Preamble: The title comes from a book by Robert Sheffield’s 2010 novel “Talking to Girls About Duran Duran.” In the novel, he takes 25 pop songs from the 1980s and uses each song as a jumping off point to talk about his love of music and growing up in the 1980s. (If you’re more into hair metal than pop, you should also check out Chuck Klosterman’s 2001 book “Fargo Rock City.”) In “Talking to People Who Don’t Know NASCAR About Daytona, I’m going to take devote each entry in the series to one of my Top 10 favourite Daytona 500s. Instead of discussing who led what laps, etc. I’m going to describe to an audience (and probably a non-existence one) why I chose this particular race.
Andre Agassi once said “Image is everything!”
Let me tweak that phrase a little bit: An image is everything. On so many levels, an image will often mean more than reality. Often what really happened is distorted by the way it is presented, and sometimes an image is remembered long after the facts are forgotten.
For example, everyone (well, everyone who follows wrestling) remembers Mick Foley being tossed off the Hell in the Cell by the Undertaker at the 1998 King of the Ring. It, much like the 1979 Daytona 500, is considered one of the key moments in the history of his sport. What most people will probably ultimately forget (even with the benefit of YouTube) is that Foley being tossed off the Cell wasn’t the end of the match, but rather just the beginning (approximately two minutes into a 17-minute match). While many will point to that as being a key moment in Foley’s career, the move that took him from solid upper-mid-carder to legend and cement his status as one of the great performers who would go to any lengths to give the fans a great match and a great moment, few people remember is that Foley was working as a heel. Fans may watch that match today and cheer Foley, it was the Undertaker who was the face.
But again, the image of Mick Foley being tossed off the top of the Cell will be what people will remember about that match, long after they forget that he got up from the fall, wrestled for another 15 minute and ultimately lost to the Undertaker.
In this way, the Hell in a Cell Match at the 1998 King of the Ring is a lot like the 1979 Daytona 500. But one image is what people remember, more so than the facts of the event. Ask most race fans about the 1979 Daytona 500 and the image of Cale Yarborough and Bobby Allison grappling in the infield in turn 3 is the first thing they think of.
But that image has led to so many recollections of the 1979 Daytona 500 being wrong.
Let’s start off with, however, what memories have gotten right.
As I stated earlier, much like Foley’s fall off the Cell is for pro wrestling, many people view that race as a pivotal moment in NASCAR. 1979 was the first running of the Daytona 500 that would be aired live, flag to flag, on national television (CBC to be exact). “Back in the day,” most races, even the Daytona 500, were joined in progress for the final laps or shown in a summary format on shows like “Wide World of Sports” a week later. Keep in mind, this was before the advent of DVR/PVRs, Netflix, OnDemand, Pay Per View, DVD and Blu-Ray (or even VCRs) or 800 different channels on satellite or cable, so there wasn’t this mass amount of stuff to watch on TV on a Sunday afternoon.
And to complete the perfect storm, pardon the pun, a blizzard hits the entire eastern seaboard and into the Midwest of the U.S. (How massive was this storm? For the first time in recorded history, for approximately a half-hour, it snowed in the Sahara Desert.) So you’ve got this captive audience who has very few choices of what to do other than sit back and watch the Daytona 500. And by all accounts, this was a thrilling race with Buddy Baker on pole, and Neil Bonnett and a young Dale Earnhardt both leading laps.
However, it is not Baker or Bonnett or Earnhardt that people remember. That one image, of Allison vs. Yarborough, repeated over and over in any look back at the history of the Daytona 500 or NASCAR in general, that overshadows and distorts the rest of the story of the 1979 Daytona 500.
For those video histories of the Daytona 500 that show clips above and beyond The Fight, they will include the almost equally iconic image of Donnie Allison and Cale Yarborough slamming into each other as they flew down the backstretch. Donnie was out front but knew that Cale would try his patented slingshot to grab the lead. As Cale tried to pass, however, Donnie moved down for the block. Whether by design, his car getting loose or being too low on the track, Cale nips the back of Donnie’s car and then slams into the driver’s side door.
By this point, both cars are loose and swerving, making contact and colliding into each other until they head up into turn 3, Donnie basically T-boning Cale’s car as they crash into the wall before sliding down into the grass.
What people have forgotten is just who won the race: Richard Petty, for the sixth time, won the Daytona 500, holding off a strong challenge from Darrell Waltrip. The win broke a 45-race winless streak for Petty, who’d had surgery in the off-season and was told not to race at Daytona. The win had serious repercussions for the 1979 season. Because by almost as slim a margin as he finished ahead of Waltrip at Daytona, the King managed to snag the Winston Cup crown – his seventh and final – from DW. 11 points was all that separated the two competitors in the final standings.
What’s even relegated further back in the history of the race is A.J. Foyt might have won were it not for a split-second reaction to slow down when the caution light first came on. In modern-NASCAR and Indy-car racing of the day, a caution would immediately freeze the field and direct drivers to slow down to pace lap speed. But in 1979 (and for many years later), a caution on the last lap meant the field raced back to the start-finish line and the first car to take the flag (Petty) wins the race. When the Allison-Yarborough crash brought out the caution, Foyt’s Indy reflexes took precedent over this NASCAR background. (He was a 4-time Indy 500 winner after all, although he did win the 1972 Daytona 500 as well.) He slowed up for just a second, which allowed Petty and Waltrip to draft by him and race to the finish.
But as Petty’s victory celebration got underway, the cameras (and history, for that matter) turned their attention to “There’s a fight”, the call by Ken Squier. And sure enough there was…Bobby Allison and Cale Yarborough were grappling on the grass by Turn 3. And suddenly, history would only remember BOBBY Allison and Cale Yarborough battling, despite the fact that it had been DONNIE and Cale slamming into each other as they raced down the back stretch.
One more similarity between the 1979 Daytona 500 and the Hell in a Cell match at the 1998 King of the Ring, as I stated earlier, Foley survived the fall off the Cell, a moment where most people probably assumed he was finished, and continued on to have a memorable match with ‘Taker. Bobby and Donnie Allison and Cale Yarborough had all been involved in a crash early on in the 500 and went several laps down to the point where many probably assumed they were out of contention, yet Donnie and Cale made up the laps to compete for the win at the end. (Bobby remained one lap down at the finish.)
And so, the famed Fight at the 1979 Daytona 500 was not about the collision between Donnie and Cale, that’s just a great image for the media to show. (And hey, even I’ll admit it looks pretty cool.) It was actually about the crash that happened many laps earlier. As Cale got out of his wrecked car at the end of the race, he was looking for Bobby, who had stopped to see if his brother was all right and to give him a ride back to the pits. Cale blamed Bobby for the earlier wreck, and it was Cale who through the first punch at Bobby. Bobby has said that if he backed down, he’d be backing down the rest of his life, so he got out of the car and, to hear Bobby tell it, allowed Cale to beat on Bobby’s fist with his face.
Meanwhile, Donnie Allison, the man who might have otherwise been celebrating his Daytona 500 at that moment, was standing behind his brother, harmlessly swinging a helmet in Cale’s direction. And so it was that Donnie would always remain in the shadows of his brother and adversary when it came to the history books, almost a footnote in what has been dubbed the most important moment in NASCAR history and the sport’s first “water cooler” moment.
But while Bobby Allison and Cale Yarborough would both win the Daytona 500 multiple times and be inducted into the NASCAR Hall of Fame (Bobby in 2011, Cale in 2012), Donnie Allison would never win another Cup race and it has been said that his involvement in the wreck and the Fight –no matter how limited it was – cost him his career. He was unable to secure another quality ride and after a wreck in the 1981 Coca-Cola 600 (won, ironically, by his brother Bobby) his career was all but over, although he raced sporadically in Cup until 1988.
In the years since 1979, the legend of the Fight has grown. The sad part is that the image of two cars slamming into each other followed by the image of a fight between two drivers has distorted people’s perception of what really happened. The two men battling are not the two men who had the wreck just moments before, nor is the fight because of that particular wreck. And, in the grand scheme of things, the Fight has become more important, and better-remembered, than the win.
The Image Is Everything.
johnmilner.ca 