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FIGHTING FOR SURVIVAL
Cover Story: Back when publicity was precious, Bobby Allison was the most controversial and outspoken NASCAR driver of his time
By ED HINTON
Orlando Sentinel
8/26/2005
Bobby Allison wants to start a pension fund for retired NASCAR drivers. At 67, he should be the poster boy.
There is no greater driver in greater need. Just this spring, he paid off the last of the medical bills from his career-ending injuries of 1988. His only guaranteed income is his Social Security check.
"That certainly is a very welcome help, but it doesn't match the need at the moment," he said last Sunday, standing inside Michigan International Speedway, virtually unnoticed by current-generation drivers, crewmen, officials, corporate CEOs and fans.
"At the moment" was a phrase he added out of pride. Bobby Allison has been broke for 17 years.
He has sold or lost virtually everything he owned. He had insurance, but one company refused to pay and another's agent absconded with the claim money.
All of this was a mere backdrop for his unspeakable sorrow, the deaths of his two racing sons, Clifford at Michigan in 1992, and Davey in a helicopter crash at Talladega, Ala., in '93.
Bobby never retired from driving - the brain-stem injury at Pocono in '88, which nearly killed him, left him disabled.
Now he can't retire at all.
"I still have to go do something here and there to generate some income," he said. "I'm fortunate that people want me to come do trade shows," for which he receives small appearance fees. And he attends fairs and other events on behalf of Miller Brewing Co., his sponsor at the time of his injury.
So at least some remember him and care - which is more than has been shown by NASCAR itself, or by its current drivers.
At least he can "buy the toys I want. . . . I don't buy big toys anymore." To today's drivers, "toys" means Lear and Gulfstream jets, helicopters, yachts, Lamborghinis. To Allison, it means "fishing poles, and things for my boat," an aluminum skiff with an 8-hp outboard motor.
So he is no worse off than millions of aging Americans who didn't and/or couldn't prepare adequately for retirement, or were robbed of their pensions by corporate wickedness.
It just seems that living legends deserve better.
Allison won 85 races, including three Daytona 500s, and the Winston Cup of 1983. He brought NASCAR untold attention, back when publicity was precious, as the most controversial and outspoken driver of his time.
In a sport whose color was built on grudges, payback, fender-banging and seat-of-the-pants engineering, Allison was the best there has been in all those categories.
The chassis that make today's cars corner so well, and make winners of today's drivers, are in place because Allison was 40 years ahead of his time. So adamantly did he advocate the "front-steer" chassis that he fell out with the other great innovator of the time, car owner Junior Johnson, and they broke up as a team.
Had Johnson listened, had they stayed together, "we'd have won 200 races, and Richard Petty wouldn't have," Johnson would say later.
Allison landed the most punches in the notorious fight - him vs. Cale Yarborough, with Allison's brother Donnie trying to break them up - immediately after the 1979 Daytona 500, the race NASCAR czar Bill France Jr. often has called NASCAR's first great milestone in the public consciousness.
Behind the scenes, Allison gave away incalculable dollars to injured and/or needy drivers and their families, always exacting promises they wouldn't divulge the name of their benefactor publicly. I was told of his generosity privately by such families for decades.
When NASCAR was confined almost solely to the Southeast, Allison traveled nationwide to race on weeknights at little tracks from California to Minnesota to New England, giving locals something of NASCAR to approach and shake hands with. He was the first to spread the popularity to other regions.
And Allison advocated what to NASCAR were unthinkable measures, such as catastrophic health insurance for drivers. Only as he lay near death in Pennsylvania, unconscious, hemorrhaging his personal funds by the hour, did NASCAR take up the concept.
So, arguably, there is no driver to whom the current generation owes more.
But there are no rear-view mirrors on Lears and Gulfstreams. The new guys don't look back, let alone turn back to help the men who built for them an arena for fortune-making.
That is the singular shame of NASCAR's rise to mainstream popularity and enormous wealth.
To initiate a pension fund, "the first thought I had was to get a loan from somewhere, and invest in the proper kind of market fund," Allison said. "It would "yield' very small payments, but, see, a lot of us old guys are used to really small payments."
If you wonder why NASCAR as a company doesn't have a driver pension fund - and probably never will - you don't understand the business model. Drivers are considered "independent contractors," NASCAR's unyielding euphemism for shirking responsibility for driver injury or death on the job, or well-being off the job. Worker relations are modeled, as one college professor has put it, after southern cotton mills of the 1930s, and that callousness is unlikely to change.
As for the current drivers, it's not that they're uncharitable. We have seen, up close, Jeff Gordon's sincerity as he makes little faces beam in the Make a Wish Foundation program for children with terminal illnesses. Tony Stewart has been at the vanguard of drivers' most monumental charitable effort, the Victory Junction Gang Ranch, founded by Kyle and Pattie Petty in memory of their late son Adam.
Not to detract at all from these endeavors, but shouldn't these drivers also embrace their own? The ones who made NASCAR the mother lode it is today?
If current drivers would contribute just another tiny fraction of their time and money to a pension seed fund, Bobby Allison wouldn't have to go looking for a loan "from somewhere."
Cover Story: Back when publicity was precious, Bobby Allison was the most controversial and outspoken NASCAR driver of his time
By ED HINTON
Orlando Sentinel
8/26/2005
Bobby Allison wants to start a pension fund for retired NASCAR drivers. At 67, he should be the poster boy.
There is no greater driver in greater need. Just this spring, he paid off the last of the medical bills from his career-ending injuries of 1988. His only guaranteed income is his Social Security check.
"That certainly is a very welcome help, but it doesn't match the need at the moment," he said last Sunday, standing inside Michigan International Speedway, virtually unnoticed by current-generation drivers, crewmen, officials, corporate CEOs and fans.
"At the moment" was a phrase he added out of pride. Bobby Allison has been broke for 17 years.
He has sold or lost virtually everything he owned. He had insurance, but one company refused to pay and another's agent absconded with the claim money.
All of this was a mere backdrop for his unspeakable sorrow, the deaths of his two racing sons, Clifford at Michigan in 1992, and Davey in a helicopter crash at Talladega, Ala., in '93.
Bobby never retired from driving - the brain-stem injury at Pocono in '88, which nearly killed him, left him disabled.
Now he can't retire at all.
"I still have to go do something here and there to generate some income," he said. "I'm fortunate that people want me to come do trade shows," for which he receives small appearance fees. And he attends fairs and other events on behalf of Miller Brewing Co., his sponsor at the time of his injury.
So at least some remember him and care - which is more than has been shown by NASCAR itself, or by its current drivers.
At least he can "buy the toys I want. . . . I don't buy big toys anymore." To today's drivers, "toys" means Lear and Gulfstream jets, helicopters, yachts, Lamborghinis. To Allison, it means "fishing poles, and things for my boat," an aluminum skiff with an 8-hp outboard motor.
So he is no worse off than millions of aging Americans who didn't and/or couldn't prepare adequately for retirement, or were robbed of their pensions by corporate wickedness.
It just seems that living legends deserve better.
Allison won 85 races, including three Daytona 500s, and the Winston Cup of 1983. He brought NASCAR untold attention, back when publicity was precious, as the most controversial and outspoken driver of his time.
In a sport whose color was built on grudges, payback, fender-banging and seat-of-the-pants engineering, Allison was the best there has been in all those categories.
The chassis that make today's cars corner so well, and make winners of today's drivers, are in place because Allison was 40 years ahead of his time. So adamantly did he advocate the "front-steer" chassis that he fell out with the other great innovator of the time, car owner Junior Johnson, and they broke up as a team.
Had Johnson listened, had they stayed together, "we'd have won 200 races, and Richard Petty wouldn't have," Johnson would say later.
Allison landed the most punches in the notorious fight - him vs. Cale Yarborough, with Allison's brother Donnie trying to break them up - immediately after the 1979 Daytona 500, the race NASCAR czar Bill France Jr. often has called NASCAR's first great milestone in the public consciousness.
Behind the scenes, Allison gave away incalculable dollars to injured and/or needy drivers and their families, always exacting promises they wouldn't divulge the name of their benefactor publicly. I was told of his generosity privately by such families for decades.
When NASCAR was confined almost solely to the Southeast, Allison traveled nationwide to race on weeknights at little tracks from California to Minnesota to New England, giving locals something of NASCAR to approach and shake hands with. He was the first to spread the popularity to other regions.
And Allison advocated what to NASCAR were unthinkable measures, such as catastrophic health insurance for drivers. Only as he lay near death in Pennsylvania, unconscious, hemorrhaging his personal funds by the hour, did NASCAR take up the concept.
So, arguably, there is no driver to whom the current generation owes more.
But there are no rear-view mirrors on Lears and Gulfstreams. The new guys don't look back, let alone turn back to help the men who built for them an arena for fortune-making.
That is the singular shame of NASCAR's rise to mainstream popularity and enormous wealth.
To initiate a pension fund, "the first thought I had was to get a loan from somewhere, and invest in the proper kind of market fund," Allison said. "It would "yield' very small payments, but, see, a lot of us old guys are used to really small payments."
If you wonder why NASCAR as a company doesn't have a driver pension fund - and probably never will - you don't understand the business model. Drivers are considered "independent contractors," NASCAR's unyielding euphemism for shirking responsibility for driver injury or death on the job, or well-being off the job. Worker relations are modeled, as one college professor has put it, after southern cotton mills of the 1930s, and that callousness is unlikely to change.
As for the current drivers, it's not that they're uncharitable. We have seen, up close, Jeff Gordon's sincerity as he makes little faces beam in the Make a Wish Foundation program for children with terminal illnesses. Tony Stewart has been at the vanguard of drivers' most monumental charitable effort, the Victory Junction Gang Ranch, founded by Kyle and Pattie Petty in memory of their late son Adam.
Not to detract at all from these endeavors, but shouldn't these drivers also embrace their own? The ones who made NASCAR the mother lode it is today?
If current drivers would contribute just another tiny fraction of their time and money to a pension seed fund, Bobby Allison wouldn't have to go looking for a loan "from somewhere."
