At 38, simple life in Gotham suits Gordon
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NEW YORK – Between a story about taking his 2-year-old daughter Ella to play in Central Park and explaining how he wants to race long enough for her to appreciate what her daddy does, a man approached Jeff Gordon for an autograph.
Jeff Gordon's wife Ingrid and daughter Ella typically join him at the track on race day.
(Getty)
"I hate to bother you," the man said to Gordon, who had stopped in an Au Bon Pain in midtown Manhattan for a quick breakfast of yogurt and granola.
"No problem," Gordon said, signing the piece of paper the man presented.
A few minutes later, a cashier approached the four-time Cup champion with a camera in her hand.
"My manager wants a picture," she said, squeamishly. "Would you mind?"
"Not at all," he replied.
With that, she held up the camera, pointed it at Gordon and …
"Hold on a second," Gordon said. "Doesn't he want to be in the picture?"
Of course he did, and Gordon made sure he was, along with another co-worker.
Still another fan wanted a photo, and when her friend couldn't figure out how to take one with an iPhone in her hand, Gordon reached over and showed her how.
For the better part of 15 years, this is the driver NASCAR fans loved to hate more than any other – the one at whom they launched beer cans, middle fingers and sexual epithets. Only since the ascension of Kyle Busch has Gordon abdicated his title as the most booed driver in the sport. Still, the jeers are there, if only for old times' sake.
If it bothered Gordon then, it doesn't anymore – maybe because, as some close to him say, he's comfortable in his own skin.
"I kind of gave up awhile ago trying to get everybody in the world to be in my shoes and understand who I am," Gordon explained. "As long as I'm happy and I have my nucleus around me – the people who are important to me – that's the most important thing to me in life. That's what's going to make me happy."
It's a simplified version of life that, at 38, suits Gordon perfectly – a version that, after some left and right turns, ironically landed him not in a sleepy town with a house and a white picket fence, but in a city known for never sleeping.
When he burst onto the NASCAR scene in 1993 as a baby-faced 22-year-old rookie, Gordon sported a natty mustache that, to this day, he can't live down. At the time, many of the big-name drivers sported mustaches, most notably the late Dale Earnhardt.
Jeff Gordon grew a mustache to look older, but after a suggestion from his ex-wife Brooke, he shaved it off in 1994.
(Getty)
But Gordon's hairy lip, which was as befitting on him as a Mohawk on Cinderella, wasn't about keeping up with the trend. He just wanted to look older.
"Everybody would say to me, 'You're 15. You look like you're 10,' " he explained. "I was always around older people that I was racing against and a lot of my friends were older, so I thought that mustache would help that. But I was wrong about that.
"When I finally shaved it off, I was like, 'Man, why did this take so long?' "
The year after the great shave of '94, Gordon won his first championship, sparking a run of three titles in four years. With them came a massive fan base, as well as the chorus of boos, mainly because every title he won was one Earnhardt didn't and because Gordon, a California native, was viewed as an outsider to what was then a mostly Southern sport.
Rich beyond anything he could have imagined while growing up in Vallejo, Calif., Gordon went "crazy."
"Not literally," he explained. "You can't go from making $50,000 a year to making hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars a year and not be affected by that in some way."
Before his 29th birthday, Gordon built a mansion on a beach in Florida, employed his own chef, two housekeepers and a guy to take care of his cars.
"It was a fun experience living in Florida, living on the beach, having a big house, enjoying what I had worked hard for," he said. "But it still wasn't me."
A lot of people go to New York City to be discovered. Gordon goes there to get lost.
On a recent Sunday afternoon, he and Ella went to Victoria Gardens, a sort of carnival in Central Park. It was packed. Still, no one recognized the part-time NYC resident – Gordon also has a place in Charlotte, N.C. – as a famous race-car driver. Or if they did, they didn't approach him.
"I was able to just be a dad, and I loved it," he said. "That's one of the reasons why I spend time in New York City."
This is the speed at which the racer has found his comfort away from the track. In the middle of the Manhattan rat race, Gordon is a slug enjoying life in the slow lane.
He no longer has the giant house in Florida, the housekeepers, the chef. Between that life and this one, he's been through a messy divorce with his first wife, Brooke, remarried and become a father.
While Gordon's life is anything but typical – Alex Rodriguez wouldn't try to chase down the car you and I were in on a New York City street – typical things are still a part of his life. Waiters lose his order, he gets stopped at security checkpoints when he can't produce proper identification and he goes on "play dates."
"It's a new term I've been introduced to," he said Thursday during the 30-minute wait for a salad he'd ordered for lunch. "A guy in my building has a kid Ella's age. We went to his apartment for a (Gordon puts up his fingers to make air quotes) 'play date.' "
Such is life for the four-time champion who on Sunday at New Hampshire Motor Speedway will begin another drive for number five. It's a quest that's going on eight years now, with Gordon's last title coming back in 2001.
Though he's won 24 races since then, he's lived mostly in the shadow of Jimmie Johnson, the teammate he helped bring to Hendrick Motorsports. Since Gordon's last title, Johnson has won nearly twice as many races (43), never finished lower than fifth in the standings and, most importantly, done something not even Gordon accomplished in his heyday – win three straight championships.
"One side of me likes to see Jimmie and Hendrick Motorsports do well," Gordon said, "but at the same time the competitor in me says it doesn't matter if a teammate is beating you; you got to push to beat them.
"We want to knock him off."
He may just do it.
Gordon understands that his style of racing is better suited to win championships under the old points system, where consistency over 36 races produced the winner. However, the 10-race Chase favors Johnson because seven of the 10 tracks in the playoff are among his favorites.
While Gordon can't make that same claim, he's getting closer.
Earlier this year he won at Texas (host to Race No. 8 in the Chase), one of the two tracks remaining on the schedule where he hadn't won, and he's confident he'll be better at Phoenix (Race No. 9) and Homestead-Miami (Race No. 10).
"This is the best opportunity we've had," Gordon said.
Still, he knows he doesn't have that many chances left. Boy Wonder has grown up. He's NASCAR's elder statesman now. He's got some gray hairs and he's a dad.
But he's not ready to go just yet.
"It's a rewarding thing to make a child proud of what you do," he explained back at the Au Bon Pain, "but [Ella's] got to get older and I got to keep racing."
As he talked about his future on the track and his life off it, a man dressed in a dark suit approached him with a piece of paper and a pen in his hand.
"I wasn't going to ask, but since others have, would you mind?" the man said to Gordon. "It's for my friend Brian. He's a huge fan of yours."
Gordon took the piece of paper and pen from the man and asked, "Does he spell it B-R-I or B-R-Y?"
