fit, so we kept puttin' it off," Sterling says. "Finally, one evening a few days before we had to leave for the race, we were sitting around the dinner table, and Daddy said something like, 'Uh, pass the potatoes, Sterling's racing at Talladega.' It took a minute for it to sink in, and when Mama realized what he'd said, sure enough, she hit the ceiling. She knew what kind of speeds they run there, and she didn't want me on that track. She eventually calmed down and gave in, but she wasn't any too happy about it.''

Marlin would go on to great success, and in recent years, evolve into something of a vanishing species: a countryfied NASCAR driver. Somehow it's hard to imagine, say, Jeff Gordon accidentally setting a cow on fire while sloshing delousing goo on her, or any other young NASCAR hottie shoveling manure, cracking a blacksnake around a buddy's neck, or crushing 'backer worms between a dark-stained thumbnail and forefinger.

Gordon, a four-time champion, grew up in California and honed his racing skills in Indiana. Cool, urban, and thoroughly cosmopolitan, Gordon is the prototype of the modern racer. They prefer Game Boys to John Deeres.

Check the backgrounds of some of the talented young drivers who want to illuminate NASCAR's future galaxy: Tony Stewart (Indiana); Jimmie Johnson (California); Kevin Harvick (California); Kurt Busch (Las Vegas); Ryan Newman (Indiana); Matt Kenseth (Wisconsin); and Greg Biffle (Washington). There currently is no driver in Winston Cup from the once racing-rich state of Alabama.

Even among NASCAR's surviving Sons of the South there is a dwindling country connection. Budding superstar Dale Earnhardt Jr., for example, has a North Carolina address but a decidedly Hollywood lifestyle.

Remember the story about the day the venerable Junior Johnson ran his first stock car race? He was plowing barefoot behind a mule when his moonshine-running brother screeched up and asked Junior if he wanted to run his "licker car'' in a local race. "I told him to let me tie up the mule and put on my shoes,'' Junior drawled.

Nowadays, playboys have replaced plowboys. Where have all the Bubbas gone?

"NASCAR is losing that connection,'' says three-time Winston Cup champion Darrell Waltrip, who grew up in a blue-collar family in Kentucky and migrated to Nashville to pursue his racing career. "This started out as a grassroots sport with mostly grassroots drivers, but it's changed over the years. We've traded in some of the old rural tracks, like North Wilkesboro, and we're seeing a flood of talented young guys coming in who didn't grow up on farms or in mill towns. I'm glad to see drivers like Sterling hanging on. He represents the bridge between the sport's past and present, and I think it's important to maintain that link. I hate to see our sport lose its soul.''