Hard Driving: The Wendell Scott Story

Hard Driving: The Wendell Scott Story

Hard Driving: The Wendell Scott Story

Hard Driving: The Wendell Scott Story

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Overview

The only book-length account of the life of Wendell Scott, the one-time moonshine runner who broke the color barrier in stock-car racing in 1952 and, against all odds, competed for more than 20 years in a sport dominated by Southern whites.


Hard Driving is the story of one man's determination to live the life he loved, and to compete at the highest level of his sport. When Wendell Scott became NASCAR's version of Jackie Robinson in the segregated 1950s, some speedways refused to let him race. Scott appealed directly to the sport's founder, NASCAR czar Bill France Sr., who promised that NASCAR would treat him without prejudice. For the next two decades, Scott chased a dream whose fulfillment depended on France backing up that promise. France reneged on his pledge, but Scott did receive inspiring support from white drivers who admired his skill and tenacity, such as NASCAR champions Ned Jarrett and Richard Petty.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781586423032
Publisher: Steerforth Press
Publication date: 08/03/2021
Series: Truth to Power: Documentary Narratives
Sold by: Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format: eBook
Pages: 362
File size: 13 MB
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About the Author



BRIAN DONOVAN was a Newsday investigative reporter who won more than forty journalism awards, including two Pulitzer Prizes and Columbia University's Paul Tobenkin Award for reporting on racial and ethnic intolerance. Driving on the EMRA Vanderbilt Cup circuit, he won a season championship, as well as a track championship at Pennsylvania's Pocono Raceway and dozens of races from Canada to West Virginia. He gained exclusive access to Wendell Scott over the last fourteen months of Scott's life and interviewed more than two hundred individuals to capture this epic, previously untold American story. Brian died in 2018.

JOE POSNANSKI is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of six books, including Paterno and The Secret of Golf. A longtime columnist for Sports Illustrated, NBC Sports, and The Kansas City Star, and currently senior writer for The Athletic, he was twice named the best sports columnist in America by the Associated Press Sports Editors. He lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, with his family.

Read an Excerpt

Foreword
I’m not entirely sure how old I was when I first heard the story of Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier — four or five, maybe? — but it utterly captivated me from the start. I cannot tell you how many times through the years I have thought about what it must have been like for Robinson, alone, defiant, playing baseball with the weight of history on his shoulders. Baseball had been segregated for more than half a century.So many forces were lined up against him. So many people wanted him to fail.
And so many people needed him to succeed.
Through the years as a sportswriter, I have spent countless hours talking to people who knew Robinson, played with him, played against him, and that is the question I ask each of them: What was it like for him? They try to answer, but they can only tell me so much. Only Robinson really knew.
And so it is astonishing to me that in so many ways I feel like I learned more about what it was like for Jackie Robinson by reading a wonderful book about . . . a race car driver.
Wendell Scott had it much rougher than Robinson, there is no question about that. As Brian Donovan explains, Wendell Scott really was alone as he did the impossible: integrated nascar as the civil rights movement took flight. While Robinson was signed by a baseball legend named Branch Rickey, Scott had to make his own way. While Robinson won over many of his white teammates (who then became some of his most devoted supporters), Scott had no racing teammates, just competitors who would enthusiastically crash him (or anyone else) into a wall to get to the checkered flag first.
While Robinson was based in Brooklyn and played all of his games in big cities (and none of them in the American South), Scott raced just about every time in the South. He raced in Birmingham weeks after Martin Luther King wrote his famous letter from a jail there. He raced in Augusta, Georgia, just before riots broke out. He raced in Charlotte at the same time that the homes of various civil rights leaders were bombed.
Wendell Scott — Brian Donovan tells us — always carried a .38-caliber revolver. And was sure to keep it loaded.
This book in your hands, this new release of Hard Driving to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of Wendell Scott’s birth, is something very special. For one thing, it is a work of passion by the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Brian Donovan, who was something of a legend himself. He was a relentless reporter, someone who would not stop until he got the story.
He was also a race car driver himself, which is part of what drew him to Wendell Scott. It is telling that the two men didn’t fully connect until Wendell needed to break loose a bolt and Brian, without request, handed him the proper wrench for the job.
The relationship between Brian and Wendell gives us a raw, uninhibited, and unapologetic look at what Wendell Scott endured to do what he was always meant to do: race cars. The book doesn’t hide from Scott’s flaws; nor does it romanticize his extraordinary accomplishments. The truth is powerful enough.
“I heard this same observation again and again,” Brian writes. “During the 1950s and ’60s, as civil rights conflict roiled the South, the first black person that many white southerners came to admire was the driver who’d integrated their beloved sport of stock car racing.”
Wendell Scott died more than thirty years ago, in 1990. Brian Donovan died in 2018 after a battle with Alzheimer’s. It took Brian many years — decades, actually — to bring this book to life, and we should all be grateful that he did because inside you will find a rip-roaring story of a man’s tireless and fearless pursuit of the checkered flag, even when the race official refused to wave it.
Yes, you’ll get that remarkable story in here, too.
I personally know almost nothing about cars or racing, but through a series of poor editing judgments I have found myself often writing about nascar and spending time with some of the legends of the sport. Once I was with Junior Johnson in his North Carolina garage, he was drinking coffee that was stronger than gasoline, and I asked him about Wendell Scott.

“That man could drive,” Junior said, the ultimate compliment. If you know something about Wendell Scott, this book will help you feel some of what he felt as he made history. And if you don’t know anything at all about Wendell Scott, I envy you. You’re about to meet one helluva man.
Joe Posnanski
December 23, 2020
Charlotte, North Carolina

Table of Contents

Note xi

Foreword xiii

Preface xvii

Prologue 1

1 "Didn't no black kids have no bicycles." 9

2 "I don't never want to punch no clock." 17

3 "A hard, nasty business." 24

4 "Judge, it couldn't have been me." 32

5 "Let me see how you doin' them turns." 39

6 "He had to be tough-skinned." 46

7 "I said, 'Well, I won the steaks'" 53

8 "You're going to be knocked around." 60

9 "The more you do it, the more you like to do it." 70

10 "He knew just how to hit me." 77

11 "If he had the power, he'd come on at you." 88

12 "We're movin' up." 96

13 "They didn't want to use the word Wendell" 100

14 "A standoffish position." 106

15 "He hid the pain so well." 112

16 "Man, I come a long way." 125

17 "They took all the kick out of it." 136

18 "I just knew Ford was going to do something for me." 146

19 "How come way out here?" 154

20 "We used to be the cleanup boys." 163

21 "I'll get it done, Bill." 173

22 "You're not gonna miss that li'l ol' wheel." 180

23 "I'm going to show them." 188

24 "The funds was just not there." 197

25 "I know my place now." 205

26 "We will not forget." 211

27 "It was about wore out." 217

28 "I'm gonna wreck him." 226

29 "A chance to win one." 231

30 "Just dreaming." 241

31 "And the crowd laughed." 252

32 "He put all his chips on the table." 259

33 "What's the purpose?" 265

34 "Business is business." 271

35 "I couldn't drive like he drove." 283

36 "I saw a different Wendell." 293

37 "Hope for the best." 301

Epilogue 309

Acknowledgments 315

Notes 319

Index 329

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