MY feelings ZACKLY! Well written..
Teresa Earnhardt.
The category is worst personnel decisions in sports history.
Any short list of perps includes all of the above.
Harry Frazee is the Red Sox owner who sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees. Bad move.Stu Inman is the Trail Blazers GM who drafted Sam Bowie instead of Michael Jordan. Dumb move.
Teresa Earnhardt is the sympathy-figure widow/wicked stepmother (pick one) who has forced Dale Earnhardt Jr. to leave the nest and look for a more comfy seat elsewhere in NASCAR.
Stinkeroo of a move.
Understand, this isn't to literally equate Little E. with the Bambino and M.J. He hasn't set records. He hasn't nailed down championships. But in every other way, he's right up there with icons. He's the most popular and powerful brand in racing. He drives markets and fills grandstands. He generates, by some estimates, upwards of 30 percent of NASCAR souvenir sales. His appeal crosses demographic borders. He's the public face of his sport.
In short, he rocks.
Second on the grid isn't even close.
That's Junior's clout. That's his leverage. That's why he's the franchise for Dale Earnhardt Inc., the company his father launched, the company his stepmom maintained after Earnhardt Sr.'s death six years ago.
The company that'll be worth approximately 20 used lug nuts when Junior moves on at season's end.
This is a train wreck for DEI that everyone saw coming.
Everyone except Teresa.
"They better figure out a way to come to terms because Dale could write his own ticket," Jeff Gordon warned in February at Daytona, for instance. "He could go anywhere he wants, and his sponsors are going to go with him. The fans are going to go with him, and he can start his own team, he can go to any organization. He's in the best seat that you could possibly be at in this sport, and I don't know if Teresa is really recognizing that."
Which maybe means that sometime yesterday morning, Teresa Earnhardt scrunched up in her desk chair at DEI headquarters in Mooresville, N.C., spat out a "D'oh!" and whacked herself upside the forehead.
For her, the migraine is just beginning.
Frankly, you knew this union was on the rocks and headed for splitsville last December.
That's when the normally reclusive Teresa (for reasons only she and her demolition experts can possibly know) called out Junior in a Wall Street Journal story -- questioning his commitment by saying he needed "to decide on whether he wants to be a NASCAR driver or whether he wants to be a public personality."
Hmmm. It didn't take long for Earnhardt to describe Teresa's sideswipe as a "low blow" and to say of their relationship, "It ain't a bed of roses."
From then on, it was only a matter of time before he steered toward the exit ramp.
The man is smart enough to know legacy's window won't stay open forever. Earnhardt turns 33 in October. His father won 67 races and six championships after the age of 33, but that was a different NASCAR -- dissimilar rules, fewer megateams -- and a different time.
Earnhardt Jr., for his part, has 17 wins all told but only two to show for his past 84 starts. He's not as good as his father -- or as much of a predator -- but he's better than that. He said yesterday it was time to "contend for championships now." It's plain he felt he couldn't get there with Teresa calling the shots. Nor, in the end, could he pry 51 percent of the pie from her hands.
So he's leaving. And leaving an incalculable void behind.
"Without Dale Jr.," Tony Stewart once said, "DEI is a museum."
Roughly what Fenway Park was for 84 years.
