Ed Hinton lands at ESPN

Stone Cane · Jul 9, 2008

breathtaking piece

imjustagirl · Jul 9, 2008

And here's the backstory, which may be even better.

http://www.sportsjournalists.com/forum/posts/996038/

pseudo · Jul 9, 2008

playthrough said:

Classic stuff.

I tried to re-read Hinton's stories before and after Earnhardt's crash but the Sentinel archives said "file not found"...anyone wanna help there?
Click to expand...

Managed to find a couple; still looking for "Learn from Earnhardt -- it's time to change," which ran on Feb. 20, 2001.

Feb. 19, 2001: Earnhardt's greatness was always on display

Families deal with NASCAR tragedies (copied to a message board)

Earnhardt lived the song; a singer's pieces at the memorial service failed to capture the racer's life as well as one that went unsung.(The Orlando Sentinel)

Source: Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service
Publication Date: 22-FEB-01

CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- They sang the wrong songs for Dale Earnhardt on Thursday.

His old buddy Randy Owen of the group Alabama was there -- the one who sings the right song, the one Earnhardt used to sing to himself, about himself.

But they didn't sing "I'm in a Hurry" at Earnhardt's memorial in the cavernous Calvary Church.

Earnhardt was about as bad a singer as you'd ever hear. But when he'd sing it to himself -- I'm in a hurry and I don't know why -- maybe sitting in his office signing pictures of himself, his right hand flying, a blur with a Sharpee pen in it, turning out relics for faraway fans at the rate of one per second while his Learjet's engines warmed for another takeoff to someplace else he didn't want to go . . . Godamighty, how it fit.

In a hurry to get things done

I rush and rush till life's no fun

"I don't have time for family life, man!" Earnhardt once said, looking up from amid a stack of boxes on boxes of those pictures, in a lamenting tone that was almost crying, the cobalt eyes desperate, the Lear's destination that day unknown to him until he would take out, at the last minute, that little leather schedule book.

He couldn't even enjoy the Lears, not even the black one, custom-built. "Just another tool," he called it.

All I've really got to do

Is live and die

But I'm in a hurry

And don't know why

At Thursday's nationally televised memorial service from the biggest church in North Carolina, Owen sang two funereal country songs, generic salve for the family of any dead man of the working class.

But he didn't sing for Earnhardt. Not the way he could have.

I hear a voice

It says I'm runnin' behind

I better pick up my pace

"Look at this one," Earnhardt once said, selecting a letter from one of dozens of thick files, as a legion of his secretaries teemed around him at Dale Earnhardt Inc. "This is the kind of letters I get from people. Read this. Woman wanted me to drive her husband's hearse to his grave. Said it was his dying wish."

I knew how Earnhardt was about funerals -- he simply would not go to them, period. A clergyman we both knew once told me: "I'm in the dying business. I've seen it all. But Earnhardt's got more hang-ups about dying than any other person I've ever known."

Knowing how he was -- and those were the days when we could still kid; kid hard, sometimes -- I shrugged and asked: "Well, did you do it? Did you drive the hearse?"

After he made a one-syllable expletive last five syllables, he finished, "No!"

And then he muttered: "I'll be in one of them things soon enough."

Don't know why I have to drive so fast

My car has nothin' to prove

The nearest thing to a eulogy Thursday came from a fresh-faced young evangelical preacher named Dale Beaver -- odd in that Earnhardt was a Lutheran who did not wear religion on his sleeve and Calvary Church is an enormous edifice to evangelism, seating 5,800.

Beaver clearly had met Earnhardt only briefly, and quite late in Earnhardt's career. Odd.

But oddest of all, in a memorial that somehow left a nation hanging in its goodbye, a memorial neatly wrapped up in 22 minutes flat while you waited for some sort of main event that never came, was that they didn't even let Owen sing it right.

Earnhardt was always "antsy," as one of his old-time handlers used to put it. Couldn't sit still. Always walking. Moving. Sitting down. Getting up. Walking around. Getting in a truck. Going somewhere. Stopping briefly. Getting in a car. Going again.

He was in a hurry, and he never knew why.

It's a race

And there ain't no room

For second place

He was born for the pace, not only the 210 mph (back before they mandated the restrictor plates he so despised) but the helter-skelter travel needed to meet all the obligations of a rising folk hero -- the public appearances, the endorsement appearances, the autograph appearances, the charity appearances, the speaking appearances, appearances, appearances, appearances.

But at the pinnacle, it got to be too much even for him, and there were times when he would just go and hide. That reclusive state, in the gloaming of Earnhardt's life, was how the Rev. Beaver seemed to have found him for the first time. From that, the little preacher struggled to tell us something about the man he knew so sparingly himself.

Earnhardt transcended NASCAR by a light year or so. He came to realize that too late -- "Unbelievable," he called it -- to stop the fast train hurtling along with him aboard. When you'd mention that to him, he'd growl: "Yeah, but I'm drivin' the train."

But you wondered. Especially when he'd take out that little leather schedule book to see where the Lear would take him next. And in public -- hell, Elvis himself could as easily have walked into a restaurant or through an airport without being mobbed.

Shakin' hands with the clock

I can't stop

I'm on a roll

And I'm ready to rock

Thursday, word was coming in to Associated Press writers at the memorial service that newspapers as far away as Japan, Korea and Taiwan carried Asian-language obituaries of Earnhardt. On some Native American reservations in North Dakota, black "3" flags flew at half-staff outside humble homes.

And so, as the strangely hollow memorial service flashed by, you wondered how much fulfillment it offered a continent, even other parts of a planet, longing for a substantive goodbye.

Owen sang:

Goodbye, goodbye

That one word

Hurts so bad

When you've lost

A friend you've had

And that was nice, generic, but it didn't apply, for NASCAR -- try as it might to continue with the "life must go on" mindset that chairman Bill France espoused this week, and Earnhardt himself embodied for all of his career -- won't be able to say goodbye to Earnhardt nearly as easily as a 22-minute memorial.

White-haired Junior Johnson, the legendary moonshine runner-turned-driver who was the nearest thing to Earnhardt before Earnhardt came along, stood outside the church in the freezing bleakness when it was over, and he said of NASCAR and its culture: "They will not shake this one off like they have some of the rest of `em, Adam Petty, Kenny Irwin. . . . This'll be around a long, long time."

Network newscasters were comparing this to the deaths of Elvis and Princess Diana, two other icons of the masses whose lives were consumed by the horrific burdens of adoration. Standing there with Johnson in the awful midday Carolina winter gloom, the truth was palpable, even unsung:

All I've really got to do

Is live and die

But I'm in a hurry

And don't know why.
Click to expand...

playthrough · Jul 9, 2008

Thanks, pseudo

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Ed Hinton lands at ESPN

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