Dale Earnhardt Jr. ~ Moving To The "Dark Side"

December 17, 2007
By Kim Roberson

Kim Roberson

It has been three months since Dale Earnhardt Jr. announced that he was leaving Dale Earnhardt, Inc., and moving over to Hendrick Motorsports. At the time, it seemed like many old school fans thought their world was coming to an end; how could the son of the man who had such a rivalry with the start driver of HMS actually go to the equivalent of the “Dark Side”?

One race fan I know compared it like this -- “It is like General Patton going over to Hitler’s side”. I saw more comments posted on various blogs on line: “Gordon and Junior on the same team: are you serious???” “The LAST thing I want to see is Junior and Jeffie as teammates!”

So, why is it that some Junior fan’s have such a hard time getting their heads around the new team? The “rivalry” between the 3 and 24 was old generation vs. new, however it has been shown that Dale Senior and Jeff Gordon were actually good friends off the track. It wasn’t as if they hated each other on the track, though….they were both fierce competitors, and treated each other as they treated everyone else: if you see me in your mirror, get out of the way.

Regardless of the friendship of the two men, their fans decided that they couldn’t possibly root for both of them: it was one or the other. And which ever one you didn’t root for, you booed. Loudly.

Once Dale Senior passed away, the line of delineation passed to his son. Dale Junior fans just refused to root for Jeff Gordon. The two drivers were contemporaries, and by the time that Junior had joined the Cup Series, Gordon already had multiple championships. That said, the fans still found it difficult to cheer for the other team. When Gordon would win at tracks where the Earnhardts were known to be “dominant” at Talladega and Daytona, for example), the 8 fans would toss their beer cans on to the track, trying to hit the 24 car, but more often than not, they were hitting their fellow fans in the stands instead. (But that is an entirely different issue).

When Jeff Gordon passed Dale Senior’s win total this year, Jeff took a “3” flag, that the team had been carrying around in their hauler for months, and proudly waved it in salute to what Dale had accomplished. Dale Junior said he thought the move was “cool”. His fans saw it as a slap in the face and an insult, claiming that Gordon was just rubbing his “superiority” in the 3 and 8 fans faces.

How is it that the men the fans are cheering for have no problem with each other, but the fans themselves think they should hate each other, and are willing to do the job for them?

I was talking to a co-worker (Andy) recently who has been a 3 and 8 fan for ages. His son is a 24 fan, and he has been “dealing” with that, with father and son taking every opportunity to razz each other about the other's driver. I went to see him after the Homestead race to talk about my trip, and about Junior’s lackluster end to his career at DEI.

Andy sat at his desk and shook his head as I talked about the year to come. “I just can’t get my head around the fact that he will be driving on the same team as Gordon”, he lamented. When I commented that this was supposed to be a good move for Junior, and the driver himself seems really excited to make the move, my friend just sighed. “I completely understand that this is a good move for him, and he needed to leave DEI. But it has almost been imprinted in my DNA that I can’t root for a HMS driver. Now he IS a HMS driver.”

I asked Andy why he didn’t like HMS. He seemed to stop and think about it for a moment. “It was just the thing to do back in the day. I don’t think Jeff Gordon is a bad person. But he was an upstart who was giving my driver a run for his money. Even back then, you knew he was talented, and that made him a threat to what Dale had done. So, I didn’t like him.” Didn’t he know that Dale and Jeff were friends? “Yeah, I knew they were friends. But it was more fun to think of them as enemies.”

Did the move mean that he wasn’t going to root for Junior any more? “Hell no. He’s still my driver. But just because he drives for them doesn’t mean I have to root for them. It means I’ll have to tolerate it when he and Jeff work together. But it sure doesn’t mean I have to root for Jimmie. I really don’t like Jimmie.” Guilt by association? “Yeah. There is just something about Jimmie that bugs me even more than Gordon. I’d root for Gordon before I’d root for Jimmie.”

As I moved to leave his office, Andy stopped me and asked “Am I the only one who feels like this? Are there other Junior fans that are having as hard of a time with this as I am?” I smiled and assured him “You are not alone. And there are some fans I have heard that won’t root for Junior any more because he is going over there.”

Andy shook his head. “That is too extreme. I like the driver. So long as he is driving, even if I don’t like who he is driving for, I’ll root for him.”

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