Arguably, there aren’t many personalities in NASCAR who have as many friends in the sport as Dale Earnhardt Jr., friends who aren’t necessarily just drivers and members of teams, but also those involved in other aspects of the sport. One such friend of Junior’s is Marty Smith, the prominent journalist best known for his work with ESPN. However, even a close friend as Smith one day found himself on the wrong side of Junior’s temper, so much so that what Junior said to him was on the lines of something his father would say.
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This was a story that Smith himself revealed a couple of years back on an episode of the Door Bumper Clear podcast. “In 2012, I did an interview with Jeff Gordon at Daytona. And I felt like I had prepared well for the interview and I wasn’t gonna let Jeff veer off the path I wanted the interview to go. And when that happened, I would cut Jeff off. I would steer it back my way,” he recalled.
“Well, I thought I was some kind of bada** because I thought it went really well.”
A couple of weeks later, after that piece aired, Smith found himself looking for a quick interview with Dale Earnhardt Jr. after the race at New Hampshire. But before he could approach Junior, the #88 driver summoned him. He described, “So I walk over to him and he kinda pushes me up to the edge of the transporter and turns his back to the crowd and he goes, ‘You need to shut up.’ And I said, ‘Excuse me?'”
“He goes, ‘You need to shut up, man. You need to stop interrupting people.’ I said, ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ He goes, ‘I was watching that interview you did with Jeff, and there were things he was saying that I wanted to hear his opinion, I wanted him to finish and you cut him off. You need to stop cutting people off. It’s rude.'”
Dale Earnhardt Jr. pulled off a Dale Sr. moment, but it helped instead of intimidating
This thing that Dale Earnhardt Jr. to Marty Smith was what NASCAR spotter Brett Griffin, who is one of the co-hosts on that podcast, deemed as something one would expect from The Intimidator. “That’s a Dale Sr. moment for Dale Jr. That’s something that Dale Sr. would’ve done to somebody,” Griffin said.
However, the connotation of such a moment with Earnhardt Sr. would often be assumed to be one of those ‘Earnhardt moments.’ But in his son’s case, it came out from a place of advice, one which ended up affecting the recipient of the advice positively.
“It completely changed my approach because I stopped interviewing people with insecurity and I started interviewing people with confidence. Because when you’re willing to let someone ask open-ended questions and let someone tell you their story, then ultimately you have your mouth shut and your ears open and you’re listening,” Smith added. “And it was honestly one of the greatest things a friend could do for me.”
Having said that, Smith also claimed that Earnhardt Jr. hates it whenever he tells this story, the story when Dale Earnhardt Jr. asked his friend to shut up.
