The Daytona 500

(Page 2: Joe Littlejohn)

"You don't piss on them Pettys and tell 'em it's rainin'," said Joe Littlejohn. This was late in the afternoon of February 15, 1976.

He was addressing Big Bud Moore (no relation whatsoever to Little Bud Moore), who was giving him a ride back to the Boar's Head (the biggest little bar ever in auto racing anywhere) before the race was over.

Big Bud's race car had been driven to death by Buddy Baker as usual— under Baker's maniacal right foot the Ford had barfed its engine in a cloud of shrapnel and burning oil that looked and sounded like an artillery round landing in the middle of the backstretch—and so there was no reason for Big Bud to stay around for the finish.

So they were listening to the finish on the radio and it was down to the final few seconds, and Richard Petty had just done what for years had been deemed impossible. He had retaken the lead from David Pearson after Pearson had executed the usually decisive slingshot pass down the backstretch into the third turn. That was tantamount, on the white-flag lap of the Daytona 500, to rising from the dead. Coming out of the fourth and final turn, Petty had the lead with the checkered flag in sight, a thousand feet away.

Big Bud opined in a split second, with a sort of amazed grunt, that Petty had the matter in hand.

"Nossir," said Littlejohn.

Two off-duty South Carolina state troopers were Joe Littlejohn's bodyguards and chauffeurs just about everywhere he went. He had raced on the beach before Big Bill France ever even thought of building Daytona International Speedway. ("Why, hell yes, I won," he would reminisce to striking women a third his age in the Boar's Head. "There wadn't nobody to beat in them days but Bill France.") He had seen Lee Petty start out in stock car racing. He had watched Richard, Lee's son, grow up, become a star, and develop the best rivalry there ever was (and probably ever will be) in NASCAR, with David Pearson.

Littlejohn and Pearson were both from Spartanburg, South Carolina, and Littlejohn's feelings toward Pearson were mixed. Littlejohn was Pearson's benefactor, having helped him put down the paint guns in the auto body shops of Spartanburg and rise out of the hellhole Saturdaynight dirt tracks of the Carolinas. Now that Pearson was a star—well, something of an antistar, Petty's chronic nemesis—Littlejohn felt slighted, forgotten, and so he pulled against Pearson a lot of the time, or at least pretended to.

Littlejohn, like everybody I have ever known who has ever been even a halfway decent race driver, had an uncanny ability to see and hear and think in slow motion. And so in the split second after Petty had retaken the lead, Littlejohn saw all over again the final minute of the Firecracker 400 at Daytona in 1974, when Pearson had beaten Petty with what Pearson's car owner, Glen Wood, called in the immediate aftermath "about the slickest trick I've ever seen in racin'." Petty had been livid at what he deemed a dirty, even deadly move.

And now, in the final few seconds of the damnedest Daytona 500 week there ever has been, Littlejohn reckoned that Petty was pondering payback for the '74 shenanigan.

"You don't piss on them Pettys and tell 'em it's rainin'."

Not unless you were David Pearson.

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.