Ferrari Mailing List: [OT] great article on Jeff Gordon by Dan Neil

[Dennis Liu (bigheaddennis]

In Men's Vogue (of all places).  By Dan Neil, one of my favorite automotive
writers (columnist for the LA Times).


http://www.mensvogue.com/health/feature/articles/2008/04/gordon

Dixie Exile

To millions of fans, Jeff Gordon is the king of Nascar. To even more, he's
the cause of its decline. One thing is for sure - Gordon is not your average
good ol' boy. 

By Dan Neil 
April 2008 


Jeff Gordon is the winningest driver in Nascar's premier series and a
four-time champion. Late in a race, running three wide and foot flat on the
floor while climbing Daytona Speedway's three-story-high banks - where in
2001 Dale Earnhardt Sr. hit it so hard it practically took his head off - he
has (and will, if the opportunity arises) knocked the car ahead to steal its
position, which is called "taking the air off." This is an act of
unimaginable skill and perfect indifference to personal welfare. Generally
speaking, Gordon races clean and fair, but he will happily play rough at 200
mph if the checkers are in sight. He'll also put somebody in the wall if he
thinks he's been wronged. Gordon doesn't even blink. The man has liquid
nitrogen in his veins and carbon-steel castanets in his fireproof undies. 

Off the track, Gordon, 36, is a nine-figure millionaire, a successful
businessman, and a sports icon. Following an ugly divorce five years ago,
he's now married to model Ingrid Vandebosch, with whom he has a baby
daughter, Ella Sofia. He owns a Hawker 800 jet. He loves football. Through
his foundation, he raises money for sick kids. He is a phenomenal athlete,
an Einstein behind the wheel. From all of this, Nascar Nation can come to
only one conclusion: Jeff Gordon is gay. 

And not just gay, but an outrageous feather-boa'd queen around whom the
chrome on trailer hitches is gravely endangered. Brokeback Talladega.
Gaytona. Google "Jeff Gordon is gay" and you'll get nearly 4,000 entries. Of
course, he is not gay. But that doesn't seem to matter. 

The first time I met him was at the 2002 Daytona 500, when he was the
reigning Winston Cup champion. It was the year after Nascar's bitter-eyed
alpha dog, Earnhardt Sr. - the Intimidator - died in a last-lap crash, and
the maudlin crowd was in no mood to honor Gordon. During driver
introductions, the horizon-wide grandstands whooped and cheered for
has-beens (Sterling Martin) and hacks (Buckshot Jones), but when Gordon was
introduced, I thought they were going to stone him to death with Budweiser
cans. A black, poisonous pall of anger and frustration gathered over the
crowd. Beer-bellied ogres held up signs that read "FAG: FANS AGAINST
GORDON." 

Gordon, by then accustomed to being the most gay-bashed straight man in
America, smiled and waved. If it hurt, if he felt that it was unjust, if he
wondered what these damn "fans" wanted, he didn't show it. Liquid nitrogen. 

When I arrive at Daytona International Speedway's office before this year's
500 - which kicked off the 2008 season - I announce I'm with Men's Vogue.
The lady behind the counter looks perplexed. What's that word? "Men's VOG?"
she ventures, reading the envelope. "Vogue," I reply. "You know, like 'in
vogue.'" She gives me the eye. "We never had any 'Vogue' here before," she
says. Later, when I meet Gordon in his spectacular new motor coach, he
laughs at the story. "Yeah, just tell them you're here to see Jeff Gordon,"
he says. "They'll go, 'Oh yeah, now we understand.'" 

Gordon is wearing crisp blue jeans, a gray sweatshirt with a DuPont logo
over the heart, a Chevrolet baseball cap, and cross-trainers. The
much-derided perfect hair is going a little gray at the temples, as is the
dense beard. "I avoid shaving every chance I get," he says. His cleft chin
is a little weak, his upper lip a little missing in action, but overall, the
pretty-boy charge still sticks. 

The centerpiece of Gordon's 45-foot custom motor coach is the playpen, front
and center in the living space. "We built it around babies," he says. "It's
probably the only one of its kind." It's a week before the big race and
V8-powered dragonflies are buzzing around the track outside, but when Gordon
closes the door all is shut out. For most of the next nine months, he and
his family will live out of the motor coach for as many as four days a week.
"I will probably sleep in that bed" - the king-sizer at the back - "more
than the bed I have at home." 

"Home" is a bit of a moving target these days. He and Ingrid recently bought
an apartment on the Upper West Side, and Gordon - who has hosted Saturday
Night Live and Regis and Kelly - has in essence relocated his private life
from Boca Raton, Florida, to Manhattan since his divorce in 2003. The most
obvious reason is that New York is about as far from Nascar Nation as you
can get. "I love the sport and I love the people in it, but I see them
enough," he says. "I don't need to see them during the week." (The Gordons
are also building a house in Charlotte, so that he can be closer to his race
team headquarters and business offices.) In New York, he says, "Unless I'm
in Times Square, it's very seldom I get recognized." 

Gordon's move to New York signals nothing less than him climbing into his
own skin. The fact is, he never was a good ol' boy, though for a while early
in his career he did try to fit the mold the sport cast for him. He had the
obligatory big house on Lake Norman outside of Charlotte, which is kind of
like the red-state Malibu. He married a Miss Winston, the Bible-thumping
Brooke Sealey, who kept the garish sports-hero mansion in Boca Raton when
they divorced. He has admitted to never really liking country music, or
hunting or fishing, or relating to any of that stars-and-bars hoo-ha. Having
spent a fair chunk of his career trying to appease the fan base - and
getting so much grief in return - Gordon has moved on to embrace the man he
wants to be. 

It's clear the big city has rubbed off on him. "I'm a Prada shoe guy," he
says, uttering a sentence Earnhardt Sr. never, ever contemplated. He enjoys
good clothes and does his own shopping. "Especially my jeans," he says. "My
jeans are me." 

Before Ella Sofia was born in June 2007, the Gordons saw a lot of the city's
red carpets and restaurants. These days, he says, "We just order takeout
from Patsy's." When I ask him about his favorite restaurants, he hems and
haws, like he can't remember them, but then the list comes out: Nobu, Neo,
Cipriani, Serafina, Il Mulino. That's a pretty nice list for a guy raised in
Indiana, where bratwurst is a considered a leafy green vegetable. 

How did the biggest star in one of the world's most popular sports, a man
adored by millions, come to be so reviled by millions more? It helps to
understand the history of the sport. Organized stock car racing was born on
red-clay short tracks bulldozed into the woods of the Appalachians in the
1940s and early fifties. Its first heroes were hard men, moonshiners and
grease monkeys and country boys whose smiles missed teeth like abandoned
buildings miss windows. Stock-car racing was an outgrowth of Southern
culture, where the greatest tribute was a trophy named after cigarettes,
where the tradition of the honor duel was observed with 3,000-pound hunks of
steel, where God and Goodyear were thanked in equal measure. It's hard to
imagine, now that Nascar is a galling lollapalooza of mega-corporate
advertising - Sprint, Red Bull, the Principal Financial Group, and so on -
but when Gordon entered the sport in the early nineties, it was still a
relatively rinky-dink operation. 

Then: cosmic inflation. Within the space of a decade, Nascar had gone
corporate. The France family, running the sport out of Daytona Beach,
brought racing to Wall Street. Ticket prices skyrocketed. Races at venerated
battlefields like Darlington and Rockingham gave way to events in California
and Las Vegas. The hard men with the scuffed knuckles and marbles in their
mouths started to disappear, replaced by fit young drivers with Hollywood
smiles who spoke in complete sentences. 

Gordon was one of the first of the new breed, and by far the most
successful. He was born in that faraway Gomorrah of California. He grew up
in Indiana and learned to race in open-wheel sprint cars, whatever the hell
they were. He was slight and nice looking, more jockey than driver. In the
multi-generational patriarchy of Nascar, where fathers pass down their cars
to sons (Earnhardt, Petty, Baker, Jarrett, Allison), Gordon was nobody's kin
in particular. 

Traditional Nascar fans, particularly in the Deep South, can't forgive him.
They associate him with the corporatization of racing, its Californication,
merchandizing, suburbanization, and feminization. 

And then, the deepest cut of all: Earnhardt Sr.'s death. The mourning for
Earnhardt Sr. - who, by the way, had nothing but respect for Gordon, whom he
nicknamed "Wonder Boy" - was galvanized by resentment. Earnhardt embodied
everything stock car racing had been. He was from Kannapolis, N.C., a high
school dropout, the son of another hard man, the racer Ralph Earnhardt. Dale
never spoke pretty. Gordon was careful to mention his sponsor, to thank the
Lord, to shave his cleft chin a shiny blue. And he had the awful manners to
whup up on Earnhardt Sr. As of this moment, he is the only driver who has a
chance to eclipse Earnhardt Sr.'s record seven championships (shared with
Richard Petty). 

These days, Gordon is his own man, and except for the fact that he's one of
the nicest people you'd ever want to meet, you might think he's on the verge
of becoming an urban sophisticate. He announced his engagement to Ingrid at
a California croquet event. He has his own wine label, the Jeff Gordon
Collection. Plainly, he is way past worrying what the grandstands think. 

But he does care what his wife thinks. Born with a high-revving metabolism,
Gordon didn't pay much attention to fitness until he hit his 30s. "You know,
I'm not really a gym guy," he admits. He prefers to tune the machine from
the inside out. "I went to a nutritionist," he says. "I started to eat a lot
more fish and vegetables, a lot less fat and calories. I do a shake every
morning with fruit." This year, he vows to more bike riding to stay in
shape. "It's always a New Year's resolution." 

To be sure, the price of being Gordon has come down a bit since the
nineties. For one thing, the hard-core fan base has finally had to concede
that he is the real deal, among the most talented drivers ever to turn a
wheel. In 2007, he came within a few points of winning his fifth Cup
championship, in a year when the conventional wisdom had him winding down,
softened by domesticity. Meanwhile, the drivers themselves are a much more
diverse group than a decade ago. There are now Europeans, open-wheel aces
like Dario Franchitti and Juan Pablo Montoya. The upside of Nascar's sudden
growth is that the sport is rapidly outgrowing its own chicken-fried
prejudices. How do you measure such progress? When Gordon wins at Southern
tracks, fewer beer cans rain down on his No. 24 car. 

Still, Gordon remains a man apart, a distant champion. He's enjoying the
immunity of being one of the sport's veterans and leaders and is speaking
his mind more than ever. For example, Gordon doesn't think much of Nascar's
new car, the larger, boxier, and safer "Car of Tomorrow" - "We could have
done so much more with the clean slate," he says. He even wonders how racing
will remain relevant in the face of global warming. Would he drive a hybrid
race car? "Absolutely. I think we all want to be green, we all want to do
things that are good for the environment, and racing isn't necessarily
what's good for the environment. So of course we should move forward with
the rest of the world." But much of Nascar Nation thinks global warming is
some sort of liberal hoax and hybrid cars are for sissies. "Well, I guess
I'm not keeping up with the pulse of the fans because to me it only makes
sense." 

Some things never change. Gordon is still ahead of the field, ahead of the
curve, and the sport is still trying to catch up to him.