Ryan McGee's Blog: End of an era

Why the demise of Petty Enterprises is anything but OK.

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The King's family business is no more.

Petty Enterprises is gone. Like totally gone. Like joined-the-T-Rex-Edsel-and-D.B.-Cooper-in-the-ether gone. So why aren't people making a bigger deal out of this?

Petty Enterprises is the New York Yankees of NASCAR. They are the all-time leader in wins, championships, laps led and pretty much everything else. Like the Yanks, the Petty Blue rides of Lee and Richard were so good that they received the praise of thousands of fans and drew the ire of jealous competitors, who claimed that they had too much money, too many resources and thus an unfair advantage over everyone else.

So imagine, if you will, what the reaction would be if the Yankees suddenly shuttered their doors and ceased to exist. Or, more accurately, if they disbanded after sending Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez to go play for the Kansas City Royals.

Well, that's what has just happened in Mooresville, North Carolina. And yet, everyone wants to tell me that it's okay.

Petty Holdings, what was left of the once-greatest team ever, is sending what's left of The King's 43 ride over to Gillett Evernham Motorsports—or whatever the new name will be—to be driven by (wait for it) Reed Sorenson.

This is the part where you do a spit take with your Richard Petty commemorative Pepsi.

It's the last page of the last chapter of a painful, slow decline of racing's greatest organization. The death knell came when longtime sponsor General Mills decided to jump ship to Richard Childress Racing in 2009. Unable to land a sponsor on its own, the team recruited help.

That help just sold them out. And yet my friends within the business keep trying to convince me that it is all a natural evolution, a sign of the times and merely part of a sport built on free enterprise.

Whatever, dude.

Sure, the Petty Enterprises of 2008 was more like the pre-Steinbrenner Yanks of 1972. They hadn't won a race in nine years; they hadn't put a car in the top 10 in points in 12 years. But not so long ago, everything was looking up. Bobby Labonte had the famous 43 sniffing the top ten again on a somewhat regular basis. And while many didn't like the move at the time, leaving the family farm in Randleman for NASCAR-mad Mooresville seemed like the right idea.

However, ever since last summer's announcement that the team would sell majority ownership to a group of fish-out-of-water capitalists called Boston Ventures, the whole situation has felt, well, icky. On that day, His Royal Fastness was clearly uncomfortable, as was son Kyle, who kept repeating over and over, "Ask someone else about this deal, I'm just a driver."

What the public hadn't known about was the infighting and disagreement happening behind closed doors in both Randleman and Mooresville. Kyle and the rest of the 45 team felt as if team VP Robbie Loomis, who'd once served as The King's crew chief and won a Cup with Jeff Gordon in 2001, could have cared less about their car, choosing to focus the team's limited resources on the revival of the 43.

That tension grew when Loomis decided to move the operation to Mooresville. On the outside, Richard and Kyle smiled and said all the right things about resources and the future, but inside they felt like they were abandoning their family roots.

They were.

Lee Petty—Richard's father and Kyle's grandfather—was a farmer/truck driver/bootlegger that lived in a little white house just north of Randleman near the crossroads of Level Cross, NC. He and his brother, Julian, fell in love with racing and started tricking-out the family roadsters to challenge friends and neighbors to races on the rolling dirt roads around his house. Soon, they started towing their cars to dirt tracks around the Carolinas with young Richard riding along. As their racing operation grew, they built larger sheds and garages in which to work that would eventually become a sprawling labyrinth of buildings that surrounds Lee's old farmhouse to this day.

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The No. 43 will still be in the pack next season. But it won't be the same.

On June 19, 1949, Lee put his wife and two sons in a borrowed Buick and drove south to participate in NASCAR's first "Strictly Stock" race at the Charlotte Fairgrounds. Lee and Richard stopped at a nearby gas station to grease the axle and slap a duct-tape number on the side of the car, randomly choosing 42 because they saw it on the license plate of a car in the parking lot.

Lee finished 17th out of 33 cars after flipping onto his roof.

"We had to thumb a ride back home," Richard recently recalled. "And Daddy's friend wasn't so happy about what we'd done to his car."

From that day until the 2008 season finale at Homestead, a NASCAR season has never been run without a Petty car in the lineup. Current NASCAR defenders and apologists continue to rattle on about how the famous 43 will still be in the field for the 2009 Daytona 500, but just because a number is slapped on the door doesn't mean it's the genuine article.

"I am proud to say that the Daytona 500 will be run with the Petty family's 43 car in the field for the 51st consecutive year," NASCAR president Mike Helton said in a recent radio interview. But his tone made him sound like a man still trying to sell himself on the reality of what he spoke. "They did what they needed to do to survive and I commend them for it."

Whatever helps you sleep at night, brother.

I recently drove by the old shop in Level Cross, pulled into the parking lot and just sat there. I thought about when I was a kid and stood in line on Fan Appreciation Day to get The King's autograph.

I thought about a visit I made one Christmas as a young adult, when the Richard Petty Museum was still housed in a tiny little building on the grounds. Lynda, Richard's wife, pulled into the parking lot at the same time that I did and practically interviewed me, asking questions about my family and my hometown like she knew who they were.

Meanwhile, Lee, the three-time NASCAR champ and winner of the inaugural Daytona 500, hit pitching wedges from one side of his yard to the other. When I asked where The King was, I was told he'd run home to take a nap, but she'd go wake him up if I needed anything.

I know this sport is a business first and foremost. I know that you must thrive to survive and the Pettys weren't able to do that. And I know that everything might be totally different today had Adam Petty not been killed in the spring of 2000.

But I own only one piece of racing apparel, a Petty Blue t-shirt emblazoned with a silhouette of The King and the bright white words "PETTY ENTERPRISES."

Now, that team no longer exists. Don't you dare tell me that I should be okay with that.

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