Florence County: Cale Yarborough wins off track, too

By BOB SPEAR - bspear@thestate.com

FLORENCE — The caller asked for a few minutes of his time, and Cale Yarborough obliged, setting up an appointment for a Monday morning in May.

Another fan, the stock-car legend figured, and he made a note on his calendar.

After all, although he has not raced in two decades, Yarborough receives numerous requests for autographs. “I get letters every day from all over the world,” he says.

The visitors, a couple from Louisiana, turned out to be fans, all right, but they brought out another side of one of South Carolina’s most treasured athletes. They appreciated Yarborough from a different perspective.

His three championships and 83 victories and all the other records matter, but something else mattered more.

“He had been in the hospital when I visited the troops in Vietnam in 1968,” Yarborough says. “They had seen me on television while I was at Daytona (in February), and she took it upon herself to call me.

“She said her husband had told her, ‘If it’s the last thing I ever do, I want to shake that man’s hand for what he did.’ That was 40 years ago, and she said my visit still meant so much to him.”

The admiration was mutual. Yarborough remembers he did not think too much about the significance of the government’s invitation then, but his attitude changed.

“The visit did as much for me as it did for the guys I saw,” he says in recalling stops at hospitals, on aircraft carriers and other outposts. “I told them I was 5-foot-7 went I went over there and 10 feet tall when I came home. That’s the way I felt.”

Conquering the ‘old’ track. He had felt 10 feet tall earlier in 1968, on the Labor Day afternoon he conquered mean, old Darlington to win the first of his five Southern 500s.

“I wouldn’t take anything in the world for winning that race,” he says. “That was my favorite win.”

It came in the last race before officials changed the banking and took some of the teeth out of racing’s toughest superspeedway.

Drivers who congregated at Darlington the past few days discovered a friendlier Darlington, thanks to a newly paved surface. The racing, Yarborough figures, would be faster with more traction and less tire wear.

“Darlington will always bite you,” he says, “but it’s not the same and hasn’t been the same since 1969. After Jeff Gordon tied my record with five Southern 500 wins, I told him, ‘Boy, you’re way behind. You never won on the old track and you have to win several more to catch up with me.’”

Ah, the old track. If the ribbon of asphalt the drivers have challenged the past 40 years has been rattlesnake-mean, imagine the original.

“The Darlington Stripe originated at the old track,” Yarborough says. “When you would go into what were then turns 3 and 4 (now 1 and 2 under the reconfigured layout), you had to let the back end of the car hit the guard rail all the way around if you wanted any speed at all.

“There was a guard rail, not a cement wall. You’d go bump, bump, bump all through the turns. You had to hit the wall, and everybody had a Darlington Stripe.”

What drivers call a Darlington Stripe now does not compare. Today’s “stripe” is scraping the wall.

“It’s a different world, in racing and at Darlington,” he says. “I loved Darlington, wanted to win there more than anywhere else. I hated it, too. That old race, that was tough, tough, tough.”

Starting at the bottom. The drivers from those days had to be tough, tough, tough, too. Rather than receiving quality equipment at an early age, they had to claw their way up the ladder.

“I started racing in a Soap Box Derby when I was 10,” Yarborough says. “I built my first car, a 1935 Ford, when I was 15 and started racing at the quarter-mile track over in Sumter.”

Today’s drivers gain early experience in go-karts and, Yarborough says, “They’re pros by the time they’re 15. We had to prove ourselves before anybody would give us any good stuff.”

“Good stuff” came to Yarborough from, among others, the Wood Brothers and Junior Johnson, and his 83 wins rank fifth on the career list. He is the only driver to win three consecutive championships, a feat achieved from 1976-78.

“I got to winning, and people noticed,” he says. “I went up and up. Racing started out to be a hobby, ended up being a profession.”

He also took a shot at open-wheel racing, competing four times in the Indianapolis 500.

“Those (Indy) cars are so much easier to drive that it’s not funny,” Yarborough says. “They build Indy cars to race. It’s like building an airplane; you build it to fly. Stock cars, you have to work to make them a race car.”

If he could be commissioner for a day, he would mandate that stock cars would resemble their brands.

“They call them Fords or Chevrolets or Dodges or Toyotas, but they don’t look like Fords and Chevrolets,” he says. “They had an old slogan, ‘Win on Sunday and sell on Monday.’ Well, the race cars on Sunday don’t look like the cars on Monday.”

A moment to treasure. Yarborough, 67, can be found these days at either his automobile dealership in Florence or working his 4,000-acre farm close to where he grew up near Sardis.

“I’m going to finish that pond this summer,” he promised in discussing a long-term farm project.

Meanwhile, his dealership is in the early stages of an eight-month remodeling project.

He keeps up with racing scene, but he watches races on television. He “fought the crowds for too many years” to make the trek to tracks. However, night races present a problem.

“They’re great, but I can’t stay awake,” he says and laughs. “I try to watch all I can, but after a day’s work and a little supper, I will doze off (during the race) then wake up for the finish.

“I did go to Daytona this year (with former 500 champions), and I’m glad I did. I got to visit with a lot of old buddies.”

Memories flowed at the reunion and prompted another moment he will always treasure.

“I walked up to a hospital bed in Vietnam, and the guy was reading a racing magazine,” Yarborough says. “I spoke to him, he looked at me, then back at the magazine and then to me again. He was reading an article about me.

“He said, ‘You’re a man who could be anywhere in the world. What are you doing here?’ I said, ‘I came to see you.’ He cried a while and I cried a while. Those are things you never forget.”

That’s a side of Cale Yarborough to remember, too.

Reach Sports Editor Bob Spear at (803) 771-8406.