Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, September 23, 1995 TAG: 9509260107
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BOB ZELLER
DATELINE: MARTINSVILLE LENGTH: Medium
It could have been Irvan's night on the town.
He had been leading or contending for the Winston Cup championship throughout all of 1994 - right up to that moment last Aug.20 at Michigan International Speedway when a tire blew and his No.28 Ford Thunderbird stopped turning in turn two and went straight into the concrete wall.
Somehow, Irvan survived the crash. His skull was fractured; his brain badly bruised and swollen. But he lived to make a remarkable recovery - and to face more than a year of the indescribable frustration of life without racing.
When Irvan announced this week that his first race back would be today's Goody's 150 SuperTruck race at Martinsville Speedway, both Irvan and his car owner, Robert Yates, remembered how bad things had been in New York last December.
Actually, the rain here Friday afternoon was yet another small dose of frustration for Irvan. It forced the postponement of SuperTruck qualifying until 8:30 a.m. today.
But it was nothing as bad as New York and the night Irvan insisted he was ready to come back - now.
``That was probably the lowest I ever got,'' Irvan said this week. ``I had all expectations of sitting at that head table at the banquet to honor me. But that ended 11 races before that.
``It would have been different if I had a broken leg or broken arm. But I'm sitting there thinking, `I can't go racing, but I don't really have nothin' wrong with me. That was a very emotional time for me.'''
To hear Yates tell it, it was even more emotional for him.
``We were almost in a screaming fit,'' Yates said. ``I was about ready to jump off the building - seriously.''
Irvan is not known for his patience, and this never was more true than in New York.
``Ernie was saying, `I'm going to race at Daytona, and Richard Childress is going to have a car for me if you don't have one.' He was just using that for leverage.
``And I just didn't feel like there was any way we could make that happen. I had listened to the doctors and I had made some evaluations. We had a lot of concerns. We just wanted to give him time. But he didn't have a lot of patience.''
The mild-mannered Yates apparently didn't have the hard-talking nerve to lay out the facts to his driver.
``He never told me, `You're not ready,''' Irvan recalled. ``But I was coming back racing - with them or without them.
``And they said, `Man, you gotta be patient.'
``And I was like, `No, I'm going to be racing at Daytona.'
``But sometimes the will to want to do it overrides the smartness of what you need to do. It was a tough time.''
The unlikely hero in those tense days was Dan Rivard, the tall, gray-haired director of Ford Motor Company's worldwide racing programs. Irvan is only one small cog in the wheel of Rivard's world. But this was not a job to be delegated. Rivard handled it himself.
``Dan Rivard sort of saved my life,'' Yates said. ``He rescued me. I was saying, `What am I going to do here?' And Dan just sat Ernie down and explained the facts to him. I wasn't in the meeting with them.''
But whatever he did, Rivard calmed him down.
As Yates later found out, ``What Dan was saying to him was, `I can give you some things to do. I'll take you to Naples [Fla.] and test you. I'll give you some steps to take and some challenges.'
``And that's what got Ernie excited,'' Yates said. ``By giving him some goals, Dan gave him some patience.''
That test in Naples happened on Dec.16 - about two weeks after the banquet. Irvan drove a Ford production-based car that generated only about 250 horsepower, but what Rivard saw convinced him that Irvan could, indeed, come back.
``He still has quite a gift and he still knows how to use it,'' Rivard told Ford publicist Wayne Estes at the time.
``I guess we all kind of realized I didn't forget everything,'' said Irvan.
And when it came time this week for Irvan to make the announcement he had waited so long to make, an entire row of chairs at the press conference was occupied by Ford racing executives. And sitting tallest among them - having flown in from Detroit just to be there - was Dan Rivard.
by CNB