The Daytona 500

(Page 3: The Fight)

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The shouted whisper, a sort of anguished gasp for help—"Ed!...Ed!"— came on the evening of March 10, 1979, from the shadows in the courtyard of a Holiday Inn in Richmond, Virginia. It was twenty days after The Fight—the oversimplified term that history has attached to the altercation between Cale Yarborough and brothers Bobby and Donnie Allison that occurred moments after the Daytona 500 of 1979 ended.

Where Donnie Allison came from in the dark, I didn't know. What was clear on his face, as he walked toward me, looking about him and over his shoulders for any unwanted eavesdroppers, was despair.

"I don't know what to do," he began, in tones hushed but urgent. "I've never been through anything like this before in my life. I don't know how to handle this."

I had heard about the death threats, even seen one letter, pencilwritten in a semiliterate hand on old-fashioned brown tablet paper: "I dont like what you done to ol Cale at Daytona, so you better lookout for a Coke botle through you're winshield or somthing like that when you race at Atlanta."

And I knew that far more daunting hunters were closing in on Donnie— journalists from as far outside the usual NASCAR media circles as TIME magazine and the New York Daily News were in town. Perhaps not since the Battle of Cold Harbor, late in the Civil War, had so many national journalists descended upon Richmond, bent on war coverage.

The situation had exploded into The War Down South, or The Feud in NASCAR—or whatever throwback themes were being seized upon by New York editors looking in from outside.

It had begun on national television. For the first time, CBS had televised the Daytona 500 live, flag-to-flag. Most of the nation had been snowed in on race day, and so ratings had soared beyond the expectations of either NASCAR or network officials.

Dueling for the win on the last lap, Cale and Donnie had wrecked each other down the backstretch and into Turn 3. Richard Petty, whose storied successes at Daytona had always been, he said, a matter of "circumstances," benefited this time more than ever. He found himself serendipitously in the lead, shot past the wreckage in Turn 3 with a fiery prodigy named Darrell Waltrip on his bumper, and held off Waltrip at the checkered flag.

All in all, that race should have been to NASCAR what the Baltimore Colts—New York Giants championship game of 1958 was to the NFL—the milestone of a league's transition from blue-collar cult appeal to mainstream national attention.

But just after the race ended, just as CBS was about to cut away from Daytona for the day, came The Fight.

Cale and Donnie, both unhurt, had climbed out of their wrecked cars and were talking, arguing, but not fighting, when Bobby drove up and began the end of his brother's career.

While it is true that Bobby Allison helped his younger brother Donnie into a NASCAR career, it is also true that Bobby spent his entire career against the wind, against the world, and that he sometimes dragged his brother into the teeth of the gales. February 18, 1979 was the worst of those times.

True, Bobby stopped to make sure his brother was all right. But also true, Donnie has always believed, Bobby came looking for Cale Yarborough.

The great tragedy of The Fight was that Donnie, the only innocent party—the only one of the three who didn't land a blow—was the singular victim. Yarborough had already won the race twice previously, and was destined to win it twice more. Bobby had won it once and would win it twice more. The '79 race had been Donnie's best chance. He had never won the Daytona 500. And he never would.

The famous Associated Press photo, which shows Cale and Bobby entangled, with Donnie wielding his helmet from behind Bobby, is what made Donnie look so bad to the public. But it does not tell the whole truth.

That photo is what a snowed-in nation saw that Monday morning, and what catapulted NASCAR and the Daytona 500 into mainstream America's consciousness.

But that was by no means the end of it, nor even the worst of it.

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.