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Marlin's victory is welcomed, but nothing can overshadow the deaths at Daytona

The hearing process begins anew.

The tight-knit stock car-racing community thought a fresh new season and the Daytona 500, the sport's Super Bowl, would finally cleanse and close the wounds of 1993.

Drivers, crews, owners, NASCAR officials and fans aren't likely to forget Davey Allison and Alan Kulwicki, celebrated driving stars who were killed in separate aircraft accidents last year. They just wanted to stop mourning.

But in a practice for the 500 on February 11, popular veteran Neil Bonnett crashed and died. Three days later, only hours before Bonnett's funeral in Hueytown, Ala., rookie Rodney Orr was killed instantly in another brutal trip into unforgiving concrete in practice.

It was against that stunning backdrop of tragedy that a first-time winner with an engaging grin and a syrupy Tennessee drawl gave stock car racing a much-needed reason to smile.

Not only had Sterling Marlin never won a NASCAR Winston Cup race, neither had his father, christened Clifton but know from childhood as "Coo Coo." Dad, a Tennessee farmer, tried 165 times. Sterling, 36, was making his 279th career start.

For numerologists, the Daytona 500 became the combined 444th father-and-son start, and Marlin, starting fourth in a Chevrolet, buried years and years of family frustration.

The race evolved into a closing-laps duel -- Marlin leading and Ernie Irvan challenging -- plus a gamble on fuel.

Marlin's car lasted. Barely.

"I think it ran out when I cam down pit road high-fivin' all the crew guys," he said in that folksy manner that makes people smile. "The engine kind of sputtered, and I couldn't get it cranked back up."

Crewmen from each team pitted from the start of pit road to the entrance to victory lane lined up to slap Marlin's gloved left palm as he coasted along reveling in the emotional moment. His own Morgan-McClure crewmen pushed the stalled Chevrolet the rest of the way into victory lane.

"Man, it took a long time to get here," Marlin said. "But I believed in myself, that I could do it."

In the closing laps, Marlin had Irvan filling his rear-view mirror. He knew his rival was ready to pounce if he made the slightest slip. "I just told myself this was a Saturday night short track at Nashville, you're leading... nothing to it," Marlin said.

And his memories flicked even further back, to when he was 10 years old and working on his father's cars. "We had a little shop behind the house, I'm going to say 20 feet by 30. Had tin on the sides, a gas heater. ... We always worked real hard on the cars in the winter, concentrating on coming to Daytona."

He remembered, too, when he first started traveling regularly to races with his father and couldn't get into the garage area. He was 14 years old. You had to be 16. So he "stood outside hanging on the fence, looking pitiful" until Bill Gazaway, then NASCAR's competition director, relented and let him in to held his dad.

He is no longer on the outside looking in.

In a family sport, Marlin became the third second-generation driver in the past three years to win the 500, joining Davey Allison and Dale Jarrett. That, too, explains why when tragedy strikes one, all hurt.

"We had a reality check this week," veteran driver Kenny Schrader said.

Spectacular crashes are part of auto racing. No one ever pretended this sport was safe. Rare is the driver who has not crawled from an upside-down race car. But that's the point.

Because drivers routinely escape the mangled remains of cars that have been stripped to steel rollcages by frightening tumbles, they build psychological barriers against the potential consequences of a life of chance.

Be assured, those shields began going up again through 1,350 miles of competition the final four days of Daytona's annual SpeedWeeks.

Two grinding, chain-reaction crashes punctuated the 500. One collected nine cars, the other five.

A 10-car pileup spiced the Goody's 300-mile Saturday feature won by Dale Earnhardt, the six-time Winston Cup champion who can't win the Daytona 500 but can't seem to lose anything else run on the 2.5-mile trioval.

And Dave Stacy, a 29-year-old Ohioan racing in NASCAR's Florida 200 for subcompacts, even flopped over a 6-foot-high embankment and actually splashed into the infield lake Friday.

But except for a cut or a bruise or a broken toe, drivers walked to ambulances, walked into the infield hospital and walked out. That, too, is part of the healing.

Bonnett, 47, epitomized the mind-set that makes it so difficult for drivers to divorce themselves from a daring vocation that addicts those who have found success in it.

An 18-time winner in Winston Cup racing, he knew every conceivable hazard and every imaginable pain of the sport that would not release its grip on him.

How much worse can it get than to crash and suffer head injuries so severe that for days afterwards you don't recognize your wife and kid and have to ask, "Who are they?" when your parents visit.

That happened in 1990 in Darlington, S.C. He didn't race again until the DieHard 500 last July at Talladega, Ala., after a thorough physical that included scrutiny by neurosurgeons. Even a terrifying airborne crash that ripped apart fencing in front of packed grandstands didn't discourage him.

Joe Gibbs, who coached the Redskins to three Super Bowl championships, owns 1993 Daytona 500 winner Dale Jarrett's team. He offered this perspective.

"Life is a constant weighing of the rewards and the risks," Gibbs says. "Here's a guy who had been out of the car, counted the costs and got back into one. To take the safe path, for a lot of us, is not quality life."

Bonnett had been most visible in recent years as an analyst on telecasts of stock car races. He was excellent. But it wasn't enough for him. So he came back. He told of shedding tears of joy on the cool-down lap after he qualified at Talladega late last year, overcome because he had signed for a limited six-race schedule this year.

He had an undying love of what he did. What he did killed him. But Neil Bonnett would not have borne a grudge.

Gary Long is a sportswriter for the Miami Herald.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Sporting News Publishing Co.
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