DAYTONA BEACH — Back home again in Indiana during the holidays, Tony Stewart went to shoot pool with some old friends.
“Three people came up and said, ‘We don’t like you,'” Stewart recalled of an incident at the friendliest turf Stewart could hope for, in a local pub in his hometown of Columbus. “They were pretty clear about what they thought.”
It was straightforward, face-to-face, just as Stewart likes it.
“Real easy,” he said of the problem and the solution.
“I started laughing, and that kind of made them mad.”
So what happened next? Who threw the first punch? Who decked whom? Which side cleaned out the joint?
None of that happened — whatever you might expect, considering Stewart’s misbegotten image.
“When I explained to them why I was laughing, then it kind of started to turn in the other direction,” he said.
He was laughing because he knows his image oh, so well — and knows himself as he really is. These folks weren’t booing from a distant grandstand. They were up close and personal. This would be “real easy” indeed.
“They spent 20 minutes around us, and you would have thought that we were all best friends by the time they left,” Stewart said. “It happens every time we get an opportunity to spend time with somebody like that.
“The thing is, you can’t spend it with four or five million people like that and show them who you really are. But those three cases alone were probably one of the highlights of my off-season — being able to sit there and show three people who I really am, and see how they changed and how their attitude changed toward me.”
HIS DETRACTORS REMAIN
There are constant reminders of the unreachable ones who detract from afar.
“The other day I read a letter a lady had written to one of the magazines, saying I shouldn’t be the Winston Cup champion because she doesn’t like how I act outside the race car,” Stewart said. “It kind of brought me back to what I was saying at Homestead [last November, after he clinched the championship]. I said the last time I checked, the Winston Cup champion was the guy who got the most points, plain and simple, no matter what you do inside or outside the race car, whether you pick your nose, whatever you do.”
That’s Stewart’s mantra and he’s sticking to it. And his notion was verified in December in New York, when he became the first Winston Cup champion ever honored while on NASCAR probation.
But that doesn’t mean Stewart doesn’t care — and doesn’t keep implying every few minutes in conversation or interviews — that he wishes he could meet those four or five million detractors, a few at a time.
Instead, millions at a time get high-powered reminders of Stewart’s outbursts of the past, no matter how far the media dredges into his past.
All winter, Fox, which will telecast the Feb. 16 Daytona 500 and the first half of the NASCAR season, has been running promotional spots centering on Stewart. Depicted are incidents nearly four years old: a garage-area scuffle with Robby Gordon, Stewart throwing the heat shields from his shoes through the window of the passing car of his one-time rival, Kenny Irwin, who was killed in 2000.
“To be honest, I haven’t been watching a lot of TV,” Stewart said of the promotion. “I haven’t seen it, so I really don’t know exactly what it is.
“But I’m to the point where people are going to pretty much do what they’re going to do, and I pretty much don’t let it rule my life. I can’t change whatever they do, so it’s about controlling things I can control.”
TIME FOR FUN
Now 31, Stewart somehow seems to have taken an enormous deep breath all winter, let it out slowly, and jettisoned much of the tumult and the fire inside him. The hatred of losing — largely the cause of all his past misdeeds, real or perceived — still may be there.
But having won American motor racing’s most prestigious championship, despite going “through the most miserable year you could go through,” has eased the part he hated the most, a compulsion to prove himself in stock cars after making the transition from Indy cars in 1999.
“I feel more relaxed going into this year vs. last year, I guess from the standpoint that I don’t feel like I have anything to prove anymore,” he said. “There are still a lot of things I want to do in Winston Cup, but I don’t feel like I have to prove something to everybody by winning a championship.
“My goal is to have fun this year — strictly to have fun.”
That’s a prima facie change in the spirit of a long-volatile, relentlessly intense man known among his peers as the consummate pure racer, and roundly well-liked for it.
Tony Stewart? Having nothing but fun?
“If we win another championship with it, great,” he said. “If we don’t win, as long as we have fun and we know that every week we gave 100 percent, we’ll take whatever it gives us. If that’s 10th in the points, then we’ll take 10th this year.”
His past two Daytona 500s have been first frightening, then miserable. In 2001, just 25 laps before Dale Earnhardt was killed, Stewart was caught up in a massive pileup and crashed head-on into the wall; then, his car went tumbling, airborne, and landed on its roof.
Last year, after he had dominated preliminary races, winning the Bud Shootout and the International Race of Champions, he was the favorite going into the 500. But he fell out after only three laps with a blown engine and finished last.
Given the two choices, “I’d rather roll into the garage than end up on my head,” he said.
Of course, he’d rather not fall out early, either, “but if that happens, I’m not going to be concerned.”
OLD BECOMES NEW
If he can hold that mindset for the 500 and the season, the post-race rages may go away. The ones that gave him his rap sheet . . .
Having to be restrained from going after then-Winston Cup director Gary Nelson in the garage at Daytona in July 2001, then slapping a tape recorder out of a reporter’s hands and kicking it under a truck.
Thumping a photographer in the chest last August after the Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis.
Surly, sometimes insulting answers to questions at news conferences — not a misdeed in and of itself, but a practice that has left the largely thin-skinned NASCAR media corps more prone to nitpick in its criticism of Stewart than of other drivers. That’s how thumping the photographer has grown into the journalistic legend that he “punched a photographer.”
The rap sheet led to image, and image led to a feeding frenzy even among NASCAR fans and workers. Last year, a safety worker at New Hampshire International Speedway claimed Stewart had hit him in the aftermath of a crash, and it took NBC videotape to clear up the matter — Stewart was only pulling away from the workers in anger over being wrecked.
Then last August, Stewart faced criminal assault charges in Bristol, Tenn., after a woman claimed he shoved her and used foul language following the Sharpie 500 there. A Tennessee grand jury found insufficient evidence to charge Stewart, and he was cleared. But the bad publicity had been resounding.
Even on his championship-clinching weekend at Homestead-Miami Speedway in November, Stewart ran into a photographer — accidentally, he claimed and NASCAR ruled — in what amounted to a hard body block, intentional or not.
Now, he knows, “If I trip in the garage area today, it will be a front-page news story in somebody’s newspaper tomorrow, and it doesn’t have anything to do with what we do with racing. . . . I’m trying to put all that stuff behind, and it’s hard because every week somebody is constantly bringing it back up.
“You ask yourself, ‘When is that going to end? When are people finally going to let it go?’ I don’t know.”
He ponders, then said, “You tell me.”
By that he means the media may have a better idea when the bad-boy image will ease than he does.
“I know who I am as a person, and what 90 percent of the fans think isn’t who I am as a real person,” he said. “The direct link from me to those people — 98 percent of it is through you guys [media]. It’s about how much you guys want to focus on it, and how much of it you guys want to let go.”
Last season, he was widely portrayed as simply an unhappy person.
“I will be happiest when everybody quits asking me if I’m happy,” he said. “That will make me happy.
“I guess I’m happy. I feel like I’m happy. You get tired of talking about negative stuff all the time. I quit reading most of the papers. I quit watching a lot of the racing shows, just from the standpoint that I’m tired of watching negative stuff.”
In essence, he has “simplified everything.”
Stop worrying about image. Make racing fun, not a weekly crucible. With those goals, he hopes, will come the new and improved, more serene, Tony Stewart.
Still, he can’t be certain.
“Am I going to screw up in the future? I’m sure I am,” he said. “How do you get me not to screw up in the future? But there are a lot of other things we can focus on.”
Such as winning three races and navigating what arguably was the worst set of distractions, throughout a season, any driver has overcome to win a championship.
“I’m not saying cover up anything I do,” he said. “But you don’t have to take something that happened one time and grind it into the ground 20 times in 20 different pieces that you write. That’s a little overkill.”
And it leaves him trying to win friends one or two or three at a time.
