THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 18, 1996 TAG: 9602180168
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C10 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY BOB ZELLER, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: DAYTONA BEACH, FLA. LENGTH: Long : 122 lines
It was your typical spectacular day in Maui last November, and Jeff Gordon, the newly crowned Winston Cup champion, once again was risking his life on horsepower.
``We went horseback riding,'' he said at Daytona International Speedway last week while preparing for the Daytona 500. ``Five minutes into the thing, the horse bucked me off. I twisted my ankle. And I got right back on and rode him for the next three hours.
``I liked it. I was having fun. But I was hurting later.''
Then there was his adventure in the ocean.
``That was the day I tried to kill myself,'' he said. ``The waves are like 15 feet high. And I'm out there trying to boogie-board with half-professional surfers. And they were like, `You better get outta here before you kill yourself.'
``I got crushed by a couple of waves,'' he said. ``I got smart. I got out of there.''
Despite his high-risk endeavors on and off the track, Jeff Gordon, at age 24, is finding that life is as good as it gets these days.
By his own measure of success, he has made it.
``I guess since I was probably about 15 years old, I thought that if I made it on David Letterman, that would be it,'' he said. ``And then it happened.''
Gordon appeared on the show last December, during the Winston Cup banquet festivities in New York. Since then, Gordon has been trying to get Letterman to come to a stock-car race.
Like many Indiana natives, Letterman is an Indianapolis 500 fan. He recently purchased a share of Bobby Rahal's Indy-car team.
``He told me that NASCAR was changing,'' Gordon said, relaxing in his motorhome between practices. ``He felt like it had come a long way and was going in a totally different direction than he ever saw. Maybe he thought it was more redneck stuff. I want to show people that it's not. He's never been to a NASCAR race. I told him, `We've got to get you to a race sometime.''
Gordon, formerly of Pittsboro, Ind., had that attitude about stock-car racing when he was driving sprint and midget cars on Midwestern dirt tracks.
``When you're around open-wheel race cars, the feeling is, `Oh, those are like taxicabs - those are big, heavy tanks,' '' he said. ``But it's really neat to see a person's reaction when they go to a race for the first time and see the cars on the track. You get 'em there and say, `Check this out.' And they go, `Wow!' ''
Emmitt Smith, the star running back for the Super Bowl champion Dallas Cowboys, is one who wouldn't need any convincing.
Gordon met him at ESPN's ESPY awards in New York last Monday night, where Gordon was honored as race driver of the year.
``It was cool, it was real cool,'' he said. ``The athletes and the stars. I talked to Emmitt, talked to him for a while. He wants to come to a race. He wants to get in a race car.
``I met a lot of athletes. I met (the rock group) Hootie and the Blowfish. They like golf and football, but they were really neat.
``I met the Japanese guy (Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Hideo) Nomo. I told him we were coming to Japan. He had no idea what I was saying.''
Yes, life is good for Jeff Gordon. But in many ways, ``I'm just as normal as you,'' he said.
During the racing season, he tries to take Mondays and Wednesday off. But those are semi-work days anyway, since he usually visits his team's shop and spends time returning calls and messages.
He'll work out on a Stairmaster if he can, but his favorite video game, Daytona USA, which is in the garage of his sprawling lakeside home in Lake Norman, N.C., doesn't get much action. He's too busy. Besides, Gordon and his wife, Brooke, have become movie junkies.
``I bet we see 100 movies a year,'' he said. ``We've seen two movies since we've been here in Daytona.''
At home, ``we go right down the street, pay $10 for both of us, walk in and just sit there for two hours and get totally involved in something that doesn't have anything to do with racing. We go see the newest, hottest movie out.''
On the road, they sometimes have to sneak in and out of theaters. Once, at Watkins Glen, he and Brooke were met by security guards after the show. There were about 300 people waiting for him outside. ``They took us down a side alley,'' he said.
But at his hometown theater, it's no problem.
``We're regulars there. We're in there all the time. They know who I am, so it's no big deal,'' he said. ``I'll sign a few autographs for the people working behind the popcorn stand. But it's usually not too crowded unless we go on the weekends, and we're hardly ever there on the weekends.''
One of Gordon's favorite recent movies is ``Crimson Tide,'' with Denzel Washington.
``I think it's a good action movie. It doesn't take things so far out of context, he said. ``Some of these action movies are getting so phony these days. They're doing things that are absolutely impossible to do.''
At Christmas, one of his presents from Brooke was an IBM Aptiva computer. Mark Martin sent him some E-mail recently. But it apparently went to the wrong Jeff Gordon - perhaps the one who used to get his phone calls by mistake when he was living in Harrisburg, N.C.
``I get on it and I get hooked and I can't get off,'' Gordon said of his computer. ``I've got my whole telephone system through it and I can talk right into the computer. I retrieve all my messages and faxes.
``I've got a printer and scanner. I'm prepared to do some serious business if I ever have time.''
Managing time is the greatest challenge in the champ's life these days. He'll do many television commercials and dozens of personal appearances in 1996.
``The first year in Winston Cup, when Brooke and I met, if there was a weekend we weren't racing, we were gone somewhere all the time. I felt like I could get up and leave and do anything I wanted to that year. We laugh about it now. It was great, but the racing wasn't quite as good.''
``This year, it was almost like our vacations were turned into work, because we were packing bags. All we ever do is pack and leave, pack and leave, pack and leave.''
And that's one of the reasons he and Brooke are not planning to start a family any time soon.
``We're not ready to have a baby,'' he said. ``We're a long ways from that. But when we do, we're definitely going to want to have two or three kids.
``But we're still young. We're still having fun with our lives and what we do.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photo
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Jeff Gordon, a movie buff, also enjoys hobnobbing with celebrities
such as Emmitt Smith and Hideo Nomo.
by CNB