Racing to the Finish Page 6

  So, yeah, freaking out, that’s understandable, right? But while I remember everything that Micky said to me that day in the examination room, what Micky remembers is that I said nothing. He recalls that I looked nervous, anxious, worried, all the stuff you would expect from someone in that situation. But he also says now that he could tell I was internalizing a lot. He could tell that I wasn’t completely showing my hand and that I was really good at that. I always have been. You figure out how to internalize your feelings when you grow up in the spotlight like I did, especially when you’re trucking it through the world with the name Dale Earnhardt, and when there are hundreds of people who are depending on your name to make their living.

  Not a lot of people pick that up about me, the internalizing. Certainly not during the first time they’ve ever met me. Micky did. He recognized it from his previous work with other high-profile athletes. That’s how I knew Micky was someone to trust. He didn’t just understand the science and the medicine of all this. He understood me.

  And that’s why I trusted him when he finished with his teaching session on brains and concussions and looked me right in the eye and said, “Dale, we can fix this.”

  People ask me all the time what it was that made things click so well between me and Steve Letarte as a driver and crew chief. Steve has an incredible knowledge of how racecars work and how the crew does its job, all of those things. He’s done it all and he’s worked under some of the greatest crew chiefs of all time and with some of the greatest drivers of all time. But where he clicked with me wasn’t building cars or putting in chassis setups. It clicked between us because he knew how to handle me as a person. He didn’t talk to me the same way he talked to Jeff Gordon or Jimmie Johnson. He talked to me, Dale Junior.

  What he realized about me from literally our very first practice session together at Daytona in 2011 was how to keep me focused and motivated. In that practice, I wrecked. But nearly before I was finished spinning, he was already on the radio in my ear, saying, “Dude, don’t worry about it. I’ve got great news. We’re already rolling the backup car off the truck; it’s even better than the car you’re in. We’re good, man.”

  In the four years we worked together he never said to me, “You need to drive better!” Instead, he said, “Okay, here’s what I need to do to make this car better, to help you, and for you to help me do that, here’s what I need you to do right now.” It might have been something in the middle of a race, like, “Dale, I really need you to be running no worse than fifteenth when we hit this last round of pit stops,” or in qualifying, like, “Dale, if you run this line around the track on this lap, I think we can pick up X-amount of speed.” Steve understood the psychology of giving me a goal to hit and explaining to me why I needed to hit it. He understood the psychology of me.

  That’s also what makes Micky a great doctor. He gave me the information that I needed to understand what was going on inside my head. He explained to me that it was treatable, that once we had pinpointed the exact signals in my brain that weren’t acting normal, he and his team would set up a very specific rehabilitation treatment. He gave me the rundown of why we were going to do the things that he was about to ask me to do. In other words, he gave me goals. Like Steve, he gave me the plan of attack and brought the people in to start that plan with me. He gave me the what, why, when, and how. When he’d started talking, I was scared to death. By the time he’d finished, I was ready to drop the green flag on this deal.

  After our chat, we headed downstairs to the gym. That’s right, the gym. Trust me, I was surprised too. And this is where we can erase one of the most common myths about concussion treatment, a myth I still believed until this very moment in Pittsburgh. The days of treating a concussion by telling someone to go lay down in a dark room are over, at least when it comes to the type of symptoms I was having. Put a washcloth on it? That washcloth was thrown in the garbage.

  The treatment now is exposure. The idea is not to let the brain rest; it’s to make the brain work. Work it out like an injured muscle, with activities that focus on what needs to be fixed. We did heavy physical exercises and we did eye exercises, all designed to make me uncomfortable, to push the limits of what my brain could do. In the end, what we discovered was what I would have to work with as I started my race back to the track. We would find the edge, go over that edge, look at the data, figure out how to push that edge out a little farther, and go at it again.

  Kind of sounds like the tire test that landed me there in the first place, doesn’t it?

  I’ll be honest: I wasn’t very good at it. At that stage in my life, working out wasn’t really my thing. Today, as I write this, I’ve become a cycling junkie, and I don’t ever go anywhere without a bottle of water in my hand. But in October 2012, there were no bikes in my life that didn’t have a motor, and the only bottles in my hand were soda and beer. Micky’s staff was used to working with Pittsburgh Steelers and Penguins and Pirates, guys who could attack these exercises like machines. But that’s not what they were measuring. They were measuring my reaction time, how well my eyes were tracking, how connected my eyes were to the activity of the rest of my body.

  I did exercises on the stationary bike, range-of-motion exercises that forced me to track one spot with my eyes while in motion, and a series of balance tests. I also took another ImPACT test. My numbers had already improved pretty dramatically from the test with Dr. Petty the previous week. I met with a vestibular system specialist and, though my left eye showed a little bit of exophoria—that means it went off on its own for a little bit under stress—I was in much better shape, and I had convinced myself that they were going to confirm it. As my anxiety level dropped, just as Micky had explained, so did my symptoms.

  When I think back now, the day was hard. Really hard. But a trip that had started out so dang scary ended up being pretty cool. Amy and I got out onto the Steelers practice field and threw the ball around. Then we got our lunch and sat down to eat. The Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin was there too. By day’s end Micky’s team had evaluated me and given me my homework, a list of exercises I was to do each day. I was to check in with Dr. Petty each day, and Micky gave me his cell phone number and told me to call him to let him know how I was doing or if I ever had any questions. I think back now about how many times I’ve called him over the years since and wonder if he maybe has regretted that!

  Micky told me that if I stuck to my regimen and did what I was assigned, then he was optimistic that I would be back in a racecar soon. I told him that I was being forced to miss two races, that I still wasn’t happy about that, and that there wasn’t a chance I would miss more than those two. Years later, even after dealing with hundreds of pro athletes, he still talks about how he’d never seen anyone so out of sorts over missing a couple of weeks. Clearly, I was the first racecar driver he’d ever worked with.

  Missing those two races was just as miserable as I expected it to be. Actually, it was worse. In 1996, when a broken collarbone forced my dad to pull himself out of his car during the Brickyard 400, he later described watching his famous No. 3 going around the track with someone else behind the wheel as being like “watching your wife going on a date with some other guy.” I have to say that Dad’s assessment was pretty accurate. Regan Smith finished thirty-sixth at Charlotte after a blown engine, but then he finished seventh at Kansas, no doubt helped by the data we’d collected during my tire test, the one that ended with the crash that had me at home now, doing medicine ball tosses while I watched my car race without me.

  The truth was, I felt okay. I really did. Micky’s plan was working, and in barely a week’s time, I felt fine. I certainly didn’t feel as bad as I did after the Kansas or Talladega crashes. What I did feel was kind of stupid. What if I had been honest after Kansas? If I’d missed a race then, maybe we’d still have been in the NASCAR postseason, the Chase, and still have a shot at the championship.

  I had to stop myself from going there, from trying to rewind everything. I
told myself it was too late for that. Besides, I had to get ready for another test.

  Monday, October 22, 2012

  Gresham Motorsports Park

  The morning after my team finished seventh at Kansas without me, I met them at Gresham Motorsports Park, a cool little short track near Athens, Georgia. We weren’t alone. Dr. Jerry Petty was there with us. We ran a ton of laps, with me blasting it as hard as I could, coming into the garage from time to time to talk things through with Steve, but really to be examined by Dr. Petty. He would talk to me, ask me specific questions about my symptoms, and study me to see if there were any signs of any of those symptoms returning, including giving me an on-the-spot eye exam.

  He would hold a stick up with a little dot on it and ask me to focus on that dot. Then he’d bring it closer, closer, and closer to my face. If everything is good to go, then your eyes stay locked on that dot and come together as it comes closer, even when the image of it splits into two right in front of your face. If you’re still concussed, your eyes just bail, splitting that image way earlier than they should, because the communication pathways have been disrupted. He’d also ask me to close my eyes and tilt my head back. Then he’d give me a push to the shoulder to see how easily I might lose my balance.

  I had done all of this in Pittsburgh too. I was locked in. Everything was fine. Even that little bit of exophoria was gone. For me, those tests were a breeze. So was the test on the racetrack.

  The next morning Dr. Petty examined me at his office. Everything was still good to go. He called Rick Hendrick, who’d created a little bit of a mess when he told reporters at Kansas that I was already cleared to return the next week. Now, Dr. Petty told him, it was official. We called Micky and gave him the good news. He says now that he was blown away at how quickly I had recovered. He attributed that speed to my dedication to the exercises that I had been given and my willingness to provide the right feedback to both his office and Dr. Petty. He also believed that restoring my confidence had played a huge part in my recovery. I had lowered the anxiety level that he believed had played a big part in making my symptoms worse. Again, his sense of me was spot-on. I wasn’t nervous at Gresham. I was too determined to be nervous. (It’s interesting now to contrast my feelings about that day at Gresham with the emotions that I felt during a very similar day four years later at Darlington Raceway. File that away—we’ll come back to that.) I’d just run 123 laps with the hammer down on a flat, half-mile oval. Our choice of track for that test wasn’t a coincidence. It was a lot like the track where my comeback was taking place that weekend.

  Sunday, October 28, 2012

  Martinsville Speedway

  Before the race on Sunday, even before our first practice session on Friday, there Steve and I were again, right back where we had left off with the public two weeks earlier, sitting behind microphones in a racetrack media center. This time it was at Martinsville, the oldest track on the Cup Series calendar and the only track still on the circuit from NASCAR’s original schedule in 1948. It was my first time seeing anyone at the racetrack, let alone the media, and I was a little taken aback at the new role I’d been pushed into.

  With concussions being such a controversial topic in the sports world, during my two-week absence I don’t think I realized how much my name had been attached to that topic. Some people were praising my decision to pull myself out of my car to figure out what was wrong, even though that’s not really how it had gone down. I guess others were starting to ask questions about racing like they were asking questions about football. Was I coming back too soon? Was racing too dangerous? That kind of stuff.

  Suddenly, whether I wanted to be or not, I was the spokesperson for concussions in auto racing.

  I was asked what my two and a half weeks away had been like. “Frustrating . . . as you’re waiting on your fogginess to clear up and your symptoms to go away.” I was asked if I had considered just parking it for the remainder of the season, for six races instead of only the two. “Just like the decision to get out of the car, I wanted the doctors to make that decision instead of me.”

  As we went along, I found myself sharing. A lot. I explained about the exercises. I confessed that the two concussions had been totally different injuries. I think that was a shocker to people. I got into the definition of the vestibular system. I talked about the role anxiety plays and described myself as “a mess” because of that anxiety when I’d traveled to Pittsburgh to see Micky. I explained that the Kansas concussion symptoms included fogginess, but the Talladega symptoms involved more irritation. Hey, these same media people were the ones standing right there for my “bloodthirsty” rant, right? I compared racers and football players and layering concussions. I said that the biggest lesson I had learned was that I would be honest with myself and everyone else if I ever found myself in that condition again.

  I went on for more than twenty minutes.

  If you’re fortunate enough to be a professional athlete and then have a long career like I did, you end up doing hundreds of press conferences. Most of them run together. They’re run of the mill, with the same questions and the same answers. But then, sometimes, sitting up there you can see the faces of the sportswriters and reporters when something different is happening, when you’re really teaching them something. Our weekly NASCAR press conferences are always streamed live over the internet and, on a day like today or at Charlotte when we announced my time off, they are carried on live TV too.

  I’ve always known that my voice has carried some weight, just because of my name and the popularity that’s always come with that, and then, thankfully, because we’d had some success on the racetrack. I don’t think I realized it right in that moment as it was happening, but that weekend at Martinsville, that was the first time I had a platform to really help people that I hadn’t thought about before. All those patients I saw at Micky’s—and he sees thousands of patients every year—and how many others who don’t go to the doctor? Instead they sit at home, in the fog, just hoping it will clear up one day.

  From October 2012 until this day, I’ve been trying to speak to them.

  At one point I was asked if I’d be able to simply climb into my car and get right back up to speed, or would I need a little time to get going. I said I felt like I’d been gone a year, so I’d be jumping in the gas right from the first lap. The truth was a little less bold. On Sunday, we ran okay and I kept it in the middle third of the field. Steve rolled out some killer pit strategy and had us in a position for me to make a late run into the top ten, but it didn’t happen. I finished twenty-first, but on the lead lap. He was pretty steamed, but after the race, when he started grilling me in the garage about why I didn’t take advantage of what he’d done, I reminded him that I’d been gone for two weekends and, like it or not, that day had been a test session for me. I might have talked a big game on Friday, but on Sunday I did indeed need a little bit of time to prove to myself that I was okay to be back out there. The next weekend I finished seventh on the fastest, hairiest intermediate track we run, Texas Motor Speedway, and I closed out 2012 with another top-ten finish, at Homestead-Miami Speedway.

  In 2013, we didn’t win a race, but in my fourteenth full season I had perhaps my most consistent year. I set a personal best with twenty-two top-ten finishes in thirty-six races, including a second place run in the Daytona 500, and I finished fifth in the championship standings, my best finish in nearly a decade. Me, Steve, the whole No. 88 team—we were clicking, man. Steve told me that he believed, as awful as it had been, that us enduring the concussion issues of 2012 had been the best thing that could have happened to us when it came to creating a bond. We weren’t just coworkers; we were really good friends. We’d experienced something together, and we were stronger for it. It was also showing at the racetrack. We both knew 2014 was going to be huge.

  At the season-ending NASCAR awards dinner in Las Vegas, I was asked, for the first time in a long time, about my 2012 concussions. The reporter wanted to know if I had e
xperienced any symptoms lately. I answered no.

  “In fact,” I told him, “now that I think back on it, I don’t think we wrecked at all, hard or soft, all year, did we? I feel great. I haven’t felt foggy since Talladega 2012. It doesn’t really even cross my mind.”

  I was at peace.

  That was about to change.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE CLOUD RETURNS

  Sunday, February 23, 2014

  Daytona International Speedway

  I don’t care how long you race for a living—you can do it for decades, for a thousand races—there will still be only one or two times in your career where you take the checkered flag and go, Man, that day was dang near perfect.

  The 2014 Daytona 500 was one of those days. It didn’t necessarily start off that way. We started the race ninth, and it rained a bunch. After the start we ended up delayed for six hours, and when the race finally got going, the No. 88 car didn’t lead until the race was nearly three-quarters done. But once we got to the front, we were awesome. Nobody had anything for us. If anyone ever took the lead from me, I’d take it right back. I led six different times and had to hold off the whole field after a late restart. Brad Keselowski came after me on the last lap, but my teammate Jeff Gordon helped push me to the win. The Daytona 500, man!

  That win made a lot of statements. It was my twentieth career Cup Series victory. Guys who have done that, that’s a small club. It was my second Daytona 500 win. That’s an even smaller club. It also snapped a fifty-five-race winless streak. Most importantly, this was the first year that NASCAR had its win-and-in postseason format. That meant that even though we were only one race into the season, we were all but guaranteed to be one of the sixteen teams competing for the championship that fall.