It’s been five years since Dale Earnhardt died in a crash on the last lap of the Daytona 500. Rarely does a day at the track go by when I don’t think of him.

Nobody ever accused Earnhardt of being a fake. What you saw and heard from the seven-time champion invariably confirmed his status as “The Intimidator.”

If you liked to push — or be pushed back — you were more likely to become friends with Earnhardt, because that suited a competitive spirit in him that was always more restless than a June bug on a hot summer night. Being a bit pushy was part of the job if you were a reporter in search of a story in the NASCAR garages, but I had no expectation it would one day lead to becoming friends with “The Intimidator.”

For many years, I simultaneously admired Earnhardt’s car control and detested his driving tactics. I had little regret, for instance, while writing the lead paragraph after he suffered another miraculous loss in the Daytona 500 (to Derrike Cope in 1990) due to a cut tire on the last lap. “The fans with the ‘Anybody But Earnhardt’ t-shirts,” the story began, “got their wish on the last lap of the Daytona 500 on Sunday… ”

His car control and sheer bravery were extraordinary, sometimes breathtaking. Early in his career Earnhardt was alone when it came to mixing it up on the superspeedways from the drop of the green as if they were short tracks. But there was always the moral question of endangering other drivers, or using underhanded tactics. It wasn’t until John Andretti arrived in the Winston Cup in the early 1990s that my attitude began to change after a conversation with the former Indy car and sportscar driver.

During an Atlanta race, I watched Andretti stay with Earnhardt for 15 laps on the track’s daunting high banks, following him through the field to the front from their respective mid-pack starting positions. I remarked on it to Andretti after the race, asking him if Earnhardt had taken the air off his rear spoiler to get by before Andretti started following the black #3. “The thing about Dale is that anything he does to your car, you can do to his,” replied Andretti.

I had generally accepted car racing as a test of skill and bravery among the guys on the track. The only rules that mattered were the ones decided upon by those same guys. Because of my respect for Andretti I began to recognize that I hadn’t quite seen the whole picture, holding a rather narrow, moralistic view of Earnhardt. Another influence was a story by Sandy McKee of the Baltimore Sun, which appeared about the same time, on the retired David Pearson, the driver many figured had been the best in the business. In the story, the always-smooth “Silver Fox” recounted how much he admired the far more rambunctious Earnhardt.

When I first began covering Winston Cup in 1976, the drivers generally shepherded each other around, trying to put any competitors fast enough to block their path to victory lane in positions where they had to lift. Like Pearson and later Bill Elliott among Earnhardt’s generation, they relied primarily on car preparation, speed and racecraft skills.

Inevitably, there were occasions where high spirits got out of hand and drivers tried to wreck one another, but they were almost always limited to late-race situations such as the infamous Daytona 500 in 1979, when Donnie Allison tried to block Cale Yarborough’s winning pass on the final lap. The bantam-sized South Carolinian returned the favor, which led to one of the most famous wrecks in NASCAR history and the post-race fistfight shown live on CBS Sports.

Earnhardt, a rookie that year, soon added a new dimension to superspeedways. Where the Petty and Pearson generation had generally saved their close-quarters moves for the end of a superspeedway race or for events on the slower short tracks, Earnhardt ran close quarters from start to finish on any kind of track, daring his competitors to do likewise.

“The Intimidator” was far more than a trademarked name. His competitors knew what to expect from him, which included occasional recklessness. Once, when asked what happened after a wreck in Turn Four early in a race at Darlington, Petty wryly replied, “I forgot I was racing around Earnhardt.” (”The King” paid Earnhardt back with a body slam at Richmond the following week.) Most other drivers didn’t have the same resolve as Earnhardt, perhaps due to less car control, less bravery, more consideration for their fellow drivers, or less desire to be the one driver everybody in the garage recognized as “The Man.”

During an annual pre-season charity event in Winston-Salem, NC attended by most of NASCAR’s biggest stars, someone once chided Jimmy Spencer for a short autograph lineup compared to the one for Earnhardt, which snaked its way through the entire pavilion like a giant python. “Everybody,” said Spencer, “wants to meet John Wayne.”

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