The Daytona 500

(Page 5: Bobby and Davey Allison)

Bobby Allison sat there beaming but saying little, letting his son Davey chirp on and on about what Davey called this day, Valentine's Day, 1988—"the happiest day of my life." If you'd walked into that press conference at that moment as an outsider, you would have thought surely the son had won the Daytona 500 and had asked his father to join him in the celebration and the doting dad was just sitting there soaking it all in while his son described the emotion of the moment.

It didn't work that way with Bobby and Davey. Never had.

Davey Allison and Kyle Petty had grown up playing together on weekends at the race tracks—even while their fathers were at war with each other, in one of NASCAR's nastiest feuds, during the boys' elementary school years. But when the pair told their fathers they wanted to be racers, their paths separated drastically.

Richard Petty placed, on the silver spoon already in Kyle's mouth, the finest race cars Petty Enterprises could build. And Kyle embarked on a career as a chronic disappointment. Bobby Allison looked at his son and shrugged and said, "There's the shop. There's all the tools. Go to work." And left him there. And Davey channeled his adolescent resentment of the old man into by-god determination to show him, and set about acquiring and piecing together junk and making it tick and then hum and then roar, up from the quarter-mile and half-mile bullrings of Alabama, up through the minor leagues of stock car racing. By 1987 he not only had made it to the Winston Cup Series but had won there as a rookie, right on the Allisons' home track, Talladega.

By the final few laps of the 1988 Daytona 500 it was clear that Davey Allison was the best young driver in NASCAR. The race was down to a duel—between him and his father. Surely to God, I thought, the old man is going to cut the kid some slack at last. But no, hell no, exiting the fourth turn on the final lap the old man floored the throttle and left the kid.

But the most endearing quality of sons is that they love their fathers unconditionally, and so, "This is," said Davey, "the happiest day of my life. It's better than if I had won myself...He's always been my hero."

Again and again as the sun went down Davey would say it—"He's always been my hero"—while Bobby sat there beaming.

Four months and five days later, on June 19, 1988, at Pocono Raceway in Pennsylvania, Bobby Allison would be critically injured—God, what an inadequate expression for what happened to him—in a wreck sickening to behold. Time after time, driving by the wreck slowly behind the pace car, under the caution flag, Davey would pass by his nearly dead father, struggling with the decision of whether to pull out of the race or not. Davey would stay in, finish fifth, and all the while his car owner, Robert Yates, could hear between the lines of Davey's radio conversations with his pit crew. "You could almost hear him thinking, struggling," Yates would say. "It was as if he was debating with himself, saying to himself, 'I love my daddy. My daddy loved this sport. I love this sport. This sport has taken my daddy. I hate this sport. My daddy taught me to love this sport. I love this sport.'"

And that night at the hospital, a neurosurgeon "called me over into a corner," Davey would say later. "He said, 'Son, tonight you're going to have to make yourself be the man of this family. Because if your daddy lives through the night, he'll probably never be able to do anything again.' "It took the breath out of me," Davey said. "It took my legs out from under me. I fell straight down onto the floor."

From those weeks that summer when Bobby hovered near death until the day Davey died, July 13, 1993, the refrain from Davey came countless times: "He's always been my hero."

Copyright © 2001 by Ed Hinton. All rights reserved. Posted with permission of http://www.twbookmark.com. Click here for ordering information for "Daytona" at Amazon.com.