The interviews and footage that remain of Dale Earnhardt, the Hall of Fame NASCAR driver, paint a picture of an audacious, swaggering man who could charm and infuriate in the same moment. He was a superstar who reveled in villainy.
But it is an image of him away from the track that captivates Dale Earnhardt Jr.
It shows his father, most likely after a hunt, with his hands wrapped around a stag’s horns. The animal’s face rests against his dark jeans. He squints into the sunlight, wearing a Wrangler trucker hat. A T-shirt bearing the label of Jack Daniel’s, the whiskey brand, peeks out from beneath a flannel shirt.
This photo, Mr. Earnhardt said, was quintessentially his dad.
The racetrack was where Dale Earnhardt won stock-car championships and millions of fans. It was also where he suffered injuries that killed him in 2001, when he crashed on the last lap of the Daytona 500. Away from the track he was ruggedly masculine, an outdoorsman. He was also often absent from the lives of his three oldest children.
The photo is fixed to a door in a saloon that the younger Mr. Earnhardt built on his property in Mooresville, N.C., about two decades ago, when he was a wildly popular racecar driver, too. Soon that saloon became a full-fledged Old West town, designed as a place where Mr. Earnhardt could party without leaving his house and being subjected to the harsh glare that fame invites. It has a hotel, a chapel and a jail with two cells. The whole thing looks like it’s right out of “The Andy Griffith Show.”
As Mr. Earnhardt grew older — he is now 50 — he stopped visiting the town so often. Then he got married and had two daughters, and the Old West town came back to life.
