Before baseball and football, for me, there was NASCAR.
Before Cleveland Brown and Cincinnati Red, there was the No. 24’s rainbow.
And before LeBron James, before Eddie George, before Joey Votto, before every athlete that I religiously follow and idolize today, there was Jeff Gordon.
And last Thursday, the former “Wonder Boy”, who raced his first full season the year before I was born, who won four titles between 1995 and 2001, who won 92 races in 22 seasons, including three Daytona 500 races, announced that 2015 would be his final full season of racing.
Which kind of sucks.
Gordon was everything I could have hoped for in a favorite driver when I was little. He drove a fast, shiny, rainbow-colored car. He was a baby-faced and soft-spoken kid, just like me. Hell, he even shared the same first name as my father.
And he won. All the freaking time.
But the loss of one of the sport’s greats isn’t what makes me saddest about this. What makes me sad about this retirement is the loss of my childhood.
I love sports as much as anything. It’s what I want to build my career around. And though many of my peers would laugh at just the thought of watching a race on a Sunday afternoon, NASCAR was my first sports love.
NASCAR is what my dad turned to on Sundays after Art Modell moved the Cleveland Browns to Baltimore in 1995. My mom, not the most avid sports fan in the world, found the races easier to follow than any other game my dad watched, so she would actually sit and watch races with us.
Therefore, some of my earliest memories are of sitting in my living room with my whole family, watching 43 fast, brightly colored cars tear up an oval every Sunday. I even set up a growing collection of replica cars in front of me, driving them in a circle, trying to mimic what was happening on TV. I did this for years.
Many of the drivers of those cars that I watched starry-eyed every weekend are out of racing now. Rusty Wallace and Dale Jarrett are analysts now. Bill Elliott is content watching his 18 year old son win titles in NASCAR’s minor leagues. It’s been 14 years since Dale Earnhardt’s fatal accident and, his son, who debuted the year before Jeff Gordon’s most recent title, just turned 40 years old. The Labonte brothers, Ward Burton and Ricky Rudd have all moved on.
And soon, Gordon will too.
Gordon was, in my eyes, the last remaining significant member of what I think of as the Winston Cup guys. Years ago, many thought he was going to challenge the number of titles won by Petty and Earnhardt. With 55 wins before his 30th birthday, 100 wins seemed like an easy bet. Hell, maybe he could reach 150. Maybe even Petty’s 200, if he stuck around long enough.
But the second act of Gordon’s career hasn’t been nearly as kind as the first. The win total of his past 13 seasons doesn’t come close to matching the total he had in his first eight. Even his so-called protege, Jimmie Johnson, has eclipsed Gordon in success, winning six titles in just the past nine seasons.
It’s true that Gordon’s retirement is just as a full-time driver. He’ll still be around to race part-time, maybe for many more years, like another Winston Cup guy, Mark Martin.
But 2015 will be the last year the Wonder Boy chases a title. It’ll be the last year I can turn on a race on any given Sunday and be guaranteed to see his name somewhere in the running order. It’ll be the last year I can truly feel the rush of nostalgia that comes from 20 years of watching the same hero try to fight off 42 bad guys in search of first place every weekend.
Jeff Gordon’s retirement means I’ve grown up. And right now, that kind of sucks.
aw987712@ohio.edu
@_tonywolfe_
