As a tear-jerker, ‘3’ has his number

that too-easy metaphor for beer-swilling, flag-waving, gay-marriage-hating, Iraq-war-supporting denizens of the South -- isn’t supposed to make you cry. And so it is with some confusion about my manhood that I inform you I wept a little during “3,” an ESPN original movie about the auto racing legend Dale Earnhardt that premieres Saturday night at 9.

I went to an Earnhardt race once, the Southern 500 in Darlington, S.C., and I was not reduced to tears. Nor did I leave understanding auto racing much better for having seen it up close. “3,” which ducks offstage before showing you the crash at the Daytona 500 that killed Earnhardt in 2001, won’t really help you there. For a movie on a network built around “SportsCenter,” in which game highlights get broken down like so many Zapruder films, “3” dwells, surprisingly, on feelings -- feelings expressed, grunted, repressed and so on. It doesn’t take you into Earnhardt’s car and the experience of driving 190 mph so much as the hard and soft spots of its subject’s heart.

“3,” named for the number on Earnhardt’s car, is a male “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” a twangy tale about a kid from North Carolina who escapes his fate (becoming a “lint-head” at the local textile mill) to realize his dream of driving fast cars around fast tracks to the devotion of millions (he won 76 Winston Cup races, including the Daytona 500) -- all without achieving the approval of his stern father, who didn’t live long enough to see his son become a champion.

This is the pathos that hangs like Spanish moss over “3.” Earnhardt is played by Barry Pepper, wearing facial prosthetics and wigs to get at Earnhardt’s look. This is Pepper’s second turn as a sports figure; he was also Roger Maris in the 2001 HBO movie “61*,” the Billy Crystal-directed homage to the 1961 home run chase between Maris and his Yankee teammate Mickey Mantle (that movie too had jocks expressing or trying to express their feelings half the time, suggesting the kind of wish fulfillment that can happen when the therapized men of Hollywood wax nostalgic about the sports heroes of their youth).

Like Maris, Earnhardt was aggressive when he was competing (his nickname was the Intimidator for the way he would unapologetically bump into his competitors), quiet and no-nonsense otherwise. Throughout the film, Earnhardt remains self-contained and likable, his ego the opposite of today’s sports heroes in that it’s projected inward.

“The winner ain’t the guy with the fastest car, son, it’s just the one who refuses to lose,” Earnhardt’s father, Ralph (J.J. Simmons), tells the young Dale. Ralph Earnhardt was a weekend legend on dirt tracks in North Carolina who never got out of the shadow of the mill. The single-minded Dale did, burning through two marriages before finding a woman (Elizabeth Mitchell) who would abide the life. In the process, he passed on the legacy to his son, Dale Jr., a leading driver on the NASCAR circuit today.

What killed Earnhardt, the movie tells us, is the same drive that made him hell-bent on winning. It tells us this better than it shows us. Televised nationally by NBC, NASCAR, for all the money it generates, remains, as sports folklore, elusive -- the uninitiated don’t even understand how you become a race car driver, much less the athleticism it takes to be a great one. Rather than fill in this information gap, “3” leaps right over it.

Granted, it’s hard to make things like car sponsorship dramatic, but I still wanted to be taken deeper into the world. It’s as if the executive producer, Orly Adelson, who previously produced the ESPN football series “Playmakers,” figured the only way to make Earnhardt palatable to the masses, finally, was to turn his life into a country ballad about fathers and sons. So once again we find ourselves staring at a red state-blue state divide. Misty-eyed, but staring.

*

‘3’

Where: ESPN

When: 9 p.m. Saturday

Rating: TV-14 (may be unsuitable for children younger than 14)

Barry Pepper...Dale Earnhardt

J.K. Simmons...Ralph Earnhardt

Elizabeth Mitchell...Teresa Earnhardt

Chad McCumbee...Dale Jr.

Shaun Bridgers...Neil Bonnet

Ron Prather...Richard Childress

Greg Thompson...Darrell Waltrip

David Hager...Junior Johnson

Executive producer, Orly Adelson. Director, Russell Mulcahy. Teleplay, Robert Eisele.