The Tragic Truth About Dale Earnhardt Jr.

Dale Earnhardt Jr. has undeniably done very well for himself, spending nearly 30 years as a professional driver on the NASCAR racing circuit. With 27 wins to his credit including two checkered-flag finishes at the Daytona 500, NASCAR's flagship event, Dale Jr. is ranked 29th overall in the league's list of best-ever drivers and still enjoys status as stock car racing's sole third-generation champion. Those achievements aside, Dale Jr. had long performed against the star-spangled backdrop of his legendary father, Dale Earnhardt, a seven-time series champion dubbed "The Intimidator" by fans, the same base that called Dale Jr. "Little E" when he was an upstart struggling with his pedigree stereotype. "I just saw, even at an early age before I was a driver that growing up in that that man's shadow was going to be a real hard challenge," he remarked, per Racing News.

That changed when his father was killed during a Daytona 500 race in 2001, leaving Dale Jr. to carry on the family name. He's also witnessed friends lose their lives during competition and has cheated death himself in a racecar numerous times. But his life away from the track has also yielded plenty of other tragedies from fragile family relationships to mental illness. Still, kept all that under perspective when he retired from his beloved sport in 2017. "I guess what I'm saying is that I accomplished way more than I ever dreamed," he said to ESPN. "So I'm good."

Besides surviving a fire that leveled his family's home, the transition from living with his mother to occupying the same household as his father wasn't easy for Dale Earnhardt Jr. After all, he was only six years old at the time and with Dale Sr. on his way to becoming a NASCAR legend, he seldom interacted with his boy. "We just didn't have a relationship," Dale Jr. said to sports journalist Graham Bensinger. "We didn't do a lot of hanging out. We didn't communicate much unless he was telling me where to stand, or where to be, or what to fix, or what to clean up. We didn't go hunting together, he didn't take me on trips. Like when he would go do things, I was never like an idea or a consideration." 

Whatever moments the two had together were hardly heartwarming, as Dale Jr. felt that his father considered him to be a disappointment with a precarious future. On "The Joe Rogan Experience," he related one story about his father asking him to haul a bucket of feces, a task Dale Jr. couldn't complete because of the weight of the contents. "And I felt like that set the tone for our relationship," he said. "I feel like that was our relationship in a nutshell for most of my teenage years. You know, he looked at me, as you know, 'I don't know what he'll amount to.'" 

Flooring a stock car at speeds that exceed 200 mph on straightaways and heading into turn embankments as steep as 33 degrees (like Talladega's superspeedway) require intense focus, gritty determination, and a complete absence of fear. On all counts, Dale Earnhardt Jr. certainly had the right stuff while competing, but away from the track, he does have one phobia, and an unusual one at that. It's a fear of jewelry, something medical practitioners call kosmemophobia, a condition Dale Jr. has had since childhood. He blames it on his older sister Kelley who used to regularly terrorize the youngster with all sorts of those shiny accessories. "My sister used to chase me around the house with it, and it's creepy to me," he said at a NASCAR Media Day gathering, per Sporting News. "I can be in the same room with it and it doesn't bother me on other people. But if you watch Amy, she doesn't wear any, so that's a dead giveaway."

That phobia also turned into an obstacle when Dale Jr. was about to tie the knot with his better half Amy Reimann. "That was such a conversation between me and her as we were getting married. It's like I don't want to wear a ring. What are we gonna do?" he said in a promotion video for QALO, a ring manufacturer whose product Dale Jr. ultimately chose because its use of silicone materials didn't trigger his phobia.

In 2001, Dale Earnhardt Jr. had reason to celebrate when he finished second at NASCAR's flagship Daytona 500 behind teammate Michael Waltrip. But that joy turned into grief after finding out that his legendary father had slammed into the concrete guardrail in the final turn of the race. Distraught, Dale Jr. rushed to the hospital, where his worst fears were confirmed: Dale Earnhardt Sr. was dead. "I went back in my bus in the room and shut the door to my bedroom and just sat there," Dale Jr. told ESPN about what he did after hearing the news. "I thought to myself in that very moment, 'I'm gonna have to do this by myself.' The rest of my life. Having Dad was like a cheat sheet, like knowing all the answers to everything. And I was like, 'Man, I'm going to have to do this without that for the rest of my life.'"

Dale Jr. struggled with the loss, crashing his car the following week in Rockingham, later making it clear to the media about his mindset at the time. "I never wanted to see another racetrack or race car," he said, per Bleacher Report. A year later, he came to terms surrounding his father's death, telling the Daytona Beach News-Journal, "Instead of being sad about it, I think about all the awesome times we had and the good things we did and stuff he would be proud of today."

After impressive runs in the lower-tiered NASCAR Busch Series, Dale Earnhardt Jr. eventually won the respect of his father, who asked him to join his own racing company Dale Earnhardt Inc. (DEI) to compete in the top-ranked Winston Cup Series in 1998. Dale Jr. did well with DEI, winning 17 races on the Winston Circuit, but started floundering after 2004, his hottest year in NASCAR. Dale Jr. felt the answer lay in getting a controlling interest in DEI so that he could restructure it into a winning organization, but ran into conflict with stepmother Teresa Earnhardt, who inherited the team after Dale Sr. died in the 2001 Daytona 500. Negotiations were at a dead end and Teresa knew that Dale Jr. wasn't happy at DEI. "If Dale Jr. doesn't want to stick around here we'll make another Dale Jr.," she once remarked, per Whiskey Riff.

In 2007, Dale Jr. jumped ship for Hendrick Motorsports, where he would stay for a decade, although he only won nine races with the team. Dale Jr. believes things would have been different if he was able to connect with his stepmother. "We just didn't have much of a relationship," he said on "In Depth With Graham Bensinger." "And if opportunities were the same, I would have stayed. I don't know. It's hard to say, I can't even imagine what I would have done if things were different one way or the other." 

You'd be hard-pressed to find any NASCAR footage of a race that didn't involve a car crash. But while fatalities are rare (Dale Earnhardt Sr. was the last NASCAR driver to die during an event, back in 2001), injuries are still common, including concussions. Dale Earnhardt Jr. has admitted he's had as many as 25 concussions during his professional racing career, and often worried about the long-term effects of those shots to the head. "I'm real concerned about what this means for me as I get older," he said on "In Depth With Graham Bensinger." "You know, am I going to have issues with my memory and my personality? You know there are things that are gonna be affected, are they already affected? Just not aware of it..."

Dale Jr. pinpointed his most serious concussion to a 2012 race in Kansas, where a blown tire triggered a high-speed collision with a wall. Earnhardt sat out at least two subsequent races to keep an eye on his symptoms. "You really can't get a measurement of that until you're in the car," he said in "Beyond the Flag." "There's just no way of knowing until you can drive." After the umpteenth series of hits by 2016, Dale Jr. sought treatment from University of Pittsburgh Medical Center physician Michael Collins. "Micky told me that if I ever did have any issues that he could fix it," said Dale Jr. to People, "And I believe in that."