1,000 Greatest Drivers: Jeff Gordon

Jeff Gordon Bleu.

Back in 2005, there was some RacingOne message board thread where we were all making stupid Chris Berman-esque punny nicknames for drivers. All I remember from that is that Jeff Gordon Bleu was mine.

Gordon was the first all-time great to emerge in my years as a fan. Indeed, the first NASCAR race I watched was during the summer of his breakout season of 1994. It wasn’t the Brickyard 400. No, it was the Pepsi 400 at Daytona where Jimmy Spencer outdueled Ernie Irvan in a photo finish in a car with an illegal intake manifold, which NASCAR allowed him to get away with since they wanted his sponsor McDonald’s to not leave the sport (at least that was the popular conspiracy theory). Gordon did not feature too heavily in that race, so I’m not sure whether I’d actually heard of him until 1995. I think the Daytona race was the only race I watched in 1994 at the time, and weirdly I’m pretty sure Loudon was in 1995. Gordon did win that race, so that was the first of his wins I watched. I think I only watched the 1996 races at Watkins Glen and the Atlanta finale, but by the end of the season, I was following most other races on nascar.com timing & scoring. Not sure why I wasn’t watching regularly even though I considered myself a fan at the time. I don’t really remember. 1997 was the first season I watched regularly, so Gordon had a large presence in my mind when he dominated the first two seasons I regularly watched.

You might think because I was such a young fan that I might have been attracted to the youngest driver, but nope! There was one vendor at the New York State Fair some year who had some NASCAR memorabilia booth or something and he assumed I was a Gordon fan. I told him that nope, I was a Dale Earnhardt fan. Which was true, albeit for the stupidest possible reason. It wasn’t about his titles or his image or his persona. Nope, Earnhardt finished third in that Daytona race and drove the #3 car and I enjoyed that numerical symbiosis. That was it. However, once I learned about his tendency to wreck other drivers in about 1997, I pivoted hard in the other direction and became a Mark Martin fan, in other words the cleanest and most boring top driver (well, maybe he was still less boring than Dale Jarrett). Then, when Tony Stewart started in 1999, I became an instant fan of his for about a year until the next year when he really started increasingly showing his ass. I think I switched back to Martin for the next bit there. Most cringeworthily, Ryan Newman also became my favorite driver in his rookie season in 2002 shortly after I started seriously embracing my nerd identity for the first time and I really liked that he went to college and had an engineering background in addition to his meteoric rise. That did not last long. By the time I started watching again in the second half of 2004, I no longer cared about Newman and I grew to dislike him and Stewart and Earnhardt over time. For most of my adulthood, I didn’t really have favorite drivers often. For a while, I was saying Juan Pablo Montoya was my favorite Cup driver because I really admired him in CART, but I gave up on that as he faded to irrelevance in 2011-2012. Currently, I consider Tyler Reddick my favorite driver, but for most of the past 25 years I didn’t have one. I know most people would criticize me for the endless bandwagon jumping and not sticking to one driver, but actually I think it made me a better and more knowledgeable fan of the sport. By not viewing racing events vicariously through one driver’s perspective, it allowed me to develop a more objective view of the sport than a lot of other younger fans who were more like “my driver, right or wrong.”

Or sometimes even older ones, like that RacingOne poster I mentioned in the McLaughlin post who was calling every week for Robbie Loomis to be fired in 2005 as if Loomis was the problem rather than Jimmie Johnson just overtaking him. It took me too long to finally acknowledge Johnson overtook him. I might have acknowledged it as early as 2009, but I don’t think so. I think I was still arguing Gordon was better due to making Hendrick a powerhouse and his greater versatility long after it was tenable on the racing-reference comments sections, even though I never liked either Gordon or Johnson. But I’ve wised up since then. By the time I started tabulating lead change data and realized that Johnson was one of the best passers in Cup history, while Gordon was a good but not spectacular one, I have never since entertained the argument that Gordon might have akshually been better. For the record, my all-time top ten is this in order: Earnhardt, Johnson, Petty, Pearson, Allison, Gordon, Yarborough, Harvick, and then pick two of Busch, Stewart, and Waltrip for the last spots (I can’t decide between them since those are basically all the same to me). But I know there are hundreds of fans still battling in the trenches like the Japanese holdouts in the Pacific after World War II that Gordon was really better. Get over it, guys. He wasn’t (even if he was obviously more important historically and as a cultural figure).

But for all my ever-rotating casts of favorite drivers, you might’ve noticed one name who didn’t show up. That’s right. Like so many others, Gordon was my least favorite driver in the ‘90s. I’m going to write a similar but shorter version of this in the entry itself, but people hated him for a myriad of reasons. Some people hated him for being the first all-time great who wasn’t from the South, while for others, it was his bland yuppie persona and mainstreaming of corporate PR speak, the fact that his dominance made the sport more boring than it needed to be, the fact that many fans felt he hadn’t paid his dues because he landed an elite car at a much younger age than most other eventual stars, his arguable religious hypocrisy, and a really stupid undercurrent of homophobia. A lot of people argued that Gordon was hated because he won too much, but I don’t think his dominance fully explained it per se. Richard Petty and Bill Elliott dominated at times and fans never hated them. No, it’s some of those other factors and I want to look back on them.

Hating Gordon for his background was stupid. While he was the first non-Southern driver to conquer NASCAR on such a monomaniacal scale, it had been a truly national league for decades prior, even if many of the top West Coast and Northeastern drivers elected to compete in the regional Winston West and Modified tours rather than the Cup Series. He may have broken the door down for a wave of drivers from non-traditional backgrounds like sprint cars or non-traditional regions outside the Southeast to get more major Cup Series opportunities, but it’s not like drivers from these regions weren’t welcomed before. Ken Schrader was literally his teammate and he replaced Tim Richmond at Hendrick Motorsports, who also came from an open wheel background. Hendrick was always interested in looking for drivers outside the traditional late model background, and that hasn’t changed. Unworthy reason for the hate, but it was definitely one of them.

His corporate persona, on the other hand, is a great reason why he rubbed people the wrong way. Hendrick has kind of always been renowned for erasing any speck of personality from his drivers and attempting to fit them into a corporate cookie-cutter mold. This has been a trend from the very beginning, as from what I have read, Geoff Bodine was the first driver to routinely rattle off lists of sponsors in post-race interviews before that became a universally accepted technique in later years, so I guess it shouldn’t be surprising Gordon did the same thing. It did seem like drivers were really being incentivized in the period of Gordon’s rise to stop showing personality or edge as big money really ballooned in NASCAR starting in the ‘90s so sponsor mandates became more and more important as a result. I also think Texaco successfully convincing Robert Yates to fire Ernie Irvan after he got into a barroom brawl in 1997 played a major role here. Gordon’s squeaky-clean dominance when combined with Irvan getting fired by corporate mandate, I think, convinced a lot of people they had to follow the corporate line, and made the drivers more boring than they needed to be. This is a good reason to hate him.

Connected with this was his overt displays of religiosity. If you think Chandler Smith is bad, you seriously have not listened to enough ‘90s Gordon interviews. Back when NASCAR was regularly marketing itself as a family sport, his supermodel wife Brooke placed Bible quotes in his cars before every race and he would thank God after winning every race. While Lake Speed, who helped co-found Motor Racing Research, seemed to be a more sincere and much more humble Christian, Gordon’s displays of religiosity seemed over-the-top, sanctimonious, and hypocritical. Like after he pulls a bump-and-run on Rusty Wallace to win at Bristol (and note that back then, bumps-and-run were considered dirty driving and not a more universally accepted technique like nowadays) he thanks the Lord for guiding him to victory. Half the time, it’s like he talked like Lake Speed and acted like Dale Earnhardt, and that was one of the main reasons I hated him, too.

As for the people who argued Gordon never “paid his dues”, there is something to be said for that maybe. For the past couple decades prior to Gordon, it seemed like the top teams weren’t really interested in hiring anyone before their late twenties. Teams went for proven, experienced commodities instead of potential and even globally, only F1 teams really ever attempted to embrace young rising stars as much as they should have. For a lot of the ‘80s, Busch Series stars were hardly advancing to the Cup Series at all, and even if they did, they often didn’t last long (Larry Pearson). Sure, Dale Jarrett and Mark Martin made it but Jarrett likely would have made it to Cup regardless of what path he chose since his father Ned was a champion driver and leading announcer and Martin was already something of a proven commodity based on his first NASCAR stint in the early ‘80s before he even raced in Busch. Nobody really thought of the Busch Series as much of a development league until the early ‘90s, and Gordon really helped change all that.

Gordon was the first Busch Series driver to land a factory development deal from Michael Kranefuss and Ford, who arranged for him to land the Bill Davis ride. Martin had been previously driving for Davis in Busch until Roush decided to add a Busch Series team and Gordon was his replacement. Ford did not have much of a presence in minor-league NASCAR and was looking to change that; indeed, in the first ten years of the Busch Series, Martin was Ford’s only winner and Gordon in 1992 became the second. Although Gordon was expected to land a factory Ford ride, he hadn’t signed any Cup Series deal until Rick Hendrick discovered him and poached him from Ford in 1993. This show of disloyalty was seen as diabolical among Ford fans, although to be honest, there were tons of shows of disloyalty in this era, so I’m not sure it really stands out. It seemed like Gordon was eventually being groomed for a Roush ride, presumably to replace Wally Dallenbach, Jr. in the #16 car alongside Martin, and he might’ve done so even for 1993 except that Gordon wanted to bring Ray Evernham along as his crew chief and Roush said no and Hendrick said yes. Did Gordon actually betray Ford or did Ford betray him because the likeliest team that would’ve signed him didn’t allow him input? This is a more complicated story than some people make it.

A lot of people felt like Gordon hadn’t paid his dues because he’d never won a Busch Series title, but now we know better. The drivers who eventually become Cup Series stars are by and large the drivers who have the fastest trajectory of improvement, typically at a younger age than their fellow contenders (okay, Jarrett is a weird exception, but I digress). It doesn’t matter whether they win the title or not. It seems a lot of people even now seem to think you need two years in the O’Reilly Series to be “ready for Cup”. It doesn’t matter. It never mattered. It was just an informal tradition that the teams believed matters. It worked for Gordon because 1991 was Gordon’s first ever full-time year in stock cars, so it makes sense that the dominance he showed in sprint cars prior to that finally showed up in 1992, when he set a record 11 poles and led a series-high 1,160 laps even though he neither won the title (Joe Nemechek) nor the most races (Robert Pressley). He was clearly the best driver even though he was also the youngest, but people still insisted for years afterward he hadn’t paid his dues because he didn’t win the title, even though the Latford points system never properly weighted performance, the Busch Series points system was even worse since neither it nor the Craftsman Truck Series even had the bonus points for leading until 1998, and he was easily the most dominant driver that season for a manufacturer that had habitually struggled in the series before (they struggled so badly that even Davey Allison mostly raced GM brands in his Busch Series starts). So bottom line: it wasn’t that Gordon hadn’t “paid his dues”. He obviously deserved it and the team owners were just being stupid. Once all the other eventual stars who developed like him arrived, Gordon looked nowhere near as special, and his main advantage is that he was the first driver to break down the doors and it took all the other team owners years to figure out how to properly recreate it.

And finally, there was the stupidest reason for the Gordon hatred. His squeaky, high-pitched voice and rainbow car really inspired a lot of idiotic redneck fans to think he was gay. In that highly homophobic decade, there was even an anti-Gordon group called “Fans Against Gordon”. Har de har har. Real clever. All that stuff should’ve been unacceptable but a lot of it was pretty accepted back then especially because so many people hated him for a litany of other reasons. It always seemed to me like Gordon was wildly overcompensating in response to that particular backlash what with his supermodel wives and all. I never thought he was gay, and who should’ve cared if he was?

As for me, I guess it was mainly three things. The religious hypocrisy, Ray Evernham, and my rocky relationship with my dad. Even though my dad was a boomer and I was a millennial, he was a Gordon fan while I was an Earnhardt/Martin fan back then. My dad was suing my mom for custody both in 1995-1996 and then again in 1998 and there were many weekends especially in the latter year when he would drill me for information, which I viewed as trying to compel me to share information that he could use against Mom, then I wouldn’t say anything, then he would yell at me for not saying anything, etc..., etc… There were many weekends I was at his apartment and this is all we did for hours with watching races or other sporting events being the only thing that broke the tension. So you can imagine how miserable the 1998 season was for me considering Martin was having one of his best seasons while Gordon was still throttling him in the championship, because it felt like Dad was winning. This might’ve been what a lot of it was for me. The summer Michigan race when Gordon won his fourth race in a row may have enraged me more than any other, because Martin and Ernie Irvan (my then-second favorite driver and my mom’s favorite in the brief period she was following NASCAR) had dominated all day until a late-race caution allowed Gordon to catch up and take the lead shortly after the restart. It was… unbearable. Obviously, I’m over it now.

In retrospect, I think I hated Evernham way more than I ever hated Gordon. Sure, he was an all-time great crew chief and so on, but his motivational mumbo-jumbo that he co-opted from Vince Lombardi and Pat Riley was beyond vomitous, to cop a phrase I stole from Mark Prindle. The stupid, smarmy motivational aphorisms he popularized got a lot of press at the time and made good soundbites, but I typically found them offensive and I don’t know if I can articulate why. “Refuse to lose.” “Winning is everything.” That stupid chart that got trotted out every two months in the era of peak Gordon: “From Nobody to Upstart, from Upstart to Winner, from Winner to Contender, from Contender to Champion, from Champion to Dynasty.” I always wanted to finish that series with “from Dynasty to Emperor of a Small Mediterranean Protectorate” or something. Even Earnhardt, typically regarded as the most cutthroat driver ever, didn’t talk like that and was way more chill, mild-mannered, and reserved. Evernham’s motivational quotes sounded unhinged, but also unhinged in a cutesy way, and the whole Jeff Gordon package made me want to gag myself with a spoon. Evernham’s maxims reminded me of the grade school classrooms bedecked with posters displaying all these similarly smarmy rhyming adages meant to brainwash us into good behavior in the ‘90s: “If you believe, you can achieve! Never lie, cheat, or deal; always strike a fair deal! Abusers are losers! If you want a friend, be a friend!” Etc., etc., etc. Hated it then, probably hate it less now. At least the elementary school messages were in my opinion marginally more inspiring than Evernham’s. And I think Evernham really captured an insincerity permeating that era that I despised.

I think I finally started having more perspective in the 2000s. I think a lot of people finally started liking him then after he divorced Brooke, and he really toned down the religious evangelism after his divorce (clearly his hardcore evangelism was contrived and he was doing it to impress her, which makes me feel better about it). Once Evernham was no longer his crew chief and the #24 team finally acted normal, I was okay with that too. They tried to recapture a retro-Evernham vibe with the “Drive for Five”, but funny how that time it didn’t work. (One of my best friends on RacingOne, who I’m still friends with on Facebook, had the cringe username DRV45N05. Hey, I’m not one to talk! One of my old AOL screen names was RevTony20.) My dad and I basically moved past our issues. And while I tended to find most of the Gen X cohort of drivers either more obnoxiously insufferable or even blander than Gordon himself was, I didn’t hate him anymore, but I was still never a fan.