Even with his full-time driving days behind him, there are some things that Dale Earnhardt Jr. won’t let go of so easily when it comes to what he considers personal attacks from other NASCAR stars.
When Dale Earnhardt Jr. was at the height of his popularity, it’s hard to argue that he was anything but good for NASCAR. Yet Kevin Harvick did the fellow competitor equivalent of a hot take and tried to do just that last summer.
Last August, as you might recall, Harvick used part of his Happy Hours show on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio and pointed the finger at Junior’s popularity as one of the big factors that had caused NASCAR’s growth to stall out.
In Harvick’s mind, Junior simply hadn’t won enough races to warrant being the sport’s most popular driver year after year.
"So for me I believe that Dale Jr. has had a big part in stunting the growth of NASCAR because he’s got these legions of fans and this huge outreach of being able to reach these places that none of us have the possibility to reach. But he’s won nine races in 10 years at Hendrick Motorsports and hasn’t been able to reach outside of that. So I know that those aren’t the most popular comments, but those are real life facts that you look up and see on the stat sheet."
That was eight months ago, so you might think that Earnhardt Jr. has let that slight roll off him, especially since he wasn’t know for getting into a ton of feuds during his driving career. But as he told Dan Patrick on The Dan Patrick Show this week (via USA Today’s FTW), there was a personal dimension to those comments that make them hard to put behind him.
"The thing that Harvick said about me – what was it? Last year or the year before? – that stuff will stick, I think, for a really long time. That bothered me pretty bad."
Earnhardt also explained that even having Harvick clarify his comments, something he sort of already did, wouldn’t make any difference, because he perceived them as “a personal dig.”
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He’s right. It’s hard to read them any other way than for Junior to feel like he’s being blamed that the sport didn’t do better during the time he was the fan favorite. That’s an impossible burden to shoulder, and would NASCAR really have better attendance and ratings now if Dale Jr. had won more races or more people had flocked to Jimmie Johnson, as Harvick suggests? Maybe, but it’s highly doubtful.
On top of that, Harvick isn’t right that other sports work the way he suggests. While there is a definite correlation between success and popularity, it’s not exact and it’s not completely a “what have you done for me lately?” deal. The New York Yankees are still way more popular that the Houston Astros, for instance, even though the Astros won last year’s World Series and the Yankees haven’t won one for nearly a decade. Nor is it all about total wins; the Boston Celtics are a popular NBA team, but no one would suggest they have the most fans at the moment even though they have 17 championships.
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It’s all a pretty silly assertion, but Harvick is entitled to his opinion just as Earnhardt Jr. is fully justified in not letting go of his annoyance about it. It just goes to reinforce the fact that at the end of the day, even the biggest NASCAR stars are people who can have their feelings hurt like the rest of us, something to which we can all relate.