The interviews and footage that remain of Dale Earnhardt, the Hall of Fame NASCAR driver, paint a picture of an audacious, swaggering man who could charm and infuriate in the same moment. He was a superstar who reveled in villainy.
But it is an image of him away from the track that captivates Dale Earnhardt Jr.
It shows his father, most likely after a hunt, with his hands wrapped around a stag’s horns. The animal’s face rests against his dark jeans. He squints into the sunlight, wearing a Wrangler trucker hat. A T-shirt bearing the label of Jack Daniel’s, the whiskey brand, peeks out from beneath a flannel shirt.
This photo, Mr. Earnhardt said, was quintessentially his dad.
The racetrack was where Dale Earnhardt won stock-car championships and millions of fans. It was also where he suffered injuries that killed him in 2001, when he crashed on the last lap of the Daytona 500. Away from the track he was ruggedly masculine, an outdoorsman. He was also often absent from the lives of his three oldest children.
The photo is fixed to a door in a saloon that the younger Mr. Earnhardt built on his property in Mooresville, N.C., about two decades ago, when he was a wildly popular racecar driver, too. Soon that saloon became a full-fledged Old West town, designed as a place where Mr. Earnhardt could party without leaving his house and being subjected to the harsh glare that fame invites. It has a hotel, a chapel and a jail with two cells. The whole thing looks like it’s right out of “The Andy Griffith Show.”
As Mr. Earnhardt grew older — he is now 50 — he stopped visiting the town so often. Then he got married and had two daughters, and the Old West town came back to life.
The door on which his father’s photo hangs leads to a hallway filled with more recent photos. There is Mr. Earnhardt, along with his wife, Amy, and their daughters — Isla, 7, and Nicole, 4 — dressed up for Easter, dressed up for one daughter’s second birthday, dressed as characters from the movie “Toy Story.” (Mr. Earnhardt wore a Woody costume, and didn’t take much persuading to put it on, his wife said.)
He is trying to break a family cycle of distant fathers. His grandfather Ralph Earnhardt was a racecar driver who never gave his son Dale the attention he craved. Dale grew up to do the same with his own children — at least the three eldest of the four.
“I’m sure with his grandkids he would have probably been everything, the father that we were wanting him to be,” Mr. Earnhardt said in his thick North Carolina accent one afternoon, sitting in the saloon with his sister Kelley Earnhardt Miller. “That doesn’t mean I have hard feelings.”
“Or regrets,” Mrs. Earnhardt Miller said.
“Or regrets,” Mr. Earnhardt agreed.
Creative Control
Despite their complicated feelings, Mr. Earnhardt and Mrs. Earnhardt Miller, 52, have made themselves unofficial stewards of their father’s legacy. Their latest project to that end is “Earnhardt,” a docuseries that recently debuted on Amazon’s Prime Video in conjunction with the start of the streaming giant’s NASCAR broadcasts. (The racing league signed a seven-year deal worth $1.1 billion a year with its TV partners, which also include Fox, NBC and Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent company of TNT.) Mr. Earnhardt has signed on as a commentator for the 10 races that Prime Video and TNT will show this summer.
The docuseries is part of Amazon’s strategy to pair creative work with its exclusive live sports broadcasts, which it began in 2022. For instance, the streamer will offer a documentary about Allen Iverson alongside its National Basketball Association coverage. It also presented a documentary about the Philadelphia Eagles’ All-Pro center, Jason Kelce, at the start of the 2023 National Football League season in conjunction with a broadcast of an Eagles game, and a documentary about the former Detroit Lions running back Barry Sanders around the time it streamed a Lions game.
The Earnhardt docuseries, produced by Imagine Documentaries, Dan Lindsay and TJ Martin and directed by Joshua Altman, spends time on Dale Earnhardt’s relationship with his own distant father and his rise as a racecar driver. It details how his aggressive style often irked his opponents. He became a villain in the sport, but that earned him fans as well. Sponsors enjoyed his unrefined persona and charm. He became a crossover star, appearing on the talk shows of Oprah Winfrey, Jay Leno and David Letterman.
The way he died particularly struck the filmmakers.
“I was like, wow, this is like a Greek tragedy,” Mr. Altman said.
Others have told the life story before. The two most prominent versions were a scripted movie, “3: The Dale Earnhardt Story,” which ESPN released in 2004, and “Dale,” a documentary narrated by Paul Newman and released in 2007, which focused on his ambitions and anxieties about his future.
Mr. Earnhardt liked “Dale” so much that when he and his wife were dating, he asked her to watch it to learn more about his father.
But he still felt that there was more to say.
“I know Dad as ‘The Intimidator,’ the seven-time champion, ‘Man in Black,’” Mr. Earnhardt said, using two of his father’s nicknames. “But what I don’t really know about Dad is the new father, the struggling parent. The guy going paycheck to paycheck, making lots of terrible decisions, you know.”
Mrs. Earnhardt Miller said having some creative control was important for her and her brother for any projects in which they would participate. In recent years, it has become more common for celebrities, including athletes like David Beckham and Michael Jordan, to have a say in documentary projects about their lives or careers.
“There’s so many benefits,” said Brett Rapkin, a documentary filmmaker who did projects with the swimmer Michael Phelps, the skier Bode Miller and the basketball player DeMar DeRozan. “You’re getting access. You’re getting, hopefully, authenticity. You’re going to be asking them for their archives, home movies of them as a child, photos and access to their network.”
Gotham Chopra, a filmmaker who has worked with Tom Brady and Kobe Bryant, said he sometimes told his subjects that a project was not worth doing if they weren’t willing to discuss uncomfortable topics.
“We’re living in a world where everyone’s kind of sniffing that out — is this a vanity piece?” Mr. Chopra said.
Still, the subject’s or family’s involvement does change the final product.
Daniel Durbin, director of the Institute of Sports, Media and Society at the University of Southern California, said he had two primary concerns. The first is that only “stories the family is comfortable telling” will be presented. The second is that the family will “air their laundry” as an act of revenge. (He said he didn’t see particular evidence of either in this docuseries.)
Life Without Him
Mr. Earnhardt was shy and small growing up. Not the life of the party that his father was. He was keenly aware that racing was the top priority in his father’s life.
The son began racing at age 17. But only when he proved he was serious about the sport did his father start to really notice him. They raced against each other in NASCAR’s Cup Series. Their fans loved it.
Mr. Earnhardt’s father lived to see two of the 26 Cup races that he would win in his career.
On the last lap of the 2001 Daytona 500, Dale Earnhardt’s car crashed into the wall on the outside edge of the track. Another driver, Ken Schrader, couldn’t avoid slamming into the passenger side.
Mr. Earnhardt was racing that day, too. The docuseries details his trip to the hospital, where he saw doctors working busily around his father. He recalled being told that his father had died and returning to the hospital room to see his father alone with his stepmother, Teresa, who looked devastated.
It seemed to him that there was nothing left for him to do at the hospital. So Mr. Earnhardt, 26 at the time, went back to the place most familiar to him — the racetrack.
“I really had a minute to sit down and really think about, like, this is really happening,” he said during the interview in the saloon. “What does the rest of my life look like? How am I going to do this without him? How can I?”
He got back to racing the very next week and raced for 16 more years, a career that landed him in the NASCAR Hall of Fame along with his father.
Since then, he has built a media career as a broadcaster, a podcaster and the owner of a production company. He especially loves telling stories about racing history.
For Mrs. Earnhardt Miller, talking about her father again during the making of the documentary made her realize how many of her questions about his death remained unanswered.
“I want to know exactly what happened,” she said in an interview. “I’ve never looked into why he died. I’ve heard things. Was it a seatbelt? Was it this, was it that? I want to ask Kenny Schrader. I want to hear his version of going up to it.”
In the years that followed the crash, others sought more information, too. Teresa Earnhardt was consumed by a fight to keep her husband’s autopsy photos away from the press — The Orlando Sentinel had requested access in order to evaluate them to determine his cause of death.
The relationship between her and her stepchildren had often been tense, and that didn’t change.
Mr. Earnhardt continued racing for his father’s team, then run by his stepmother. In the docuseries, Mrs. Earnhardt Miller discusses feeling that Teresa Earnhardt wasn’t equipped to act in her brother’s best interest during that time, so Mrs. Earnhardt Miller took a pay cut to work for him and protect his future. She has managed his business affairs ever since.
But the docuseries never delves into some of the more dramatic moments, like the time Mr. Earnhardt accused his stepmother of not paying him, or when she accused him of being more interested in being a rock star than a racer. The series ends before Mr. Earnhardt left the team his father built after the 2007 racing season.
“I think there’s a whole other film series potentially that could be made that follows the events from 2001 on,” said Mr. Altman, the director. He said that the filmmakers had asked about those issues during the interviews but that they thought the subject was too much of a diversion. “I think it’s all fascinating, and for us it sort of had the makings of something like ‘Succession,’” he added.
Before filming started, Mr. Earnhardt and Mrs. Earnhardt Miller gave producers a list of people they thought would add to the story. Teresa Earnhardt and her daughter, Taylor, Dale Earnhardt’s youngest child, who is 36, were on it. “I thought maybe it might give us an opportunity to communicate,” Mr. Earnhardt said. But neither participated. Efforts to reach them for this article were unsuccessful.
Their father’s grave is on their stepmother’s property, but Mr. Earnhardt and his sister don’t visit it because of the estrangement. The mausoleum has room for six, he said, but he is no longer certain he will be buried there.
On the Saturday morning before flying to Nashville for a race broadcast, Mr. Earnhardt was at a dance recital. The man whose father rarely told him he loved him tells his daughters every day. The openness with which he can now talk about his father is somewhat new.
“I thought I wanted a son, and it’s not in the cards for me. It’s not what was my destiny,” Mr. Earnhardt said. “And I’m actually very OK with that.”
His sister put a finer point on it: “The shadow of being an Earnhardt and a boy is so much different than being a girl under the shadow of being an Earnhardt.”
Mrs. Earnhardt-Miller’s youngest, Wyatt Miller, 13, has taken up the family trade. Most stories about his racing mention that he is Dale Earnhardt’s grandson.
Mr. Earnhardt’s older daughter, Isla, has said she isn’t interested in racing.
But a few weeks ago, 4-year-old Nicole had a race day at her school. She and her classmates wore little homemade racecars around their waists and ran around a room the school had made into a track. Nicole won the race.
“That has ignited Dale’s excitement,” his wife, Amy, said.
Tania Ganguli writes about money, power and influence in sports and how it impacts the broader culture.
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