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Friday, March 7, 2008
Brad Daugherty, a 7-foot-tall NASCAR fanatic
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
Just guessing, but the most conspicuous person at the Atlanta Motor Speedway on Sunday for the Kobalt Tools 500 will be an African-American. He will be nearly taller than the scoring tower. He will be the guy whose drawl sounds like somebody from Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s household. He will be the one who could tell you every aspect of the Car of Tomorrow for hours, days or weeks without you asking.
Brad Daugherty really is into this racing stuff, and, yes, we’re talking about that Brad Daugherty.
Remember the former All-America basketball player for the University of North Carolina who later used his considerable skills at 7 feet to make a slew of All-Star teams in the NBA? He’s more than just a NASCAR analyst for ESPN these days. He’s a loyal racing fan who was so into the sport while growing up in Black Mountain, N.C., that he later wore No. 43 during his nine years with the Cleveland Cavaliers.
That was the number of Richard Petty, Daugherty’s hero.
This isn’t necessarily an indication that NASCAR is closer to its stated goal of more diversity. This is just an entry for Ripley’s Believe It Or Not. In fact, a lot of folks probably look at Daugherty as if he’s a little goofy or something.
“Oh, man. I’ll tell ya. Yeah,” said Daugherty, 41, who couldn’t care less how others view his passion. He spoke over the phone from his home in Asheville, N.C., adding, “My dad was a race fan, and I used to go to the track with him back in the mid-1970s, and it really wasn’t cool back then [for African-Americans]. But my dad was a big dude, man. He was about 6-foot-6, 300 pounds, and he was an ex-Marine. He was a good-natured guy, but nobody bothered him, and he loved racing.”
So did the son, along with the son’s childhood friends. They included Robert Pressley, whose father, Bob, was a legendary short-track racer around North Carolina. The younger Pressley had chores to do involving his father’s race car after school, and before long, Pressley’s buddy, Brad, began helping, too.
Then others followed. “These were the guys I played basketball with and also just knocked around with, and we built some race cars together,” Daugherty said. “We had a little short track here in Asheville, and we would go out on Fridays to try to see if we could get into the race, and it kept a lot of us out of trouble. I was the only African-American kid there, but I never really thought about it.”
Obviously not, because Daugherty kept living his passion. He loved basketball, but he really loved racing.
There were those late-model stock cars that Daugherty built with his friends during the mid-1980s. They loaded the cars on an old truck for trips around the Southeast, and they became proficient enough to win 38 races one summer. Even when he joined the NBA, he reached into his pocket to have a Busch car built for Pressley. Not only that, Daugherty was the crew chief, the spotter and often the mechanic for the operation. “I was the first rookie owner, and certainly the first African-American owner, to win with a rookie driver in the Busch series,” said Daugherty, who eventually moved into the Craftsman Truck Series.
With the likes of Kenny Irwin Jr. and Kevin Harvick, Daugherty’s team won two Truck Series races.
“So it tickles me. I’ve been going to these old raggedy tracks for 30 years, and I’ve done all kinds of things, and it amazes me, because people always say, ‘Gosh, man I can’t believe you’re at the race track,’ ” Daugherty said, laughing, before recalling that he also has been a member of NASCAR’s diversity council and rules committee.
Still, the looks. The giggles.
The disbelief.
“I find it funny that a lot of [media] people really have a problem with me being around the track,” Daugherty said. “They think it’s just some kind of political move, but I’m not there for that. I’m a huge racer. I’m a racer at heart, and I love what I’m doing.”
Since this was Daugherty, that ending sounded like something “The King” would say. Or maybe Petty would let his cowboy hat and shades do the talking.
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Hey, check out local sports-talk radio
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
I’ll say this right off. I’m a radio guy. Grew up on radio in my little hometown. An old Atwater Kent, with the round speaker on top. It was my constant companion, soon as I got my homework done. I thought I could listen and do homework at the same time, but my mama wasn’t buying any of that.
I saw in my imagination only scenes that radio could bring me. Some of my closest friends lived in that old Atwater Kent. Grady Cole, Lee Kirby, Clare Shadwell, Ted Husing, Eddie Dooley, though we never met, and on Saturday afternoon in the fall, that radio was mine. Football, even if it was Columbia playing Middlebury.
Not a lot has changed, except everything. First thing I do in the morning is turn on the radio, one of those little Bose things. No television for me. I don’t want to waste time distracted by people invading my privacy from a screen. I can listen and do things. Television, you have to watch.
There are two radio stations in town, both bragging about being the “most-listened-to sports station in the South,” or the station that “knows what guys want.” I do, too. I am one, but I don’t think we’re talking about the same thing.
They’re pretty good, most of the time. Sometimes they can’t stick to their games before veering off into women and booze, and women and sex, and just women. Not that I’m against either - I may be near 90, but I’m not dead - I don’t tune in for sports to get the leering voices of guys jabbering about women. Stick to the games, or you lose me.
One is 680 The Fan, the other 790 The Zone. They jab at one another now and then, rather subtlely most of the time. In the morning hours I jockey back and forth between the two, all depending on which is sticking to business.
A guy named Christopher Rude rules on one station, a show they call “The Rude Awakening.” Clever, wot? It, however, is not an original. The real “Rude Wakening” is brought to you by the garrulous Neal Boortz, and he has been rude and awakening for years on WSB.
Steak Shapiro - he must have a birth name, but I don’t know it - runs the other morning show, whatever they call it, on 790. Tell you the truth, I kind of like The Fan’s morning style a little better - especially since The Fan came at you the other day with a full course of the infamous Pacman Jones, at the same time The Zone was on Vince Dooley’s patio - under glass, of course - having breakfast with Mark Richt.
Newspaper types don’t get this sort of socializing. You see, we sit down, take out a notebook and start asking questions, it’s about as exciting as a haircut. Besides, Dooley or Richt, or whoever you may be talking to, isn’t sure how that’s going to come out until the paper hits the door the next day.
On radio, it’s live and on record. No misquotes. No misremembered moments, to invade the Roger Clemens vocabulary. And, frankly, it is sort of exciting. Makes you jealous.
Some of the locals visited the Braves in spring training and interviewed Jeff Francoeur, Tom Glavine and some others - no Smoltz, he’s in hibernation - and they just jabbered away, spewing out their secrets like schoolboys. Take out your notebook and pen, even your tape recorder, they start measuring their words like candidates.
Makes you envious. Could be one reason so many newspaper guys are bailing out for ESPN and the mike and the camera.
In the afternoon, well, I’m sort of partial to the two guys on The Fan. I like their style, and that they stick pretty much to business and steer away from skirts. Oh, they speak of their wives and kids now and then, but mainly, Buck Belue and John Kincade play the course.
Belue, every Bulldog knows, out of Valdosta, quarterback of the team that won the national championship in 1980. A gentle fellow with heart. No rable-rousing for Buck.
Kincade is a Philadelphian, and has trouble getting over it. Opinionated. Territorial. Good radio, has a weekend show on ESPN. It’s the combination, the contrast that comes across with them. They stick more to the news of the moment than sticking pins in stuffed shirts, though Kincade, infected by hockey, does get off rather heavily on the guys who own the Thrashers and the Hawks. And why not? Has there ever been a more mucked-up sports ownership since Naismith hung up the first peach basket?
That’s about it. Just wanted to let you know there’s something out there in the radio world. Turn it on.
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