Kevin Harvick: Into the spotlight
By Marty Smith, Turner Sports Interactive
January 26, 2002
12:48 PM EST (1748 GMT)
CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- Kevin Harvick is bored.
He's slyly navigating the gargantuan campus of Concord Mills Mall near Charlotte, having just finished a photo shoot downtown. Harvick is killing time in the BASS Pro Shops outlet before attending a prearranged dinner engagement.
Donning a gray sweatshirt and cargo jeans, he looks much like every other mid-20s punk in the rolling sea of Limp Bizkit clones. His head is pointed towards the floor in hopes that a red Hurley Surfboards lid might somehow hide his now-famous identity.
No dice. A gentleman immediately recognizes him.
But rather than run for cover, Harvick decides to amuse himself with a little game of hide and go seek before making a break for the door.
He peruses aisle after lure-laden aisle, frustrating the stalker more and more with each passing rod and reel. Just as the gentleman thinks he’s close enough to touch, Harvick sneaks out a side door into mega-mall oblivion.
So goes a day in the life of a budding superstar: You wish you were normal, but super-human talent makes normalcy an impossibility.
In 11 exhausting months, Harvick has risen from racing obscurity to NASCAR’s biggest stage. With an unrelenting brashness and unforgiving driving style, he has revived an entire industry left reeling from the lowest point in its storied history.
THE WRECK
Like much of America, Harvick was parked on his couch when Dale Earnhardt died at Daytona. He and his wife-to-be, DeLana, had just clicked off the television and were out the door to dinner when their cell phones began ringing furiously.
On the other end was RCR Busch driver-turned-team manager Mike Dillon.
“Mike Dillon actually called us,” reflected Harvick between bites of meat lasagna, sitting in the furthest corner of a dimly lit restaurant near the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
“Everybody went to his house, and they had (Motor Racing Outreach) there. All the guys came over when they got home from Daytona. It was pretty bad that day. It was real bad.”
The realization that Earnhardt had died failed to sink in. Something of this magnitude was unfathomable.
“Nobody asked anything because nobody wanted to know anything,” Harvick said. “We actually went to Atlanta and tested (the next day). We took the AOL car and the Busch car, both of them. They locked the racetrack and kept all the media out, just so we could test and keep our minds off of things.
“That was probably one of the smartest things (Richard Childress) did. Just get us away from it. Then, Wednesday night we got back and they called the house and told me to come to the shop. Kevin (Hamlin) and Richard and Bobby Hutchens were in the office. I knew what was coming.”
ON THE DOUBLE
In that meeting, Childress asked his young driver to perform a seemingly impossible task, one no driver had accomplished -- or even dared to for that matter -- in the 53 previous years of NASCAR competition.
Childress asked Harvick his thoughts about the prospect of simultaneously competing in two series on a full-time basis.
“I told Richard that night, 'Just do what you think is right,' ” Harvick said. “We don’t need to talk about salary, nothing. Just go to the racetrack and do it, adjust as we go.
"He told me to just be yourself and I’ll do everything I can to make it right for you. I was brought up to treat people like I was treated. So I told him, whatever you think is right, do it. I’m behind the decision all the way.”
DeLana, however, had a bit more difficult time accepting her fiancée’s new burden. She was to be married in two weeks, and wasn’t overly thrilled with the prospect of spending her first year of marriage in the sky between Pocono and Colorado Springs.
“I didn’t know, had no idea, he’d drive that car all year,” said DeLana, who after serving as Harvick’s chief supporter in 2001, will retake her role as Randy LaJoie’s publicist in the NASCAR Busch Series this year. “It was two weeks before our wedding, so I was in panic mode.
“He told me he was going to drive the car in Rockingham, and I was like, OK. Never asked any questions. I just assumed he would drive it in the interim until they found somebody else.
"It never occurred to me, ever, that he would do this the whole time.”
TOEING THE LINE
Whether he was fully prepared for double duty or not, Harvick had no choice. He pulled into North Carolina Speedway -- and simultaneously into an impossible situation -- on Feb. 22 with one solitary purpose in mind: keep RCR afloat in the midst of a tumultuous storm.
The one thing he wasn’t concerned with was replacing Earnhardt. That wasn't possible. Fortunately, Harvick realized this from the outset of his journey.
“The first thing we talked about was the number issue,” said Harvick of dealings with Childress over those first few days. “We decided it would never be a No. 3 or a black No. 3. That was important to me. That’s not me. That’s Dale Earnhardt.
“The thing we all came to understand that night, and the weeks to come when everybody was talking about us having big shoes to fill and all this responsibility, was that there was no responsibility and no shoes to fill.
“Sure, there was responsibility to the Goodwrench car and the Goodwrench name, but there was no responsibility to fill Dale Earnhardt’s shoes. Nobody could do that, ever.
"We knew right from the beginning that that’s not what we were trying to accomplish. What we were trying to accomplish was to keep everything that Richard had built over the past 15 years going.”
Harvick performed admirably at Rockingham, finishing 14th in his Winston Cup debut. He followed that up the following week with wedding bells and an eighth-place effort at Las Vegas. Folks were already guessing when his first win might come, but no one imagined it would be so soon.
The outcome of Week 3 was befitting a storybook, a fairytale, a figment of a downtrodden community’s imagination.
Harvick qualified fifth for the Cracker Barrel 500 at Atlanta, a race that came down to a five-car battle with two laps to go. Harvick, who hadn’t been a threat for much of the day, sneaked his way into the top five late, then into contention with a daring three-wide split of two other competitors as they came to the white flag.
As the final lap wound down, the tension was palpable. Harvick and Jeff Gordon raced door-to-door, trading paint all the while. As they crossed the line, Childress stared at the monitor, waiting…waiting… for the No. 24 to move atop of the running order.
It never did.
Suddenly, a weight of biblical proportions had been lifted from the young pilot’s shoulders.
“Dale was riding with me that day,” Harvick said. “I couldn’t have done that alone.”
BREAKING POINT
Harvick cruised along undaunted for the first two-thirds of the season, winning two Busch Series events, the Atlanta and Chicagoland Cup races and tallying 14 top-fives overall.
Then on a weekend when the Winston Cup Series headed to Pocono and the Busch boys went to St. Louis, Harvick reached a crossroads.
“I think we were good up until we got to the summer, and then St. Louis pretty much knocked me on my knees,” said Harvick, laughing at the thought of it. “St. Louis was the first real, dead-heat back-and-forth trip of the summer and I suddenly felt like, ‘What in the hell am I doing?’”
He was doing what no one else could. After an unforgiving, dicey battle with Jason Keller, Harvick won that race at St. Louis. The race proved easier than the Victory Lane celebration.
“We won the race in St. Louis, but I was absolutely drained. (DeLana) had to hold me up in Victory Lane,” Harvick said. “I parked the car and couldn’t get out. I couldn’t move. They pulled me out and I couldn’t stand up. I actually went behind Victory Lane and got oxygen. I still couldn’t stand up.
“So we went and got IVs. I got two full bags of IVs before we left. We got on a helicopter to the airport, then got on a plane and I got in the seat that’s broken and lays all the way back, and that’s where I slept the whole summer.”
SOUTHERN (CALIFORNIA) PRIDE
The next day at Pocono Raceway, a pack of hungry reporters surrounded him, eyeing him up and down for even the slightest sign of weakness. Flashing that trademark smile, Harvick assured them he knew no fatigue. Meanwhile, he was holding a secret deep within.
“We got to Loudon the next morning and I kinda just ventured off by myself for awhile,” he laughed. “I wandered over the medical room and went and got an IV. I never even told anybody. Actually, when we were standing outside my trailer and I was telling (the media) that I don’t get tired, I had IV gauze on my arm.
“I couldn’t let anybody know I was tired.”
But he was, in fact, exhausted. That very day at Pocono he had a top-five car, but admittedly didn’t have the mental fortitude to get up front and battle the leaders.
“While I was actually in the car, I don’t think there was ever a time when I thought about how tired I was,” he said, pondering the answer deeply. “I was so focused on what I was doing that I’d have to physically stop before I lose that focus.”
That’s not to say there weren’t times when he was on the verge of physical and mental breakdown.
“In both of the Pocono races, I was tired going into the races and I think, over the radio, I became absolutely flustered,” Harvick said. “I remember one time just yelling, yelling at the top of my lungs about nothing. I was just tired. I wasn’t even cranky, I was just mentally exhausted.
“We were trying as hard as we could, but I was just riding around. There’s so much that’s mental. We ran in the top 10 until the last lap and ran outta gas in the first Pocono. And the second Pocono we ran 15th or 20th.
"We had good enough cars to run in the top five, but I wasn’t mentally in the game. I thought I was at the moment, but I know now I wasn’t there 100 percent.”
There were other similar weekends when the pressure and travel were unrelenting. Pride can be a driving force like no other.
“There was never any ‘I can’t do it.’ It was always, ‘I have to do it,’” Harvick said. “I didn’t want to, but I knew I had to because everybody said I couldn’t. I was to the point where I would have passed out in the car and wrecked it before I got out of it.
“That’s how much it meant to me. I was going to every extreme to go as far as I could go. They would have make me stop, to stop.”
CLASH OF THE TITANS
As the season wore on, Harvick's relentless driving style became grating to some of the most prominent Winston Cup veterans. Some said he was bullish, impatient, way too cocky.
Ricky Rudd called him a "bull in a china shop" after the youngster turned him completely sideways at Richmond.
Bobby Hamilton went a bit too far at Martinsville, however, after Harvick removed him from contention at with a payback love tap in the race’s final laps.
Hamilton said: "He's trying to fill Earnhardt's shoes and thinks he is Dale Earnhardt, but he wouldn't even make a scab on Dale Earnhardt's butt right now."
Having been reminded of it, Harvick can’t hold back that grin.
“Isn’t controversy fun,” he said. “That stuff never fazes me. That stuff actually amuses me almost.
"It’s almost intriguing to hear people say things like that because they don’t know anything that’s gone on. I think part of it is frustration. There’s a lot of young guys … it’s almost like a Clash of the Titans kind of deal.”
Harvick means there is a clearly drawn divider between the old-school racer and his new-generation cohorts.
“It’s young versus old out there right now,” he said. “You’ve got me, Tony, Junior. We all say what we think, what’s on our minds. I respect my elders, but I say what I think. We’re almost rebellious in not wanting to do what our parents did.
“And I can see that in the guys around me. If they’re gonna run into me, then I’m gonna run into them, then get outta my car and tell you how I feel about it. That’s the way I’ve always done it. My dad never liked it. He always called me a cocky punk, a prima donna.”
Some continue to voice such opinions, particularly about Harvick and Stewart. Harvick finds this amusing.
“Let ‘em say it,” he said. “I’m gonna say what I feel. That’s just how it is, how it’s gonna be.”
THE FINE PRINT
Harvick’s willingness to be vocal on any subject produced many of the finest sound bites of the season for journalists and fans alike. Although always cool and witty in front of the camera, the media crush that surrounded his whirlwind season was a learning experience unlike any he’d ever imagined.
Media hype is a fickle thing. Some want to build you up, others seek to break you down. Although always equipped with a solid front that hid any hint of frustration, some of the words were hurtful to the Harvicks.
“It got to the point where DeLana and I would fight over going to look at the Internet, just all the stories,” Harvick said. “Once I learned that there’s gonna be people against you and people for you, and in order for me to race the car how I wanted to race it, I was gonna have to learn how to take all of that.
“I don’t know if it’s explainable. I’m one of those people who likes to be liked by everybody outside the racecar. I could give a s--- what they think inside the racecar, because I’m gonna be me in there. But out of the car, I’m happy go lucky, go with the flow, don’t really ever get mad.”
Having his attitude misconstrued makes him plenty mad.
“The media deal is hard to learn. How to make it all meet in the middle and keep it all right is tough,” Harvick said. “I did learn this: It doesn’t matter. Be yourself.
"The people that are for you will be for you, and the people that are against you are always gonna be against you. Even if you do it 100 percent right, they’re gonna find something wrong.”
With media exposure comes stardom, something Harvick, nor his new bride, were totally prepared for.
“That’s been the hardest thing to get used to,” DeLana said. “We’re just normal, everyday people who like to hang out. And all the sudden you’re put on this pedestal because you’re a Winston Cup racer.
"He could be a Busch racer forever and no one would really know who he was. But you come into Winston Cup and the entire world knows who you are.”
Everyone knows who Harvick is these days.
Ask that guy in BASS Pro Shops. Or ask the busloads of children brought to his house on Halloween, making it impossible for him to hand out candy. Or what about the people who slowly drive by trying to catch a glimpse of the budding star.
“All that stuff is really crazy,” he said with a grin.
With Harvick, it’s pretty much a "what you see is what you get" deal. He still dresses the same way he did in ’98, when he struggled along in the Craftsman Truck Series.
For that matter, he still does practically everything the same. Childress wouldn’t have it any other way.
“The first thing Richard told me when I took the job was, ‘I want you to dress the same, act the same, drive the same, and as we go through this together. I’ll help you clean it all up,’” Harvick said. “What other way would you want to approach a job?
"As we make mistakes, we talk about them, talk about why they’re mistakes and adjust them. You can’t ask for a better situation than that.”
A BANNER YEAR AND A BLINDING FUTURE
When Harvick’s exhausting year was finally said and done, he had clinched his first Busch Series championship, a ninth-place finish in the Winston Cup standings and Winston Cup Rookie of the Year.
Nobody had ever come close to doing that before.
His 10-month journey wound through 70 events in NASCAR’s three major series, resulting in an astounding 17,007 laps -- 21,347.14 miles -- seven wins and 26 top-five finishes.
Despite previous plans to run a limited schedule in the Busch Series, Harvick will concentrate solely on the Winston Cup Series in 2002. Thirty-six races is plenty this time around.
“I just decided it was time to concentrate on the Cup side,” Harvick said. “Last year my No. 1 goal was to fulfill my duties with ACDelco and we did that. Now I need to focus on the Winston Cup side and do the same thing for Goodwrench.”
Ironically, Earnhardt is the only driver in Winston Cup history to win Rookie of the Year and his first championship in consecutive seasons. If Harvick equals that accomplishment, he may never be able to go unnoticed again.
After eluding the guy in BASS Pro Shops, Harvick noticed a large mass of people standing around a table where fellow Winston Cup driver Mike Wallace was helping to raise money for St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital.
Before long, a motorsports public relations firm had located 120 diecast cars for Harvick to sign as well. He gladly did so, smiling all the while.
Last year, the guy could have shopped unnoticed and strolled incognito among the masses.
No longer.
So goes the life of a budding superstar.
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