George Diaz: At 80, Richard Petty remains King of the Road

Sometimes, ever so rarely, someone doesn’t recognize The King as he walks along NASCAR’s assorted security checkpoints.

“Excuse me sir, I need to see your credential,” they will say.

Richard Petty always fires back with a spot-on answer: “My face is my credential.”

Take a look, because it is timeless. Decades of historic markers, wonderful memories, devastating ones, bumps and bruises, broken bones and a twice-broken neck, a walking monument casting a reflection of NASCAR history.

The face that launched the sport from bootleggers’ back roads into the living rooms of modern suburbia. The face that has witnessed adoration of Presidents across party lines, from Carter to Reagan to the Bushes.

The face that has smiled proudly, cherishing a record 200 victories, seven Cup championships and seven Daytona 500 wins. The face that has cried, mourning the loss of a beloved grandson, and a doting wife of 55 years.

After celebrating his 80th birthday on Sunday, Richard Petty still gives us a blueprint on how to weather oncoming storms, and how to bask in the sunlight without letting it blind us.

They call him The King for a reason. Petty’s throne has been the seat of a stock-car. Southern Royalty in a firesuit.

That Cup record of 200 victories will never be broken. Neither will a ridiculous run of 10 consecutive victories in 1967, a year in which Petty won 27 out of 48 races. His seven titles ties him for best of all-time beside Dale Earnhardt and Jimmie Johnson.

He’s driven everything from hardtops to convertibles. Chevrolets, Pontiacs, Fords, all branded in baby blue with those STP stickers and the iconic number 43.

“If you bought a ‘43’ shirt 20 years ago, that baby is still relevant,” said former NASCAR rival Darrell Waltrip, and a fellow NASCAR Hall of Famer.

Petty remains relevant because he makes people feel good. An iconic speedracer who treats everybody like kinfolk. He signs as many as 600 autographs a day, whether it’s a drive-by deal while walking along pit road, or sitting in his office at the compound in Level Cross, North Carolina. “I keep Sharpie in business,” he said.

He takes a visitor along for a nostalgic ride for a tour of the Richard Petty Museum, a piece of a catch-all history of the Petty legacy. The adjoining property – part of a 500-acre spread – also includes Petty’s Garage, where customers can get their old cars refurbished and rebuilt, down to the last original detail.

It also includes the “Reaper Shed,” where his father Lee Petty started a racing empire on the foundation of a dirt floor. It’s was paved by Petty and his brother Maurice many years ago. You can still see the spots where Lee Petty marked his initials on the uneven concrete floor, along with a RC Cola soda vending machine and a stray MoonPie that may be as hard as that concrete now.

It includes the wood frame white house where Petty was born on July 2, 1937. A rocking chair still rests on the porch. That house, along with the original race shop, are designated historical landmarks.

And if you walk a few miles down the road, you will fight back tears as you approach the Victory Junction Gang Camp, a welcoming safe-place for children with traumatic illnesses or disabilities. It stands as a celebration of the life of Petty’s grandson Adam, who died from a skull fracture after the accelerator of his car got stuck and he crashed into a wall at New Hampshire in 2000. He was only 19.

From Victory Junction, you can hop on a golf cart and reach Petty’s expansive ranch-style home where he now lives, complete with a few buffaloes and cattle, reflecting the spoils of a man whose estimated net worth is now around $65 million.

Every penny has been earned. The King started with nothing, a poor man’s son. Racing was the family business. His grandfather raced. His father raced. He would race too, learning to drive on the family farm when he was a five-year-old, behind the wheel of an old Ford truck. “I would stand on the seat and hold the steering wheel straight and they would put it in really low gear,” Petty said. “When I got to the end of the road they would jump in and turn it around. I didn’t drive it I just held it, you know what I mean?”

He competed in his first race on July 18, 1958, just 16 days after his 21st birthday. The years rolled by and his prowess grew. The success was equal parts organic and calculated.

“The Petty family, because of Lee, approached the sport differently than anybody else,” Waltrip said. “They were professional racers.”

“I remember back in the 1970s when I started, I’d look at Richard’s car and every week it looked like it rolled off the showroom floor. Everybody else’s cars were beat up. They’d put sheet metal on it and spray some paint over some dents. Not the Pettys. Their cars were immaculate, well prepared and they were the class of field.”

Petty raced until 1992, wrecking at Atlanta, his car catching on fire. He still drove the thing, looking for a fire truck to put out the flames. “The guys got out and wanted an autograph,” Petty said. “I had a few choice words for them. You always hear about people going out in a blaze of glory. I just went out in a blaze.”

Petty retired, becoming the front man for his Petty Motorsports race team, but mostly, he just remained the face of the sport. No other athlete – with the possible exception of Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus in golf – exemplifies a sport more than Petty.

“He’s leaving a legacy that won’t even be touched by any other driver,” said Brad Keselowski, the 2012 Cup champion. “Maybe any athlete in the sports world.”

Best of all, as Keselowski also noted, he’s still here, doing this thing at 80. Petty doesn’t dawdle. There’s the museum and all the other obligations entangled along the vast property. The race shop is about 70 miles across I-85 in Mooresville.

He helps raise money for Victory Junction yearly by joining his son in a 2,400-mile journey on a motorcycle for the Kyle Petty Charity Ride from Portland, Oregon, to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He had to cut the trip short by a few days this year after one of Petty’s drivers, Aric Almirola, was injured in a race.

Through it all, Petty mostly fends for himself despite his expansive digs. He’s been riding solo since cancer took the life of his beloved bride, Lynda Petty, in March of 2014. She was 72.

They had been together forever. She was 17 and he was 21 when they married. Her parents – who disapproved of a poor boy in the racing profession – didn’t know they were married for three months. Lynda kept living at home before they broke the news.

“That didn’t go over real good,” Petty said. “Once we told them what we were doing it was fine. It was a surprise. But they welcomed me into the family.”

Their loving legacy includes four kids, 12 grandkids and five great grandkids.

Petty has soldiered on admirably without her. He likes to cook steaks for dinner, and supplements them with an assortment of celery and onions and peppers that he cuts up at the beginning of the week, putting leftovers in a plastic bag.

Petty has been rail-thin for years now, weighing around 160 pounds. After suffering through major gastro problems, Petty had surgery in 1978 to removed 40 percent of his stomach, ravaged with ulcers.

The rest of the profile is iconic: The mustache, sunglasses and the Charlie 1 Horse hat with feathers tucked in place. A hearing aid helps him cope with partial deafness. He is hard to miss, and a magnet in every NASCAR garage area.

Fans adore him. The adoration has more to do with his connection to people than all the victories. These days, many athletes look to put a price tag on their signature, tapping into the memorabilia market. Never Petty.

He’s always had time for fans, whether it was hanging out along pit road walls for hours after a race, or kindly stepping away from the family table at suppertime, when people would show up, unannounced, at his home. Petty always obliged, politely meeting them at the door, posing for a picture on the front porch, then walking back to the dinner table to rejoin his family.

“Those are the people who put me in business,” Petty said.

Richard Petty is still in business. A living landmark, just like those historical properties that bear the family name.

That credential remains hanging on a door in his motor coach, as it’s been for years. Petty said he can always ask somebody to fetch it, in case some naive kid working security needs a refresher on NASCAR history.