Target Practice

Ask Jeff Gordon what it’s like to be the man to beat in NASCAR, the guy seemingly every other driver is aiming for, and he’ll probably tell you it’s just racin’.

When Tony Stewart spins Gordon out on pit road at Bristol after the March race?

Just racin’.

When Gordon has a heated confrontation on pit road with Rusty Wallace after the spring race at Richmond?

Just racin’.

How about when Stewart says Gordon is the one driver he likes to beat more than any other because he’s so squeaky clean?

Just racin’, of course.

“I have fun with that,” Gordon says. “Really, it’s part of the entertainment of our sport. Our sport, it’s racing but it’s also entertainment. I get a chuckle out of it. Rusty and I laughed after the deal in Richmond, and Tony and I, we’ve talked since (the Bristol spin). It’s not as big a deal as the media and the fans want to make out of it. You just go on about your job. It’s racing, and you’ve got to race those guys every weekend.”

Yes, in this homogenized new world of NASCAR, when a little verbal spin for the sake of public relations takes precedence over the reality of a situation, “Jeffspeak” is alive and well.

What, though, makes Gordon such a target for heated emotion and, sometimes, controversy? From spectators who vehemently boo and root against him to competitors who confront him or spin his car out on pit road, what gives?

Gordon is, after all, a mild mannered, relatively soft-spoken young man, nearly always polite, gracious in Victory Lane, seemingly respectful toward his peers, never prone to exaggerated emotion or theatrics.

Could it be, then, that Jeff Gordon, gentleman racer, is just too perfect? Indeed, too squeaky clean?

A Prelude

Let’s turn back the clock a few decades. In the early ’70s a brash, cocky, outgoing, young gun of a racer burst onto the NASCAR scene. A decade later he had the stock car racing world by the tail.

In ’81 and ’82, while driving for Junior Johnson, Darrell Waltrip earned consecutive Winston Cup championships. He won 12 of 31 races in ’81 and 12 of 30 races (40 percent) the next year. For a six-year period ending in ’86, when Waltrip and Johnson parted, their pairing produced 43 wins and three Winston Cup titles, the last one in ’85.

But Darrell Waltrip didn’t just win races—he talked, he joked, he took verbal jabs at his fellow competitors, he even bragged about winning. He was so talkative, in fact, that Cale Yarborough tabbed him with the moniker “Jaws.”

The name fit all too well. Waltrip relished being the man in the bull’s-eye, the man stirring things up among NASCAR’s old guard. The nickname wasn’t merely a reference to a big-mouthed driver; it was, for all intents and purposes, a reference to the way Waltrip rocked the NASCAR boat and devoured everything in his path.

“I raised the bar back in the ’80s to a new level and fans didn’t like that,” says Waltrip, now a commentator for NASCAR races on FOX. “I was beating their heroes, and I was the guy who looked like I had it all. I had a beautiful wife. I was winning lots of races and championships, making a lot of money. I represented something to a lot of people that they could never achieve. That created a controversy. And in my case—I’ve said this time and again—I put fuel on that fire. I played with that as if it were a game. If people booed me, I’d make them madder. That was just how I was.”

No DW Here

What, then, makes Gordon susceptible to the same negative and often emotional responses from spectators and competitors? He is, after all, the very antithesis of Darrell Waltrip. Nonconfrontational. Mostly unemotional. Politically correct in speech and manner. Able to maintain an even keel in good times or bad.

Even his crew chief, Robbie Loomis, shakes his head sometimes and wonders how Jeff Gordon can still be Jeff Gordon in most any circumstance.

“From the competition-side, people wonder what is his makeup,” says Loomis. “I’ll be honest with you, and I work with him, but the guy is so special as far as the way he treats people and the way he handles himself even in bad times, you sit there and ask yourself, ‘Man, is this guy human?’ You can definitely tell that he’s got some divine guidance inside to make Jeff Gordon what he is. I mean, there are times when I say he’s not human.”

That—coupled with the fact he wins and wins often—may get at the heart of why Gordon often finds himself in the bull’s-eye and the guy others are aiming to beat on the racetrack or berate off it. He’s like the kid in fourth grade who refuses to tease the teacher or engage in other school boy mischief, thereby directing the mischief and childish pranks of others toward him like flies to a Sunday picnic.

It’s an image that Gordon is entirely comfortable with, however.

“My personality is my personality,” he says. “I can’t really control or change that. That’s just the way I am, the way I was brought up and the way I like to go about things. I’m a fierce competitor on the racetrack, but I like to do it clean. If somebody rubs me the wrong way, I don’t mind giving it right back.”

One common perception of Gordon goes beyond his personality, though. His image as a young driver who wins races and serves as poster boy for a new generation of NASCAR drivers has spawned nicknames such as “Golden Boy,” “Wonder Boy” and “The Kid”—a far cry from the Jaws nickname slapped on Waltrip, but with the same intent.

“He looks like he could be a star in a movie,” says Waltrip. “There’s so many things about him that people are so envious of, and envy is the problem in our sport. The other competitors are envious. They want to be like Jeff Gordon, just like I was envious of Richard Petty. I wanted to be the King. I wanted to be the guy that they turned to, and I wanted to be the guy that everybody looked to.

“Being envious of a guy’s position, most of us don’t have the intelligence to attack somebody on an intellectual level. We go at them in a way to make them look bad.”

Another common perception of Gordon is that success came too easy for him. He was, after all, 24 years old and in just his third full season of Winston Cup competition when he won his first championship. He claimed his third Cup title soon after turning 27. But after a downturn in the No. 24 team’s fortunes last season, Gordon says he has sensed a softening in the way the public and others in the sport perceive him.

“I think that these last couple of years we’ve earned a lot of respect from the competitors and from the fans,” says Gordon. “Because we were so successful, so fast, it was just like it was handed to us on a platter and we didn’t have to work for it, even though we did work real hard for it.

“Going through some years where you struggle, I think it makes people realize you’re human and that you’re not perfect, and that you do go through the same things that other people go through somewhere along the way. It makes them appreciate when you do come back to the front a whole lot more.”

Trying Times

When Loomis came to Hendrick Motorsports before the 2000 season, following former crew chief Ray Evernham’s departure to form his own team, he came with at least a twinge of trepidation.

“Being on the outside and looking in, that was one of the big uncertainties I had because I really didn’t know Jeff Gordon,” says Loomis. “I knew him as a driver, I knew he was a winner, but you don’t know the personality, you don’t know how they handle bad times and bad races and situations they have outside of racing, business deals that go bad. You just never know how they handle those things.

“I’ve been fortunate enough to have worked with the King (Petty), and I’ve been around him and several other drivers. Jeff handles himself in a way that makes people better without really demanding it on them. He encourages you to want to do better. At the end of the day, if we haven’t won the race, you feel like you’ve let Jeff Gordon down, but he’ll come up and pat you on the back and tell you you did a good job.”

The 2000 season was a letdown for the entire 24 team. Loomis came in on the heels of a phenomenal six-year run during which Gordon and Evernham won 47 races and three Winston Cup championships. For most drivers, last season’s three wins, a ninth-place finish in points and one pole position would constitute a successful run. For the 24 team, the numbers indicated a struggling former champion. Gordon finished 11th through 35th a career-high 10 times last season.

Those were trying times for a team that for the better part of six seasons set the standard for success in Winston Cup. Being the team to beat one season then struggling the next season was quite a change for Gordon and his Hendrick Motorsports teammates.

“Some guys don’t always get to experience both spectrums, where you’re the guy to beat, you’re on top, then you’re not the guy—you’re the guy struggling to finish 15th,” Gordon says. “Most guys will feel one or the other but not typically both. When you’ve been through both of them, it just makes you appreciate winning and being on top that much more.”

By last season’s midpoint, Gordon had clearly re-emerged, winning races and vaulting past Dale Jarrett into the top spot in the points battle.

Consecutive wins during June, with one at Michigan following a dominating performance at Dover (where Gordon led all but 19 of 400 laps), had the team back at the top of its game and back in championship form.

Jarrett looks at the 24 team and sees Gordon’s re-emergence as nothing unusual.

“I can’t say that I’m surprised because someone like Jeff Gordon, who has the kind of talent he does, and the resources Hendrick Motorsports has, you know that they’re not going to struggle,” says Jarrett. “He struggled to win four or five races or something like that (in 2000). That’s really struggling (he says with a laugh), but you know they’re not going to be behind very long. Robbie Loomis is very capable and he has a lot of good people around him, plus Jeff Gordon is a great talent. He’s going to definitely be the one we battle all year, and we’re going to do our best to try to keep up and keep him in sight.”

Staying Focused

Winning and being back on top brings consequences, of course, even consequences you can joke about.

“I told Jeff, ‘Man, all these years I built relationships for these people to like me and now all of a sudden they’re not liking me,’” Loomis says with a laugh. “But we were kidding about that. It’s been great. The biggest thing is probably the happy surprise it’s been with his personality. He’s such a thankful person. At the end of the day when we win, we look at each other and we’re both very thankful for the team that we get to work with and for all the tools and stuff that Rick Hendrick supplies us with, which makes it so much easier.

“That’s the thing about him that’s so fun to work with him—it’s not like he beats his chest and says ‘I’m the best, I whupped them today.’ He’s just very thankful for what he does get, and sometimes he looks at it and says, ‘How does all this happen?’”

When it does happen, Loomis gets to experience a situation where he and his teammates are not the most highly thought of team around the racetrack, sometimes thrust into circumstances where thick skin may be the most valuable tool a team member can have.

“We talk about it a little bit during our meetings sometimes,” says Loomis. “We really have to keep the focus on our job, our cars and what we’re doing. There’s going to be a lot of things from the outside that will try to distract you from that, but I think as long as we stay focused, we communicate well together, then we’ll be fine.”

So Loomis, having been on the outside looking in and now being an insider, may be the most qualified to answer the overriding question: Why is Gordon such a target for ill will from competitors and spectators?

“You know, I thought about that a lot before I took the job,” says Loomis. “I think the biggest thing I came to when I looked at it is I was like, ‘What is it that everybody doesn’t like about him?’ And, you know, he’s a winner. If you look at anybody else, nobody likes to see a guy win all the time.”

Waltrip carries the point further.

“It’s real simple,” he says. “When you represent perfection, when you are the perfect guy, that rubs people the wrong way. Not only that, when you have a standard as high as his is, if you do make any kind of an error, then people really want to jump on you and criticize you or boo you or whatever.”

The “whatevers” have been hurled at Gordon with a fair amount of frequency in recent seasons—like when Mike Skinner won a 1997 NASCAR exhibition race in Japan and a television audience was privy to Skinner’s comment to his teammates, via his headset, about beating the “little S.O.B.,” or when Tony Stewart referred to Gordon as “Prince Charming” after Stewart won this summer at Sears Point.

Stewart, however—despite his remarks and aggressive action toward Gordon—downplays any notion of a rivalry between the two.

“I think the so-called rivalry between me and Jeff Gordon is overplayed,” says Stewart. “I want to beat everybody week-in and week-out, and that includes Jeff.”

Unlike Gordon, who rarely says anything that might hint of a detour from putting forth a positive PR image, Stewart is known as a driver who speaks his mind, sometimes too much, he admits. But Stewart will agree straight up that most drivers are too PR conscious, too afraid to really speak their minds.

“Absolutely. I’ve always thought that,” Stewart says. “I feel if someone asks me an honest question then they deserve an honest answer. That’s probably why I’ve gotten in trouble as often as I have. People ask questions that they sometimes don’t like the answers to. You’ll have that.”

Why, then, does Gordon—the very personification of a clean-cut, easygoing nice guy—draw so much ill will from spectators and competitors?

“I have no idea,” says Stewart. “He seems to do everything right, so I don’t know why he gets booed.”

Just A Little Noise

There’s a NASCAR adage that says it’s better for a driver to hear something—anything at all—over dead silence.

“It’s all about noise, man,” says Waltrip. “I ain’t out there counting which ones are doing what. I’m just out there listening to the noise. There’s nothing any more disheartening and makes you feel any worse than to have them call out your name and you walk across that stage and nobody ever claps their hands or even acts like they know you’re there. That’s the kiss of death. I’m always listening. Tony Stewart gets a reaction. Jeff Gordon gets a reaction. I like the guys who get a reaction.”

Waltrip, though, had an epiphany of sorts during the waning years of his heyday.

“There was a point when I had accomplished so much and I had done so much that I didn’t want to hear those boos any more,” says Waltrip. “It took a real effort on my part. I had to change a lot of things, had to change the way I did a lot of things to stop those boos and turn them to cheers. I had to not be the bad guy anymore; I had to become one of the good guys. It paid off for me. I was the most popular driver (as voted by fans) in ’89 and ’90. Those two awards are probably as dear to me as anything I’ve done—considering the fact I was so unpopular for so long.”

Gordon, on the other hand, as Stewart points out “seems to do everything right.” He is, seemingly, the quintessential good guy.

“He’s not the kind of guy who goes out looking for controversy,” says Waltrip. “He’s not the kind of guy who says things that’s going to create controversy. What’s wrong with Jeff Gordon? The answer to that is nothing. And that’s where the problem is.”