Childress is common man who made it big
RALEIGH — Richard Childress grew up shooting rabbits and fishing for bass in the woods and hollers of Forsyth County. He went on to become a race car driver, tearing up the asphalt at Bowman Gray Stadium and then the high banks of Talladega.
Along the way, he left his education behind but never forgot his upbringing. He made the big time as a car owner for the late, great Dale Earnhardt, but he never forgot his friends.
Childress is North Carolina born and raised, and Thursday night he was inducted into the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame along with some of the greatest sports names in the state's history, names such as Leo Hart and Roy Williams, Bill Hensley and Tom Butters, Ken Huff and Greensboro's Jack Jensen and Curly Neal.
They were all there together on the stage of the North Raleigh Hilton, all there for their prowess on the fields and the sidelines of their sports. Under the name Richard Childress were the words auto racing. But as the legendary car owner and vineyard proprietor looked out over a packed house, he saw table after table of friends and colleagues who had more to do with his rabbit hunting days than his days as a stock car driver and owner.
"I've always been an outdoor person," he said. "It goes back to my days as a kid running through the woods of Forsyth County. I support a lot of conservation efforts and do a lot of fundraising, and I'm really proud of what we've been able to accomplish."
Childress won six Winston Cup titles with Earnhardt and 11 NASCAR titles in all. He has won Busch and Truck titles in addition to the Cup championships, all this after driving from 1969-81. And to most North Carolinians and many people across the country, that's his claim to fame.
But in the wilds of Montana and on the plains of Africa and in the backcountry of Canada and in the unknown reaches of Mongolia he's the great white hunter, the very embodiment of America itself. Childress is one of the greatest big-game hunters of our time.
"I've got the Grand Slam," he said Thursday, smiling as everyone around talked about basketball and football and golf and assumed Childress was holding court about auto racing. And he was, because most of the people there only knew to ask him about his Cup titles or his current race team with Kevin Harvick, Jeff Burton and Clint Bowyer. A few others, including Jack Jensen's wife, Marsha, talked to him about wine. She said she had recently tasted some cantaloupe wine and loved it.
"Cantaloupe?" he asked. "And it was good?"
He's one of us, a man of the people, a common man who made it big. The truth is, we have no idea how big this man is.
"Yeah, I got the Grand Slam," he said almost matter-of-factly.
That means he's one of the few people who have killed the big four of North American sheep -- the Dall, Stone, bighorn and desert bighorn.
"I've got the Big Five of Africa, I've got the Dangerous Seven and I'm one away from having the North American 29."
Now let that sink in for a second because those words have probably never been uttered before, certainly not by anyone you know. He has hunted on every continent. Go to his race shop in Welcome, and you'll be impressed by all the Earnhardt cars he has there and those of his current teams at RCR and even some of the cars he drove back in the '70s. But there's also one of the most impressive displays of stuffed and mounted animals in the world.
Childress explains his trophies as people around him listen with their mouths open.
"Yeah, I've got the polar bear and the elk, all it takes," he said, explaining what the North American 29 is. "The only one I don't have is the caribou up in Newfoundland. I'm gonna go up there and get that."
He just got back from Mongolia, having taken something called an Altai argali, a sheep native to the Altai mountain range. This week, he'll enter his race cars in NASCAR's All-Star race in Concord. It's a long cry from the boy who lost his dad at age 5 and left school for the last time in the ninth grade.
"I felt then that I had to become a man," he said. "I didn't make it all the way through school. I had to go to work. I had to earn money. I'm not proud of that at all. I think everyone should finish school, but at the time, under the circumstance, you also had to make a living."
In his spare time, he hunted rabbits.
"Ri' cheer in North Carolina," he said. "Forsyth County. I lived over off Wayside Drive. We had fields out there and creeks. We'd hunt and fish as much as we could."
He still does. He also makes wine and owns a race team and sponsors wildlife causes and conservation efforts. He's all-American the way we used to think Americans should look. Davy Crockett in buckskins. Teddy Roosevelt in camo. Richard Childress in a suit. We saw that last night.
He looked right at home.
Contact Ed Hardin at ed.hardin@news-record.com
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