The ties that drive

Sporting News, The, August 6, 2001 by Lee Spencer

"We didn't run well enough to race for food," Tony Eury Sr. says. "My daddy was a plumber. We were all just weekend warriors. And when Ralph (Earnhardt) died in 1973, my father lost all interest in racing."

By then the die had been cast. The Earnhardts and Eurys were intertwined, and Dale Earnhardt and Tony Eury had begun their own dirt-racing careers.

When he was 18, Earnhardt was married and the father of a son, Kerry. Earnhardt worked at garages and in a textile factory to support his family and racing habit. After a divorce, Earnhardt began dating Brenda Gee, the daughter of well-known car builder Robert Gee.

At some point, Earnhardt mentioned to Tony Eury that Brenda had a good-looking sister named Sandra. Sure enough, Earnhardt married Brenda and Eury married Sandra. Both marriages ended in divorce, but the next generation of racers--Kelley Earnhardt, Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Tony Eury Jr.--was born. The racing heritage of those children is mind-boggling. A brief example:

Kelley and Dale Jr. regularly visited Granddaddy Gee with their mother. Later, as a relationship grew between twice-divorced Dale and Teresa Houston, the children gathered with Teresa's father, Hal, a racecar driver, and his brother, Tommy Houston, a Hickory Motor Speedway track champion.

Teresa and Dale married in 1982. She became CEO of Dale Earnhardt Inc. and has been a guiding force in Junior's career. (One of his first thank-yous went to Teresa after the triumph at Daytona.)

Over the years, the children got to know many famous figures in racing, but the glory and glamour extended only so far. Because their father and Teresa had a demanding travel schedule, the kids often were in the charge of nannies and sitters. They could have drifted apart; instead, Kelley and Dale Jr. grew exceptionally close.

Kelley was always there for Junior. Even when he was shipped off to military school in the late '80s, she went, too, making sure he felt safe in his new surroundings. To be sure, there were no handouts in the Earnhardt world. All three children worked at their father's Chevrolet dealership, and Kelley held other jobs as well.

"He was smaller than other people in his grade, and he was shy," Kelley says of her brother. "People always walked over him and didn't treat him with respect....

"I was the only Dale Jr. came to when he needed to talk or, actually more often, when he needed money. I used to do his chores to keep him out of trouble."

As is the case with many blended or separated families, children don't always understand the relationships between kin. When they were kids, Kelley and Dale Jr. lived near their half-brother, Kerry, and his mother and stepfather in Kannapolis, but they thought of him "as just another kid" Kerry spent time with Dale's sisters, Kaye and Cathy Earnhardt, but he seldom saw his famous father.

Despite the early confusion, once the three Earnhardt children established a bond, it was as if they never had lived apart. For a time, Kerry and Dale Jr. shared a single-wide trailer on the Earnhardt farm, and all three siblings raced against each other in late models.