Fellow Winston Cup driver Michael Waltrip on Gordon: "He's good-looking, he wins races, he's got money. He's a good guy to hate." (AP)

By Sally Jenkins
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 18, 2001; Page D1

People want to mess Jeff Gordon up. They want to start with his aerodynamically imperturbable hair. Since they can't reach his hair, they settle for hurling boos down on his head. Gordon accepts this as his lot; it is the price for looking too good and winning too much in a sport that, despite its many modern innovations, features a race named the Pork The Other White Meat 400.

Maybe stock-car fans would like Gordon better if he got his fingernails dirty and his chin greasy, or better yet, failed more often. But he can only be his tidy little self, and so he does what comes naturally to him. "If the car is fast, I want to drive it to the front," he says. "I could be racing my wife, and I don't want to be second."

Gordon, 30, has six victories this season and he is expected to officially clinch yet another Winston Cup title today in the Atlanta 500. It will be his fourth title in seven years, a fact that further enrages his detractors, who consider him an outsider in the rural, working-class-based stock-car culture. "He's good-looking, he wins races, he's got money," Michael Waltrip says. "He's a good guy to hate."

But Gordon's fourth title has been his most slow in coming, and, oddly, his most convincing. Last season, for the first time in his career, the perpetually immaculate and suave Gordon faltered. He won just three races and finished ninth in the Winston Cup standings – his worst showing in five years. His determined rebound in 2001 may at last persuade race fans to relent in their judgment (shared by some competitors), that he is a privileged son and sleek corporate peddler to whom things came too easily. "I heard it for years, people saying that it was given to me," he says, "that it was easy, that I was in the best equipment, 'Aw, I could do that.'‚"

The enmity toward Gordon is based in the notion that stock-car drivers are supposed to be reared in the south, work-toughened and self-made men who build their own cars. Instead, Gordon's career smacks of prodigy-dom. He was born in Vallejo, Calif., and raised in Pittsboro, Ind., where he was hand-fed racing and financed by his devoted stepfather, John Bickford. "They might be right to a point," Gordon says. "Some of that came from inside the garage. They knew I didn't know a lot about stock cars. I just drove the wheels off the thing."

Gordon has been driving the wheels off of vehicles since he climbed into a Big Wheel as a toddler. Bickford, who helped rear Gordon from the age of 1, remembers the heart-stopping site of Gordon, little more than a baby, hurtling down a steep hill near their home in Vallejo on his Big Wheel, and whipping it in circles. He sped down the hill in a fire engine, and on a skateboard. By the time he was 4, he was racing BMX dirt bikes. "Everyone else was on training wheels," Gordon says.

He was 5 when Bickford, a machine shop owner who was a frustrated speed demon himself, came home one afternoon with a junky, broken down Quarter Midget.

Gordon and Bickford spent the next several weeks tinkering with the car until they got it running. Then they took it to a vacant fairground, where Bickford dug out a track with a shovel. Gordon started up the engine and tore around in circles. "I just went till I stalled the thing," Gordon says.

Bickford doesn't claim to be prescient. "When they're 5, you don't see a Winston Cup champ, even with glasses on," he says. But he does admit that by the time Gordon was 7, it occurred to him that he might be raising a future racecar driver. Gordon was small – he's only 5 feet 7 and 150 pounds. "He wasn't going to be a football player, or a baseball player, and he for sure wasn't going to be a basketball star," Bickford says. "Drivers are not notoriously big and I knew that."

By the time he was 8, Gordon was the national champion in Quarter Midgets, and when he was 11, he won 25 straight races in Go-Karts division. As a teenager he entered sprint cars, and dominated those, too. "Success is an addiction like a drug or a food," Bickford says. "You win a little, and you say, maybe I can win a lot. And then you win a lot and you feel like you've failed if you don't win everything. It came stacked, one right after the other. He would succeed at anything I threw at him."

While Gordon's classmates went on dates and played basketball, he worked in the garage. With Bickford pushing him, he spent every weekend at the track, and every afternoon after school in the machine shop. "For a while, he was Hitler to me," Gordon says. "I was wanting to be a kid."

Instead, he spent hours practicing, working on the precision movements and rhythms of driving. His mother would drive alongside him and wave flags, so he could practice starts. Bickford now says, "To me if we could educate people as to what he's done, how he gave up his entire childhood to go racing, and that's why he's succeeded at young age, maybe they'd have less of a tendency to boo him."

By the time Gordon was a senior at Tri-West High School, his classmates were wearing his T-shirts, and it was clear he was going racing instead of going to college. After graduation he spent just one season dominating the sprint circuit before he was joined the Hendrick Motorsports team. On Nov. 15, 1992, Gordon made his Winston Cup debut, in the same race that was Richard Petty's last. Stock-car fans hated him almost on sight.

They didn't like his clean jaw and upturned nose, or his neat A-frame of a physique. Or the robotic way he won races – he has claimed roughly one of every five he has entered. Or the way he scooped up and married Miss Winston, the lovely Brooke Sealy.

"He got in that situation early, and he never spun his tires," Waltrip says. "He won early and it made him get good in a hurry."

There was rampant jealousy of the young interloper in the garage. "You start beating up on the established stars, people think it's not too cool," Waltrip says. It was said that his success was because of his master mechanic and crew chief Ray Evernham, the real hands-on talent in the operation.

When the boos came, Gordon was baffled. "At the beginning I didn't understand it," he said. "I was like, man, what did I do to tick these people off? The more I won, the louder the boos got."

But one afternoon at Daytona in 1993, Gordon received a crucial piece of advice from a fellow driver he revered. He was riding on a tractor with Dale Earnhardt, who was alternately beloved and berated by fans. Boos were raining down on Gordon's head again, and more than a few on Earnhardt's, too. Earnhardt said, "As long as they're making noise, that's what matters most. If they don't make any noise at all, that's when it's a bad day."

Gordon learned the truth of that last season, his most quiet as a Winston Cup driver. For the first time in 10 years, Gordon was without Evernham, who departed to start his own Winston Cup team. When Gordon couldn't seem to perform without Evernham, there was quiet satisfaction in the garage and in the stands, where it was taken as his comeuppance.

"I wish they'd boo again, because they only boo when I'm winning," a disheartened Gordon said to Bickford.

Gordon's new chief was Robbie Loomis, who'd had his doubts about leaving Petty Enterprises and going to work for Gordon. He mulled over the boo factor for a few days, wondering if he should take the job. "I'm like, there's a lot of people out there who aren't Jeff Gordon fans," he admits. But Loomis made up his mind after talking to Kyle Petty. "What is it people don't like about him?" Loomis asked. Kyle Petty said, "Jeff is a great guy, but nobody cares for him because he's a winner."

Loomis now says, "If you took any race fan and put them in room with all 43 drivers for 10 minutes, when they walked out every one would be a Jeff Gordon fan."

But just because Loomis liked Gordon didn't mean that they worked well together at first. After 10 years, Gordon was extremely attuned to Evernham, and with Evernham, Gordon also lost 15 of 34 crew members. It took months for Gordon and Loomis and the new crew members to develop a rapport.

"The biggest thing was developing the line of communication and confidence in each other," Loomis says. "We had a lot of new things in place, and it takes awhile before everyone believes in one another. There was a lot of, 'Why is he asking me to do that?' You can see when you don't have it all working, you can tell if they're going along with it 100 percent or not. It was a matter of everyone working together and working toward a common goal. I used a simple analogy: Last year, if one guy spilled a drink, three guys would be laughing at him. This year, one guy spills a drink and three guys help him clean it up."

According to Bickford, Gordon and Loomis finally learned to interpret each other. "Jeff lets the car talk to him, have its head, and he communicates what he feels back to Robbie," Bickford says. "Robbie has to makes sense of it, break it down. It took Robbie a year to learn Jeff's language."

The results speak for themselves: Gordon started the 2001 season with 11 top-10 finishes in his first 16 races. In one flurry he finished third or better in six of seven starts. He has had the title firmly in his grip ever since.

Gordon's strength as a driver, according to Loomis, lies in his intimate knowledge of the racecar. It's not the mechanical knowledge possessed by a Rusty Wallace – Gordon knows more engineering than some and less than others. What Gordon has is something more important, which is an almost princess-and-the-pea sensitivity to a car's performance, and the ability to articulate it to his crew.

"Gordon is the number one driver in the world in coming off the track and describing what he feels the car doing," Loomis says. "He can find the edge of the tire better than anyone. When he talks to you about the car he can make you feel every little part of the track. He makes you a part of the car, makes you ride in it with him. He's probably seventh or 10th in knowing the racecar a 100 percent, technically. But when you take his number one feel and ability to relate it to the guys who know the engineering part of it, it makes him hard to beat."

Once, at Pocono, Gordon radioed Loomis, "The car is real tight across the tunnel turn." Loomis was just starting to consider what to do about that, when Gordon's voice came through again. "Don't mess with the car, I think it's just the wind." Loomis looked up at a flagpole – and saw the wind ruffling the flag.

Gordon says, "I've been driving a car since I was 5. I hope by now I'm good at it." There is more to it than that, of course, just as his success never came as easily as it seemed to. He can lose as much as eight pounds during a race, and his concentration is such that by the time he crosses the finish line, "My eye sockets ache." These things are not obvious to the casual fan. But the discerning one is beginning to catch on, and to acknowledge that Gordon, with 58 career victories and counting, is a deserving and a dominant champion. He may even be the most important driver since Petty.

"One thing this year has done is earn me a lot more respect inside the garage area and out," Gordon says. "They finally saw me struggle."

So he got a little messed up. "Looking back, it was good for me," he says.