Every day, on the grainy film of Michael Waltrip's memory, the images from that afternoon a decade ago still flicker, no matter how hard he tries to block them out. They always unspool the same way: He is back at Daytona in 2001, back in Victory Lane under a blue sky, celebrating the first win of his Cup career, when driver Ken Schrader approaches. Waltrip notices something terrible in his friend's expression. Schrader had been the first person to reach Dale Earnhardt after Earnhardt crashed into the wall at more than 160 mph on the last lap of the Daytona 500 on that Sunday 10 years ago this week, and Schrader saw the horrifying result: Earnhardt, slumped in his driver's seat with a severe fracture at the base of his skull, already dead.
"It's not good," Schrader told Waltrip, who was driving for Earnhardt's team, Dale Earnhardt Inc. (DEI). "I think Dale's hurt."
Dale's hurt. No two words in the history of stock car racing have been freighted with greater significance. At the time of his death the 49-year-old Earnhardt was a seven-time Cup champion—tying him with Richard Petty for most career titles—a one-man industry who at the time of his death had a record $42 million in career earnings and was making millions more in endorsements, and the heart and soul of NASCAR, the rare sports icon whom beer-drinking, blue-jean-wearing fans embraced as one of their own. Hours after his death, makeshift vigils sprang up all around Daytona, at DEI headquarters in Mooresville, N.C., and at other tracks around the South, where thousands of fans held candles in the darkness and quietly shared memories of the life and times of the Intimidator.
In the days that followed it would be made clear, for the first time, that NASCAR was no longer a strictly Southern phenomena. Earnhardt's death led newscasts in markets as distant as California, North Dakota and New York City, where the news was also carried on the front page of The New York Times. On the day of Earnhardt's funeral, in his hometown of Kannapolis, N.C., U2 took the stage in Los Angeles to perform at the Grammys. The band is from Dublin, a world away from the tiny garage where Earnhardt prepared cars as a teenager to race for grocery money, but U2's guitarist, The Edge, strode onto the stage wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with Earnhardt's number 3.
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