Dale Earnhardt Jr. was recently on an episode of ‘I am Athlete’ podcast where he talked about his famous father, the great legend himself, Dale Earnhardt Sr.
According to Essentially Sports, During the interview with Brandon Marshall and Chad Johnson, Junior revealed that his father was too busy to guide him in his childhood.
“When I was 13 years old my dad was really focused on his own career. He wasn’t like gonna go out in the yard and play with me on a go-kart; he wasn’t going to do that kind of thing with me.”
Junior talked about a time when his dad gave him tough fatherly advice when it came to racing.
“He’d go to work at the shop in the morning and he’d come home at nine o’clock at night and sit down, sit on his recliner pop that thing back, and be asleep in 20 seconds. And so I didn’t have a lot of time to you know, pick his ear and say, hey what do I need to do? What should I be helping you?”
“I remember sitting on the couch and there’s pops in that recliner, nine o’clock at night, and I was like ‘dad I’m 13 and I can’t wait anymore, I can’t, it’s driving me crazy.”
“I want to race so bad I can’t stand it. I don’t know what to do and you don’t seem to get it like you don’t seem to understand how bad I want to do this,” Junior continued.
“One day I came into uh the shop and he threw a newspaper down on the table and there was a sports page from the charlotte observer that was talking about this new series and you could basically take a car off the street and put a roll cage in it and race it.”
“He said you ‘should figure out how to do this’. And so it took a couple hundred bucks I had me a car and we went, me and my brother went and started racing.”
