And yet for the man who is now graying at the temples, pushing age 38 and having problems with his back, the senior statesman of NASCAR drivers, "it's been a blur, kind of, ever since then …"

It's been 15 years since Jeff Gordon won his first one, the Coca-Cola 600 here at Lowe's Motor Speedway, known simply as "Charlotte" back then.

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AP Photo/Mike ConroyTwo months after winning his first Cup race at Charlotte in 1994, Jeff Gordon celebrated a victory in the inaugural Brickyard 400 at Indy.

Now he has 82 victories, and a win Sunday night in the 600 would tie him with Cale Yarborough for fifth on the all-time winners list, and send him after the tie for third, at 84, between Bobby Allison and Darrell Waltrip.

The gruff driver who rode the kid unmercifully in 1994 about crying like a baby, Dale Earnhardt, is gone. When Earnhardt was killed in 2001, Gordon became the go-to guy, the driver of record, for all of us in the media whenever there was any sort of issue about NASCAR.

Earnhardt's sidekick, Rusty Wallace, who joined in the ribbing -- and whom Gordon beat that night -- is retired from driving and working as an ESPN commentator. Darrell Waltrip, who told the two tough guys to leave the kid alone, is long retired, long gone to the Fox broadcast booths.

Ray Evernham, the crew chief who made the two-tire call on the last stop, to get the kid out front and keep him there, went on to a career that brought him recognition as the best crew chief of all time in NASCAR, then became a team owner, and is now on a fun-only schedule, as a commentator for ESPN and the operator of a small dirt track in North Carolina.

So much has changed, so many milestones have been passed, that it seems an awfully long time since the kid wept uncontrollably.

I missed that race. My assignment that year was the Grand Prix of Monaco, in the wake of the deaths at Imola, Italy, of Ayrton Senna and Roland Ratzenberger, and the serious injury at Monaco to Karl Wendlinger. It was a fortnight so terrible that the French newspaper Le Figaro ran the headline: "Fomule 1: La Série Noire." Formula One: The Black Series.

"We thought we walked on water," F1 czar Bernie Ecclestone told me on race morning. "And now someone's drowned."

I tell you this to put in perspective just how long it's been since the kid wept. It was the weekend the world's great motor racing safety revolution began, with F1 going immediately into radical surgery on its cars.

Not for seven more years, until the death of Earnhardt, would NASCAR begin its own safety revolution. But F1 had already provided a road map to the HANS device, better seats, soft barriers.

Ascension Day came early that year, and Monaco was run in mid-May, and so I got home in time to see the kid weep on TV … in time to memorize the spelling of "Evernham," the guy who'd made the pit call, for it was pretty clear he was going places.

It seems so much longer since, when an F1 or Indy or NASCAR driver had a bad wreck, you knew there was a significant chance of death or serious injury. It's still a concern, but a relatively remote one.

The kid who wept has survived, without serious injury, so long that the constant pounding and wrenching of the routine act of racing has aged and deteriorated his back.

He's such a big name now that he can make headlines anytime he wants, with a quick comment. Take just the other day here. Somebody asked him whether his back problems could be enough to hasten his retirement.

He said yes, if it didn't get better. But it is getting better.

"If my back were the way that it was at Bristol this year, it's definitely going to shorten my career. I can't race like that for long periods of time."

Voilà! Headlines everywhere that back problems could shorten his career. But Gordon will turn 38 in August and has long questioned whether he'll race much past the age of 40.

If he goes out with back pain, he'll go out the way David Pearson did -- Pearson never suffered a serious injury, never so much as a broken bone, his entire career. He lasted long enough that back pain got him, the way it gets a lot of people, in and out of race cars.

Think of it: Jeff Gordon has lasted so long, between the kid who wept and the graying man, that it is taking back pain to raise questions of his retirement.

But to Gordon it's been a blur -- he first told me that in the spring of 1995, when he was clearly NASCAR's rising star. And he has told me that twice again this weekend here, as I've asked how vivid the memories of '94 remain in his mind.

Hard to remember the details for 15 years, he admitted, especially through the blur, "and to be honest, since 1994 the things that have happened to this team and me personally have just been unbelievable. It's been one heck of a ride."

For Gordon, for NASCAR, for all the motor racing world.

CONCORD, N.C. -- Get a grip on Turns 3 and 4 of Lowe's Motor Speedway, and eat during the race.

Those are the two tricks to winning the Coca-Cola 600 touted by the two drivers who have dominated it over the past six years, Kasey Kahne and Jimmie Johnson.

Even approaching this, the 50th running of NASCAR's longest race, we media types keep asking drivers how they handle that extra 100 miles.

"You need to eat during the course of the race to make sure you have energy for the end of it," said Johnson, who won three 600s in a row -- and five out of six Cup races at Lowe's Motor Speedway -- from 2003 to 2005, before giving up the edge to Kahne.

"When Ray [Evernham] was still around [Kahne's team], he passed me a Power Bar, some type of bar during one of the cautions about halfway through the race," Kahne said via teleconference this week. "The first year I got it, I put it aside -- I didn't feel like eating.

"And the second year he said, 'Just try it, just do it.' And I ate it, and it was night and day how much better I felt for the final 100 miles of the race."

Kahne won the 600 in 2006, and again last year. The only 600 not won by him or Johnson since '03 was by Casey Mears on fuel strategy in '07.

Johnson lost his edge in '06 when the track was resurfaced, but before that, he realized that "there's a must-take line in [Turns] 3 and 4 that I [could] always set our car up to run.

"As soon as I would hit that spot, I'd fly through 3 and 4," Johnson continued, "and pass two cars at a time sometimes through there."

The edge "has mainly been in 3 and 4 for myself, too," Kahne said. "I always worked really hard on that corner to get the car through there like I want it to."

Why are 3 and 4 more important than 1 and 2?

"I feel like 1 and 2, to me, has a little bit more grip," Kahne said. "So it's a little bit easier to get through. If you can get through 3 and 4, usually you're really fast in 1 and 2 also."

So to pick a winner Sunday night, watch who's getting through 3 and 4 better as darkness falls and the track tightens up for the later stages of the race.

And watch who's getting an energy bar handed through the window on pit stops. Johnson may actually eat two or three times, as his crew cuts an energy bar into halves or thirds.

But then there's Kyle Busch, who not only doesn't eat, but also drinks very little before the race and in the early stages.

"If I could get a hamburger to fit in the helmet, I might have that," Busch quipped here Thursday. But, "I don't think I can get it in there. … I don't diet any differently [for this race]. The only thing that I'll do is that I probably won't hydrate as much before the race."

Say what? "Won't" hydrate?

"Because it's such a long race, you don't get any opportunity to go to the bathroom," Busch said. "I won't hydrate at all until I get in the car, probably. You'll actually start the race probably almost dehydrated, and then you'll hydrate through the event just to keep that state so you don't have to go to the bathroom every hour."

So in summary, the keys to that extra 100 miles seem to be: 1) Don't be hungry; 2) Don't be loose or tight through 3 and 4; 3) Don't be nagged by the urge to go to the bathroom.

That, plus dodging all the wrecks.

"I would appreciate it if you wouldn't write that I'm coming back for one more shot at the championship," Martin said at Darlington Raceway, in his first news conference since re-upping for another full season with Hendrick Motorsports next year.

Martin, 50, known in the NASCAR garages as "the best driver never to win the championship," is a four-time runner-up for the Cup, and has finished in the hunt eight times in his career.

But he has stopped fretting about that, and would like for the talk to stop.

"I do this because I love racing with all my heart," he said.

It took a partial season in 2007 for him to get his priorities in order, he added. He had to break some of his obsession with championships.

"Just for example, in 1999, on Friday night before the 400 on Saturday at Daytona in July, I broke my wrist, my ribs and my knee [in a practice crash]," he said. "I did that because I wanted to win a championship."

Later, "I raced for a year and a half with excruciating back pain," he said. "I never missed a practice session, I never missed a test session, I never missed anything. Because I wanted to win a championship.

"I was allowing that points thing to affect how I felt about racing. I focused on that more than I really realized how much I love it."

Then, "When I finally stepped out of the car and ran 26 [of 36] races in '07, I started gradually realizing how much I love to race. And I'm going to keep it that way. ... I'm not going to try to will more points than we can score at the finish line each week."

The fun of it all set in his mind, and Martin said his conversation with team owner Rick Hendrick about another full season was very brief and to the point.

"After Phoenix [where he won on April 18] was the first conversation I had, and that lasted -- five minutes would be a stretch. The conversation with Rick was probably less than five minutes, probably more like 60 seconds.

"He said that's what he wanted to do, and I said that's what I wanted to do.

"So here we are."

Just for the fun of it, mind you.

This time it was joy, glee and enormous fatherly pride in his son, Robert, 15, who the other night won "the first race he drove, anywhere," Junior said by phone.

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Courtesy Junior Johnson Does a Cup career await Robert Johnson, left, the 15-year-old son of Junior Johnson?

How'd the boy look?

Junior thundered laughter.

"He shocked me."

More proud laughter.

"When the race started, he left out [in a hurry]. You'd have thought he'd been driving for 10 years."

No NASCAR dad in the Cup garages today is as qualified as Junior Johnson to know when he's got a natural on his hands. The legendary moonshine-runner-turned-racer was a natural himself in the 1950s and '60s -- no one, before or since, has been as flat-out, all the time as Junior.

But, "I don't know if I was that gung ho to go as he was," Junior said of Robert's run last Saturday night at Caraway Speedway, a highly respected cradle track for stars, in the Sportsman division.

"He was tickled to death, and so was I," said Junior, 77, who sold his racing team in 1995 and retired to his cattle ranch in the Blue Ridge foothills of North Carolina.

But his only son has him looking toward a return to NASCAR -- which requires that drivers be at least 18 -- within three years.

"If he keeps learning and learning and learning, he'll be able to make it plumb to the top," Junior said. "But you know how kids are. They get different things on their mind and stuff."

Should Robert divert his thinking to another career, his father would understand. Junior himself never was extremely passionate about racing -- just very good at driving, stretching mechanical rules to and beyond the limits, and obtaining lucrative sponsorships.

"But I think he's really dedicated to it," Junior said. "He's got his mind made up that's what he wants to do. He looks like he's really dead set to make it."

If so, "Every step he makes, I'm gonna be there," Junior said.

Even all the way back to NASCAR, where Junior won 50 races as a driver and 140 more as a car owner before growing weary of NASCAR busting him on rules violations?

"I wouldn't be a bit surprised," Junior said. "You know, I can cope with the rules, whatever they are."

Did he ever, in his time. He was NASCAR's most celebrated "cheater," a word he has long dismissed. "It ain't cheatin'; it's gaining a technical advantage."

If Robert wants to go all the way to Sprint Cup, "I know what it takes and how to get it done," said the man who fielded winning cars for LeeRoy Yarbrough, Bobby Allison, Cale Yarborough, Darrell Waltrip and others.

In my mind, there simply could be no better teacher of stock car racing, anywhere, than Junior Johnson, who has had his son testing privately on both dirt and asphalt tracks -- Caraway is paved -- for more than a year.

"We've worked on dirt more than anything to start with," Junior said. "I want him to learn how to back a car in a corner and save it when he gets sideways and everything like that.

"He's accomplished most all that stuff."

Despite the Caraway win, "I'm not going to let him just drop dirt and take off to asphalt. I'm going to keep stepping back and refreshing his memory on what it takes to handle a car."

The training will remain methodical throughout.

"When he moves, he'll be able to handle a move that we make," Junior said. "I'm not going to rush him into something headstrong, hoping to get there real quick.

"We've got plenty of time. He's got three or four years yet to go [before he's eligible for NASCAR]."

Teenaged Robert is sponsored by Junior Johnson's Country Hams. Might he need to turn 21 before he can be sponsored by the legal liquor brand, Junior Johnson's Midnight Moon?

Junior thundered laughter again: "I don't know about that, now."

So if they could get the brand on the side of the car, Robert Glenn Johnson III would be the third generation in what you could call the moonshine business.

So what's all this business about two cars, hooked up, flying past drafting lines of 10 or 12 or more at Talladega?

Used to seem that the more cars, the faster in a line.

But Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Ryan Newman formed a breakaway duo late. Then they were run down and passed by the tag-team of Carl Edwards and Brad Keselowski to form the final duel and set up Edwards' now-notorious crash.

Sprint Cup director John Darby, chief technical officer of the series, explained the two-car phenomenon.

"As they team up like that [in pairs], they double their horsepower," Darby said this week on a NASCAR teleconference.

"But they don't necessarily double their drag that each individual car would have, so that enables them to go through the air quicker."

An unrestricted engine in 32 of the 36 points races develops more than 800 horsepower. Engines stifled by carburetor restrictor plates, in the four races at Talladega and Daytona, develop only a little more than 400 horsepower.

So what developed at Talladega was that two cars, jammed together, usually touching nose-to-tail, essentially developed 800 horsepower in a package that amounted to just a little more than one car.

Edwards and Keselowski had the best "one-car package" because they worked on the high side, which, Earnhardt said later, was more conducive to "winding out the engines" fully.

"Brad is pretty smart," Earnhardt said of his protégé. "I guess he was the first one out of anybody to figure out that was what [had to be done] to get back up to us."

Figuring out how to make one unrestricted car in a restrictor-plate race is what won the race for Keselowski.

Both came from Carolina mill towns and working-class families; both were driven to rise higher, and both did; both were toughened by the climb.

Young Earnhardt hit the dirt tracks, and you know the rest.

Young Poole hit the books and won a Morehead Scholarship to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Otherwise, he couldn't have afforded college at all, he once told me.

He pounded the keyboards and traveled with Dean Smith and the Tar Heels as a working journalist all the way through school.

Then he rose to become one of the greats in American auto racing journalism, not just of his time but ever.

David Poole died Tuesday of a heart attack, soon after finishing his daily Sirius satellite radio show and probably thinking about the next one -- and his next column in The Charlotte Observer, and his next blog on Thatsracin.com.

He was 50. Just 50. Remember that next time you think sports journalists -- particularly NASCAR writers, in this case -- have the greatest, the cushiest, the most fun jobs in the world.

It's hard work and serious responsibility, this truth-telling business. And here I differentiate between the amateur, cottage-industry blogs and Web sites that are springing up everywhere and the true professionals, the serious journalists like David Poole.

If you do it the way he did it, the pressure is constant, even in your sleep. You're always on call, like a resident physician.

It's largely thankless -- you try to be the fans' voice to NASCAR and NASCAR's voice to the fans, and neither side is happy. When everybody's mad at you, you figure you're doing your job right, you're being fair.

After he took the radio gig -- several hours daily, early mornings, on top of the Web site, on top of the paper, on top of writing books, on top of doing guest TV appearances for ESPN and others -- I told him, "Poole, that's one job too many."

"Probably," he said, and shrugged, and went on typing -- I think it was in the media center at Richmond -- on deadline for the Observer.

He was making the transition from print to electronic media, as all of us have or will -- or else find other lines of work entirely.

Our beloved newspapers are dying, their time almost over. David was changing, but he'd have stayed with The Charlotte Observer until its last edition if he could -- he would change, but he would not desert. He would do it all.

He never let up. Never backed off. He was never anything but intense, driven, passionate about motor racing and journalism. Even when he told a joke -- and he could make an entire media center explode with laughter in five or fewer words -- it was with intensity in his voice.

Like Earnhardt, Poole never knew any other way but to be hungry. Both toughened, developed sharp edges. They ruffled, intimidated, angered some people -- you don't do well in NASCAR by being warm and fuzzy.

But they got their jobs done, very well indeed.

The night Earnhardt died, I went on autopilot, as you have to do about the death of a friend in this business. You have to report it first and analyze it for the public. Then and only then do you get to go home and do your own grieving.

I've been on TV and on the phone and at the keyboard all afternoon and half the evening, working on autopilot about the death of David Poole.

I'm going home now.

Not enough NASCAR people offer specific examples of why they like and respect Mark Martin -- and why they're genuinely happy for him when he wins, as he did Saturday night at Phoenix.

Well, here's an up close and personal example.

We'll have to rewind through a 15-year period, but stick with me -- the 1990 part is both vital and gut-wrenching.

Down to the wire of that '90 championship, there were two contenders: Martin and the relentless player of mind games, Dale Earnhardt.

The day before the penultimate race of the season, at Phoenix, the two contenders were brought into the media center for a joint news conference about the championship.

No sooner had they sat down in front of the microphones than Earnhardt went to work on Martin's head.

The specialty concession of Phoenix International Raceway was homemade lemonade, and the track publicist brought Martin and Earnhardt each a large cup.

"This got any vodka in it?" Earnhardt cracked into the microphone, making sure everybody could hear.

"Well, no," said the publicist.

"We want some vodka in this, don't we Mark?" Earnhardt pressed.

Martin said not a word, although the allusion was clear to the savvy in the room.

Martin in his youth had had a drinking problem. That was back in the time where you see the gaps in his Cup career statistics chart. He ran a full season in 1982, part of a season for four different owners in '83, disappeared entirely from the Cup series in '84 and '85 and didn't return full-time until Jack Roush hired him in '88.

By Phoenix 1990, Martin hadn't had a drink in years -- still hasn't, 19 years later -- but Earnhardt kept boring in.

There would be a test session the following week, at Atlanta, going into the finale there.

"I'll tell you how me and Mark are gonna test," Earnhardt said. "We're gonna go out and make a lap, and then we're gonna come in and have a beer. Ain't we Mark?"

Martin said nothing, remained stoic-faced. In the audience I whispered to a colleague that Earnhardt had played some harsh mind games in his time, but this was the worst.

"Then we're gonna make another lap, and come in and have another beer. And another lap, and another beer. Ain't we, Mark?"

Earnhardt won that championship, but it wasn't because of that particular mind game. It hadn't fazed Martin; it was just the cruelty of it that stuck with me for years.

Now fast-forward about 15 years. Martin was in the Chase. I wrote a column about the diminutive man who by then had become known as "the best driver never to win the championship."

I cited all the times he'd barely missed the title -- four times he'd finished second, and four times third -- and pointed out '90 as his first near miss, complete with the Earnhardt story.

Next race was Talladega, just like this week. At the desk of a hotel in Anniston, Ala., I ran into a Ford publicist who said, "Mark wants to see you."

I thought, "Oh, hell. He's upset that I dredged up his old drinking problem."

Next morning, I stepped up into the trailer and saw him up in the lounge. He waved me in and said sit down. It took him a few seconds of gathering his thoughts before he spoke.

"I just wanted to thank you," he said. "I had no idea anybody realized what he [Earnhardt] was doing that day -- let alone that anybody would remember it all these years."

He wasn't upset about the column. He appreciated it.

That's the kind of man the stars of NASCAR were lined up to congratulate in Victory Lane at Phoenix on Saturday night.

I found her -- actually, it -- through idle Easter Googling that led to my most serendipitous find ever on the Internet.

The Little Widow, you see, is why I am what I am, where I am, who I am. Its siren song to a child changed the course of a life in the bud.

I'd thought it was long gone, destroyed, rusted away in some junkyard, decades ago relegated to my memory.

[+] Enlarge
Courtesy Tobby Taylor/Misschicken.comThe Little Widow, smaller and sleeker than the boxier Miss Chicken, was built on a rail frame with a severely chopped-down body. She is more typical of the innovation of the Mississippi constructors of the time, who went for light weight and low profile.

But there the Little Widow sits -- restored, gleaming black -- in pictures from a recent car show, looking as race-ready as it was the night it was the very first glimmer, inkling, spark of my passion for motor racing.

If you want to see it, here's a link: www.misschicken.com. Scroll down the home page until you see the striking little black open-wheel car.

When first I saw and heard it, I wasn't much older than the kid in the picture.

There are some links to other pictures of the car in its heyday on my hometown dirt track, in what was then a racing hotbed.

Was this North Carolina? Indiana? Georgia? Not at all.

This was in Mississippi, of all places.

On summer nights as a preschooler I would lie awake in the dark with the screened windows open, listening to the iron thunder rolling across the trees from the fairgrounds a few miles away.

"What is that, Mama?" I would ask.

"Old stock car races," she would say.

"Can we go see them?"

"No, honey. Only sorry people go to those old stock car races."

The matter was closed for several summers, the taboo absolute -- and tantalizing.

Then my Cub Scout pack was invited to the races. Our leader was a postman. A coworker moonlighted as track announcer at the Laurel Fairgrounds Speedway, a half-mile dirt track, and agreed to let us all in free.

The announcer was called Fats Harvison. Hearing that, I guessed he must be some sort of gangster from New Orleans. Turned out he was quite skinny, and was a mild-mannered mail carrier with a rich and wondrous voice.

The great racing voice Chris Economaki, decades later, would tell me his lifelong philosophy about calling races: "The crowd must never leave the track having seen nearly as good a race as it thinks it has seen. That is the job of the track announcer."

By that measure Fats remains, in my heart, the best who's ever been, or ever will be.

Climbing high into the old roofed grandstands originally built for horse racing, I beheld a little black object in full broadslide through a turn. It came off the corner faster than any car I had ever seen anywhere, and when it reached full throttle I put my fingers in my splitting ears, without even thinking about it, to ease the banshee scream.

They didn't have race cams in those days, so the engines didn't crack or rumble. They shrieked: a horrific high, operatic scream, relentless, the roof of the old grandstand an echo chamber that made it even more painful to hear.

The nearest sound today is that of Formula One cars.

Something called "time trials" was occurring.

There was nothing "stock" about the Little Widow, or any of the other cars. "Stock" was just a word they got from the eastern side of the South. These cars were all highly modified, with rail frames, their bodies cut down so much that even though they had roofs, they were actually smaller than the Indy cars of the time.

The tiny black car came past in a blur, and Fats Harvison bellowed on the loudspeakers:

"This is Ellis Palasini, Leland, Mississippi, in the Little Widow."

From that moment, my world changed. There was far more to it than Ole Miss football and the New York Yankees, my first two sports obsessions.

Down through the decades, at the starts of races from Daytona to Indianapolis to Monaco to Le Mans, the Little Widow has screamed past me in my mind.

A lot of cars then had names, or combinations of names and numbers: Little Widow, Purple People Eater, 2x4, 12 Gauge.

The year was 1958.

Not until Easter Sunday 2009 did I learn on misschicken.com that the Little Widow lost only two races that summer of '58 on Palasini's tour of tracks in Mississippi, Louisiana and western Tennessee.

The other eye-misting Easter surprise was that not only does Ellis Palasini still live in the Mississippi Delta town of Leland, hard by the big river, but that at almost 78, he has a Web site, www.EPV8.com.

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Courtesy Misschicken.com/Bo Freeman The grandstand and frontstretch of the Laurel Fairgrounds Speedway in 1955. This was the source of the mysterious thunder that kept little Eddie Hinton awake on Saturday nights.

And, it turns out, Fats Harvison is alive and well at 86 in Laurel.

So I have spent the past 24 hours, except for some sleep, wandering through my childhood, viewing pictures of racetracks long razed. A couple of years ago I asked my brother if we could go to the place the Laurel Fairgrounds Speedway once was, and he took me to what was nothing more than a vast asphalt parking lot where hundreds of FEMA trailers were stored from the Katrina disaster.

Palasini and his archrival, Ival Cooper (my second-favorite driver) didn't learn to race by running moonshine. Palasini learned to drive on tractors and combines on his family's vast plantation in the rich Delta land.

Cooper learned by racing fully loaded log trucks for the hell of it on dirt roads leading out of the backwoods of Arkansas. After moving to Mississippi for a better day job, he never did think racing cars was very daunting. He has been dead for decades, although I can't find records of the circumstances. I heard once he'd been killed racing, long past his prime.

Palasini quit in 1972, apparently bored with the takeover of Southern racing by late models, cars with fenders that weren't nearly as powerful or quick as the modifieds and supermodifieds he loved so.

The Little Widow was Palasini's sportsman-class ride. That was supposed to be the slower class, but it had a small-block V8 Chevy engine mounted on a rail frame fashioned from the driveshaft of a truck, covered with the chopped-down body of a 1934 Ford coupe.

It looks nothing like those supposedly pioneering North Carolina cars of the 1950s. Beside the Little Widow they are big, clumsy, bumbling oafs.

Palasini's even-faster car, in the modified division, was called the Black Widow and carried the simple number "V8" on the side. But that particular V8 engine was a highly modified version of what went into Corvettes in those days. Well-to-do Delta planters could afford such exotic machinery.

Cooper's No. 248 had a Cadillac engine. Bob Herrin's "Little 312" carried a GMC truck engine, modified by the maestro engine builder Buck Ishee in a place called Sullivan's Hollow.

These were all open-wheel cars. Even the "sportsman" cars were modified, and the "modified" cars were extremely modified. The only cars with fenders were the junkers, the "jalopy" class, and they were run as more of a joke, an intermission from the serious stuff.

I didn't see a serious fendered race car until showroom-like cars began to appear on TV, racing in a league called NASCAR, which didn't impress me at all -- why, Fireball Roberts' Pontiac looked no cooler than any sitting in our neighborhood driveways.

To this day I find it highly amusing when racers and race fans assume my background is in full-bodied cars because of my Southern accent. Along the Gulf of Mexico, from Florida to Texas, it was all open-wheel in those days.

In the 1960s they paved the Laurel track and made it part of a supermodified circuit that included high-banked half-miles at Jackson, Miss.; Mobile, Ala.; Montgomery, Ala.; and Pensacola, Fla.

New drivers arrived, among them two brothers from Alabama named Bobby and Donnie Allison. (You want to know how good Ellis Palasini was? Ask either of the Allisons to this day.)

To big races, 200- and 300-lappers, would come the hotshots from as far away as Indiana and Texas, hunting easy pickings. But they would always leave badly beaten, amazed by the brilliance of Gulf region mechanics like Ishee, Chicken McComb, Fred Sabbatini … outdriven by Palasini, Cooper, Gene Tapia, Armond Holley, Wayne Niedecken.

What dried up the Mississippi racing? Lack of money, probably. And the advent of fendered late models, which nobody down there ever really cared for.

And racing got too professional to be sport.

Once, at Laurel, I paid my 50 cents and scanned the pits for the Black Widow and the Little Widow, and they weren't there. Fats apologized to the crowd, saying Ellis and his father were running combines on the Delta plantation 24 hours a day trying to get the crops in before the rains came.

Think about it. Wouldn't you love for racing to return to such simplicity that its stars could go missing because they had to get their crops in?

Maybe the preachers killed off racing in Mississippi, calling it sin to their congregations, so that the decent folk abhorred a pastime for "sorry people."

For decades afterward, Mama would admonish me: "Honey, no good will ever come from you going to those old stock car races."

In that time, I have known the greatest and most renowned racing drivers in the world, from Graham Hill to Ayrton Senna to Michael Schumacher … from Richard Petty to David Pearson to Jeff Gordon … A.J. Foyt, Mario Andretti, all the Unsers and Allisons and Earnhardts.

For some reason, I never have felt awed in the presence of any of them.

But today I have written the first fan letter of my life to a driver. It's an e-mail to Mr. Ellis Palasini, Leland, Miss.

Destination was the 20th century, down in Darlington, S.C., home of NASCAR's first big track -- and to this day its most difficult.

We were shooting some TV advance material for ESPN at hallowed Darlington Raceway with its all-time maestro driver, David Pearson, and the man I think resuscitated the Lady in Black from her deathbed in the 1990s, Jim Hunter.

To get there from here, you drive through several glimpses of the 19th century, down U.S. Highway 1, for which the path through the Carolinas was originally cleared for another purpose -- Sherman's army marching 60,000 strong, felling forests as it came.

This was the second leg of their trip, the first being their more famous March to the Sea, from Atlanta to Savannah, Ga. Once rested at Savannah, Sherman turned to the north, wreaking vastly worse wrath than he had in Georgia, for as one of his soldiers said upon setting foot in South Carolina, "Here treason began, and here, by God, it shall end."

Somehow the western edge of his army barely missed the town of Cheraw, S.C., and as you drive through today, if there were no power lines or automobiles, it could just as easily be the spring of 1842, the year St. Peter's Catholic Church was established -- the old wooden church stands now, little changed from then.

My all-time favorite observation about the Carolinas was from the eloquent Charlotte Observer columnist Ron Green Sr., who once told me, "The Mason-Dixon Line should have been drawn between North and South Carolina."

That's how different they are. Their populations even have very different Southern accents.

Crossing the state line headed south, you're not only entering a different state but almost a different region, and the pace of life slows down by half.

The very border is a demarcation line between the pre-spring buds of North Carolina and the blooming, pollen-misted spring of South Carolina.

And there is the deeply traditional challenge of passing through Society Hill, S.C., without running afoul of the law.

It's the Eastern Seaboard's most notorious and longest-running speed trap, where, as far as I've been able to tell through the decades, every male citizen is a town policeman sitting in a patrol car with his radar pulsing.

Past Society Hill you're home free down to Darlington, and there we met -- Hunter and Pearson and me, and an ESPN crew led by producer Bonnie Larkin -- to sit on the dock at Walter McKnight's house, overlooking the lake and across to the Pearson Grandstands.

We talked for a good two hours on camera, and I haven't laughed that hard, that long, in years. What did we talk about? I can't tell you yet. It would spoil the fun of the feature pieces that will air on "NASCAR Now" the week, and the day, of the Southern 500, May 9.

Suffice it to say there's a lot of Hunter, who managed old Darlington from 1992 to 2000 and brought it back from dilapidation to dignity, talking about the history of the place.

And there's a lot of Pearson, telling the secrets of how he won 10 races, more than anyone else, on the Lady in Black & and precisely why he would barely turn the steering wheel coming off corners where drivers such as Cale Yarborough, Darrell Waltrip and Richard Petty would saw and yank on their steering wheels for dear life.

Pearson always looked like he was driving down an interstate, and I always wondered how he could do that, and today he finally told me. Just another case of legerdemain by the Silver Fox that no one could guess for decades.

Couldn't leave Darlington without stopping by the Raceway Grill, home of the best hamburger steak (smothered in onions and melted cheese) in the Eastern time zone. And french fries cut from fresh potatoes.

Which left me drowsy for the drive back north, up the way Sherman's army had come, and just at the state line I stopped and read the historical marker for the exact dates. They crossed into North Carolina on March 4-7, 1865.

Three days to cross the state line. That must have been some army.

The immortal Kurt Vonnegut Jr. admonished us all, in the last book of his life, to remember the times that we are truly, sublimely happy, for when you think about it, those times are relatively few in anyone's lifetime.

Today was one of those times.

I'm well aware of the old line, "Show me a good loser, and I'll show you a loser."

And I've heard many a football coach say that to win, you have to really, really, really hate to lose.

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AP Photo/Steve HelberJimmie Johnson, left, earned the Martinsville victory. Denny Hamlin earned respect for the way he handled the loss.

I have no doubt that Denny Hamlin hates to lose. But I had to admire the class with which he lost Sunday to Jimmie Johnson at Martinsville Speedway, a track where both excel -- but where in the past six races, Johnson has won five times, and Hamlin but once.

With 15 laps to go, Hamlin was leading when Johnson edged his right-front fender inside Hamlin's left rear. They rubbed, Hamlin slid high, Johnson got underneath and went on to win.

Hamlin was heartsick afterward. You could see it on his face and in eyes that retained a sort of stunned stare for a good half hour following the Goody's 500.

Yet he made himself smile, and even laugh, as he acknowledged that losing a fender-rubbing contest with Johnson as the aggressor coming from second while Hamlin was trying to defend his lead was all accepted procedure for short-track racing.

At 28 years old, Hamlin has made no secret in recent weeks that he feels he should have more Cup wins on his résumé than just four in his 3½ seasons -- two of those in his rookie year.

I've lost count of the races he should have won when his pit crew has cost him. He has complained occasionally about that, but not nearly as much as he has been hurt by it.

Taking that into account, then adding that Martinsville is one of two "home tracks" -- Richmond being the other -- that can be claimed by the Chesterfield, Va., native, and that he lost Sunday in such a rough-and-tumble way, I expected Hamlin to be livid when he climbed out of his car, maybe raging.

But here's the first answer he gave to Fox TV reporters:

"I'm honored to be on the racetrack with guys like Jimmie and Jeff [Gordon, who finished fourth] and Tony [Stewart, who was third]. Those are the guys who are the best in the business.

"And, you know, it's just that we came up short. That was short-track racing. I would have done the same to him [Johnson], and if it comes back around, I will do the same.

"But that's just the way it is. This is Martinsville. You gotta battle for every inch. I was trying to protect the spot and he was trying to get it, at the end of the race, and that's the way it goes."

Later, in the media center, I asked Hamlin just how hard that was, to give such a classy answer after such a heartbreaking -- and to some, infuriating -- loss.

Hamlin not only gave me yet another classy answer but also added that he really, really does hate to lose … but keeps his dignity.

"It's not that hard," he said, "because I know I would have done the same thing. You can't sit here and … nobody can sit here and tell me they wouldn't do the same thing that [Johnson] did. You know, with 15 to go, I'd rather be in second than first because I'm going to move the guy out of the way."

And then he broke eloquently into the disappointments of a career that started off as such a skyrocket.

"It's tough to say that you've gotten used to losing," he said, "but I've gotten used to the disappointment at the end. It's not like a new thing.

"My hunger is still the same, for sure. I want to win races … but I can't help being in the position I was in."

He questioned himself for taking the lead from Johnson with 45 laps to go. Maybe, Hamlin thought, he should have stayed in second and made Johnson the vulnerable one late.

When Johnson came into the media center for the winner's interview, he became quietly, dignifiedly incensed when we told him what Hamlin had said about being moved out of the way. Johnson felt he'd actually had the position by his front fender, and that Hamlin had squeezed him, and that's why they had touched and nearly wrecked -- "the fact that he chopped me," as Johnson put it.

Johnson was nice about it, soft-spoken as usual.

The winner came away as a class act, but the loser -- hating the result though Hamlin did -- came away as the classiest act of a typically slam-bang day at Martinsville.

My 21-year-old son, who was a Dale Earnhardt fan growing up, has been a Hamlin fan for a few years now because Hamlin's driving style reminds him of The Man in Black.

And a dad who sees beyond the driving, sees the character, is just fine with the son's choice of favorites.