End of A Reign

Stock car racing fans have long thought of Richard Petty as bigger than life. And now, in front of the Atlanta Motor Speedway, he really is.

A 7-foot 2-inch statue of “the King”--even his son Kyle refers to him as the King--was unveiled Friday as part of the final round of a season-long fan-appreciation tour that has been as exhausting as a presidential campaign. The statue is not of Petty in his familiar blue and red No. 43 race car, but, more appropriately, of Petty signing an autograph for a young fan.

Other athletes, such as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Julius Erving, Carl Yastrzemski and Bill Shoemaker, made triumphal tours in the final years of their careers, but their appearances were largely limited to game-day activities.

Petty’s has been different. The race--today’s Hooters 500 will be his 29th this season and the 1,185th and last of his career--has been the easy part of his schedule.

“Wouldn’t it be something if I won my last race?” the King mused, patiently leaning against a stack of tires in the garage area, signing autographs while waiting to qualify his Pontiac for the last time. “It’d be one of those Hollywood script deals, but if all those other cats in the race fell over and let me win, I’d take it.”

Even Petty knows it’s not going to happen. He hasn’t won a race in eight years, not since the Firecracker 400 on July 4, 1984, when he won at Daytona Beach, Fla., with President Ronald Reagan looking on. That was 212 races ago.

He has not even been a contender these days. His highest finish in 28 races this season was 15th.

It’s not so much that he is too old, at 55, or that his crew chief-cousin-best friend, Dale Inman, doesn’t have the car ready to run up front; it’s that he is so exhausted from nearly 10 months of daily appearances, signing sessions, talk shows, interviews, fan-club meetings and corporate outings that when he climbs into his car, he is not ready for nearly four hours of 200-m.p.h. racing on a high-banked superspeedway.

Friday, for instance, the unveiling of the 500-pound bronze statue in the Petty Garden occurred only 45 minutes before he was to qualify his Pontiac for the last time.

“I can’t believe how good we feel about the fuss you all are making over us,” he said, acknowledging the cheers that followed his every step as fans first caught sight of the trademark cowboy hat and wraparound dark glasses. “Usually, you don’t get a statue dedicated to you until they’ve got you laid out and your toes turned up.”

Petty qualified 36th at 175.318 m.p.h., more than 5 m.p.h. slower than surprise pole-sitter Rick Mast, who ran a track-record 180.183 in an Oldsmobile.

Saturday night, when even the playboys among the drivers head home early, Petty was at the Georgia Dome, being entertained by the country singing group, Alabama, in a three-hour special called “Alabama Salutes Richard Petty.”

“This is as much a celebration for my fans as it is for me,” Petty said before the concert.

The only thing better might be if the group were called North Carolina.

It has been this way all season.

Take the Pepsi 400 last July at Daytona, where Petty had his last hurrah on the track he calls his favorite. Petty was second-fastest qualifier and jumped into the lead when the green flag dropped. The huge crowd exploded when they saw No. 43 out in front, just like the old days.

But the euphoria lasted only five laps before he began to slide back through the field. And midway through the race, he pulled into pit lane and asked for a relief driver.

“I got pumped up when the race started and I was out in front,” he said. “It was like I was 20 years younger. I was having a big old time, but after a couple of hours I was plain old tuckered out.”

Consider why. The Friday night before the race, Petty’s friends and family gave him a gigantic birthday party that lasted into the wee hours. The next morning he was there for the dedication of Richard Petty Boulevard, an artery leading from the airport to Daytona International Speedway.

And on the morning of the race, right up until it was time to take the green flag, Petty shared the center of attention with President George Bush. Instead of resting back in the garages in the shade with the other drivers, Petty stood in 90-degree heat, shaking hands, accepting gifts and making small talk.

“I don’t believe it,” driver Darrell Waltrip said. “I don’t see how anyone can be that patient when he’s about ready to go racing. I’ve been around him for 21 years and he never stops amazing me.”

A week later, Petty was back home in Level Cross, N.C., where Petty Enterprises held its annual open house--a weekend of fan worship at the Petty shrine. More than 65,000 fans visited the family complex, the traditional event helping fill the motels in neighboring High Point, Asheboro, Greensboro and Winston-Salem. The log book showed they came from nearly every state in the union.

“Bush and Clinton should be glad that Richard isn’t running,” one fan said as Petty sat on a red, white and blue couch on the front steps of his parent’s home, patiently autographing anything placed before him. The line was sometimes a quarter-mile long, weaving its way around the shop and museum, where the memorabilia of his career was on display.

Each of the season’s 29 race dates was filled with Petty appointments. Consider his schedule two weeks ago at Phoenix. He arrived six days early for the Nov. 1 race so he could attend a charity barbecue on Tuesday, sign autographs for two hours on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, and attend a recognition dinner Thursday night at the Wigwam Resort after a golf tournament.

Petty doesn’t play golf, although he once agreed to caddie for his father, Lee, an inveterate golfer, in a World Open pro-am at Pinehurst, N.C. The elder Petty was paired with Arnold Palmer.

“I told my Daddy that I was only going to carry one club, so he’d better pick out the one he likes the most,” Richard said. “I ain’t about to carry a bag full of clubs all day.”

Which brings to mind what Petty said he does for training, or for relaxing between races: “Nothing. I just sit around, drink a lot of Cokes, climb in the race car and go.”

Between “sitting around,” Petty filled the NASCAR record book with accomplishments not likely to be matched. His 200 victories are more than the combined total by the top nine drivers this year--Davey Allison, Alan Kulwicki, Bill Elliott, Harry Gant, son Kyle, Mark Martin, Ricky Rudd, Waltrip and Terry Labonte.

“When I won my 100th race, people asked me what I wanted to do next, and I told them win 200 races,” he said. “When I won my 200th, they asked me the same question and I said, ‘I want to win my 201st. That shows you how much things have changed.’ ”

Petty also has won the most poles, 127; most races in a season, 27; most in succession, 10; has the most consecutive starts, 513, and the most starts, 1,185. He has won seven Winston Cup championships, seven Daytona 500s and nine times been voted most popular driver.

Harvey Duck, the STP publicist who has accompanied Petty on most of his excursions this season, estimates that Petty can sign as many as 300 autographs an hour, even though he elaborately lavishes swirls and curlicues and No. 43 on each one. That adds up to 30,000 or more at the formal autograph sessions held at this year’s 29 Winston Cup races.

“It still surprises me when somebody stands in line for hours just to ask for my autograph and then says thanks,” he said. “I should be the cat doing the thanking.”

Of all the things he was asked to sign this year, the most bizarre was offered during a session at the Raleigh, N.C., Fairgrounds.

“I signed a live duck,” he said. “The maintenance guy there said he wanted me to sign something. We went down to the pond and there’s this duck. He called him Fred. I signed my name and the cat threw him back in the water. He said he’d given me a pen with waterproof ink so Fred’ll have to shed his feathers to get rid of Richard Petty.”

He’ll go anywhere. En route to Northern California for a race at Sears Point, he stopped off at a Pontiac dealership in Hastings, Neb., to sign some autographs. Seven hundred turned out.

The day after the Hastings visit, he was at the Oakland Coliseum for an Oakland A’s-Boston Red Sox game, where he threw out the first ball.

“I was afraid I was going to bounce the ball to home plate, but I got it all the way there,” he said. “That really made me feel good.”

The next day was “Richard Petty Day” at Sears Point Raceway. There was no racing, just an autograph session. An estimated 5,000 showed up.

When a similar outing was scheduled at Bristol, Tenn., last April, it was raining and sleeting, but fans stood outside for more than an hour, waiting to step inside for a face-to-face meeting with the King.

“You should have seen them cats, they was dripping with water and their hands were so cold they couldn’t hardly hold the paper,” Petty said. “All that for a little old piece of paper with my name scribbled on it. It really touched me, if you know what I mean.”

When Petty--who spent a season in drag racing--rode down the drag strip at Indianapolis as grand marshal during the National Hot Rod Assn.’s U.S. Nationals on Labor Day, longtime racing observers said he received the longest and loudest reception in Indiana motorsports history. When an autographed Petty hat was offered at auction, top-fuel driver Ed McCulloch won the bidding at $3,100.

Each hat is a masterpiece fashioned by an old friend, Charley One Horse, and retails at up to $1,000, depending on how much frufru is used. On the one Petty is wearing this week, the band is a mix of pheasant and quail feathers and raccoon and python skins, trimmed with mink bones.

At Dover, Del., Petty introduced Gwaltney’s Richard Petty Hot Dogs--now the official hot dog of the fan-appreciation tour.

“My family taste-tested about eight major brands (of hot dogs) before we picked Gwaltney’s to put our name on,” he said.

Hot dogs, hats, corn flakes, toy race cars, sunglasses, fuel additives, shirts, racing jackets, soft drinks, headache powders--you name it, all carry the Petty imprint. It will probably continue as long as the King is active in racing--next year as the owner of car No. 44 with Rick Wilson the driver. But the driving era ends today. And when Petty retires after today’s race, so will No. 43.

“I hate to give in to age, but maybe it has something to do with it,” he said when asked what prompted his retirement. “It was a lot of fun.”